Every year, I’m confident that this is the year I will keep up with my reviewing, and I’ll get to everything that I want to review, and every year, I fall short. But hope springs eternal, yo! This year has been a bit difficult, just in terms of real-life stuff, and while I’ve kept up with reading single issues and trade paperbacks, I’ve fallen way behind on stand-alone graphic novels. Recently, I had a bunch of them up on consecutive days, which is how I like to do it these days – write reviews over several months, and then post them all on consecutive days. I’ve done that for some years, and it’s fine. But then I fall way behind, and it’s just not feasible. For example: I posted 10 reviews from 1-10 November. Easy, right? Well, The Cold Ever After, which showed up on the first, came out in February, and I didn’t post the review until November. Khiêm, the final review on 10 November, came out in May. I finished writing about The Cold Ever After on 5 August. I finished writing about Khiêm on 31 October. So it took me almost 3 months to write 10 reviews. They don’t take too long to write, of course, but I just don’t get to them fast enough. Hence, I’m way behind. I could simply skip the rest, which is what I’ve often done, but this year, I’m going to try to review them all in old-school “capsule” review form – just a few thoughts about each of them. Can I keep from blathering on about these books? We shall see!
Seoul Before Sunrise is the first book up. It’s by Samir Dahmani and is translated by Nanette McGuinness. Humanoids published this through their “Life Drawn” imprint. It’s about two teenagers, Seong-ji and Ji-won, who are about to go off to college in Seoul, but at different colleges, and Seong is worried they’ll drift apart. Hilariously and somewhat poignantly, they’re introduced to us as they’re discussing the nose jobs they will get once they get out of school – I guess that’s a cultural thing in Korea? Anyway, they do drift apart, and Seong finds herself adrift in Seoul, until she meets an older woman who does oddball things at night, and she gets Seong to embrace her new reality. It’s a very nice story about growing up (yes, a coming-of-age story, blech!), as Seong needs to become a full-fledged person before she can deal with the loss of her friend, but when she does, Ji-won shows that she, too, has changed, and perhaps not for the better. It’s not necessarily a tragic tale, but it is somewhat melancholy – Seong can’t see some things that she should be able to, and nobody is really happy at the end, but for Seong, at least, it’s a necessary part of her evolution from girl to woman. Dahmani’s beautiful watercolor art helps create a dreamlike environment, as Seong and her friend haunt Seoul through the night and experience it in a strange way, and the way Dahmani does the art helps that vibe greatly.
Seoul Before Sunrise is a very good comic. Give it a look!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Up next we have Griz Grobus and the Tale of Azkon’s Heart, which is an odd science fiction comic. It’s written and drawn by Simon Roy, with the story by Roy and Jess Pollard. The colors are by Sergey Nazarov, and it’s published by Image. I’ve liked Roy’s art for a while, so I figured I’d give this a look, and it does look neat. Roy creates two different worlds, one a place where the people live generally as subsistence farmers in a world bereft of most modern technology, which changes when one of them – a scribe who never gets a name – finds a fuel cell for the old robotic shell that the people in the village commemorate and almost worship. When they install it, the robot wakes up, and … it’s not exactly what they expect. Meanwhile, on a war-torn world, a wizard summons the spirit of an ancient war god to go into his side’s greatest warrior, but through a somewhat humorous turn of events, the spirit goes into … a goose. Which wants to fight!
It’s a strange comic, because the two stories are seemingly unrelated, and when we do find out how they are, it’s a bit disappointing. Still, both stories are fun and weird, as the scribe has to figure out how to talk to the awakened robot, which seems very single-minded about its mission, while the cook whose goose it is has to figure out how to not get killed because the goose wants to fight so much. Both stories resolve oddly but well, as the war god discovers things about the world in which he lives that make him rethink his priorities and the scribe understands that some treasure in life doesn’t reveal itself easily. Roy does really well filling both of these worlds with wonderful and weird characters, and he does well to show how the regular folk might feel about, say, a robot god coming back to life or a goose talking about leading a charge. It’s a slightly goofy comic, but at its heart, Roy and Pollard do a good job showing us what’s really important in life.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Kimberly Wang and Silver Sprocket bring us our next book, Of Thunder & Lightning. This is very much a video game/manga inspired comic, as two protagonists simply fight whenever they meet, and the people back at their home bases fix them up and send them out to fight again, but Wang goes a bit deeper than that, which is nice. It’s not the most original story, but Wang’s frenetic art and somewhat dark sense of humor help make it a bit more fun to read, until Wang goes pretty dark at the end. Magni and Dimo are the two warriors, and Wang does a nice job not taking sides in the war, as it’s clear both sides aren’t great but they also have what, for them, are good reasons for going to war. She does a nice thing of showing the war from both sides, and it’s depressing how similar both sides are when it comes to propaganda. She also keeps some of the facts about both sides subtle, so we soon realize that (shocking!) the rulers of both sides might be just a bit cynical about why they’re fighting. She stays with Magni a bit more, and when something happens that takes them out of the fight for a time, she can examine a bit of what happens when a warrior doesn’t have a war to fight. As I noted, it’s not the most original story, but Wang tells it well, and her vibrant art is a very good complement to the story. She can show devastation quite well, but she also is able to soften her art to show how Magni and Dimo are connected and what that means. It’s more an interesting book than a really good one, but it’s not bad by any means.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Walking Distance by Lizzy Stewart (and published by Avery Hill) is a strange beast. It’s not really a comic, as Stewart doesn’t tell a story in a sequential style, and in fact doesn’t use comics’ conventional storytelling tropes at all. She uses big chunks of prose, with a lot of wordless panels to highlight some of the things she’s writing about. This is also not really a memoir, more a kind of reckoning with who she is at the moment she is writing (which was when she was 31 years old). She writes about walking around London and how that connects her to the world, and she writes about women walking in movies and how much she enjoys it even though, later in the book, she notes how unlike real life it really is. She writes about her mother when she was 30 and how they might have gotten along, and she writes about her friends getting pregnant and what she thinks about that. She also writes about how it might be dumb to write about all this stuff. Navel-gazing is fun to do, to a degree, but Stewart also recognizes that it might not be productive. This is something I think a lot of people struggle with, and it’s interesting to read Stewart’s thoughts on it. This was written in 2019, so the Dumb Orange was in charge then, and I don’t know how much Stewart is reacting to that, but now that he’s back (just like all those sequels no one asked for!), this kind of self-reflection is plaguing a lot of people, I would imagine. Part of the problem with this is that I think far too many people do NOT like to be introspective, and they don’t consider things carefully, and we end up with the Fascist Clown. Stewart keeps things personal to a degree, but she also notes how the world is burning down and perhaps there’s something we could do about that. It doesn’t permeate the book too much, but it’s still there. She links this prose to some gorgeous black-and-white watercolor work of her walking through the world and interacting with some of the people in her life. It’s a quiet, contemplative book, and it’s quite well done.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Next we have Dandelion, which is written by Sabir Pirzada and drawn by a bunch of different people. It comes to us from Image Comics. Pirzada sets the book a few decades in the future and gives us a new invention – floating homes. A woman created homes that, basically, float around (they’re called “dandelions,” of course), and she thought they would be good to alleviate the land/housing crisis of the world, but of course governments turned them into places to send “undesirables” (who give up any right to touch land again) while the wealthy stayed firmly on the ground. This is an interesting book, as it’s divided into chapters, showing different aspects of the world of the future. Different artists draw each chapter, and there are very few recurring characters. Martín Morazzo draws two chapters, following a couple who decides to live in a dandelion and what that means for them, while Vanesa Del Rey draws two as well, as her story is about an enigmatic young lady who seems to know an awful lot about the dandelions and what one can do with them. Meanwhile, we get a stories about a dude who uses the dandelions to attack a corporate skyscraper (for a hilarious yet poignant reason); people who flout the rules and return to the ground covertly, which doesn’t go well; one of the characters from that story turns up again as a rebellious artist; and old lady visits her grandson and great-grandson and discusses their old family restaurant (it’s relevant, trust me!); a boy turns his family home into a pirate ship and sails the slowly flooding world, getting some assistance from a dude in a dandelion along the way. There’s even a Christmas story! It’s a contemplative comic – Pirzada doesn’t give us a ton of action, and due to the shortness of the stories, the characters aren’t developed that much, but the few recurring characters are fairly interesting, and the idea of the book goes a long way toward making it successful. Simply by coming up with this odd invention and obviously weaponizing it against the poor, Pirzada can create all these stories about the way the world works without being too, too obvious about it, and the book works as a social critique and also a nice paean to real social interaction, as the people in the book struggle to make connections with others in a world that no longer promotes that and doesn’t make much sense. It’s not a great comic, but it is pretty good, and it’s cleverer than you might expect. Which is nice.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
You know I dig the YA books (well, sometimes), so I picked up Of Her Own Design from Mad Cave’s YA imprint, Maverick. Birdie Willis and Nicole Andelfinger wrote it, and several people worked on the art. Vash Taylor and Fiona Marchbank draw the bulk of it, with Laurent Reis, Eva Cabrera, Rowan MacColl, and Linden Cahill (who colors MacColl’s work) doing separate chapters, while Saida Temofonte letters the entire thing. Despite the many artists, the book has a nice, consistent tone, art-wise, and the three latter artists – Reis, Cabrera, and MacColl – are drawing different chapters that take place in different realities, so it’s not a bad thing that there are different artists for those sections. The book is about Brie, a 16-year-old who’s struggling at school a bit and terrified of asking out the cool girl she digs because she – Brie – thinks she’s not cool. Her best friend from back in the day, Viv, is no longer nice to her, and she doesn’t know why. Her parents are discussing moving to “the city,” away from the small town they live in, and they’re arguing about it a lot. Brie is a writer, but she can’t figure out what to write, until she stumbles across a bookstore with an unusual proprietor, who sells her some fancy ink and a fancy pen. When Brie starts writing with that, she discovers that whatever she writes becomes real. This would be fine, except it’s all slowly seeping into the “real” world, so she has to go into each story and try to stop that from happening. The writers have fun with this – she goes into a fantasy world where she’s the queen, and she needs to face off against Viv, who has become an evil sorceress; she’s a space pirate who finds out that her parents are in the story with her; she’s in a Brontë-esque drama where the third-person narrator keeps trying to keep her on course even though she’s trying to break free and find the object of her crush. Of course, she learns life lessons and secrets about the people in her life, and she finds out why this all happened in the first place, and none of it is terribly surprising, but the writers do a very good job making these characters real, so even though we can predict where the book is going, when we get there, it’s still very effective. The sense of humor in the book is very fun, too – there is a lot of heartfelt stuff, sure, but the book can be very funny. The art is nice, too – I assume Taylor starts the book, and her art is very nice – angular and kinetic and a bit raucous, showing how stressful Brie’s life has become. Marchbank’s art – which comes later in the book, I think – is a bit less angular and therefore a bit softer, and while I don’t love it quite as much, it feels more in keeping with how Brie’s life has become a bit better. Reis’s art on the fantasy world and MacColl’s work on the “Brontë” world is excellent, while Cabrera’s art on the pirate world is not quite as good, but still very solid. This is a just a charming story about becoming your own person, and it’s a fun read.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Ilias Kyriazis, of whom I’ve been a fan for some time, has What We Wished For from Humanoids, which is lettered by Tom Williams and has a color assist from Nikki Spanou. This is a superb comic, one of the best of the year, and before it came out, I was looking forward to it, and now I’m even more keen to see what Kyriazis will do going forward. It’s about a group of kids who, in the 1980s, find a cave inhabited by a strange being (it looks different to each kid, which is nifty) who grants them wishes while a comet passing overhead is still there. One of the group takes too long to make his wish, so the wishes are not granted. However, the comet passes by 38 years later, and the kids get their wishes as adults. Things do not necessarily go well. For one, they’ve pretty much forgotten about the wishes and, in some cases, each other (the main boy in the kid group was forced to take his sisters with him to play, and the sisters don’t really remember the other boys all that much because they weren’t really friends). Second, they made, well, kid wishes, and those do not turn out the way they planned. The main character, such as she is, wished for endless cake without really thinking about it, so when her wish is granted as an adult, things get hilariously ridiculous. Kyriazis does a very good job with not only the plot, which is interesting, but how the characters have grown up and how they’ve changed, so maybe their wishes aren’t as pertinent to their lives as they used to be (and in some cases, far too pertinent). The book is a bit tragic because some of the characters simply don’t know how to handle their wishes, but it’s not a tragedy overall, because Kyriazis does such a good job showing how these people need to figure out how to live in this odd new world. He does a very good job building up these characters, so when bad things happen to them, it hits hard, and when good things happen, it’s a triumph. His art is brilliant, as well – he makes the “1980s” portion of the book a bit more cartoony, with simpler body structure and faces (there’s kind of a “Little Orphan Annie” feel to the art). Then, when we move to the present, he uses much greater detail and precision, and his characters go through emotional wringers that Kyriazis draws beautifully. He’s always been very good at action (why he has barely worked for the Big Two is a mystery to me, unless he really doesn’t want to), and we get some big action set pieces in this book, which are quite awe-inspiring (and, in one instance, hilarious). What We Wished For is excellent, and you should definitely check it out.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
As I noted above, I check out YA books every once in a while, because very often they’re pretty good for adults, too, and The Old Willis Place (from Clarion Books) is one of those. It’s not the greatest comic, but it’s creepy and disturbing without being too creepy and disturbing, and it’s a bit scary without being too scary. Older teens might scoff at it because they’re so very worldly, but younger teens and crotchety oldsters like me will probably like it. Scott Peterson adapts Mary Downing Hahn’s novel, and he does a good job with it. Diana and George are siblings who live on the grounds of the titular property, and they are bound by rules that they fear to break. A new caretaker with a daughter about Diana’s age moves in, and that’s where it all starts to go to hell, as Diana decides she wants to be friends with Lissa. It’s fairly obvious what’s going on, but the reason behind it is cleverer than you might expect, and Hahn doesn’t go where we think she’s going to go in the story, which is nice. Meredith Laxson and Sienna Harelson do a nice job with the line art and coloring, as a lot of the story’s power rests on the way the three kids interact with each other, and Laxson is good at that. It’s a good story for kids, because it’s not completely cynical – the ending works well in the context of the story. It’s just a solid comic, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
A Phone Call Away by Rich Douek, Russell Mark Olson, and Lucas Gattoni belongs in the interesting sub-genre of fiction in which people will do almost anything to be famous, a sub-genre, I might add, that depresses me to no end. Douek’s a pretty good writer, so this story is pretty good. A couple’s 6-year-old daughter is kidnapped, which would be horrible enough, but it turns out that 14 years earlier, their first daughter was also kidnapped, and police eventually found her body. They became celebrities, naturally, and parlayed that into a foundation to help kids but they also star on a reality show, and it’s clear that that’s what’s important to them. When their second daughter disappears, a figure from their past resurfaces and connects with the detective who worked the case. He didn’t exactly cover himself in glory, and the woman – Nina – did a lot more work on the case than he did, because the cops had a suspect and they killed him, so they didn’t dig any deeper. Shockingly, the parents are hiding something, and Douek does a good job simply walking us through it all, as revelations pile up and everyone is a suspect and what the heck exactly is going on? Olson does nice work with the art, giving us several people on the brink, which adds to the tension of the book. It’s a nifty little crime comic. Mad Cave published this, and it’s not super-long, so take a look at it!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
In a similar vein, Don’t Let Go from Magnetic Press is also about a disappearance that isn’t all what it seems, and it’s also quite good. Fred Duval and Didier Cassegrain adapt Michael Bussi’s novel, in which a woman vacationing in Réunion returns to her hotel room and disappears. Her husband turns out to be the prime suspect, but then he goes off the grid, too, taking their daughter with him, and it’s clear that he too has something going on. Then we learn that some years earlier, his son drowned on the island, and while it was ruled accidental, the man was supposed to looking after the son and he wasn’t. The local investigator, Aja, knows something is up, but she can’t figure it out and the French national police wants to step in and shoot first without asking questions, so Aja has to keep them off her back. It’s a clever mystery, actually, and Aja and her second-in-command actually do a good job unraveling it, plus we get the interesting plot about the husband trying to do … something, all while keeping his daughter safe and staying a step ahead of the cops. There’s one moment that bugged me because, in typical fiction fashion, a character does some monumentally stupid and bad things happen because of it, but overall, it’s a pretty cool mystery story, and Cassegrain does beautiful work on the art. Who doesn’t love a good mystery?!?!?
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Moving on, we get Flesh and Blood from White Hart Comics, which is written by Simon Lewis and drawn, colored, and lettered by Chris Geary. This is a terrific, moody crime/horror comic set in the Scottish Highlands during the winter, so we get a lot of very stark, white scenes, which adds to the creepy tone of the book. A paramedic named Ruth is called to a scene of a crime, with the body of a dude who’s been partially eaten … by humans. This hits home for Ruth, as her husband was killed in a similar way a few years earlier, and she begins investigating the case, annoying the English cop who’s new to the area and is, of course, attracted to her (when he’s not annoyed with her for investigating the case). Of course they figure it out and the bad guys get them, but the explanation for the cannibalism is pretty keen, and Lewis throws in some nice twists about it. The characters are pretty interesting, and Geary does a really nice job with the art. The outdoor scenes just feel cold, and because the indoor scenes are in isolated locations, he does a good job with the claustrophobia the characters might feel. I don’t want to give too much away, so I won’t. This is just a keen comic.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
In the Shadow of Stalin: The Story of Mr. Jones by Andrea Chalupa and Ivan Rodrigues, comes to us from Oni and tells about Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who exposed the truth about the famine in Ukraine to the world. It is not, you might expect, a happy story. I mean, you can Google Jones and find out what happened to him, or you can read the book, dang it! Chalupa writes that she tries to use as much that is verifiable fact as possible, which is, I guess, nice. The book is fine, but it does seem to lack some drama that you might expect from a journalist trying to expose the big secret of a fairly evil totalitarian government. At one point, Jones slips his handler and goes on a horrifying journey through Ukraine where he actually sees what’s happening, but it’s the tiniest bit inert in the story, which is odd. The Russians take several English engineers hostage in order to force him to keep quiet about the famine, but he doesn’t, and … nothing happens to the engineers. I know that in real life, things often have anticlimactic endings, and that’s fine, but does make the book slightly less intense than it could be. Jones was denigrated by fellow journalists who wanted to keep their access to Stalin (which, sadly, is something that happens today with political journalists and, I would argue, people who write about comics for a living), and the book ends oddly because it seems Chalupa wanted to avoid writing about Jones’s premature death, but it’s still pretty good. Rodrigues doesn’t do anything spectacular on the art, but it’s solid, and he saves the best work for Jones’s harrowing trip through the Ukrainian countryside, which is where the best work should be. It feels like it should be better, but it’s still pretty good!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
As a history major interested in medieval stuff, you could probably expect I’d be interested in The Library Mule of Córdoba, which is published by Ablaze and is by Wilfred Lupano, Léonard Chemineau, Christophe Bouchard, Lynn Eskow, and Rodolfo Muraguchi, as it’s set late in the 10th century in Al-Andalus, the Muslim Umayyad caliphate in the Iberian peninsula. Al-Mansur, the vizier, has isolated the young caliph and decided to become a warlord, and he allies with the religious fundamentalists in the kingdom who aren’t keen on the fact that people are reading and learning things and previous caliphs brought in filthy furriners (like Jews!) to help with the administration and education of the state. He orders the destruction of the library of Córdoba, the capital of the caliphate, but one of the librarians, along with his assistant, tries to save as many books as he can. He steals a mule from a dude who happens to wander into the library’s garden one night, and they’re off! Of course, the dude comes along. He wants his mule back!
This is a very good adventure, and Lupano manages to keep it somewhat light despite the dark subject matter (and he shows how, throughout history, other despots have tried to oppress the populace by destroying knowledge, up to and including the present day … although he doesn’t get into the fact that these days, people willingly give up their knowledge!). The dude with the mule, Marwan, happens to know the librarian, Tarid (and the vizier, as well), and there’s a good backstory about both of them. There’s trauma in both of their histories, and the assistant, Lubna, as a woman in a world that didn’t think too highly of women, has her own trauma, but they form a good team as they try to figure out what to do with the books they saved (which is, naturally, a tiny percentage of the total). Marwan’s mule is, as he puts it, the worst one ever, so a lot of the humor of the book comes from them trying to get the mule to move. They have no good destination, and Lupano does a good job sorting through the political situation in Al-Andalus in the 970s, so this becomes a human story about three refugees with nowhere really to go. It’s very well done. Chemineau’s charming art does a lot, too, as he gives us beautifully detailed drawings of the Spanish landscape and wonderful interactions between the characters as they experience all sorts of hardships. His cartoonish style helps with the humorous sections, too, as the mule and its stubbornness is a big part of what makes the book work. It’s colored beautifully, too, with a lot of earth tones and wonderful shading. The book is absolutely gorgeous to look at.
I’m inclined to like this because of the historical setting, but obviously the subject matter is still relevant today, especially in the U.S., where people seem prouder and prouder of their wilful ignorance. Sadly, this comic reminds us that there have always been people who want to suppress knowledge, and there will always be people who are enthusiastic about helping them. Don’t be one of those people!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
I wondered if I’d be a bit torn about Dying Inside, because while the hook sounded good (suicidal girl stabs herself with a bewitched blade that doesn’t allow her to kill herself), it did also sound a bit annoying, as the girl is an angsty teenager who worships Elliott Smith. Blech! But the book, which is from Vault, written by Pete Wentz (yes, that Pete Wentz) and Hannah Klein and drawn by Lisa Sterle, is pretty good, despite how annoying Ash actually is! Ash breaks the fourth wall to tell us that she’s going to kill herself and how she got a freaky-looking dagger on Etsy to do it (in homage to Smith), but her desire for suicide is, unfortunately, the weakest part of the book. Ash tells us that she’s “chronically depressed and tired,” but it doesn’t feel real, and it seems to quickly fade when she discovers that the person who sold her the knife put a spell on it so it can’t hurt her and, in fact, makes her impervious to harm. She meets that person, a witch-in-training named Liv, and they start to figure out how to break the spell … and they start to fall for each other, too. The romance is really well done, and as they figure out what’s going on and it’s clear it’s a bit bigger than just the spell on the knife, the plot becomes more interesting. It’s frustrating because Ash doesn’t seem to be suicidal at all (and yes, I know it can be hard to spot!), and so it feels like the writers are using suicide almost as a MacGuffin, which doesn’t feel right. I don’t know how they could kickstart the romance otherwise, but it still feels weird. It’s a nice romance, it’s an intriguing mystery and even a decent family drama, and while the authors revisit Ash’s suicidal tendencies, it’s almost like they never take it too seriously. It’s weird, because I think they do a good job showing how Ash gets beyond it, but because it never seems “real” in the first place, it doesn’t hit as hard. Anyway, Sterle does a nice job with the art – Ash and Liv feel like actual people who dig each other, and Sterle does a good job with their clothing and hair throughout the book. A lot of the book is in gray tones, but when color does show up, it’s effective.
I liked Dying Inside, and I don’t know how I would change it. I don’t want it to be too heavy, but I also think the writers could take the suicidal thoughts of their main character a bit more seriously or not give them to her at all. It’s frustrating, because it doesn’t make the book bad, but it does feel like it’s not quite as strong as it could have been.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Charles Burns’s Final Cut (from Pantheon) has been getting a lot of love around the interwebs, and for the most part, it’s deserved. It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever read, but it’s pretty darned good, so that’s all right. The art is superb, as Burns takes his (relatively) simple figures and places them in a gorgeous world. His scenery is inked delicately and beautifully, and as one of the characters draws a lot, the drawings are done with much softer lines and muted colors than the rest of the book. It’s absolutely stunning. The story is pretty good, too – I could have sworn in the blurb for this book, it sounded fairly creepy, and maybe Burns thinks it’s creepy, but it’s … really not? Brian, a shy, aspiring filmmaker, and his friend Jimmy, who also makes movies but is more outgoing, are trying to make a “grown-up” movie – they made many when they were kids – and they find Laurie, who consents to star in the film. Brian falls hard for Laurie, but like most nerds, he can’t say anything. Laurie, meanwhile, remains oblivious (although it’s fairly obvious that Brian is crushing on her), and that opens the door for someone else to get her affections. What will Brian do?!?!? I thought the blurb made it sound like a creepy stalker movie, but it’s really not – it’s more about Brian trying to figure out his own feelings and what he should do about it. I mean, what he does probably isn’t the healthiest thing in the world, but it’s also not a terrible thing, and it shows how artists can manipulate reality quite well, which in some hands can be frightening but doesn’t seem so here. It’s just Brian trying to deal with his loneliness. I think. Maybe you read it differently and think Brian is a monster. That’s your prerogative!
This is a very good comic, so I’m not terribly surprised a lot of people dig it. You should give it a look and see if you dig it, too!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
After a bit of a delay, the third and final volume of Friday came out last year from Image, and I was able to read the entire epic. Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martín, and Muntsa Vicente do a really nice job with this – Brubaker postulates what happens after a YA detective grows up and moves on, while Martín and Vicente provide exquisite artwork. Friday Fitzhugh returns to her hometown after her first semester at college for Christmas, 1973, and she quickly falls back into the routine of playing sidekick to Young Detective Lancelot Jones (certainly nothing like Encyclopedia Brown or Jupiter Jones, no sir!), who didn’t leave town. Of course, Lancelot is killed at the end of volume 1, and Friday has to figure out what happened. Brubaker does a really nice job with the two main characters, including their awkward not-really-a-romance-but-more-than-a-friendship thing they have going, and he does a good job with the tight plotting (which the story needs, as it gets weird in volumes 2 and 3) and the explanations behind why Lancelot is never hurting for business in such a small town (which others have done as well; it’s not necessary to know why the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew always find weird mysteries right in their own little corner of the world, but it’s fun when a writer does try to explain it). Martín’s and Vicente’s astounding artwork helps quite a bit, too – they evoke the time period wonderfully, and they’re able to handle the weird stuff while keeping the book grounded. This is a terrific mystery, and it’s a very good character book, as well, as Brubaker delves into what makes these people tick very well. Go pick it up!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
Meschugge, The Madman’s Maze, is a pretty keen horror comic by Benni Bødker and Christian Højgaard, published by FairSquare Comics. It’s set in 1905 Copenhagen, where Jewish prostitutes are being killed in a gruesome manner. A young secretary, Miss Nathansen (I’m not sure she ever gets a first name), is recruited by her policeman boss to head into the ghetto to get information, because she herself is Jewish and he thinks she’ll be able to find things out that the cops can’t. Of course, she’s from an upper-class family that has integrated, to a large degree, into mainstream Danish society, so she’s as out of place in the ghetto as the police, but she quickly realizes that the murders do have something to do with Judaism, and she pursues the investigation even though the cops don’t seem interested (given that the victims are not only women, but prostitutes, not only Jewish, but low class). It’s an interesting examination of a society where everyone has a place and nobody seems that interesting in changing the social structure (as was the case in most of Europe at the time), as Miss Nathansen is ignored and belittled not because she’s Jewish but because she’s a woman, but of course both her religion and her gender help her solve the case, as she’s able to see things the Christian men can’t. It’s a creepy book in some ways, but Bødker does a nice job balancing the realism of the time period with a slight supernatural bent, while Højgaard brings turn-of-the-century Copenhagen to vivid and often horrific life. He reminds me a bit of Brian Hurtt, and as Hurtt is a good artist, I enjoy this art, too. Meschugge is a keen book.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
I wanted to like Medusa, Tony Parker’s new graphic novel from Dark Horse, more than I did, because Parker is a hell of a nice guy and I’ve been a fan of his for a while now. It’s not that this is a bad comic – not by any means – it’s just that it treads a familiar path, and you can just see some things on the edges that would have made it far more interesting. Medusa wanders the Earth, cursed by Zeus to be ignored by humanity even though her entire job is to fight monsters that will destroy humanity. She will only ever be remembered as a monster, even though she’s a hero. She is confronted by a monster that is really frickin’ bad – it even scares the gods, who take themselves away to a different dimension to hide from it – and she has to defeat it. Easy-peasy. Parker’s artwork is, I think, a career-best – he has come a long way, and his designs, both of characters and misc-en-scene, and his storytelling are top-notch. When Medusa has to fight, he lays the pages out beautifully, leading our eyes through busy but never overwhelming panels to give us an excellent sense of the scale of the battles. Tamra Bonvillain’s coloring is superb, as she keeps everything bright and visible even when Medusa heads into darker territory. The big problem is that this is just a superhero battle. A good one, sure, but we don’t really need another one. Parker hints at things about Medusa that he never explores. She’s killed in Greek myth, after all, so why is she still alive? She wears a mask so she doesn’t turn anyone to stone, which is fine, but the snakes on her head flow freely, and I thought that was part of the whole “enstoning” thing. Maybe not. How did she get this job? Why does she do it? What does she do in her down time, given that nobody can remember her (which Parker shows visually really well)? I know Parker wants to make this an exciting book, and it is, but it just feels like there’s a lot more meat on the bone in terms of who Medusa is and why she does her thing. There’s really no reason for this to be “Medusa,” after all, when it could just be a random hero that Parker created. Why did this have to be about Medusa? It’s frustrating, because obviously Parker can write out a pretty good plot, and the battle doesn’t exactly go as we expect, but it just feels like it could have been more. This is, I think, Parker’s first foray as a writer (he adapted Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but of course didn’t exactly write that), so I can forgive him a little, but I do wish this had been a bit more thoughtful. Still, it’s a gorgeous book, and it’s fun to read!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Scott Chantler is back with the second volume of Squire & Knight (from First Second), subtitled “Wayward Travelers” because it features our hero and his knight lost in the woods. Yep. They’re escorting a goblin child to a wizarding school in the middle of a large forest, and they keep getting lost. I mean, there seems to be an enchantment working against them, sure, and Chantler makes sure there are dangers to be overcome, but … yeah, they get lost in the woods. Chantler does a nice job making this different from the first volume – in that one, the squire was the hero because he used his brains, while in this volume, Sir Kelton is still an idiot, but the squire finds out that being book-smart doesn’t always get you out of trouble, and being book-smart doesn’t mean you can be a jerk. It’s a very funny book, of course, and Chantler does a nice job putting his characters into tough situations and then having them figure out ways out of them (which, for Sir Kelton, means fighting). He has fun with the giant mosquitos and the other creatures lurking in the forest, and his art is terrific, as usual. He begins to fill in the squire’s backstory just a tiny bit, too, so maybe, in subsequent volumes, we’ll see more of that (maybe he’ll get a name eventually!). I hope Chantler keeps doing these, because they’re a lot of fun.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
We Called Them Giants (from Image) is gorgeous, naturally, because it’s drawn by Stephanie Hans, whose “painted” look (I assume it’s digital, but maybe not?) creates a lush, oddly unsettling world where almost everyone has disappeared, leaving behind survivors who are confronted by large alien-type creatures whose purpose on Earth is … unknown!!! Hans’s designs of the monsters and their living quarters is superb, and she contrasts that nicely with the bleak, wintry world that the few remaining humans now inhabit. She uses negative space and chunk blacks in some crucial areas, which only makes the vibrant colors of the giants pop that much more. Kieron Gillen’s story isn’t quite as good, although it’s not bad. The problem with the plot is that he introduces fantastical elements to tell a story about something very down-to-earth and human, but he never bothers to explain the two big fantastical elements in the book. That’s the trend these days, of course – do something wacky with the world and just tell everyone to accept it – and I don’t like it. Yes, it’s a “me” problem, but I’m the one writing this, aren’t I? Gillen’s ultimate point, which I don’t want to give away, is made well, and his characters – Lori, Annette, and Beatrice – are very well done (not surprising, given that it’s Gillen), and their relationship is at the heart of the book, so it works for a lot of it, but for me, I guess, the fantastical elements are just a bridge too far. Again, that’s just me – to me, if you’re going to bring in fantastical elements, you ought to at least try to explain it a little bit. Even hints work! But here, we don’t get even that. Is that petty of me? Maybe, but that’s the way it is. For the most part, this is a very cool comic. I just think it could have been a bit better!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
I wrote about Alex Segura’s book Secret Identity back in July, and I mentioned how cool Sandy Jarrell’s interstitial art is in the book, and now we get … an entire book about the Legendary Lynx, featuring Jarrell’s art (colored this time!) and coming to us from Mad Cave. Segura’s story is fun, although a bit disjointed (which might be the point; it’s supposed to be a comic written and drawn in 1975), as our intrepid hero, Claudia Calla, is caught up in a big plot involving the creepy Mr. Void but she also ends up on side plots against other weird characters. Segura has fun with the book, as it really does feel like a 1975 comic, although he does avoid some of the more annoying excesses of the era (like overwrought writing). The overall plot is interesting, and the characters Segura creates are weird and sinister, much like a lot of the edgier Marvel books of the period. As this is supposed to be written by a Hispanic lesbian (the main character of Secret Identity), Segura seeds it with hints that way (well, Claudia is obviously Hispanic, but the lesbianism is a bit more subtle), which makes it a bit more interesting. Jarrell’s art, full of Zip-A-Tone effects, rough hatching, and spot blacks, is tremendous, and both Grey Allison’s coloring and Jack Morelli’s lettering evoke the time period without being beholden to it (the coloring, for instance, is far crisper than it would be had this been a real 1975 comic). Segura obviously took one of Brian Cronin’s cats hostage, as Our Former Dread Lord and Master contributes a fun “Comic Book Legends” text piece at the back treating this like an actual artifact from the Seventies. My only caveat: it ends on a cliffhanger. Will we ever see more of the Legendary Lynx? In Segura’s world of Secret Identity, the book did continue for a bit, so maybe we’ll see a second volume. Get on it, Mr. Segura!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Charlie Adlard is out of Walking Dead Purgatory and kicking much ass, as we saw with Damn Them All and now Heretic, which is written by Robbie Morrison and published by Image. He takes us to Antwerp in 1529, and his David-Lloyd-esque lack of holding lines, use of blacks, and shifts between soft pencils for backgrounds and a harder line for figures is just stupendous. This a crowded book, with a lot of characters, all of whom Adlard gives a distinctive look so it’s not hard to figure out who’s who, and he makes Antwerp into a messy, filthy, often beautiful emporium, which of course it was at this time. He’s great at the violence in the book, and toward the end, when things come to a head, he steps up his game tremendously to give us a harrowing showdown between the good guys and the bad guys. This is 124 pages long, but it feels longer (not in a bad way), because each page is such a visual treat. Morrison’s story is pretty cool, too. A bishop in Antwerp is murdered horribly, which brings the Inquisition in, but Cornelius Agrippa, a lawyer, doctor, and writer, is opposed to their methods. He works with the Inquisition because he has to, but he’s constantly butting heads with the Chief Inquisitor, Bernard Eymerich, who of course wants to blame witches and Jews and isn’t terribly worried that there’s no evidence against them. Agrippa’s new student, Johann Weyer, is our POV character, which is a good choice, as Agrippa needs to explain things to him, so he explains things to us. Yes, a lot of this is fairly standard – the mean old Inquisitor, the enlightened teacher who’s nominally Christian but doesn’t let that overwhelm his intellect – but Morrison tells a good story, and there are some nice twists along the way. He also does a nice job with the social situation in the 16th century, which is always interesting. Agrippa and Weyer were real people, and Morrison does a good job showing that they certainly could have been involved in a case like this. I’m inclined to like this because of the subject matter, true, but both Morrison and Adlard do a really nice job with it.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
I wish I could have done these books a bit more justice, naturally, but such is life. I hope you find something in here that piques your interest, though. Will I ever get back on track? I hope so, but who the heck knows???? Have a great day!
I read Friday some time last year, too, and yeah, it’s really good.
Otherwise, though, I read the e-versions that I purchased at the Panel Syndicate – where the individual installments were first released.
Of this list, I’ve Friday (one of the best things Ed Brubaker’s ever written, honestly!) and We Called Them Giants…which I found similarly underwhelming.
It was lovely, but I just expect more from Gillen…whom I’d rate as the best writer working in mainstream comics, right now.
Also! I finally finished Monsters, by BWS.
Holy shit, that’s a hell of a book.
I’m a bit traumatized, honestly.
Yeah, Monsters is a thing, all right. Sheesh, it’s good.
I totally missed out on that second volume of Squire and Knight, I will have to try and pick up a copy.
I must be in the minority with We Called Them Giants, I thought it was pretty great overall.
Also got to say congrats to Greg on the Eagles reaching the Super Bowl, although I’m still seething that the Lions blew it once again.
Too bad about the Lions. They’ve been down for soooooo long, it’s nice to see them relevant again, and I’m glad the Eagles didn’t have to play them in Detroit, because that would have been no fun. Injuries just caught up to them. I imagine they’ll still be good next year despite the losses of their coaches!
Go Birds, baby!
Shame the Bills couldn’t get past KC – definitely the team to whom I’d least mind losing.
Most of these I overlooked or hadn’t heard of. Dandelion sounds like it’s up my alley. I remember What We Wished For from the solicits– love the premise, glad to hear it’s good. Will have to keep an eye out.
I read Friday. The artwork is stunning as expected, but I still remain unmoved by Brubaker’s writing. As for Medusa, I like the idea of making Medusa a sympathetic/heroic character, but I struggled to make heads or tails of that one.