Loki by George O'Connor

The surviving corpus of Norse mythology is very thin - the two Eddas, Prose and Poetic, from an era after most of the Norse peoples stopped believing these gods were real and started thinking of them more as stories or metaphors. So retellings often have notes to say "this background character is named, and it looks like he was a major god of something-or-other, but this is the only surviving reference to him" or "from the way it's told, this seems to be one of a long cycle of similar stories, but it's the only one we have." 

But the stories we do have are compelling, full of interesting characters, complex mythology, and great stories - or maybe, in some cases, fragments or pieces of stories. So modern storytellers keep trying to put those two Eddas into modern language, to frame what we do know in ways that attract and thrill present-day audiences.

George O'Connor is in the middle of a four-book series, which I think will retell most, if not roughly all, of the existing Norse stories in comics form, under the overall title Asgardians. Like his previous twelve-book series about the Greek gods, Olympians, so far the books have been titled after, and focused on, specific gods: first Odin and then Thor.

The third book is this one, Loki. The fourth, teased at the end here, will of course be Ragnarok. (If you do a four-book series retelling Norse mythology, you're pretty much required to make the fourth one Ragnarok. Same with a two- or three- book series; you might be able to avoid that title if you do just one.)

Since I've written about all fourteen of O'Connor's previous mythological books, I don't know if I have a lot to add here. This is just as good - compelling, well-told, strongly organized, drawn in an style influenced by classic adventure comics and colored in moody tones by SJ Miller.

In Loki, we do see again O'Connor's skill at weaving what were separate myths - how this happened, how Loki tricked that guy, and so on - into a fuller, linked story. It's still clearly a bunch of tales, but O'Connor organizes them, and narrates them, and foreshadows later events, to make this, like his other books, not just a collection of pieces, but a single integrated tale.

And, not to give it away, but he notes in his extensive backmatter that the story here is Loki's "heel turn" - how he went from an annoying but usually helpful (in the end, mostly, while having fun along the way) trickster god who was loosely allied with the Aesir to the guy who sparked that previously mentioned - and, in so much Norse mythology, foreshadowed repeatedly - apocalypse that will destroy most of the Nine Worlds and its peoples.

The stories here see him shifting in that direction - we start with the creation of Asgard's walls, by a mysterious stranger, and how Loki got the Aesir out of their agreement with that stranger when it looked like the stranger actually could live up to his outrageous promise and claim his even more outrageous prize. Then we see the story of Idunn's golden apples, which shows Loki's random, cruel, chaos-for-chaos's-sake style. In between, though, there are scenes of Baldr, and of his mother Frigg - who, O'Connor repeatedly notes "knows the fates of all, but makes no prophesies" - extracting promises from nearly all of the animals and plants and objects in the world not to harm him.

If we know anything of Norse mythology, we know the one item she will not get a promise from. And we know what will happen. That's the last story page of this book.

There are other Loki tales in the middle as well, particularly those about his children. We see a slimy worm, thoughtlessly thrown into a river that leads to the sea by Thor. We see a small wolf that grows very large, and how he is chained. We see a little girl, dead on one side and alive on the other side, and learn where she goes and what name she takes.

Before those, we see an eight-legged horse, and O'Connor does not tell us that horse's parentage - one of the few obvious nods in this book to its young-readers audience - but he hints as obviously and clearly as he can, so only the very most cossetted and innocent and dim young readers will fail to realize just how Loki saved Asgard from having to pay for its walls.

Most of O'Connor's mythological books stand alone; this one less so. It's partially "here's some stories about Loki, the great trickster," but also partially "here's how Loki helped to bring about The End of All Things, which we will see in the next and final book." But if you're reading a four-book retelling of Norse myth, you're expecting Ragnarok - it's not going to be a surprise.

And Ragnarok will be coming. The George O'Connor book, I mean, not the actual end of all the nine worlds. With luck, it will hit next fall. I'm looking forward to it, and wondering what myth sequence (The Kalevala? The Irish "cycles"? The Mahabharata? Something Egyptian?) he might be thinking about next.

Thor by George O'Connor

When I wrote about the first of George O'Connor's Asgardian books, Odin, I said confidently that it would be a four-book series. This time, I tried to see if I could figure out where I saw that, and what the last two would be. (Number three is Loki, unsurprisingly - I got that from his publisher's website.) Perhaps my Google-fu is weak today, or the tide of AI slop is drowning out useful search results, but I can't now confirm that this will be a four-book series, or find any indications of what the last book will be.

I still think that is true, and that the fourth book will be about one specific Norse god - rather than being called Ragnarok, for example. My guesses are that it will either go to Frigg or Freyja, despite the few myths about either of them, so there can be at least one woman in this very boyish mythos, or that it will be basically the Ragnarok book under a different title, probably Balder or Tyr. On the other hand, O'Connor could throw us a curveball and do Frey. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Thor is the second book in the series: it was the obvious choice, as Odin was the obvious first choice. (Let's face it: if you do a four-book series about Norse gods, three of them have to be Thor, Odin, and Loki, period. The only thing to decide is that fourth one.)

Thor is a fun character, so this is an energetic, amusing book. O'Connor takes pains, especially in his back matter, to make it clear that his Thor - the mythic Thor - is not quite the came as '60s Donald Blake or the MCU Thor, but you can see their common aspects. Thor is big and straightforward and strong and driven by strong emotion and not exactly dumb, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer and pretty easily led. The cover is a great indication of that: O'Connor's Thor is the kind of guy with a huge grin on his face, doing something he loves - in this case, smashing things with a magical hammer, but you know how gods are.

As in O'Connor's other mythological books (Odin, obviously, and his epic earlier Olympians series about the Greek gods), he weaves myths together into a single narrative, keeping the sense of multiple overlapping stories while still making the book a single overall thing. This time out, Thor is on his way back from something - we'll find out what, eventually - wearing rags, hugely happy with himself, and he wants an old ferryman to get him across the river on the border of Jotunheim and Midgard. That leads to Thor telling stories to confirm who he is - or maybe just to boast; it's hard to tell with Thor - and the book flows out from there.

Again, Thor is fun to read about, the kind of mythological figure that generations of storytellers delighted in because his personality is so perfect for stories. O'Connor - here supported with colors by SJ Miller - places Thor in a believable world, bleaker and darker than the Olympians' but full of life and people, and tells a bunch of those stories, going back to the original source material as he always does.

O'Connor's mythological books are supposedly for younger readers - at least, they're made so as to be accessible to middle-graders, and published via an apparatus that's really good at getting books in front of middle-schoolers - but myths are deep and wondrous things, and should never be left only to children. O'Connor knows that well, and at the same time knows that children are smarter than you expect and more focused than you imagine. His books have an impressive array of backmatter, scholarly enough for the adults reading and accessible enough for the kids, to explain all of the references and send more dedicated readers back to the sources.

Odin by George O'Connor

How do you follow up a decade-long, twelve-book series about the most famous group of gods on the planet?

If you're George O'Connor, you pick what's arguably the next most famous pantheon, and start a new four-book series. (The Olympians series was originally four books, then expanded quickly to twelve after early success, so some people might hope the same will happen to Asgardians - I hate to dash anyone's hopes, but I don't think there's that much underlying myth to work from. So four is what we should expect.)

The Olympians series ran from 2010 through 2022, and was a surprisingly robust, nuanced retelling of Greek myth in comics - a format and style that was not off-putting to middle-grade readers but only made a few allowances (like avoiding direct references to Zeus's tendency to turn himself into an animal and rape any woman who caught his eye) to their younger years. Those books were Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos, and Dionysos.

The Norse pantheon is far more doom-laden than the Greek, with the whole Ragnarok thing baked into the story from the beginning, and the existing stories are more focused on blood and sex in ways that might make teachers and parents uneasy (may I mention what happened when Loki turns himself into a mare?) And, as I alluded to above, the corpus of Norse myth is tiny: two books, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, both of which were literary productions from a time when people had mostly stopped believing in these myths as being religiously true. The Greek equivalent would be if we had Hesiod, but nothing else - or maybe a four-century-later retelling of Hesiod, with random quotes from stories that aren't told in full.

But O'Connor is up to the challenge, and Odin - the first of this expected four-book Asgardians series - arrived almost a year ago, to tell the origin myths of the Nordic Nine Worlds and a bunch of myths about Odin. His art is moodier here, I think - not that there wasn't plenty of battle and mayhem in Olympians - and the coloring by Norm Grock subtly differentiates it from the mostly sunnier, Mediterranean feel of the Olympians books.

The framing story involves the Valkyries and Valhalla - the viewpoint is a person chosen on a battlefield and brought to the mead hall, where three mysterious figures tell him how the world came to be, what the nine worlds are, and some of the things Odin, chief of the gods of Valhalla, has done.

So we get the giant Ymir in the void, and the two races that appeared on him - the gods of the Aesir and the Jotnar, sometimes called giants. The Aesir go from Buri to Bor to Odin, Vili, and Ve, who kill Ymir and build their world from his corpse. The Aesir and Jotnar battle a bit, but Odin becomes blood-brothers with the Jotnar Loki. The Vanir appear, and the two pantheons of gods fight before making peace. And Odin seeks more knowledge, particularly of the future, hanging on the tree and learning the runes and losing his eye.

O'Connor drops back to the frame story multiple times, which helps smooth some of those inevitable transitions - Norse myth is a bunch of sometimes disconnected moments (What happened to Buri, Bor, Villi, and Ve? Where did the Vanir come from?), and O'Connor's detailed, interesting backmatter dives into the details of what we know and what we simply don't. The main story reads cleanly and flows well; it doesn't need the backmatter but having it is helpful for the nosy readers like me who want more details.

I find O'Connor's work more organic than what I've seen of the Gaiman/Russell Norse Mythology comics adaptation, which is more Marvel-inspired and tells each story as a separate tale on its own. O'Connor, I think, is trying to tell the whole story of Norse myth, as well as we know it, straight through from beginning to end, with the backmatter notes to explain the things that he has to leap over or guess at along the way. Both are valid approaches, but I appreciate O'Connor's ambition and enthusiasm more.

Dionysos: The New God by George O'Connor

I'll start off with a hat tip: I knew this book existed, and immediately sought out a copy, because of an interview with the author at The Comics Journal. I always like that their definition of "comics" includes all of the worlds of comics, and that they're as serious about middle-grade mythology as poor-me autobio. That interview may be a good starting point for anyone who's not familiar with O'Connor, actually.

George O'Connor has been working on a series of graphic novels about the Greek Gods - deeply researched, vividly written, drawn album-size in an energetic style with a lot of '80s superhero art in its DNA - for more than a decade now. The series is called Olympians, and it's now complete at twelve books with the publication earlier this year of Dionysos: The New God.

(I've covered all of them here: Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares/Apollo/Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos.)

They've all come out from First Second, in a unified trade dress, and my impression is that they were not officially published for younger readers - the copyright page doesn't have the age-level details and content coding that end of publishing requires - but First Second is a major publisher of GNs for younger readers and is well plugged into the selling channels for younger readers and this series was, as far as I can tell, mostly promoted in that direction. So maybe a bit of an asterisk on the "is this made for middle-graders?" question - it's a No But Yes.

This one is narrated by Hestia, the one of the original twelve Olympians who didn't get her own book - possibly because very few stories actually about her survived (or were ever told?), possibly because she's less interesting to modern audiences. That is appropriate for a story reason that was spoiled by myths several thousand years ago, but if you don't know, I'll let you learn it in the ending pages of this book.

As with the other books in the series, O'Connor weaves a group of somewhat discrete myths and folktales together into one narrative, to tell the main story of his central character's life. It all has to be vaguely appropriate for those middle-schoolers, so O'Connor elides some of the activities of Dionysos and his Bacchantes (I don't think he actually uses that word, actually, probably because it's of Roman origin), but adults can generally read between the lines. There's wine, there's revelry, and there's blood - it's just the sexual end of the revels that has to be implied.

Dionysos is always one of the more fun gods, up there with Hermes. (I'm sure Eddie Campbell would agree with me there.) So these are exciting stories, even with the sex parts mostly elided over, and Dionysos, as he must be, is riveting throughout. It is a fine way to end a fine series, and I'm happy to learn (from that interview I mentioned up top) that O'Connor will next do a four-book series on Norse mythology but has hopes to come back to the Greek world for more books about Titans or heroes or others. (Hey, how about a series about sons of Zeus?)

Poseidon: Earth Shaker by George O'Connor

I've said it several times and several ways, so I might as well be blunt this time: George O'Connor, with this series, could and should be to the current generation of young readers what Edith Hamilton was to mine and the generation or two before that. He's in the middle of a series of graphic novels about the Greek gods -- so far there have been Zeus, Athena, Hera, and Hades, with Aphrodite promised and, with luck, another half-dozen or so to follow that -- that combine deep scholarship, a thoughtful attention to the core elements of stories, a master draftsman's eye and hand for pages that tell those stories brilliantly, and a narrative voice that speaks straight to younger readers without ever talking down to them.

This time, with Poseidon, he takes on one of the least relatable of the Olympians -- sure, Hades seems cold and distant, but his story is all about wanting some human contact. Poseidon, on the other hand, is a figure of power and distant wrath in the myths, but rarely if ever descends to the human level -- he doesn't chase mortal women like Zeus, or bless a chosen city like Athena. O'Connor turns that around by letting Poseidon tell his own story...and we still don't get that close to him, but that's on purpose.

So Poseidon tells us how he, Hades, and Zeus split the world three ways -- the earth would be common to them all, but Hades had the underworld, Zeus the sky, and Poseidon the seas, as it must be. And then he tells the stories of some of his children -- as he says, "my children have tended to be monstrous" -- from the cyclopes Polyphemos to Theseus, and other stories, of how he contended with Athena for the patronage of the city that would become Athens, of how he and others rebelled against Zeus, of his dream of being free of his father Kronos's belly. And through it all, Poseidon is distant, mercurial, changing -- like the deep sea itself.

This book has a palette filled with deep greens and blues, as it must -- and O'Connor's art is both supple and muscular to show the battles and confrontations of this most contentious of gods. These books are really good -- O'Connor provides extensive annotations to his pages, plus thoughtful afterwords on the sources and stories, plus lists of further reading, plus discussion questions (suitable for book club or classroom), so you really couldn't ask for more. These are some of the deepest, best stories the human race has, and O'Connor is doing a magnificent job of bringing them to new life.

Book-A-Day 2014 #103: Aphrodite by George O'Connor

If I were creating a series of books about the Greek gods for an audience of teenagers and other young people -- and thus subject to the whims of librarians and teachers and those annoying small-winded pressure groups of parents in our more benighted states -- I would probably stay as far away from Aphrodite as possible, because all of those folks can't stand "their kids" hearing any hint of S-E-X. Luckily, George O'Connor is not me.

His excellent series of graphic novels about the Olympians -- previously: Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon -- reaches its sixth volume with Aphrodite: Goddess of Love, the story of the hottest tamale on Olympus or any other mountain of the ancient world. (Sorry, Ishtar: it's true.) As before, O'Connor manages the very tricky and difficult job of telling his story in a way that's entirely appropriate for that young audience but hinting and nodding in the direction of adult complexities that many of his readers (including more of those kids than the meddling parents' groups would credit) will understand and think about.

Aphrodite, like the earlier Hera and Poseidon, tells an origin story and then skillfully weaves in many other myths and stories -- some in as little as a glancing panel -- instead of focusing on one major story, the way Hades and Zeus and Athena did. O'Connor does get into the biggest story that Aphrodite is part of -- the Trojan War -- at the end of this book, with the famous Judgement of Paris and Eris's golden apple. But the war itself doesn't happen before the end of this book -- O'Connor ends on what I hope is a promise to tell that story in a later book. (He still has plenty of Olympians to cover: Artemis and Apollo and Hephaistos, Hermes and Ares and, I fervently hope, Dionysos. Or he could have an all-Trojan War book; either way, I'll be there.)

Greek mythology is endlessly fascinating, particularly to the smart young audience that sees a thousand cultural references start to snap into clarity and to the slightly less obsessive types that just love great stories of larger-than-life characters. And O'Connor's graphic novels could easily be the Edith Hamilton of the current middle-school generation: he's that good, that smart, that versed in the literature, and that enthusiastic about his work and sources. I expect to see battered copies of these books brought out and read to a new generation of kids around 2030, as well: this is the real deal.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 86 (4/30) -- Zeus: King of the Gods by George O'Connor

Kids love the Greek gods -- maybe because they have great powers, maybe because they're always fighting with their parents and siblings, maybe because they always seem to be able to do whatever they want. But kids love 'em -- from Edith Hamilton to the D'Aulaires to Percy Jackson, they can't seem to get enough thunderbolt-throwing action. (The Norse gods get somewhat less love, possibly because of the increased level of doom, and the relative dearth of family squabbles.)

This year sees the launch of a new series of twelve graphic novels for young readers about the Greek gods, all written and drawn by George O'Connor, and on what looks like a quarterly publication schedule. Zeus was the first of the series, though I've already read the second book (Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess, which was Book-A-Day # 72).

Zeus is even stronger than Athena was, going the full Hesiod to start with the birth of Gaea from Kaos and run through the appearance of Ouranos and the birth and rebellion of the Titans before even getting to Zeus. He does skim over some of the more gory details, but, in general, this is a very authentic retelling of myth, given energy and excitement by O'Connor's vivid, stunning reimaginings of the characters: the Titans have star-fields for eyes and trailing clouds instead of hair, and their brothers, the Cyclopes and Hekatonchieres, are even stranger. O'Connor shapes Zeus's story to be a classic hero's quest -- as of course it already is, being one of the templates of that form -- with stunning panels and great scenes throughout.

O'Connor also manages to show -- at least to his older readers -- Zeus's wandering eye, which becomes much more important in the later myths. (I wonder if this will come more into play in Hera, the next volume.) His Zeus is cocky and attractive and in love with his own power, not the bearded old man of so many modern retellings, but eternally young and sure of his power and righteousness. And this is a great book for younger readers -- though they'll be even more eager to pick it up if you can manage to hide how educational it is!
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Midnight Spin - In the Air (Revival)
via FoxyTunes

Ares, Apollo, and Artemis by George O'Connor (three books)

I've written about George O'Connor's great series of books Olympians -- retelling the stories of the Greek gods for an audience not yet old enough to drive -- several times before, but now he's clearly getting to the A-team!

(Pause for laughter for a very, very weak joke.)

Actually, the previous books are Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Aphrodite, so the A-team has been featured twice before...but there are a lot of Greek gods beginning with A to begin with. You also could note that this planned twelve-book series is now three-quarters complete, leaving O'Connor with Hermes, Haiphestos, and possibly Dionysos and/or Hestia to finish up the set.

Like each of the preceding books, Ares, Apollo, and Artemis each presents the titular god at the center of authentic mythological action, somewhat opaqued to make certain elements more acceptable to a middle-school audience (or, more precisely, to the librarians, teachers, and purse-string-holding school boards of those young people). O'Connor doesn't exactly bowdlerize, but he doesn't dwell on the gore and rape -- though his annotations and notes at the end are specific enough to explain to all but the dullest middle-schoolers what was actually going on.

Some of the books dramatize one major myth or story about that god, while others have taken a more holistic approach -- you can't encapsulate Zeus by telling how he seduced one particular mortal women, for example.

So Ares is set at the climax of The Illiad, tightly focused on the squabbles among the gods over their demigod children and favorites, while Apollo and Artemis are more like mosaics, telling many stories to fill in the lives of their title characters. Apollo is told by the nine Muses, each telling (alone or in tandem) one story of this most Lannister-looking of gods, from his birth through his pursuits of various women to his defiance of Zeus. Artemis's story is told by a wider chorus (and, yes, a Greek one, har har), but similarly covers the major myths about her.

O'Connor clearly loves this material and has spent a lot of time and effort to present it well. And he has detailed notes on his story, plus an actual bibliography to send interest readers back to the originals. This is pretty much the Platonic ideal of a series for young readers: detailed, exciting, colorful, well-researched, and connecting back to works with more depth. And it's of serious interest even to readers who are old enough to drive.

Book-A-Day 2018 #215: Hermes by George O'Connor

Long-time Antick Musings readers know that I'm deeply in the tank for George O'Connor and his wonderful Olympians series of young-adult graphic novels about the Greek gods -- see my posts on Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite and then the Ares/Apollo/Artemis trifecta last year. [1]

So you can take it as read that, once I realized he had a new one out this year, I got myself a copy of Hermes, ran through it quickly, and jumped up here to tell you about it. And you will probably be assuming that I'm going to be effusive in praise, as usual.

Well.....

Of course I am! O'Connor still marries deep scholarship, snappy dialogue, believable characterization, and ace drawing skills to pull masses of semi-random mythic tales into sixty-six pages of story and about a dozen pages of sources, notes and full-page stats/bios for the major characters. Like most of the recent Olympians books, Hermes retells a bunch of different myths, and has a explicit structure that facilitates that.

In this case, one character whose real name I shouldn't reveal is telling stories of Hermes to another character whose real name I probably could reveal (because it's pretty obscure), as something like payment for hospitality. So we learn of Hermes' birth -- and how he stole a herd of cows from his brother Apollo, invented the lyre, and was accepted on Mount Olympus all the same night of the day he was born -- and then goes on to a mythic life only slightly less filled with incidents than first day.

They're mostly light stories, befitting Hermes's trickster nature, but O'Connor does break out the story of Typhon, the last and most monstrous son of Grandmother Earth, and his battles with Zeus -- which Hermes played an important part in. And, as usual, he gets a lot of mythology into his pages, and details his sources and side references in the extensive notes at the end.

These are great books: they're smart, well-researched, look gorgeous, and retell great stories in compelling ways. They should not be left to only younger readers.


[1] Particularly careful readers may be able to determine when I fell off the publicity lists for First Second, his publisher.

Reviewing the Mail, Week of 8/15: Part One: Comics and Graphic Novels

There's usually one week each month where the mail is much heavier than the others, and, for August, that would be this week. (Unless one of the next two weeks turns out even heavier, which would be awesome in more than one way.) So my usual single post is being broken into two pieces; the second half will cover SF and Fantasy books, and should be popping up here in a couple of hours.

Here's the deal with these posts: as you can see, I get a lot of stuff in the mail (a lot of bloggers/reviewers do), and it's unlikely that I'll have the time, energy, and will to read them all and write official reviews. But I can -- and do -- note all of these books as they come in, and say whatever I can about them from a cursory glance. It might not be a lot of attention, but my hope is always that it will help books find readers that will enjoy them. And, with that said, let's dive into this long list:

One of the buzz books -- there's usually a small handful, no more than half a dozen, books that nearly everyone seems to have read and be enthusiastic about -- from this year's BEA convention was David Small's comics memoir Stitches, which W.W. Norton will publish in hardcover on September 8th. I've only just seen it now, because I only got to BEA on Saturday, after the buzz had gone around the hall several times and the galleys had evaporated. Small is an award-winning children's book author -- he got the Caldecott, among others -- but this is his first work for adults, and his first graphic novel. Small grew up in the '50s, in one of those families we now call dysfunctional, but were just "families" back then. It's one I'm really looking forward to.

On a whole different level -- but also wonderful in their own way -- are three collections of Antonio Prohias's long-running "Spy Vs. Spy" feature from Mad magazine: Danger! Intrigue! Stupidity!, Missions of Madness and Masters of Mayhem. If you read Mad any time from the '60s to the '80s, you know Prohias's work: those two color-coded, beaked agents of destruction, forever scheming to destroy each other and neither of them ever being successful. Prohias's strips are reminiscent of Chuck Jones's Roadrunner cartoons -- only with two coyotes and no roadrunner. Each of these three medium-sized trade paperbacks -- a little bigger than a mass-market -- collects nearly two hundred pages of wordless Spy Vs. Spy strips, with all of their attendant inventive violence and intrigue. They're all available this month from Watson-Guptill.

The Big Kahn is a new graphic novel by Neil Kleid (Xeric Award-winning author of Brownsville) and Nicolas Cinquegrani. It's the story of a beloved Rabbi -- except that, after his death, his family and congregation learn that Rabbi David Kahn wasn't Jewish in the first place. The book description mostly talks about Kahn's two sons, and how they deal with the revelation...but (and I'm sure I'll have to read the book to figure out how this comes into play) Judiaism is determined matrilineally, so they're still precisely as Jewish as they were before, and that all depends on their mother (who, presumably, is just as Jewish after her husband's death as she was before it, no matter how Jewish, precisely, that was). The Big Kahn is being published in September by NBM.

Adam Rapp is a writer in various media (plays, novels, films) who seems to specialize in the horrific and the unpleasant -- his one adult novel is called The Year of Endless Sorrows, for example -- and he's now come to comics with the graphic novel Ball Peen Hammer, joined by George O'Connor on art. (And can I complain about the credits on this book? It's a graphic novel, not an illustrated piece of prose, so it's insulting to O'Connor's work to credit it as "by Adam Rapp; artwork by George O'Connor" unless Rapp actually laid out the damn thing and O'Connor just followed his thumbnails. The art in comics is as important as the words; turning a script into a page is more than just "illustrating.") Ball Peen Hammer takes place in one of your obligatory nihilistic near futures, in a conveniently nameless city where the survivors of "war and plague" (why not throw in famine and death while you're at it?) form "diseased deranged mobs that roam the streets." I warn you: the publisher calls it "an unflinching meditation on art and human nature," which usually means that none of the characters are pleasant, that most of them die in hideous ways, that the ending is bleak and depressing, and that you may not be able to understand large stretches of it. Of course, I may be wrong. Ball Peen Hammer will be published October 1st by First Second.

Del Rey and the Dabel Brothers extend their beachhead into graphic novel urban fantasy (already established with the Jim Butcher books together, and with other Dabel projects with other co-publishers) in Mercy Thompson: Homecoming, an original graphic novel in Patricia Briggs's popular werewolf series. It's written by Briggs and David Lawrence (an editor at Dabel and the creator of the Ex-Mutants) and has art by Francis Tsai and Amelia Woo, and it will be on shelves as a hardcover on August 25th.

The rest of this list all comes from one big box, crammed full of wonderful stuff from Fantagraphics, that I found on my doorstep a week ago today when I came back from Montreal. (And there's very little that's better as a welcome-home gift than that, particularly since Scarlett Johansson keeps refusing to wait behind my door in a bikini.)

I've only seen Johnny Ryan's work -- which is deliberately offensive in nearly every possible way, showing an impressive comprehensiveness -- in small doses before, but now I have a concentrated shot of Ryan at his best/worst. Prison Pit: Book One is the first in a new series about ultra-violence among a group of nasty characters inspired equally by pro wrestling, Fist of the North Star, and Grand Theft Auto. I expect epic levels of scatology and violence with a vague SFnal skin, all in Ryan's only slightly grown-up version of the notebook drawings of that creepy boy we all knew in seventh grade. Prison Pit is publishing on October 20th.

The Squirrel Machine is a major graphic novel, in a vaguely steampunk style, from Hans Rickheit. I don't know Rickheit's work, but it looks to fit in well with the general run of Fantagraphics' creators: careful detailed art slightly reminiscent of Rick Geary, and a deeply symbolic, surreal story that follows image much more than narrative. It's also coming October 20th.

I complain about the world sometimes -- who doesn't? -- but it's hard to find fault with a world in which Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 2 lands on my doorstep when I didn't expect it. That's a world that still has grace and surprise in it, a world I can believe in. The current incarnation of Love and Rockets -- one of the best comics of all time, with separate but compatible universes of story created by brothers Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez for the past almost thirty years -- is a yearly trade paperback with about fifty pages of comics from each of them. It's also coming on October 20th.

The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book includes two new stories by South African cartoonist Joe Daly, both of them featuring stoners Dave and Paul. I don't know Daly's work -- his previous book is Scrublands, from 2006 -- but Fanta describes this one as "stuffed to the gills with mystery, suspense, action, adventure, conspiracy theories, cool cars, and massive amounts of killer weed." It's yet another piece of Fanta's attempt to utterly dominate the comics world on October 20th.

You know, all of these books from Fantagraphics are publishing on October 20th, so I probably don't need to say that every time. Hmm. Anyway, next is Giraffes in my Hair: A Rock 'N' Roll Life, by Bruce Paley (who lived it) and Carol Swain (who drew it). Paley and Swain "live together in London," according to the publicity materials for this book, which I guess means that Paley is still far too rock 'n' roll to get married. Giraffes tells stories from ten years of Paley's life, from the late '60s through the late '70s, from his late teens to about thirty. Swain is an acclaimed British cartoonist, and this book was well-reviewed when it was originally published in France.

Last from the 10/20 Fanta box, and last for this week, is the first book in their program reprinting a huge swath of the work of the great French cartoonist Jacques Tardi. It's West Coast Blues, a noir graphic novel adapted by Tardi from the novel Le Petit Bleu de la Cote Ouest by Jean-Patrick Manchette (the novel has been translated into English as Three To Kill) and originally published in 1976.
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Listening to: Josh Ritter - Golden Age of Radio (live)
via FoxyTunes

Comics Round-Up: More Random Books

I have not read as many books as I wanted to this year, nor have I written about as many of the ones I did manage to read. (I didn't manage to save as much from the flood as I would have liked, either; it's a low-batting-average kind of year.) But the year is not over, and I can catch up on one of those fronts very quickly, viz:

I've devoted several thousand words over the past few years to the "Best American Comics" series -- see my posts on the 2006 and 2007 and 2008 and 2009 editions -- so perhaps I'll be forgiven for not diving as deeply into the Neil Gaiman-edited 2010 edition. (Particularly since the 2011 book is out now, all shiny and new, so this is terribly old news.) Each editor shifts the material somewhat -- Gaiman's volume leads off with a long excerpt from the Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple/Gary Panter Omega the Unknown, the first Big Two story in the series, which feels significant -- but the core of each book is very similar, drawing from the same group of major mid-career "alternative" cartoonists, from Gilbert Hernandez (here represented by a story done with his vastly less-prolific brother Mario) to Ben Katchor to Chris Ware to Peter Bagge to Bryan Lee O'Malley to C. Tyler to Robert Crumb. As usual, the series editors, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, picked a hundred notable works from their year -- September 1, 2008 through August 31, 2009 -- and sent those to Gaiman, who chose from them (and, possibly, from a few things he discovered on his own) to make this collection. Gaiman's introduction makes it clear that this isn't the "best" comics of the year -- nor even the best "American" comics of the year, whatever that may mean -- but it is a big collection of a lot of very good comics (and a few clunkers, though precisely which ones are clunkers may be a matter of personal taste) at a reasonable price. The whole series is a great way to discover what's going on over on the more interesting, less punchy side of the modern comics world, so I recommend this book, as I do its predecessors, for people who like stories told in comics form, though probably not for the kind of people who like the things that draw in the crowds of maladapted boy-men every Wednesday.

George O'Connor's Hera: The Goddess and her Glory is the third in a series of graphic albums -- published to be appropriate for younger readers, but not dumbed down for them, in a neat sidestep that O'Connor has gracefully mastered -- retelling, very faithfully and well, the stories of the Olympian gods and goddesses. (The first two covered Athena and Zeus; they are both also excellent.) Hera is a bold choice for this early in the series; she's the goddess of marriage and childbirth, two very adult (and boring, to kids) things, as well as used in most mythological retellings purely as an antagonist, either the shrewish wife of Zeus who drove him to wander or the nasty cuckolded wife piling torments on her roving husband's blameless sons. O'Connor does get into that side of Hera's life -- much of this book is a retelling of the labors of Heracles -- but she's the heroine of her own story here, smart and poised and utterly in control, even when Zeus goes haring off after yet another pretty mortal princess. O'Connor's knack for telling his stories in ways that are appropriate for smart pre-teens but with buried hints of darker matters for older readers is just as keen as in the previous books, and his afterword -- which is as scholarly as it is enthusiastic -- dives deeper into the mythological underpinnings of his story and O'Connor's thoughts as he put it together. And his art is as evocative and moody as before; his monsters are truly monstrous and his world is full of wonders. This is an amazing series, absolutely perfect for those mythology-loving kids and just as enthralling for those of us who discovered Edith Hamilton much longer ago than we care to admit.

I don't know if I have anything coherent or meaningful to say about R. Crumb's The Book of Mr. Natural, the collected stories of a character who is very much a product of a very specific time -- and that time was before I was born. Mr. Natural is described on the back cover as a "bearded, robed, curmudgeonly guru," but, really, he was just one in a long line of Crumb stand-ins, embodying one particular part of Crumb's own psyche to make particular points about contemporary society. Natural was the hippie side of Crumb, I suppose, forever disdaining all kinds of restraints, seeking mystical guidance from supernatural forces of one kind or another, and, most centrally, nakedly questioning the point of life and what, if anything, we're supposed to do with ourselves while we're alive. He does this, most usually, in pseudo-Socratic dialogues with Flakey Foont -- yes, these characters were conceived in the late '60s, and that permeates everything about them -- who is just as stereotyped an "Establishment" "square" "straight man" as Natural is a stereotype old hippie. (Though Crumb did anticipate what the real hippies would turn into, a couple of decades ahead.) I find it all a bit sad and woolly-headed, forty years later, but I am a well-known grump with no soul; more spiritually-oriented folks are likely to get more out of Natural's antics than I do.

And last for this installment will be Pearls Blows Up, the fifth treasury edition reprinting Stephan Pastis's morbid and pun-filled Pearls Before Swine comic strip. I've written about this strip a number of times before, and I've never had all that much to say about it -- it's a fun, occasionally dark, not-terribly-well-drawn, and usually very fun newspaper strip, and I greatly appreciate with without feeling the need to anatomize what makes it good. So: this was another one, with more Pastis annotations (which make any cartoon collection better), and it was just as enjoyable as the others.