not simple

Natsume Ono, writer/artist

Viz Signature/Ikki, January 2010

320 pages

$14.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

I’m gonna go so far as to say don’t waste your time with this one. Sure, the cover makes it look like an imported slice-of-lifer of the sort that’s at least surface-level appealing to American altcomix readers like me. But inside is a story so rife with tragedy, maudlin melodrama, and ludicrous implausibility it feels less like, say, Solanin and more like something you’d waste a couple Saturday afternoon hours watching on Lifetime. Its confusing intro at first makes the book seem like it’s going to be about a totally different person and scenario and then gets barely a dozen pages before lobbing the first in an onslaught of absurd coincidences, all of which come in lieu of a plot that emerges organically from character. When we finally do get around to telling the story of our protagonist Ian–a young man recovering from abuse and hoping to reunite with the older sister he suspects was secretly his birth mother–it quickly becomes clear that Ono’s art isn’t up to the task she sets up for herself, in which the characters’ appearances and who looks like whom are a major plot point. She’s not really making up for it with style or layout either: Her angular line and big-eyed emo-haired impossibly slim characters are pleasant enough for a time, but they wouldn’t look out of place in an undistinguished minicomic being sold at a MoCCA table, and her panels feel cramped and at times illogically placed. There’s a comparatively strong, thoughtful, intriguing subplot-cum-A-plot involving a young writer who befriends Ian with the intention of writing a novel about his tragic life but quietly falls in love with him. It nearly rights the ship, but only nearly, especially once it’s capsized once again by the most over-the-top plot twist of the lot. I’ll say this for the book: it reads like a breeze–even if that’s in part because the art is slight and you’re racing through the narrative since it doesn’t reward dwelling.

It Was the War of the Trenches

Jacques Tardi, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, March 2010

120 pages, hardcover

$24.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

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Just a few observations on the art here:

1) With the exception of the introductory story, this entire book features three tiered panels per page. In superhero comics this format is known as “widescreen”; it connotes power. It’s powerful here, too, but it’s a power to oppress and crush rather than soar or punch in action-movie style. They’re like miniature trenches.

2) In one memorable sequence early in the book, soldiers leap up from their trench and charge their opposite numbers. Their charge is depicted against a blank white background in lieu of any kind of detail for the sky or the horizon. You see men cut down by invisible bullets–no speed lines, no blurs, certainly no enemy firing.

3) One particularly strong page in the sequence uses panels of two soldiers leaning forward to sandwich a grisly shot of a soldier being blown backwards–hat flying off and blood streaming out behind him–by a bullet to the head.

4) Tardi’s art frequently piles detail on detail–meticulously researched trenches filled with the detritus of war, huge gatherings of massed soldiers in impeccably drawn uniforms and toting forests of guns and bayonets–but one thing he rarely if ever does is bury his protagonists in the visual cacophony. Flipping through the book, it’s impressive how he uses various tricks to pop them out from their surroundings. Most frequently, he’ll use the device of having people face directly out at the reader in weird little pseudo-portraits of them against their backgrounds. This is where the strength of his portraiture–his signature taciturn squinty-eyed stubbly everymen–comes in.

5) But he also uses a lot of forward motion, characters moving or leaning from the left-hand side of the panel to the right, serving as guideposts for your eyes and thus standing out to you.

6) It’s actually interesting to see the cases where people face right to left instead. I don’t think it’s always used for effect–it’s not like every single time is like that famous sequence from Safe Area Gorazde where Sacco drew people fleeing through a forest from right to left, “against the grain” of the reading experience if you will, to drive home the difficulty of their journey. But flipping through, I see some notable cases–a man seizing a suspected traitor, wounded Englishmen leaving the front, two soldiers from opposite sides of the conflict hiding out in a basement together, a soldier who gets lost in No Man’s Land sitting and trying to figure out which way to head…in most cases it suggests an inability to escape.

7) The whole book seems smeared with zipatone, dingy and dreary, like you’re being rained on. It makes the un-shaded parts–that attack sequence, a series photo-like images of the wounded and disfigured veterans toward the end–practically radiate from the page.

All of which is to say that this is Tardi’s thesis, as articulated in his foreword:

There are no “heroes,” there is no “protagonist” in this awful collective “adventure” that is war. nothing, but a gigantic, anonymous scream of agony.

…and but for my own personal history I’d be tempted to dismiss this as Captain Obvious territory. But the specific and unique awfulness of World War I is that trench warfare by its very nature highlights the pointlessness of the deaths of its participants: Untold thousands upon thousands of men standing up, moving forward a few feet, and being blown to pieces, gaining no ground, rinse, repeat for years on end. Add to this the French experience of many many soldiers being executed by their own side on entirely spurious or totally unfair accusations of dereliction of duty, a duty that was frequently impossible for them to execute. Tardi is brining very specific and very effective weapons to bear in his chillingly successful effort to convey this particular horror.

Peter’s Muscle

Michael DeForge, writer/artist

self-published, May 2010

12 pages

no price listed

Visit DeForge’s website

The second panel in this comic, a view of the buildings lining a city street–here, you can see it yourself–literally made me say “whooo” out loud on the train. Yeah, I’m quite frankly impressed as hell by what I’ve seen from Michael DeForge so far. This minicomic contains two nightmarish short stories, both of which pivot off of characters from popular comics (Spider-Man and freaking Foxtrot respectively) as is DeForge’s apparent wont, and they’re maybe the tightest things I’ve seen from him yet. The first involves Spider-Man recounting to his therapist a sex dream he had about Aunt May and Doctor Octopus; it’s not a “haha look the famous corporate icon is doing something dirty” joke, it’s a way to make this sort of uncomfortable Freudian stuff even more up-close-and-personal by using the familiar visual vocabulary of a hugely popular pop-culture staple to keep everything painfully simple to understand. The second shows a loinclothed character wandering through a wasteland whose geological features seem to consist solely of viscera, killing a phallic animal, and offering its disembowled corpse to the colossal, godlike, bifurcating head of a cute comic-strip kid. Again, this kind of “cute thing doing gross thing” material might read as overly broad in less skilled hands, but DeForge appears in complete control of his line, his figurework, his character designs, his backgrounds, his use of zipatone, his cartoony satirical representations of Spidey and Doc Ock and Aunt May, his pacing, his punchlines, his choice of nightmare imagery (sidewalk-as-thin-membrane is gonna be hard to shake when I walk to the comic shop today)…it’s very, very sharp, it does exactly what it wants to do.

Neely Covers Comics to Give You the Creeps!

Tom Neely, writer/artist

I Will Destroy You, May 2010

24 pages

$6

Buy it from Tom Neely

Tom Neely’s “cover versions” of various classic (or in some cases just old) horror comic covers have been a highlight of the Internet ever since he started putting them up on his site and on Robert Goodin’s never-miss-a-day Covered site. So naturally a collection of them is gonna be a treat if you’re into that sort of thing. But I think this minicomic is worth the price admission for more than just horror-hound eyecandy.

For one thing, it’s more like an eye-dessert cart, in large part due to the colors. People ought to be studying that lush midnight blue background in Adventures Into Terror, that sickly purple twilight in Beware the Clutching Hand and Unearthly Spectaculars, the candlelight effect giving way to a rich orange shadow in Creepy #79. That the comic’s paper holds them as well as it does is a testament to Neely’s skill as a self-publisher in addition to his instincts as a colorist.

For another, this collection is a sort of capsule version of the horror gospel according to Tom Neely. Not so much in the selections as in the interpretations, a picture emerges of what it is that Neely finds frightening; put simply, it’s the vulnerability of the body. His figures are both rail-thin and out-of-shape, a brand of body horror not far removed from black-and-white photos of the prisoners of Andersonville or Auschwitz. They grasp and point with arms that look like they could be snapped in half like twigs–honestly, Beware the Clutching Hand could serve as the title for Neely’s whole oeuvre. And there’s a horror of hair here as palpable as anything outside of The Ring. Weedy black locks cascade out from the heads of women like snakes and sprout from the heads and faces of men like anemones, suggesting an intense loathing of the way our bodies behave beyond our control. It’s like a zombie apocalypse perpetrated by sentient armpits and groins. All told, it’s much more than a series of kitschy nostalgic pin-ups. Creepy? You betcha.

Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka

Naoki Urasawa, writer/artist

Takashi Nagasaki, writer

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

Viz, 2009-2010

Eight volumes

200 pages or so each

$12.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

I was over the moon for the first three volumes of Pluto, suspense mangaka Naoki Urasawa’s Watchmen-style reimagining of a classic Astro Boy storyline–and for precisely the same reasons lots of other smart critics weren’t. I love stories about emotionally wounded men (or in this case, robots) crying over the death of puppies and children. I love stories about people paralyzed by grief and loss. I love stories about people who lay it all on the line, and lose it all, to save other people, and then how those other people handle being the reluctant beneficiaries of that sacrifice. In a word, I love melodrama. If it involves robots, so much the better. And in Pluto, I felt for the first time that Urasawa was connecting with something more than mere story.

Ultimately the series fails to fully live up to the magical magisterial melodramatic pomp of that first volume. As I found to be the case with Monster (although certainly not to that extent), Urasawa’s technique of drawing out characters’ climactic realizations and confrontations for page after page eventually dilutes their impact. In this particular case, the murder mystery at the story’s heart ends up being solved in a fashion that’s both disappointingly straightforward in terms of motive and unnecessarily, distractingly complicated in terms of execution. And since this is a super-robot story, the climax must come about through combat, ironically the one thing that Urasawa’s visual vocabulary does not enable him to portray in the most thrilling of all possible ways; particularly given the environment in which the final battle takes place, it’s difficult to get a handle on where you are, what’s going on, or what the consequences for each beat might be. Like the characters whose fate will be determined by the battle’s outcome, you just have to take it on faith that the involved parties know what they’re doing and things will come out in the end.

That said, the robots, and their surreally obtrusive appearances in Urasawa’s meticulous blend of realism and slick cartooniness, never ceased to be a joy to look at and never stopped lodging themselves in my brain. The repeated use of flashbacks to horrible events that haunt the main characters had that same effect on me. I came to care about these people/”people”–well, more like I came to be intrigued by them. I wanted to find out what happened to them to make them the way they are, and for things to work out for them, and I was frequently surprised when things went bad way before I thought they would. And in the end I appreciated the book’s blend of deep, unshakable, even scientific pessimism about human nature with an impassioned insistence that we can reject that programming if we try–in a fashion that’s a lot more convincing than the similar moral throughline in Monster, by the way. It may not stick the landing, but it’s a thing of beauty in flight.

Ex Machina Vols. 1-9

Brian K. Vaughan, writer

Tony Harris, artist

with John Paul Leon, Chris Sprouse, artists

DC/WildStorm, 2005-2010

various page counts

$12.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

There’s something lovably clunky about Ex Machina. Before we get to the lovably, let’s talk about the clunky, from the ripped-from-NPR political factoids that in some cases all but replace actual dialogue to the silent-movie mugging and gesticulating of Tony Harris’s photoref’d art. In my re-read of the series in three or four sittings prior to its imminent conclusion with issue #50, I was struck by just how clunky it is, particularly at first–much more so than I remember it.

Those first few issues get over largely on the strength of Brian K. Vaughan’s unfuckwithable high concept, the most button-pushing such idea in a career already full of them: Main character Mitchell Hundred is a New York City civil engineer whose contact with a mysterious artifact gives him the ability to communicate with machinery, inspiring him to launch a second career as a masked vigilante which culminates in his diversion of the airplane aimed at the second tower on 9/11 and leads to his election as mayor months later. So strong is that final page of the first issue, with one tower standing next to the light beam used to memorialize the second, that it’s easy to forget how Hundred’s politics are a “both sides make good points” centrist-pragmatist-contrarian hodgepodge that’s both unwieldy and unconvincing. Having the aforementioned both sides shout their points at Mitchell and one another via his various advisors, staffers, and constituents doesn’t help matters, especially because they’re usually concocted in such a way as to smack you over the head with “hey look how ideologically diverse this city is, you can’t pigeonhole anyone, we’re here to challenge your preconceptions, it’s not as simple as Left/Right black/white etc etc.” If you meet a priest, you can bet he’ll also be a boxer who takes the Lord’s name in vain; if a gay couple’s gonna get married, you’re damn straight they consist of one of the city’s, like, eight black firefighters and a Log Cabin Republican. Meanwhile they all point and shrug and flail about like they have some sort of neurological condition. It’s quite silly-sounding and silly-looking at times.

And yet! Just because a choice of how to write or draw something isn’t the choice I would have made doesn’t mean those choices can’t work on their own terms. For example, I always preferred Ex Machina to the other BKV book written in this vein, Y: The Last Man, because of Pia Guerra’s stiff art on the latter–even though I think that stiffness, that neither-fish-nor-fowl not quite naturalistic not quite cartoony look that was Vertigo’s house style for so long, is a big part of what makes that book such a hit with people new to comics: It’s simple and clear, yet not “childish.” Rereading Ex Machina this time around, I had a few flashes of suddenly thinking “Guerra Was Right”: Maybe her simplified, styleless figures are the perfect vehicles for Vaughan’s dialogue in his sociopolitically tinged series, where complex ideas are boiled down into streamlined approximations thereof in much the same way. Maybe Harris’s almost fumetti-like fealty to his models is what makes Vaughan’s Trivial Pursuit: Fiorello LaGuardia Edition dialogue feel so weird here and there.

But you know what Harris does have, in spades? Style, even glamour. Compared with the white glare of that other famous photorealist, Alex Ross, Harris’s art is awash in thick blacks that seem to make his figures both shine and swirl, and their eyes light up the room like Ellen DeGeneres’s when your’e watching American Idol in HD. (Seriously, that woman has unbelievable Lord of the Rings eyes.) Their world of constant grinning and shouting may be one uncanny valley removed from our own, but it’s still a world it seems like it’d be fun to hang out in, argue in, get embroiled in a political crisis or hostage situation in. It’s buoyant, it’s bright, and even the recurring grand-guignol violence feels like some sort of pop-art explosion as much as a series of brutal murders.

And in reading all nine of the currently collected volumes back to back, I discovered so much to enjoy about Vaughan’s writing, or more specifically his plotting. I’d never noticed before that each arc features a masked “villain” of some sort, even if it’s more likely to be someone who stole a fireman’s outfit from the set of Third Watch than a genuine “bad guy.” I also never picked up on the fact that while Hundred and his confidants self-consciously refer to Jack Pherson–a super-powered stalker who gained the ability to communicate with animals in an attempt to crack and duplicate Hundred’s power–as his “arch-enemy,” the book also features a real arch-enemy in the sense of a character plotting behind the scenes to take Hundred down for pretty much the series’ entire duration. In other words, like many heroes, Hundred has a “fighter” arch-enemy and a “thinker” arch-enemy. And by contrast with so many serialized genre entertainments of the past decade, the mythology elements are doled out so judiciously I’d forgotten they even existed. Seriously, you can go for twenty issues at a time before a given reference to the mystery of Hundred’s powers is repeated or followed up on; I can think of at least one very major one from the book’s second arc that still hasn’t been mentioned again. Once you get into it, even the speech becomes easy to enjoy. Vaughan clearly has a blast cussing, for one thing. Moreover, behind the didactic dialogue lurks the satirical concept that the only way to power through the avalanche of ossified bullshit that is politics and government is for a superhero to essentially bully people into it.

But it’s important to note that Vaughan in no way thinks this is a good idea. Indeed, the real secret to Ex Machina‘s success for me is that Vaughan announces, from the first page (set after Hundred’s term ends; everything that follows is a glorified flashback), that the story is a tragedy. Hundred’s personal heroism and political maverickiness will all end in unspecified disaster, perhaps for him, perhaps for the whole city–and as the issues go by, it seems possible that it’ll end in disaster for the whole world. All the characters who argue and chuckle and backslap their way through this whole NYC morality play have no idea what kind of story they’re actually in, but we do. Some rough beast is slouching toward Gracie Mansion, and the tension between the zesty surface gestures and the dark heart beneath is what will ultimately make these ten volumes worth returning to.

Studio Visit

James McShane, writer/artist

self-published, April 2010

48 pages

I don’t know how much it costs

Contact James McShane, I bet he can hook you up with a copy

Like his excellent minicomic Archaeology, James McShane’s Studio Visit explores the intersection of memory and environment. And like the cleverly conceived but ultimately more interesting in practice than in theory log-comic from Kramers Ergot and Ivan Brunetti’s Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction, it explores the Heisenbergian interaction of lived experience and the recording thereof. It’s not as successful a comic as the former, nor as flat a comic as the latter. What it is is gestural, I think–McShane’s minimal lines, both of art and narration, get across a day in the life, from aspects of his daily routine to memories of past experiences evoked by objects he comes across in his house to his thoughts on process and his past works. That last bit’s maybe the most interesting–I was fascinated to hear that Archaeology was assembled in an almost Burroughsian cut-up fashion, and I also appreciated the quiet confidence in his explanation of how his very formal methods make him a better observer of what’s worth drawing. I think his…taste, maybe? gets away from here a bit–the memories he recounts of fun adventures in nature with friends are a bit on the twee side, the balletic image he chooses to represent “presenting the mundane with elan” is knowingly cheesy but cheesy nonetheless, and his vision of “growing” a story is depicted with too-literal gardening imagery. But the book isn’t intended to be anything more than what the title implies: a visit to the space, mental and physical, McShane inhabits when he works. This is where he was working on that particular day. It’s the recording of a step on a path, not of a destination reached.

New Painting and Drawing

Ben Jones, writer/artist

PictureBox, 2008

32 pages, hardcover

$20

See a preview at BenjaminQJones.com

Sold out at PictureBox

Buy it from Amazon.com

You can’t understand New Painting and Drawing until you have it in your hands. It shimmers, as though the Platonic ideal of the color Orange just gave birth to a bouncing baby book. I actually think the Platonic ideal is a good concept to keep in mind when looking at Paper Rad honcho Ben Jones’s stuff. It’s like, “So be it–if I must draw a dog, then let it be the best of all possible dogs!” So you get a dog that is as wide-eyed and jolly as any dog you’ve ever petted, but he’s also bright orange and pink and yellow and aqua and another shade of orange, and he looks like he just stepped out of some sort of electronic animal shelter run by Shigeru Miyamoto, and he’s placed against a background of white-and-gold diagonal stripes, the better to pop him off the page and into your eyeballs. You get religious-iconography pastiche, but the icon is like Jesus and Mary and a Greek Orthodox saint all rolled into one, and he’s wearing Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat and a Ring Pop, and he’s got a mustache and is pointing almost like Buddy Christ, and he’s placed against a sky that looks like Apocalypse Tron. Jones’s obsessive use of patterns, stripes, brick fields and so on, each tier done in as bright a neon as you please, serves to foreground everything, backgrounding nothing. Every part of every drawing is designed to be as exciting as possible. It is such a thrill looking at this book.