Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Life

Bruce Paley, writer

Carol Swain, artist

Fantagraphics, 2009

136 pages, hardcover

$19.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

Pencil is not an easy medium to publish in for a cartoonist–just ask the superhero artists whose work looks like the proverbial cake left out in the rain when “digitally inked” or colored right off the original pencils. But Carol Swain makes it look easy, and I think it’s because she’s figured out a way to spot blacks with a pencil. Those sooty shadows and clouds and night skies and manes of wild hair suffuse her work in Giraffes in My Hair with a sort of negative-image glow, popping her foregrounded figures off the page with a barely-there white aura. Couple it with her ever-shifting angles and it’s a damned effective way to create a sense of space and depth, reminiscent of similarly adroit strategies by Jeffrey Brown and Ben Katchor. If Swain’s jarring close-ups make her panels less immersive than theirs, her porous gray shadings make up for it with atmosphere–an inviting softness, tinged with just enough smokiness to remind us that what’s going on here isn’t entirely pleasant. The overall effect works so well that I really had to stop myself and peer at her pages to figure out what made them tick. I was too busy being propelled along by the effortlessness of the art.

So Giraffes, a collection of anecdotes from Bruce Paley’s teens and twenties on America’s countercultural fringe, is a breezy read. But it’s one rooted in an almost unchanging nine-panel grid with sparse, nearly monotone narration. At times this allows the comics to tip over into bluntness, particularly with the ending to some of the stories: The tale of how Paley avoided Vietnam ends with a shot of the Wall; a story of New York City’s ’70s heroin scene ends with Death itself offering us a bag of smack. But in general, the art and the writing are a perfect fit. Swain’s art rarely calls attention to or gets in the way of itself, and in that it meshes seamlessly with Paley’s deadpan “here’s what happened” narrative style, his reluctance to overstate or oversell the import of the anecdote reminiscent of Harvey Pekar’s. (Of course, Pekar’s work rises and falls on the strength of his collaborators–Paley’s got Swain, so there’s not much falling to do here.)

Yet at the same time the presence of that subtitle indicates a unifying theme, which makes Paley’s storytelling choices all the more interesting. The first story shows an 18-year-old Paley ditching college and leaving home to hitchhike cross-country with his girlfriend, but the home life that led him to drop everything and drop out is relegated to a quick line of dialogue and about half a page upon his return from the journey. As hippies give way to punks we suddenly discover that Paley’s a habitual heroin user, but we never see his introduction to the drug. A story about an ill-fated attempt to import drugs from overseas sees Paley casually mention time spent in Tangiers, but up until that point his adventures had been strictly domestic. In some graphic memoirs these lacunae would be maddening; here’s they’re sort of the point.

Paley’s not claiming anything spectacular about the life he lived or the stories he plucked from it. The way he tells it and Swain draws it, living on the edge feels like an interchangeable commodity with Pekar’s life as a civil servant. An interesting conversation with the janitor may be replaced by doing speedballs with Johnny Thunders, but the game’s the same: get by, find a little happiness when you can, and cling to the stories that comprise your life, the recounting of which has a value all its own.

* Wow, this is really something: Like half the cast and writing staff of Saturday Night Live is doing a fundraiser for the off-Broadway adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Money well spent for a variety of reasons.

* Powr Masters 3 and If ‘n Oof: on the way in May!

* Over at Robot 6 I rounded up some notable posts in the great “Did comics stink in 2009 or is it just me?” debate.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Jog on Death Note, one of the great entertainments of the comics decade.

Avatar is a so-so movie that I highly recommend you see in as big and expensive theater as possible. My evening at Avatar cost me in the neighborhood of $30 all told, and had to be scheduled half a week in advance, like an in-demand local theater production or something. I do feel like I got my money’s worth, even though everything that everyone says about the movie is 100% true. It’s a deeply impressive visual experience tied to a deeply pedestrian script. But you don’t ride the Cyclone for the character arcs, do you? Seeing the movie in 3D on the biggest IMAX screen in New York State that isn’t for a museum seems to me the ideal way to see it. So yeah, thirty bucks well spent. Even though I very much doubt I’d even want to watch it on a television. Because here’s the problem: It’s only ever good enough.

The one thing it does inarguably well is take advantage of the 3D canvas to work with vertical scale. Worm’s-eye and bird’s-eye shots of the kind of landscapes that would simply boggle your mind were they real abound–you peer up and down floating mountains thousands of feet in the sky, you get a view of a tree the size of the Sears Tower. Fantasy and fantastic fiction generally sorely need to use their Y-axis, and Cameron gets that right, no doubt. It’s obviously the perfect use of his genuinely fantastic 3D technology. You’re not getting shit flung in your face, you’re not simulating an amusement-park ride, you’re as close to being in there, or up there, or down there, or out there, or whatever, as movies can get.

But. While they’re not as obnoxious and ridiculous as you probably thought they were when you first laid eyes on them after all the hype, those blue alien designs really are dullsville. Smurf Gollum Jar-Jar Omaha the Cat Dancer people in loincloths and dreadlocks with your basic “here’s what James Cameron synthesized from reading about tribal customs” worldbuilding undergirding them. That’s all.

(Regarding a related issue, I’m not the kind of person who’s easily offended by the supposed racial overtones of fictional races. The Gungans didn’t bother me, and neither did the Orcs. Of course, in neither of those cases did the storyline hinge on the kind of racial dynamic we’ve actually seen here in real life, with white dudes coming in and knocking an indigenous people out the box to steal their land and resources. Even still, aside from a slightly cringeworthy bit where everyone gawked at the newcomer and some silly hula-hula dancing, it didn’t really rub me the wrong way. I mean, it’s too rote to be upsetting.)

I’d been similarly skeptical about the creature designs–they all just looked like a mess of colors and limbs with very little thought to how they’d actually evolve and function. Seeing them in action makes them a lot more persuasive–nearly all the lifeforms we see, the fauna at least, look and feel like they’re part of a consistent ecosystem. Even there, though, I was frustrated by the lack of imagination. There’s a monkey species, a lion species, a dog species (that barks!), a horse species (that our main character, Jake Sully, actually calls horses!), and then some dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are my favorites, you can get away with dinosaurs, but I couldn’t help but feel like they could have done better with the rest. Meanwhile–prepare for geekiness–all of the animals have six limbs, except the Na’vi, the humanoids we’re involved with here. Are they supposed to be on an entirely separate evolutionary chain? I don’t think so–if the six-limbed monkeys, ostensibly the world’s equivalent of the primates several limbs over from us here on Earth, weren’t enough of a clue, the plotline about the interconnectedness of all life on the planet would argue against it. So you’re left drawing the conclusion that they have four limbs because it’s easier that way.

It’s sort of unfair to compare the movie to The Lord of the Rings, in that Tolkien had one of the most unique minds in literary history while James Cameron, um, doesn’t. But when you look at Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, which share with Avatar the same special effects team, you can see how weak and doughy the world of Pandora is compared to the world of Middle-earth. Watching the behind-the-scenes material on the LOTR DVDs, you see time and again Peter Jackson rejecting sketches and designs for the various creatures that inhabit that world because they’re too fanciful, they wouldn’t work. No such guiding intelligence was at the helm here, so bring on the six-winged four-eyed rainbow dinosaurs.

Alright, to heck with it, let’s compare it to Lord of the Rings. The reason those movies succeed so well as action cinema is because all the combat is so rooted in a sense of location and direction. I could sit here and describe to you the Battle of Helm’s Deep like I was transcribing it from the screen, that’s how well delineated each state of the fighting is and how clear the consequences for each major turning point are. The same is true of the attack of the Uruk-Hai at the end of Fellowship, and even the wide-open Battle of the Pelennor Fields in Return of the King. When the Rohirrim reform the line and charge the Haradrim, it’s crystal clear what’s happening and why. (The one exception in all three films is the warg fight, for which they just didn’t have time to devise an intricate fight plan, and for which they apologize on the commentary track–but since it’s the exception, that chaotic lack of choreography ends up working for it. It stands out as a frantic, nasty battle.) With Avatar you just have a bunch of swooping and charging. There’s the slightest nod to taking advantage of positioning at the very beginning of the climactic battle, and then it’s all flying around and running around and shooting around. And there’s a big ground charge where I kept waiting for what the trick or surprise would be, but was shocked to discover that there wasn’t one. It’s exactly what it looked like it would be. It’s frustrating, because think of Aliens or Terminator 2–Cameron once knew how to stage action within a visually described environment. Here he seems to be hoping the 3D will do the trick for us. It doesn’t.

Then there’s the writing. Over the past few days I’ve given some thought to how important it is to care about, flesh out, and even empathize with your villains. This is because I’m a couple eps deep into season two of True Blood, and there’s a storyline involving an evangelical megachurch pastiche that is just sooooooo boring, because you can tell that everyone involved with the show bleeds with contempt for these people and has no interest in making them interesting, appealing, or sympathetic. They’re just cardboard cutouts. They’re called The Fellowship of the Sun, which is funny, because the last time I saw TV antagonists this dull and this much a waste of my time they were called the Baltimore Sun and I was watching The Wire Season Five. Vampires and drug kingpins who’ve murdered dozens of people were painted in a much more sympathetic, and not coincidentally alluring and compelling, light than some asshole godbotherers and hack editors respectively. If the filmmakers don’t care enough to even try, why should I?

I’m almost tempted to say this about Avatar, in which the military guns-for-hire who evolve into the movie’s villains are just a faceless bunch of rapacious barbarians led by General Goony McGoonerson. One-dimensional barely cuts it. But it’s hard to get too worked up, because there’s really nothing going on with any of these characters. Everyone zigs when you expect them to zig, zags when the plot needs them to zag. People have the changes of heart you expect them to, make the heroic sacrifices you expect them to, misunderstand what you expect them to and then overcome those misunderstandings when you expect them to. Never once did I feel any attachment to anyone in the movie, or any investment in their fate, beyond whatever lizard-brain response run-of-the-mill “good vs. evil/underdog vs. empire” conflicts can muster.

The one surprise is just what a full-throated endorsement of treason the movie ends up being, and how full of visceral hatred it is for the despoiling of the environment and the invasion of small countries by big countries. I got a big kick out of all of that–it was so in-your-face it was admirable–but not enough to overcome how well it paid to expect the expected from the rest of the flick. Also, we’ve been there once before with Paul Reiser, who was funnier and sleazier and tougher to predict.

And there’s more, of course: plot holes regarding the escape of our heroes from captivity, a boring score (dammit I am so sick of that), shots that stunned but never seduced (I counted three what I would call “visually poetic” shots or cuts in the entire film–lots of gosh-wow, very little damn). On the other hand I never got bored, which given its running time and predictability was definitely a peril–it does draw you in, and I didn’t even get up to use the bathroom. Like I said, it was a good way to spend my time and money, a fun film, a demonstration of what someone with Cameron’s budget and all the CGI and 3D tech now at filmmakers’ disposal can do. I just can’t wait for someone to actually do it.

* Robot Roll Call! Here’s a round-up post I did featuring links to everything that went up during Robot 6’s big anniversary weekend. Lots and lots and lots of cool content, something for everyone I daresay.

* My favorite of the bunch is our list of The 30 Most Important Comics of the Decade. Part One I already mentioned; Part Two contains my write-ups for The Complete Peanuts, Kramers Ergot, Art Out of Time, Daredevil, and Blankets–all in a row! But you’ll have to click to see where they all fell on the countdown. And check the comment thread for a “editorial cartoons aren’t comics” argument preserved in amber from the McCloudian past like one of those Jurassic Park mosquitos.

* I greatly enjoyed Douglas Wolk’s conversation with Tom Spurgeon about Invincible Iron Man. It really is a conversation, and that’s what makes it one of my favorite pieces in Tom’s holiday interview series on the books of the decade thus far. To paraphrase what Tori Amos’s Jungian mystic once said about me and my wife, the rocks in Tom’s head fit the holes in Douglas’s.

* Here’s another post I cheered for: David Uzumeri’s look back on 2009, by way of responding to the oft-advanced notion that the year really uniquely sucked for comics and/or superhero comics. He just piles up evidence for the case against. On a related note, Jeff Lester did a bang-up job with his post on the origin of comics burnout.

* The thing I loved about Jog’s Best of 2009 post is that he spends as much time talking about the books he missed as he does the books he loved. A great idea! You get almost as much of a picture of the state of the art from the former as you do from the latter. The thing that bummed me out about the post is that two of his top five were books I haven’t even read (through no lack of trying on my end, in my defense), meaning my own list is probably a big lo’ shit sandwich.

* Elsewhere, Jog and I have a quick back-and-forth about our differing reactions to the differing works of Naoki Urasawa.

* MOAR DECADE IN REVIEW FROM MATT MAXWELL

* Yep, I’m gonna have to see Pontypool.

* Matt Rota is great.

* If you’re looking for good music you haven’t heard, you could do a lot worse than to download Matthew Perpetua’s “Lost ’00s” mix, featuring gems that were largely overlooked over the past 10 years. You really can’t go wrong with Muscles and In Flagranti, I can tell you that much. I’ll tell you what, it’s a bit of a bummer that I’ve become friends with Matthew, because for years he was my source for music I could impress my friends with that no one else had ever heard of, but what the hell can I impress him with? My extensive Pigface collection? (It’s pretty impressive.)

Big Questions #13: A House That Floats

Anders Nilsen, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, 2009

44 pages

$9.95

Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly

My sincere hope is that a couple years from now the collected Big Questions will lodge itself at the top of future Best of the Decade lists on the strength of material largely published the previous decade, like Jimmy Corrigan and Black Hole before it. Certainly Nilsen is a capital-M Major Talent, a real world-beater for his generation, but the book by which he will be defined has not yet been released. The two Monologues for… books from Fantagraphics delight me with their weird existentialist stick-figure stand-up comedy, but talk about an aquired taste. Dogs and Water might pick up steam in the post-The Road world, but it’s always gonna read grim, and its strange release pattern–first as the fattest stapled pamphlet you ever saw, then a slightly revamped version in hardcover–threw folks for a loop. Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow devastates virtually anyone who reads it, but its hodgepodge hybrid format, arising from its tragic origin as a travelogue-turned-eulogy, makes it a tough item to classify. The End could end up topping my personal Best of the Decade list, but it’s a one-shot Ignatz-format pamphlet. I could see his mythological comics for Kramers Ergot clicking but there’s just not enough of them.

But soon, along will come a thick hardcover of this monumental series, tracing its evolution from xeroxed minicomics sold at a table alongside Jeffrey Brown, John Hankiewicz, and Paul Hornschemeier comics, through its adoption by D&Q, into its status as one of the only regularly released alternative serials in North America. It’s as fragile and frightening as any of Nilsen’s many, many comics about the baffling horror of senseless death, but it’s also a funny-animal book stuffed with subplots and side-stories and borderline gag strips about wisecracking birds. It works as a showcase of pure cartooning as well as even Nilsen’s most abstract, “pure comics” stuff from MOME or The End, but in the service of a sad and searing realism whose beauty is apparent to any reader even remotely open to altcomics work–certainly I’d stack this issue’s cockpit sequence against anything else this year for sheer stunning loveliness. It functions as allegory, but then turns around and acknowledges its own allegorical nature, and ads enough detail and twists to hold up as a real-deal semi-adventure. It manages to capture and cry for the world’s cruelty, yet hold alive the hope offered by cooperation and community and small kindnesses, even those arising from bare enlightened self-interest, as well as anything this side of Deadwood. I laughed, I cried, in the space of this issue alone. Big Questions is a great comic.

The Ganges material in Tucker Stone’s installment of Tom Spurgeon’s decade-in-review interview series is pretty great. I like all the attention he pays to how the mere size of the page Huizenga’s working with for the Ignatz format gives him latitude he doesn’t have in Or Else or Fight or Run–that’s a pretty terrific point, especially considering how much the Ganges comics depend on reproducing certain effects across the space of the page. Jesus, can you imagine “A Sunset” as appearing in Ganges rather than Or Else? Drooooool

But let’s face it, I came here to kvetch about Tucker’s latest hand-waving about the futility of making value judgments as critics. He responds to Tom Spurgeon’s (accurate) assessment of people who summarily dismiss non-genre comics as “ignorant” by more or less attacking the very idea that anyone should read anything but what they’re already reading, labeling those who’d argue otherwise “boring assholes.” It’s similar to how, during the SPX critcs roundtable, someone mentioned the critical discourse, and he equated it to people on YouTube calling each other cunts.

First of all it dodges Tom’s specific point, which is that it really is ignorant to dismiss comics like Ganges as boring out of hand. Yes, all criticism is subjective, everyone’s coming at everything from different places, but if you can’t say “Ganges isn’t boring,” there’s no point to writing about comics at all. “Comics culture,” as everyone from Wizard to the The Beat to the San Diego Comic Con to me understand it, is “comics plus genre work from other media,” which is an indication of how hard non-genre comics have to fight to gain a foothold. It’s big problem, and Tom’s not wrong for pointing it out.

Secondly, Tucker tries to back up his argument by reversing it, saying it’s just as stupid to harass big Anders Nilsen fans into reading Batman. But that’s a strawman. Can you find anyone (besides maybe Rob Clough and Domingos) who dismisses genre the way so many superhero fans do the reverse, so that you would even have to harass them? Gary Groth loves Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman wrote a book about Jack Cole, Joe McCulloch has read every Garth Ennis Punisher comic, and Tom Spurgeon has waged years-long campaigns on behalf of the Luna Brothers and Lee/Kirby Thor. On the other hand it’s almost impossible to avoid best-of lists that don’t include anything further afield than Mark Waid’s Irredeemable. It’s a problem in one direction; it’s not a problem in the other direction.

I mean, if you met someone who only watched superhero movies, you’d think that was weird and dumb, and you’d be right, and saying so wouldn’t make you a boring asshole, it’d make you a person who was right. Moreover, saying so does not mean you’ve extrapolated that they’re some horrible CSI Miami-watching mouthbreather or anything else about “who they really are” or whatever. You’re just a critic, addressing what people are saying about specific comics, which is a valid thing for a critic to do.

Finally, Tucker’s coup de grace is the fact that most of the audience doesn’t really care about critics or critical approaches to what they enjoy reading anyway. But so what? Most of the people in the theater with us at Up in the Air yesterday have never read Pauline Kael. But criticism is not therefore an egomaniacal waste of time, any more than making art that most of the audience for that art form doesn’t really care about would be. Kevin Huizenga shouldn’t hang it up just because he’s not Jim Davis; similarly, we shouldn’t crumple up the idea of analyzing art and arguing for standards and throw it in the trash because many people would just rather read/watch/listen and then do something else.

Is Up in the Air the first movie about the Great Recession? Because I’ll tell you what. Whether or not the movie succeeds for you largely depends upon how charming you find George Clooney, how sexy you find Vera Farmiga, how adorable you find Anna Kendrick, and how glorious you find cameos from Sam Elliott. I enjoy Clooney, Farmiga is very sexy (although: Permission to speak freely? Bummer about the body double), Kendrick is indeed adorable (and quite talented–she’s been one of the highlights of the Twilights), and Sam fucking Elliott, man. Even though Jason Reitman’s directorial choices are usually strictly functional, and when they’re not (as in the flyover-view credits sequence) they overstay their welcome, there’s more to a movie than that: These folks are fun to spend time around, and that’s a big part of what can make a good movie–just the pleasure of sitting in front of people whose voices and smiles and faces draw you in. So I enjoyed it even if I rarely was blown away by its “Fight Club and Office Space: Ten Years Later” take on soul-crushing corporate culture. Except when, repeatedly, it put you right there in the room with men and women being fired. The level of unemployment and underemployment in this country right now is, frankly, nightmarish, and the inattention paid to it versus the daily Dow Jones rollercoaster is scandalous, and the culture that spawned it is a form of sociopathy. Speaking as someone who was laid off twice before he turned thirty, and has seen it happen to his wife and around three-quarters of his closest friends, I think people devastated by the fear, grief, and shame of losing your job so that your bosses can make more money need to be shown in cineplexes nationwide over and over again until they’re at least as much a part of our national pop-cultural conversation as billionaire superheroes and gorgeous young urban professionals who need to learn something about love.

* It’s a big big day at Robot 6, aka the blog that pays me, because it’s our 1st anniversary. So both at the blog’s page and on the main page of Comic Book Resources you can find tons and tons of goodies, including sneak previews of Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft, Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales, Matt Kindt’s Super Spy: The Lost Dossiers, Stuart & Kathryn Immonen’s Moving Pictures, Matt Maxwell & Luis Garagna’s Strangeways: Red Hands, and Parker / Pak / Van Lente / Buchemi / Hardman’s Incredible Hercules. Many many thanks to Eric Reynolds, Jacq Cohen, Paul Baresh, Chris Staros, Brett Warnock, and Leigh Walton for hooking me up with the Fantagraphics and Top Shelf previews!

* Also, Guy Davis drew us an anniversary card. It’s Christmas all over again!

* Finally, I had a great time helping to put together our list of The 30 Most Important Comics of the Decade. The first installment includes my write-ups for Civil War, Achewood, and New X-Men.

* Elsewhere, there are great alternative comics being posted on the Internet everywhere you look. Here’s some terrific new work from Kevin Huizenga and Noel Freibert. What Freibert’s doing in particular, I could stand to see a lot more of.

* Jim Henley proclaims the triumph of geek culture to be “The THING of the Decade.” But because he’s Jim Henley he does it in such a way as to NOT make you feel like Fred “The Ogre” Palowakski.

* Since I’m too intimidated to even peep into the great Matt Zoller Seitz’s days-long rollout of essays on the decade in film, I’ll instead link to this clean and simple list from Peet Gelderblom at Setiz’s old site The House Next Door. I love it, even for the placement of the films I haven’t seen, just because of what I imagine them being like. Is there anything sadder than the fact that I haven’t seen Mulholland Drive yet? Me?!?

* More holiday interviews on the books of the decade at Spurge’s: Chris Mautner on Scott Pilgrim and Tim Hodler on In the Shadow of No Towers. The latter’s the first of these interviews to focus on a book the interviewee doesn’t care for.

* I linked to this in passing yesterday, but here’s the Robot 6 crew’s Best of 2009 post.

* More decade in review from Matt Maxwell, mostly on his favorite and least-favorite superhero material.

* Disney owns Marvel.

* Real-Life Horror: According to rightwing polling outfit Rasmussen, Americans would love to torture the underpants bomber. Happy New Year!

* Not Real-Life Horror: My friend Matthew Perpetua concocted a little flight of fancy about what would happen if a gaggle of Pitchfork bands were hired to play covers at the Insane Clown Posse’s Gathering of the Juggalos. Sample quote: “I probably wouldn’t be alive today if Will Oldham hadn’t rescued myself and Antony and shepherded us to safety on a John Deere tractor.”

* Coming soon: Night Business #3!

Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka Vols. 1-3

Naoki Urasawa, writer/artist

Takashi Nagasaki, writer

Based on Astro Boy: The Greatest Robot on Earth by Osamu Tezuka

Viz, 2009

200 pages each

$12.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

I take back everything I said about Naoki Urasawa. Well, okay, no I don’t, but everything I said about Naoki Urasawa definitely does not apply here. Finally, one of his series contains visual elements that exist for more than simply conveying the information of the story as clearly and dramatically as possible. And I didn’t think that was in the offing, by the way, since in the first few pages you get a “guy with a gun turns a corner, does a half-turn and whips the gun at the camera” sequence that struck me as an unimaginative, un-comicsy rip from the cinema. But a few pages later our straight-laced, sad robot detective Gesicht informs a robot-maid wife that her robot-cop husband has been killed in the line of duty, and Urasawa gives us a series of close-ups of the grief-stricken robot’s machine face, which, of course, never changes. And blam, I was hooked.

In Pluto, a contemporary-superhero-comics-style “reimagining” of a classic < i>Astro Boy story by Osamu Tezuka, Urasawa uses the presence of robots as embodiments of surrealism. From the bereaved wife’s static expression, to the towering North No. 2 in his judge’s robe, to sinister Brau 1589’s mangled scrap heap of a body, to a revamp of Astro Boy (aka Atom) that makes him less like a jaunty short-pantsed slugger and more like an eerie kid out of The Shining, they’re the flourish of Weird, the touches of visual poetry, that I always wanted from my limited experience with Urasawa’s work. That his line and design sensibility is otherwise such a just-the-facts affair only heightens their “thing that should not be” effect.

And they seem to have unleashed more where that came from. The series of murders that are the series’ central mystery are themselves like staged art installations, sort of like the theory that holds the Black Dahlia’s murder as a macabre Surrealist masterpiece. Elsewhere, jagged black lines emerge from transmission static as a literal representation of despair; a huge black thing slouches half-unseen through the smoke and sand of a war-ravaged Persian town, the sight of it driving a young boy mad; traumatic memories of war are represented by indistinct flurries of the violent clash of robotic limbs, or a decontextualized and repeated offer of money for bodies; a sentient teddy bear sits immobile, a puppet master at the mercy of whoever moves it around; a tiny figure is captured leaping from rooftop to rooftop in the final images recorded by a dying robot, its blurry body silhouetted against the sky.

You add all this to Urasawa’s usual page-turning panache, and suddenly what had felt like mere proficiency gains the power to haunt and to move. There are the usual resonances with and/or swipes from other genre-art touchstones: Brau 1589 is Hannibal Lecter with microprocessors, there’s an Iraq War riff as is custom with science fiction that wants to be taken seriously this decade, and the plot–super detective believes that other super beings of his acquaintance are being hunted by a serial killer so he travels around to warn them with varying degrees of success–is straight-up Watchmen Chapter One. Plus, the whole thing is an adaptation of a story about Japan’s Mickey Mouse/Superman cultural juggernaut. (“Flying boy robot in shorts” is the extent of my knowledge of Astro Boy, so what Urasawa is taking from Tezuka narratively or visually is beyond me.) But instead of coming across like button-pushing, all of this, and all the chases and clue-hunting and races against time and unsuspected reversals that are Urasawa’s thriller trademarks, now feels like ammo in the arsenal of someone taking aim at some big old-fashioned sci-fi questions about war, technology, human rights, friendship, childhood, and that old chestnut, what it means to be human. The thing that fills me with delight here is that when you look at that robot maid just standing and staring, unable to express her emotion, you get the sense that for once, this master penciller and plotter doesn’t have all the answers.

For real this time. As seen on Robot 6!

25. CAPTAIN AMERICA & CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN (Ed Brubaker et al, Marvel)

24. REYKJAVIK (Henrik Rehr, Fahrenheit)

23. PRISON PIT (Johnny Ryan, Fantagraphics)

22. RED RIDING HOOD REDUX (Nora Krug, Bries)

21. INVINCIBLE (Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ottley, and Cory Walker, Image)

20. COLD HEAT & COLD HEAT SPECIAL (Frank Santoro, BJ et al, PictureBox)/SCOTT PILGRIM VOL. 5: SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE UNIVERSE (Bryan Lee O’Malley, Oni)

19. INVINCIBLE IRON MAN (Matt Fraction & Salvador Larroca, Marvel)

18. FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY (Jeffrey Brown, Hyperion)

17. THE SQUIRREL MACHINE (Hans Rickheit, Fantagraphics)

16. YOU ARE THERE (Jean-Claude Forest & Jacques Tardi, Fantagraphics)

15. BATMAN & ROBIN (Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, DC)

14. TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE (Michael Kupperman, Fantagraphics)

13. GANGES (Kevin Huizenga, Coconino/Fantagraphics)

12. PLUTO: URASAWA X TEZUKA (Naoki Urasawa et al, Viz)

11. WEST COAST BLUES (Jacques Tardi & Jean-Patrick Manchette, Fantagraphics)

10. NIGHT BUSINESS & GANGSTA RAP POSSE (Benjamin Marra, American Tradition)

9. B.P.R.D. and related titles (Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Guy Davis et al, Dark Horse)

8. ASTERIOS POLYP (David Mazzucchelli, Pantheon)

7. MULTIFORCE (Mat Brinkman, PictureBox)

6. BOY’S CLUB (Matt Furie, Buenaventura)

5. BIG QUESTIONS (Anders Nilsen, Drawn & Quarterly)

4. FINAL CRISIS (Grant Morrison, Doug Mahnke et al, DC)

3. COCKBONE (Josh Simmons, self-published)

2. DRIVEN BY LEMONS (Joshua W. Cotter, AdHouse)

1. PIM & FRANCIE: THE GOLDEN BEAR DAYS (Al Columbia, Fantagraphics)

I did pretty good this year in terms of reading what I wanted to read, but there were still a bunch that slipped past me: GoGo Monster, Crossing the Empty Quarter, George Sprott, Footnotes in Gaza, Map of My Heart, What a Wonderful World, The Book of Genesis…Still, at some point you gotta fish or cut bait, and the CBR and Robot 6 best-of submission deadlines gave me an excuse to fish.

There were many many many great comics released during this final year of comics’ greatest decade. I think you’ll enjoy the ones above, which I enjoyed more than all the others. Woo!

10. A Father’s Gift

9. Brule’s Rules

8. Channel 5 Kid Break

7. Whoopsie Daisy

6. D-Pants

5. The Best of Pusswhip Banggang

4. Prices

3. Channel 5 Presents The Human Body with Dr. Steve Brule

2. Free Real Estate

1. The Cinco Urinal Shower

* I have a few more entries in Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2009 countdown today: Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions (#70), Grant Morrison etc.’s Final Crisis (#61), and Josh Simmons’s Cockbone (#53).

* I don’t know what to call what it is that Matt Maxwell does, but he’s the best there is at it, and now he’s doing it about His Comics Decade.

* I tried to buy Avatar tickets today and almost did but for discovering that in two of the three IMAX theaters available in NYC, the “IMAX” label is utter hogwash. That is some serious bullroar right there, man.

You’ll Never Know Book One: A Good and Decent Man

C. Tyler, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2009

104 pages, hardcover

$29.95

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

You’ll Never Know is a memoir about creating a memoir. In it, the affable but scatterbrained Carol Tyler, buffeted by her separation from her cheating, indecisive husband and by her own memories, finds solace in attempting to construct for her father a scrapbook chronicling his military service during World War II. As becomes clear during a climactic dream sequence in which Hitler proclaims that the trauma inflicted on her father during the War warms his heart from beyond the grave, doing this is much more to Tyler than an attempt to set the historical record straight or satisfy her own curiosity (though it is both of those things as well). It’s the product of a realization that something vital was taken from her father, whom she sees as hard-working, lovably ornery, and an incorrigible cut-up, yet also distant and damaged in a way that suggests a missing puzzle piece she might be able to reconstruct.

Therein lies the problem. So personal is the project to Tyler that in some basic ways it fails to translate to the reader. Her dad, Chuck, is a gruff dude to be sure, but funny and lively. He’s apparently a brilliant handyman, a helluva dancer, he swept the hottest girl in the base’s secretarial pool off her feat, he tears it up at the Pop Hop to which he escorts Carol as a teen, he’s undyingly romantic toward her mother, and most importantly he eventually unloads his previously unspoken military memories for her not once but several times–and yet Tyler insists upon the notion that the horror of his experiences in Italy broke him. It’s just not present in the text. In recounting the plot just now I realized how very similar it is to Art Spiegelman’s experience with his own father in Maus, which is a solid point of comparison–compared to the nightmarish psychological scarring the Holocaust inflicted upon Spiegelman’s parents, and how painfully Spiegelman evokes it, what Tyler’s up to in her depiction of her father remains obtuse.

Tyler’s confidence in the face of this lacuna is reflected in her buoyant but ramshackle art. Her comics’ landscape layout and dashed-off line and lettering (complete with blue-pencil guidelines) evoke a mid-tier slice-of-life webcomic; they’re pleasant and likeable, but they make this very serious and personal project feel slightly airy and inconsequential. They’re not helped in this regard by their presentation as a supplement to the actual scrapbook she’s putting together for her father, nor by her presentation of herself in an always slightly humorous fashion even when literally prostrated by her husband’s infidelity and departure. Transitions and juxtapositions, too, feel under-considered, from the cuts to and from her own life story to this volume’s abrupt cut-off point. I’m not saying her familial war story needs to be the unrelenting legacy of horror that was Maus–their experience was and is different and so should be Tyler’s book about it. But the effect of her writing and drawing serves to cut the tale’s gravitas off at the knees. I know it’s a story she needed to tell; I’m not convinced it’s a story that needed to be told, or perhaps more to the point, that I needed to hear.

* Comic Book Resources began posting its Top 100 Comics of 2009 list today. I’ve got two write-ups in this first installment: Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce (#90) and Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club (#79). I apologize for the egregious mixing of metaphors in that last one in advance, but in my defense, I was super-baked.

* At Josh Simmons’s hilariously named blog he links to a whole bunch of comics of his you can read online. Merry Christmas!

* Anders Nilsen salutes James Cameron. Not kidding.

* Heidi Mac helpfully links to almost all the Comics Journal #300 cartoonist conversations. It’s kind of funny how they’re easier to find on the Beat than on TCJ.com. Funny sad.

* More Tom Spurgeon books-of-the-decade holiday interviews: Rob Clough on Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19, which is maybe the best comic of the decade, and Jeet Heer on Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, which if this were one of those holiday-weekend classic-rock radio mega-countdowns would be played in the final hour of the marathon, no doubt.

* Speaking of Ware, the latest Our Comics Decade post at The Cool Kids Table features Jimmy Corrigan, which is the “Comfortably Numb” to Acme #19’s “Stairway to Heaven” or vice versa depending on what mood I’m in. Also, the story of how Ben Morse ended up at Wizard, which is one of the better stories of its kind.

* Christopher Allen’s year-in-review piece is a treat.

* Congratulations to newly minted Xeric Grant winner Lane Milburn! Really looking forward to what he can do with it.

* An undiscovered Fletcher Hanks story has surfaced. Wunderbar!

* A Field Guide to Lovecraftian Fauna. Or flora, or whatever the hell those things are. My favorite bit right now is a toss-up between the advice on what to do if you encounter a shoggoth and the way to tell the difference between Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath.

* Flying crocodilians: a visual history.

* Today on Robot 6: a cool guitar gods poster and a Prison Pit doll.

* I enjoyed this Laura Clawson piece on being a fan of romance novels–a lot of it seems applicable to any kind of fandom or nerddom.

* Related: A couple of quick things about Abhay Khosla’s latest essay. First, it’s a lot easier to score points off of opinions when you ascribe them to “Internet” than it is when you properly attribute them to, say, Tom Spurgeon. Second, discovering that certain kinds of comics no longer deliver the same thrills you got from them when you were a younger and less experienced reader and subsequently proclaiming that Comics Has Failed Me This Year is neither news nor analysis, it’s flounce.

There’s an awful lot to love about the video for Miles Fisher’s cover of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place.” I mean, there are layers and layers of things to love.

1) The spot-on recreation of Mary Harron’s adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho

2) Fisher’s spot-on impression of Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman

3) How Fisher’s resemblance to Tom Cruise teases out the fact that Bale himself impersonated Cruise as the basis for this role

4) The fact that Fisher literally impersonated Cruise in a movie

5) All the additional weight and resonance Bale’s subsequent role as Batman and subsequent freakout on the set of Terminator Salvation bring to anything having to do with this role

6) Fisher’s bio

7) The identity of Fisher’s co-stars

8) Fisher’s most recent role

9) The fact that the image for Fisher’s homepage appears to be an homage to the cover of Ministry’s Filth Pig, which in turn is an homage to something I forget

10) Talking Heads’ epigrammatic role in the original novel

11) The cover itself, which at this point I prefer to the original

(Via Matthew Perpetua)

Without them I would not be here.

The Photographer

Didier Lefevre, story/photographs

Emmanuel Guibert, writer/artist

Frederic Lemercier, colors/layouts

First Second, 2009

288 pages

$29.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

The high point of The Photographer is literally the geographical high point of The Photographer. After chronicling a Doctors Without Borders mission into the war-torn country–then occupied by the Soviet Union–lensman Didier Lefevre makes the ill-advised decision to leave his more experienced Western colleagues and return through the mountains to Pakistan alone. Abandoned by guides who barely knew the way themselves, Lefevre finds himself stranded at the summit of a mountain pass. In the gloom he desperately tries to make it through by nightfall, and is reduced to beating his exhausted, dying horse until he realizes neither of them can go any further. He bivouacs beneath his horse’s body, melting snow in his mouth in an attempt to stay hydrated, cursing his recklessness and the fecklessness of his escorts. Realizing that he will most likely never make it down the other side of the mountain, he writes a note to his girlfriend and then takes the most beautiful, dramatic, and chilling photographs of his journey, capturing his emaciated horse and the nightmarish wasteland that surrounds them, believing in his heart that they are the last things he will see. In the several pages that chronicle this most dire stretch of Lefevre’s memoir, artist Emmanuel Guibert manages to capture the photographer’s initial panic at being left alone in an unfamiliar place, contrasting his nervous movements and increasingly desperate drive to move on against the cold and motionless stones of the land and small dwelling where he was abandoned. And as Lefevre and his horse reach what he believes to be their final resting place, they are depicted solely in silhouette, black against the icy twilight blues provided by colorist Frederic Lemercier. The effect is a perfect evocation of Lefevre’s Sisyphean plight–frantic effort colliding with unyielding futility and ultimately despair. Gorgeous, frightening, powerful comics.

Alas, it’s one of the only sequences in the whole of The Photographer‘s 288 pages to which any of those four words apply. The story of Lefevre’s trip into and out of Afghanistan is plodding journey through a featureless wash of minutiae about his companions, their hosts, their jobs, and the land. Obviously, the choice to leech the proceedings of nearly any drama–save for Lefevre’s near-death at the mountaintop and a trio of gut-punch accounts of war-wounded children, nothing cuts through the haze of tedious detail–was a conscious one, meant to evoke the reality of life in a desperately poor and brutalized country, and how no grand Orientalist gestures are possible, only the quotidian work of traveling there, setting up shop, and treating those who can be treated. However, a flawless evocation of boredom is still boring.

Meanwhile, memoirists of conflict like Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman have shown that dull horror can make for compelling comics. But Guibert’s work here is tough to classify as comics at all. Yes, there are panels, word balloons, caption boxes, but his visual contribution is essentially an unending series of stiff minimalist portraits that look like they were produced with a photoshop filter, or one of those dreadful animation projects that take live action footage and boil them down to a “cartooned” style. They demonstrate the story rather than tell it. Even on top of Guibert and layout artist Frederic’s lack of attention to image-to-image flow or to the composition of a page, big blocks of narrative text and the interspersal of Lefevre’s actual photographs all but prevent the effects of accumulative or juxtaposed meaning that are so crucial to the book’s nominal medium of comics. Backgrounds are frequently dropped altogether, replaced with a baffling, uncommunicative palette of pea green and acidic yellow; one rare sequence where backgrounds were present stands out for its wrongheadedness, with rocky terrain all but obliterating the conversation in which Lefevre argues the head of his expedition into letting him return by himself. That Guibert had it in him to produce that knockout climax makes the lack of energy and life in the rest of the book all the more depressing. Nobly intentioned though it may be, bad comics is bad comics.

* WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA Jordan Crane, Sammy Harkham, and Ted May have a new webcomics site up in which pretty much every page of every Jordan Crane comic that isn’t The Clouds Above is available to read for free. HOLY SHIT. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Chris Allen about Powers is my favorite installment in that books of the decade series so far. The way Chris unpacks what made that book such a stand-out, its place in Bendis’s oeuvre, the stuff he says about Bendis’s later Marvel work, the line about the three-man superhero-crime subgenre–really phenomenal. Meanwhile I’m saving Shaenon Garrity’s take on Achewood until I get around to a long-planned catch-up session with the strip.

* Jog’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival con report, part two of which is now up, is sort of like a holiday fruitcake in that there’s all sorts of shit jammed in there. Scans from various manga, an interview with Tucker Stone reviewing various comics, his own reviews of stuff he got at the show, actual con-report material here and there…

* Grant Morrison on Joe the Barbarian and Grant Morrison on Batman & Robin. Sounds like his 12-issue run has expanded to 16, not even counting the separate Return miniseries.

* Let Chris Mautner tell you which R. Crumb books to buy first. This is super-helpful.

* Kevin Huizenga’s “Postcards from Fielder” continues.

* I didn’t know Kate Beaton had this in her.

* When Old Gods create natural resources.

* Road House: the video game? Please tell me it had a “time to not be nice-o-meter.” (Image and link via Chris Ward.)

And to all a good Monster Squad t-shirt!