Book-A-Day 2010 # 317 (12/17) -- Cairo by G. Willow Wilson & M.K. Perker

I've typed several paragraphs of a review of Cairo -- a DC/Vertigo graphic novel from a few years ago, written by G. Willow Wilson and drawn by M.K. Perker -- twice now, only to have both of them lost to Firefox crashes. (Lesson: don't place too much faith in betas.) So, for this third and I hope last try, I'm avoiding the fripperies and fancy metaphors, all of the oblique beginnings and other look-at-me-ma-I'm-writin'-now tricks, and just diving into a quick summary of the book itself.

(Pauses to save.)

Cairo is pretty ungeneric for mainstream comics: it's an adventure story with an odd assortment of characters and a few supernatural elements, the kind of thing that no one would be surprised to see in a movie, but there are women in prominent roles, it takes place in something resembling the real world, and the characters even occasionally change their (non-skin-tight, non-brightly-colored) clothes. Those six main characters -- as the back cover puts it, "a drug runner, a down-on-his-luck journalist, an American expatriate, a troubled young student, and an Israeli soldier", plus the requisite djinn for appropriate Middle Eastern flavor -- have depth beyond their plot functions (though they all slot pretty easily into Hollywood-appropriate types), and the story they race through, though it does involve a magic hookah and a box containing a very unlikely treasure, involves saving no one but themselves and no tortured speeches about responsibility. In other words, as I hinted, it would make a very mainstream movie or TV show but comes across as shockingly artsy from DC Comics.

And Cairo lives up to that: it's good but not spectacular, entertaining but not transporting, entirely enjoyable to read and even likely to raise a thought or three in the reader's mind about the ways the world really is. Perker's art, in B-movie tones of black and white, occasionally goes a bit broad in the facial expressions -- just as Wilson's script occasionally goes a bit big in the thematic material -- but it supports the story excellently, and that brings us a view of a world almost entirely alien to US comics readers.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Quote of the Week: Special Snowflakes

"Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everybody else."
- Margaret Mead

Book-A-Day 2010 # 316 (12/16) -- War Is Boring by David Axe & Matt Bors

There are always some people who run towards danger when the rest of us are running away. Some do it for glory, and some for self-destruction, and some for more noble reasons, like service and chivalry. But many, I would guess, don't really know why they run towards danger -- they only know that they do. And David Axe is one of them.

His recent book -- ably drawn, in a very slightly broad-faced style by noted editorial cartoonist David Bors -- is titled War is Boring, but Axe's focus is much more on himself than on the war zones he visits. In fact, this book should have been titled something like War Junkie (though that particular title, of course, has been used By Joe Sacco for comics about war reporting). Axe has a frame story set in Chad in the summer of 2008, where a UN driver asks him why he's in Chad. Axe replies that it's a long story...and that becomes this story.

Axe doesn't tell us about his reporting, either the mechanics of it (sources, cameras, power supplies, uploading stories, getting details right) or the stories he covered (Iraq, Lebanon, weaponry trade shows in DC, East Timor, Afghanistan, Somalia) -- War Is Boring is entirely the story of what it felt like to be David Axe, the war correspondent who hates the term, in the moments between action and reporting, on the ground in all of those places, addicted to the thrill and slowly going broke to feed that addiction. This really is an addiction memoir -- though Axe-as-a-character-in-the-book doesn't quite realize that on the page -- focused on Axe's need and longing for war. But this addiction memoir is more along the lines of De Quincey than Mary Karr. Axe doesn't overcome his addiction or transcend it; as far as the reader can tell, Axe is even more addicted to war (though he never quite explains what it is about war that thrills him, and his close calls are mostly things that happen to other people) at the end than he was at the beginning.

War Is Boring is a good collection of scenes, all of them showing David Axe either in a war zone or wishing he was, but it doesn't quite cohere as either pure reportage or a think piece; it remains just David Axe's individual story, without most of the details that would make it really particular and specific. It's not boring, but it doesn't really make the case that war is, either.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Advice to a Would-Be SF Writer

Hey! Non-Book-a-Day content has been slim here for donkey's years, and I just wrote the following (thinly edited to remove the recipient's name) to an editor at my place of employment, as advice/encouragement to an author who wanted to write a SF novel with a friend. Since it's on-topic for what I originally thought Antick Musings would mostly be, I'll stick it in here as well, in case someone else can benefit from this advice (which you could get, in much the same form, from many, many other people in the SF world, and from whom I have shamelessly cribbed).

I did work as a science fiction editor for sixteen years before coming to Wiley, and I’d tell a would-be author one thing to begin with: fiction is very unlike non-fiction in how projects are sold. No first novels ever sell before they’re completed, so the first and most important thing is to finish writing the book and get it up to a professional level.

Once the book is finished – not just with “The End” in place, but actually as good as the authors can make it – they should start to research agents. (Don’t contact agents before you have a complete book ready to show them – if they get interested, you’ll just lose them as possibilities once they discover that the book isn’t done.)

Some good links to read about agents and the field in general:

• http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/agents/
• http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/
• http://pred-ed.com/

And, yes, they will want to have an agent first – there’s a huge flood of submissions from people who think they can write novels. (Most of which are really pretty awful.) That’s meant that fiction editors have almost entirely stopped reading unsolicited or unagented manuscripts – and the one or two houses that do read unagented works put them into a huge pile that gets ignored for months.

Those links are a good place to start researching agents; another is through the works of similar authors. Aspiring SF authors should do a little market research, by seeing what else is out there that’s similar to their books. Make a list of authors that write books in the same subgenre (alternate history, space opera, military SF, whatever) and also try to find out their agents – authors often thank their agents in the acknowledgements in their books, and even more often list their agents as contacts on their websites.

Once you have a book that’s good enough to publish and a list of agents that have represented successful, published books in that area, it’s time to match the two up: go to the agents’ websites, and look for their submission guidelines. Then follow those guidelines precisely – fiction agents can get grumpy about non-standard submissions because they see huge waves of submission material. So if one agent asks for a synopsis, and another asks for the first ten pages and a synopsis, and a third asks for the first chapter but no synopsis…do it the way they ask, because that shows that you’re a professional.

Again, there are literally thousands of people writing novels for every published writer. The bad news there is that good work has to stand out from the flood. The good news is that salable work does stand out strongly from the flood; if you can tell a good story with interesting characters, to the level that people who don’t already know you want to pay money for it, you will get published eventually.

But I’d also say that, for most writers, the first novel they complete is not the first one they sell – and the ones that succeed are the ones who want to tell stories, not just have one idea that they’d like to see become a novel. It’s not unheard to publish the first novel you write – particularly, like in this case, when you’ve been a professional writer of other things – but fiction-writing is different from non-fiction in a lot of tricky little ways, and a novel is a long story with a lot of ways to go wrong in the middle. If you do really want to write fiction, don’t get discouraged – there will always be more stories, and each story teaches you something about your writing.

Good luck!

Book-A-Day 2010 # 315 (12/15) -- Dark Entries by Rankin and Dell'edera

It's a wonder that John Constantine isn't permanently crouched in a corner somewhere, keening softly and rocking back and forth in time with the voices in his head. (And, as I write that, I'm instantly sure that there have been at least two or three "John Constantine goes crazy/has a nervous breakdown" stories, probably from new writers trying to make their mark on the character.) Every major comics character has had far more drama in his life than the combined houses of Lancaster and York, but Constantine's drama has always been so relentlessly soul-destroying (literally so, since he's quite often twisting the noses of whatever demons and devils DC Comics is featuring this year) that one has to wonder how he can remain upright, let alone continue his line of wise-ass patter.

That thought has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of Dark Entries, a stylish small hardcover from the Vertigo Crime line (which usually, I thought, stayed away from the borders of the DC universe, but I suppose Constantine isn't much seen in those parts lately) that came out last year, I must admit -- this is a sturdy, standalone Constantine story, which could have slotted into his continuity at nearly any point in the last twenty-five years. Scottish crime bestseller Ian Rankin, writing for comics for the first time, provides the script, and Italian artist Werther Dell'edera brings the art. And Constantine, as usual, drags in his world-weary, cynical, hard-nosed baggage -- one of the many young women who died on him [1] is in his mind through much of the middle part of Dark Entries.

The story, this time, is that Constantine is hired by a producer of reality TV shows, because his latest ratings blockbuster (coincidentally called "Dark Entries"), in which the usual sextet of sullen self-obsessed twenty-somethings are locked in a rambling, complicated house designed to scare them into quitting before they get the big payoff in the end, has started to act really strange, with nasty scares the creators didn't design in plaguing the inmates of the house. (So, in TV parlance, it's "Big Brother meets Fear Factor;" there's something quaintly 2003 about the idea.) Constantine agrees, for a sufficient pile of cash, to enter the house, join the contestants, and figure out what's going on.

And, of course, that's not what's really going on, as Constantine quickly learns. So he has to find out the full details of the real situation, and then extract himself, and as many others as he can (which often with Constantine means "none," but I won't say how successful he is this time) from that situation. Along the way, there's some reality-TV satire, but not nearly as much as I feared -- in particular, the contestants never become as loathsome and self-aggrandizing as their real-world counterparts, though the slick TV-producer figure isn't quite as slimy and sneaky and devious as I expected, either. Actually, Dark Entries turns into a pretty straightforward supernatural puzzle story, and is definitely on the subdued side for a comic starring John Constantine. (Come to think of it, Dark Entries doesn't substantially add to Constantine's weight of guilt and self-loathing, which makes it a rarity among standalone Constantine stories.)

Dell'edera is fine with Constantine and the contestants, making them each individual and identifiable while still giving the graphic novel a moody, edgy, "European" feel. But he's less successful with the supernatural creatures that show up late in the book, which look lumpy and odd -- I would have liked to have seen Rankin's script, so I'd know what they were supposed to be. In the end, Dark Entries comes across as a solid but not stunning story about John Constantine, feeling faintly disappointing given the fancy package.



[1] This was a half-jokey plot point the last time I read the regular Constantine comic, Hellblazer, and that was at least a decade ago. I have to assume that several more pretty young things have died on his watch -- in suitably horrible ways, of course -- since then, because that's just the kind of thing that happens to John Constantine.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 314 (12/14) -- The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan

It's amazing how much a graphic novel suffers from lack of real lettering -- you wouldn't think that carefully-placed, professionally-typeset words in a handsome font could seriously damage the potential of a work, but they do. And when there are some hand-lettered singing and sound effects, as here -- no matter how simple they are or how inadequate that style would have been for the whole graphic novel -- it only makes that lack clearer.

The Storm in the Barn overcomes that flaw -- it's not a fatal problem, ever, but it does tend to make a book look more mechanical and draw the readers' attention to the production and away from the story -- but no story should have to overcome flaws in its presentation, in a perfect world. (This, though, is not a perfect world, and many, many stories do have to overcome flaws in their presentation.) But we can hope that Matt Phelan will investigate the state-of-the-art in comics lettering the next time he wants to create a graphic novel. More seriously, The Storm in the Barn is an essentially fabulist story told in an unfantastic, realistic style, which raises some tensions -- it's not a story like Geoff Ryman's Was, that wants to explore that tension, though, so the combination of elements doesn't always feel appropriate.

Jack Clark is an ordinary boy in 1937 Kansas, trying to help his family in any way he can (and there aren't many) as the dust-bowl winds and lack of rain scour his family's farm and the surrounding countryside for the fourth year straight. His older sister Dorothy hides in a curtained bed, reading Oz books, an invalid to dust pneumonia. And the kindly druggist Ernie tells him stories about the exploits of the fable-hero Jack, and tries to keep an eye on him when the other local boys bully him. But Jack is a quiet and withdrawn boy, and the local doctor mutters about "dust dementia" when Jack talks about seeing something odd in a nearby barn, empty since its owners left for California. Of course Jack did see something, and that something is vitally important -- not just for Jack himself, and his family, but for all of Kansas and (by implication) for the entire Dust Bowl USA. And Jack is the one who will have to make it all better.

Phelan uses soft, dusty lines and watercolors -- there's some ink on his pages, but the pencils stand out more, with their soft edges and smudged contours -- to depict this battered, unhappy landscape, and the dust nearly rolls off the pages, out from Phelan's many soft-edged panels. But he tends to throw in more of those soft-edged square panels to show action and tenseness, which doesn't entirely work to his benefit -- his pages work much better when he allows his panels to sprawl some more, taking up more space and revealing more of the bleak Kansas landscape.

The Storm in the Barn isn't perfect, but it's an accomplished and evocative first graphic novel, with a lot of atmosphere and a quietly compelling hero. Phelan has illustrated a lot of books for young readers before, but this is the first time he's turned his pictures into a graphic novel -- and it shouldn't be the last time.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 313 (12/13) -- Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist

There are certainly artists whose work up to the age of twenty-nine would easily justify a major retrospective: Keats, Byron, and Shelley in poetry, for example, and Mozart in music. Several visual artists showed amazing talent early, as well -- Millais entered the Royal Academy at eleven, and, of the current generation of cartoonists, Bryan Lee O'Malley was two-thirds through his "Scott Pilgrim" series at that age.

Sophie Crumb (born September 27, 1981), on the other hand, has a very thin resume up to this point: she produced two issues of Belly Button Comix (in 2002 and 2004), and did some art seen in the movie Ghost World. Oh, and, possibly more importantly, she's the daughter of underground cartoonist superstar R. Crumb (and only slightly-less-major feminist cartooning icon Aline Kominsky-Crumb). So it is very, very easy to be cynical about a book presenting Sophie Crumb's artistic journey -- since she hasn't arrived anywhere in particular, as far as most of us know -- particularly when it comes edited by the three Crumbs, published by R. Crumb's usual publisher, and full of work Sophie produced before she could legally drink.

Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist does look very much like what Norton slotted into the schedule when they realized they wouldn't get another R. Crumb book for a while after The Book of Genesis, but that's no reason to take someone else's cynicism out on Sophie, or to dismiss her book out of hand. It does show one young artist's development, from an exceptionally early age -- the first piece in here was created when Sophie was twenty-six months old -- up through sophistication and publishable work. (Part of the point of Evolution of a Crazy Artist, though, is to avoid work that was published, so every page in here has sketchbook drawings and other things that have never been seen before outside of the Crumb family living room.)

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Sophie's Belly Button Comix, so I can't speak to the question of how Evolution traces her development to that pinnacle. She does complain, on a number of sketchbook pages in her late teens, that she doesn't have a specific style, and that rang true to me -- she showed flashes of being a mature artist in terms of technique from around the age of ten, and was consistently technically accomplished by her mid-teens, but there's no sign here that she has yet developed a specific, individual style. (The question behind that, of course, is if a personal style is necessary -- but I suspect the real underlying cause is that Sophie Crumb has spent too much time in sketchbooks and not enough creating art, of any kind, for an audience.)

There are some notes by Sophie, on each section (divided chronologically into three-to-five year periods), but nothing more extensive, and no notes on individual drawings. It's exactly what it claims to be: selections of the better pages from the sketchbooks of a young woman who can certainly draw, but hasn't particularly done much with that talent yet. It will be of the highest interest to stalkers of the Crumb family, or otherwise fanatical fans of the elder Crumbs -- there may be some fanatical fans of Sophie herself, I suppose, but that group is likely to be quite small. But, since we don't know this "crazy artist" from any real body of finished work, seeing her evolution is less than enthralling.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/11

I usually have a long, tedious explanation of the point of the "Reviewing the Mail" posts here, but it feels silly to do so this week, since the mail brought just one book. I still do have to admit that I haven't read this book yet, which is slightly embarrassing -- it's only one book, and a graphic novel at that! -- but I should point out that the pre-existing stack of books to be read is quite large, and I picked up five books from the library this week as well. Anyway, the one book that arrived in the mail this week is...

The new book by French cartoonist Nicolas De Crecy, author of Glacial Period -- it's the first in a series, called Salvatore, Vol. 1: Transports of Love. NBM will publish this in trade paperback in January, and, as usual for things coming over from France, it actually collects the first two European Salvatore albums. Salvatore himself is a "crack mechanic dog," who is trying to build a magnificent vehicle so he can go visit his lost love after she moved to South America. (Comics are full of people who never think of saving up to buy a ticket, so I feel right at home with that premise.) It looks cute and quirky in about equal measure, but that's from a very fast glance -- I do expect to review this one soon.

I did get things that weren't books in the mail, and I could mention one of them here: a little pre-publication pamphlet (not sure if the publisher is calling this a "teaser" or a "blad") for Doug Savage's Savage Chickens, coming as a trade paperback in March 2011 from Perigee. From what I can see here, it's a book of cartoons about chickens in office situations, and it's pretty funny in an early-Dilbert way. (If you want to check our Savage's cartoons, they were, as nearly everything is these days, published first for free on these very Interwebs.)

Book-A-Day 2010 # 312 (12/12) -- The Zabime Sisters by Aristophane

Quiet, closely observed stories from odd corners of the world have never been the sort of thing to set the graphic novel world on fire. (Or any other literary world, really -- they're the kind of thing universally referred to as "small.") So it's slightly odd to see French graphic novelist Aristophane's work introduced to English-language readers through a quiet story about three sisters on the first day of summer vacation, high in the mountains of the Carribean island nation of Guadeloupe.

(On the other hand, Aristophane's career raises other questions for the American reader, primarily among them why this 1996 book was his last published work, since he lived until 2004. There may be good answers, or bad answers, or no answers for those questions.)

But we have to take The Zabime Sisters as it is: Aristophane wrote and drew it over a decade ago, but Matt Madden has translated and presented it to us now, so now is when we can see it. Those three sisters -- M'Rose, Ella, and Celina -- have different ways that they want to spend that first day of vacation, but they and their friends and schoolmates end up, as children and other social animals do, grouping together to do what everyone else is doing. And those events are almost startlingly timeless -- a fight between two boys, a stolen bottle of rum to drink, picking growing fruit for a snack, and so much walking and talking -- that they wouldn't be out of place in Tom Sawyer, or in a story two or three centuries older.

It wouldn't make much sense to describe the plot of Zabime Sisters in any detail: the three girls go out to indulge their summer freedom, meet many other kids they know, and have a summer day. There are no huge moments here, but the small ones are thoughtfully chosen and carefully organized -- this is not a typical day, but an exemplary one. Along the way, Aristophane's chiaroscuro-esque blacks mimic the bring sunlight and dark jungle shadows of tropical Guadeloupe, taking these universal moments and making them particular. His characters don't strike as strongly as his images do -- they're believable and identifiable without leaping off the page urgently; we feel that we have known people like M'Rose without strongly understanding M'Rose herself. Zabime Sisters, in the end, is what it looked like in the beginning: a well-made but quiet story of childhood, in an evocative style, by a creator we probably won't ever get to know better. It's interesting and worth reading, but not compelling.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 311 (12/11) -- All-Star Superman, Vol. 1 by Morrison & Quitely

This book is museum-quality: a highly-polished, painstakingly labored over, carefully presented coprolite. Every moment of it was digested long ago -- by writer Grant Morrison, by its expected readers, by twelve-year-olds of all ages and eras -- and it's been fossilized to precisely replicate the quirks and oddities of the cud that Morrison and that audience chewed together, decades ago, with all of the original short-lived deadline-driven newsprint goofiness replaced by the granitic rock of fancy modern printing and trendy retro-superhero nostalgia.

But it's still a turd.

I can't blame Grant Morrison, even though he long ago aimed his career down the narrow corridor of allowable modern superhero stories, carefully aping the past as slavishly as possible while still giving a sense of newness [1] -- a man's got to eat, and Morrison is clearly good at punching that particular button in the fanboy brain. And I suppose it's not Frank Quitely's fault that every single one of his characters seems to be assessing the reader as a very low form of life and considering extermination options. (And there is a clear masochistic streak in the modern superhero fan -- who else would return, again and again, to the scene of the "raping of his childhood"? -- which, I suppose, makes Quitely's characters the doms of the comics dungeon.)

And it's unsurprising that All-Star Superman, the twelve-issue monthly series that took three years to complete, has been almost universally beloved in the comics world, since it's exactly what that audience craves so much: a product meticulously crafted to appear to their now-jaded and middle-aged eyes as closely as possible to the way Silver Age stories looked when those eyes were young. It's not even nostalgia, which at least genuinely looks backward, but something much less healthy, a dragging of childhood obsessions bodily forward into later life under the pretense that they're anything but childhood obsessions. And so here we have a Fortress of Solitude full of Superman robots, a Lois Lane obsessed with unmasking Superman, a Jimmy Olsen forever donning bizarre costumes and having absurd adventures, and even that pinnacle of '70s absurdity, Steve Lombard. Of course we do: the fake nostalgia wouldn't be complete if all of the pieces weren't clicked into place.

All Star Superman, Vol. 1 is a collection of the first six of these twelve trompe-l'oeil paintings, each one minutely detailed to give to the kind of grown men who hang around in comics shops every Wednesday the illusion that it's 1974 again and all of their lives are still in front of them. But it only works if you were there, if in 1974 or some similar year you imprinted on unsophisticated Superman comics and yearned for the world they depicted. If you had any other kind of childhood, reading All-Star Superman is like reading a well-bound, impeccably produced collection of someone else's sexual fetishes.

I read the second half of this series back when I was an Eisner judge, early in 2009, and I wasn't overly impressed. But I figured I should give it a second chance, since so many people seem to love it so much, and I picked up the first half of the story this week. Nothing changed my mind, and now I resent past-me for making now-me read this junk. Good thing I can't get my hands on my own past self.

I'm sure I won't change anyone's mind on All-Star Superman; it's one of the pillars of modern adventure comics. But it's bad in corrosive, creativity-destroying ways, and someone needs to point those out every so often, even if no one listens.


[1] See my ComicMix review of Batman R.I.P. for another example of High Morrison.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 310 (12/10) -- Pride of Bagdhad by Vaughan and Henrichon

It's amazingly easy to trivialize something, if you want to. "Four talking lions from Saddam's zoo meet a highly symbolic end after an aimless odyssey." There you go. Of course it's not fair, but that's the whole point of trivializing something: to make it trivial.

It's not quite as easy to aggrandize a work of art, and it takes longer -- short descriptions are always reductive. (Witness "A young girl travels to a distant land and murders the first person she meets, then teams up with 3 strangers to kill again.") But it would be possible to spin a paragraph-long, ecstatically-positive description of Pride of Baghdad as well, with phrases like "geopolitical allegory," "fabulistic realism," "gem-like luminosity," and "shattering climax."

The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle: Pride of Bagdhad is a thoughtful, strong story, marred slightly by being a bit silly and a bit too obviously Meaningful. (The note at the end, tying it into the real news story that inspired it, is the final dig in the ribs, where writer Brian K. Vaughan mutters under his breath, "Did'ya see how touching I was?")

Beast fables used to serve to illuminate human behavior by putting recognizable characters into animal roles and satirically observing them; that was the method of Aesop, and most of his imitators. Vaughan, though, wants to work in a modern, blunter style, in which the animals are innocents (to the extent that's plausible) and humans are outside forces, all-powerful and unknowable, who destroy nature at every turn, and pervert the poor innocent animals no matter what they do. (Or perhaps "innocent" isn't the right word -- "powerless" may be better.)

And so Pride of Baghdad follows four lions from the Bagdhad zoo: a mature male, his like-aged mate, an older and wiser lioness [1], and the requisite innocent, a very young male. The story opens on what might be a typical day in the zoo for the lions and other inhabitants, except that this is the day American forces reach Bagdhad, dropping bombs as they go. Chaos erupts, the zoo animals are freed and run wild, and the four lions escape for a journey through several landscapes that show the nastiness and overwhelming power of humans (broken up by a flashback or two), before the inevitable bad end.

Luckily, Vaughan doesn't try to make the lions noble and unspoiled; they bicker and squabble, plot and complain, and aren't united in purpose for more than a moment or two at any point. But they're still the poor downtrodden (magnificent, powerful) animals caught in the middle of a human war; that's the central point of Pride of Bagdhad, and can't be avoided. If you can stand a little didacticism in your fiction, Pride of Bagdhad is impressive: the four central characters ring true (for talking lions), and the secondary animal-characters fill their roles well. And Henrichson's art, which I haven't mentioned before, is gorgeously, luminously detailed. (The book doesn't say specifically, but it doesn't credit a colorist, so I believe Henrichon is responsible for all of the art.) But reading it does feel not unlike being led around by the nose -- the view is excellent, but the obviousness of the steering is annoying.


[1] Who, if this were a real pack, would be equally the male's mate, but that would veer too far from the cozy lion-nuclear-family Vaughan is crafting.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Quote of the Week: What to Do

"Think nothing profitable to you which compels you to break a promise, to lose your self-respect, to hate any person, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything that requires walls and curtains about it."
- Marcus Aurelius

Book-A-Day 2010 # 309 (12/9) -- Denys Wortman's New York

Well over ninety-nine percent of humanity is forgotten fifty years after they die -- no matter how smart, or beautiful, or accomplished, or tough they might have been, their memory slips away and they're left as just another member of the vast mass of anonymous dead. And it has to be that way: we don't know well all the people we could that are alive, out of the six billion of us, so how can we keep up the names of the dead as well? But, still, every so often, one of those forgotten has a chance to leap back up into public consciousness -- and we always want to applaud that, to root for the forgotten and dead, in the silent hope that we, too, will be remembered and appreciated in some unlikely way long after we're gone.

So the story of Denys Wortman is tremendously appealing: he drew a single-panel slice-of-life feature, Metropolitan Movies, for the New York World from 1924 to 1954, among a lot of other illustration work, but was almost entirely forgotten after his death in 1958. (The bulk of his work -- over five thousand illustrations -- mouldered in his son's shed for thirty-five years before he was rediscovered by James Sturm of the Center for Cartoon Studies.) Wortman's work isn't much like the conventional pillars of the comics pantheon, either of his day or ours: it's reflective rather than demanding, the product of a seeing eye rather than a defining sensibility, and he avoided larger narratives and stories throughout his career. And that makes it tremendously valuable now: Wortman's Metropolitan Movies are amazing records of how people -- mostly working-class New Yorkers of the Lower East Side -- lived over the course of an entire generation.

Denys Wortman's New York is the first book of Wortman's art in over forty years and the first retrospective of his work ever: an amazingly immersive journey, arranged as if to show one long day in the city, ably curated by Sturm and Brandon Elston. Some of the details of life shift over the long stretch of time this book covers -- the standard entertainment shifts from sitting on the stoop and watching the world to radio and even (in a cartoon or two from the early '50s) to television. But the feel of these lives is remarkably similar, from the depths of the Depression to the war years and on to prosperity afterward -- Wortman captures the everyday-ness of all of these days, and so they all flow together to make one master day, a perfect, full day that never existed.

Wortman's art is soft, with a look of pencils and charcoal rather than ink, and looks almost finished rather than completed, as if Wortman just stepped away from his drawing board for a second, or that this world is an instant away from coalescing into reality. His faces are expressive and individual, but his line isn't as loose as it may look -- there's a mass of carefully observed and precisely rendered detail in each of these drawings, making them several hundred windows into a world now gone. He was a master of one of the trickiest things in drawing: the careful composition that looks artless, the panel that's so much like life that the artifice is completely forgotten.

So Wortman's regular New Yorkers work and shop and play, go to school and the park and Coney Island, fight with their spouses, play cards, go to shows and the dentist and the beach, laugh and complain and make jokes about their lives, and congregate on front stoops and back fire escapes to talk and pass the time. All the way, each drawing has a caption -- usually a line of dialogue, and usually pretty long for a caption, but never too long. And those captions -- many or most of them, an afterword explains, by Wortman's wife Hilda, who also took thousands of photos for reference over the years -- capture brilliantly the voices of thousands of regular city dwellers, in all of their moods and styles.

Denys Wortman's New York is a wonder of a book, brilliantly bringing back to life a time and place that hardly anyone left alive can remember, and giving it a depth and energy rare in any cartoonist. Wortman is the rediscovery of the year, and his New York is a place to dive into again and again, a fully real world populated with a vast array of real people. Like Wortman, this book comes out of nowhere to charm and amaze what I hope will be a large audience -- of fans of great cartooning and armchair social historians alike.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 308 (12/8) -- Manga Claus: The Blade of Kringle by Marunas & Craddock

There's a kind of comic -- exclusively published by people who have little experience in the form, though usually they know a lot about other kinds of publishing -- where the credits inevitably run "by so-and-so" (the writer) and then a secondary credit of "artwork" or "illustrated" by a second name. Of course, a finished graphic story is no more "by" its scripter than a finished movie is, but regular publishing fetishizes the prose-slinger, so we have to make allowances.

Manga Claus: The Blade of Kringle has credits like that: it's "by" Nathaniel Marunas, a book editor (at the time of publication, with B&N's original publication arm and currently at Sterling, a publisher owned by B&N), and has "artwork by" Erik Craddock, a cartoonist, storyboard artist, and animation director. If one suspects that Craddock probably did more to influence the final look of the book, given his experience, one should just shake one's head ruefully at the vagaries of life and publishing, and then reflect that one might well be wrong.

This is a silly little book, and it would do no one any good to take it too seriously. It was meant to be an entertaining trifle for tweens, and it's certainly that. And it's very appropriate this season, which is one of the reasons -- the other is just how deeply silly it looks -- that I picked it up recently.

In the cold opening -- Manga Claus aspires to be a slightly edgy animated TV special, the kind of thing that Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network would air -- old Saint Nick parts from his sensei in Japan at the end of the Edo period, and returns to the North Pole. The rest of the story takes place in the modern day, in Santa's compound, during the busy last days before The Big Night. One elf, Fritz, feels unappreciated (in a very theatrical manner) and contrives a situation which he can then fix and show how useful he is. It doesn't work out that way, of course. And so a relentless army of evil -- cute, fuzzy, little evil, but evil nonetheless -- sweeps over the North Pole, until only Santa and Fritz are left free. Can Fritz get Santa's two swords to his boss in time to save the day? Well, what do you think?

There are very few books with armies of ninja teddy bears in them, so Manga Claus has that in its favor. And artist Craddock has a crisp, animation-derived style that almost makes us believe we're watching this at 8 PM on some Thursday this month. And it is remarkably straight-faced, given how silly the idea is. It's not particularly noteworthy or exciting, but it's a decent non-lachrymose Christmas Special in print form, which has some appeal.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 307 (12/7) -- The Complete Peanuts, 1977 to 1978 by Charles M. Schulz

When I last left Peanuts -- with my Book-A-Day #298 post on the 1975-76 volume, less than two weeks ago -- I noted that Peanuts wasn't in its first flowering in those years, but that it still had clear strengths, particularly in its longer continuities and character work. As the '70s wound down, the next couple of years were very much like '75 and '76, but even more so.

The Complete Peanuts 1977-1978 showcases an era when Schulz's drawing was still at its peak, and his story-making skills were perhaps greater than ever before -- there are many long continuities, and Schulz had developed a pleasing knack of segueing from one storyline to another, in the vein of the great adventure strips of his youth. (Though, still the consummate professional, he never let any continuity run longer than about five weeks, and then broke for a week or two of single gag strips before the next storyline took hold.) But his new characters were mostly thin and unappealing, with tennis players like "Crybaby" Boobie and Molly Volley and a sequence with Snoopy as a great disco dancer. (On the other hand, these years also introduced Eudora, often confused and a rival for Linus's affections -- she could have grown into a Peppermint Patty for the '70s, with a little more work, but she ended up another discarded short-termer, like Linus's previous love Truffles, whom she somewhat resembled.)

The central spark of Peanuts -- the sense that the world was tough but probably worth it, as seen in the disparate reactions of characters like the downtrodden Charlie Brown, the tough but vulnerable Peppermint Patty, the philosophical Linus, the pugnacious Lucy, and the monomaniacal Schroeder -- had receded like a long withdrawing tide by 1977, with Lucy less grumpy, Linus less put-upon, and even Charlie Brown's travails more comical than sad. Armchair psychologizing is always dangerous , but I'd venture to say that, by this point, Schulz's self-image character wasn't Charlie Brown (the sad sack to whom nothing good can ever happen) but Snoopy (jogger, tennis player, world traveler, living in his own dreams and making them real).

Success didn't ruin Peanuts, but it did sweeten it, and a little sweetness goes a long way. A larger dose of sweetness, from the dominant comic strip on the planet, could be nearly inescapable. There are flashes of the old Peanuts, still, as when Charlie Brown bites the kite-eating tree, goes on the run from the EPA, and ends up coaching the "Goose Eggs" team of tiny kids -- but even that is clearly a poorer cousin to storylines like "Mr. Sack" from a few years before. Peanuts was still funny and engaging, a little shard of joy on the comics page, during these years -- it just wasn't what it once had been. (But who is, twenty-seven years in?)

This book does contain a sequence with a line of dialogue that keeps coming back to me at the oddest moments -- I haven't been able to forget it yet, and I guess I might never:
If I leave you with one thought, let it be this one: Growl, Snarl, Snap, Growf, Bark, Woof.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index