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.

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.

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.

The Photographer

Didier Lefevre, story/photographs

Emmanuel Guibert, writer/artist

Frederic Lemercier, colors/layouts

First Second, 2009

288 pages

$29.95

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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.

Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys Vols. 4 & 5

Naoki Urasawa, writer/artist

Viz, 2009

200 pages, Vol. 4

216 pages, Vol. 5

$12.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

There are two major developments in these installments of Urasawa’s cult-conspiracy thriller. The first is the introduction as a secondary protagonist of Wolverine. The gruff longhaired badass who plays by his own rules but has a heart of gold and so on–named Shogun, in case you didn’t pick up on his awesomeness–was technically introduced in Vol. 3, but here we find out who he really is, get an origin story involving a wise old sensei, and connect him to the main thread of action. The second major development, which is interesting because it upends the first, is a big honking shift of the whole territory of the story that came waaaaaay quicker than expected. I won’t spoil it beyond the spoilage that is announcing its existence, but it’s what longtime watchers of Lost might call a “game-changer.” And if you opt to look at Shogun as the Sawyer figure instead of the Wolverine figure, that may be even more helpful in terms of establishing just how expertly Urasawa plays with genre tropes, insofar as these same tropes would later be key to the greatest work of American pop/pulp fiction this decade. 20th Century Boys has a lot in common with Lost, a neutral observation that doubles as an endorsement.

PS for readers of the series: The first lyrics in T. Rex’s “20th Century Boys” are “Friends say it’s fine, friends say it’s good.” Ha!

Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys Vols. 1-3

Naoki Urasawa, writer/artist

Viz, 2009

216 pages, Vols. 1&2

200 pages, Vol. 3

$12.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

I don’t like to read manga series until I have the whole thing. It’s not like superhero serials that are ongoing in perpetuity, or TV shows where the same thing is theoretically the case–these stories are serialized but they’re of a finite length, and I find that if I try to read a little here, a little there, I end up forgetting half of what’s going on by the time I catch up with later volumes. This isn’t really the fault of the material, mind you, it’s just because I’m not terribly bright.

Anyway, sometimes needs must, and so I found myself reading the three volumes of 20th Century Boys I have in my possession at the moment. (Without having Vols. 4-6, or god help me, without having finished Monster, since I’m missing about six volumes in the middle of the run and totally can’t remember what happened in the three or four volumes I already read. Like I said, not the sharpest knife in the drawer.) And this probably comes as a surprise to no one, but they’re a lot of fun. The story’s like a cross between Stephen King’s It and the Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo subway attack, with thirtysomething go-nowhere convenience-store franchisee Kenji discovering that the heroes-and-villains game he helped concoct as a kid is being used as a how-to manual for murdering people by a shadowy cult, most likely led by one of his childhood friends. The drill so far is one of watching bodies pile up and the revelations slowly accumulate, often in sublimely unexpected ways. There’s at least one supporting character who gets offed way before I’d have seen it coming, a lot of the secrets are way more out in the open than I’d have expected them to be at this stage in the game (a lot of “so, now you know that I know what you know”), there’s a wooly subplot involving a psychic bum, there’s a very cool t-shirt-ready symbol for the death cult…a thrill a minute, baby, and dammit, I wish I had the other three volumes.

That said, I think what prevents the Urasawa I’ve read from springboarding off its obvious proficiency with genre into the realm of genuinely great art is that his actual art, his drawings, are strictly functional. Actually, that’s not quite the word for it. “Strictly functional” implies “merely adequate,” and it’s more than that. The visual storytelling is crystal-clear, which is a huge help for a mystery translated from a foreign language with its own cultural cues. The character designs are easy to keep track of even as childhood friends are reintroduced at a dizzying pace. The line is as slick as manga gets, retaining energy during quieter scenes like a coiled spring that boings back up during confrontations and action sequences. But it only has style in the sense that, say, your basic Hollywood thriller has: The goal of the art is to stay out of the way of the story. I’m reminded of Pia Guerra’s work on Y: The Last Man–Urasawa would never draw anything that stiff, of course, but that kind of nondescript conveyor-of-information-type art is the sort of thing that works really well for a comic with this kind of broad civilian appeal. Are you here for an art class, or are you here to find out if Kenji can save the world?