Dragon Head Vols. 1-5

Minetaro Mochizuki, writer/artist

Tokyopop, 2005-2007

232-248 pages each

$9.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

Originally written on February 21, 2007 for publication in The Comics Journal

First, an admission: If it’s the post-apocalypse, I’ll eat it.

Second, an assertion: Even discounting my bias, Dragon Head is one of the most compulsively readable manga to reach an appreciable non-otaku audience (or at least this member thereof) in quite some time.

I found this somewhat surprising given DH‘s shaky start. Its first two volumes focus on an overbaked, if gut-level-gripping, high concept: Three high-school students are the sole survivors of a catastrophic train wreck in a collapsed tunnel deep underground. At this early stage the characters come out of Battle Royale central casting: Older boy Teru tries to do the right thing despite his mounting panic, younger nerd Nobuo bugs out and start doing things with knives and dead bodies, damsel in distress Ako is disarmingly wounded and pretty and ultimately more sensible than her two male companions combined, that sort of thing. Nobuo in particular is played to the cheap seats, going from zero to Lord of the Flies in the space of the first volume. Smart, detail-driven moment, like Ako awakening from a two-day coma to discover she’d gotten her period while she was unconscious and nearly going to pieces because her tampons were lost in the rubble, are few and far between.

By contrast, Mochizuki’s cartooning is vivid, memorable, even sensual, and seems to be where he’s deriving most of his pleasure here. However weak the psychological underpinnings of Nobuo’s freakout may be, Mochizuki renders its end result, the demonic face and body markings the kid gives himself using dead girls’ makeup, with graphic glee. Nearly wordless sequences throughout the second volume in which he chases Ako and later strips and paints her unconscious body utilize predatory pacing and intelligent image choices (a sharply turned head, a hand on a breast) to portray adolescent pre-sexuality gone vicious and sour. Mochizuki also evokes the impenetrable with evident relish, be it the walls of stone that hem the survivors in, the darkness that the kids are always trying to stave off with flashlights, lighters, and torched bottles of booze, or the mass of upturned seats, broken glass, torn-up backpacks and mangled limbs that fills the wreckage of the train.

Indeed, Mochizuki’s zeal for colossal depictions of the man-versus-nature conflict (a surprisingly rare sight in comics, for some reason) gives rise to a fairly major problem with Tokyopop’s translation work: In a world where so much action is the result of massive, indistinguishable walls of steam, stone, water, flame, earth, mud, and/or ash threatening to consume our protagonists, would it really be too much to ask for the publisher to translate the damn sound effects? They don’t even have to replace the Japanese characters–just run an English translation in smaller print alongside them and you’d be good to go. As it stands, without a telltale “RRRRUMBLE” or “HISSSSSSSSSSS” or “FWOOOOOSH,” the book’s many otherwise-silent sequences of natural disaster are extremely difficult to parse. Is that an ominous groan or an imminent collapse we’re hearing? Are Ako and Teru being overwhelmed by water or smoke or heat or their own overactive imaginations? All too frequently, if you don’t understand the kanji, your guess is as good as mine.

But all is forgiven once the inevitable showdown between sanity and face-painting, darkness-worshipping lunacy is over and the surviving kids finally make it to the surface world. We’re not entirely safe from wonky mental breakdowns yet; both Ako and Teru will, at varying points throughout the remaining volumes, weave in and out of catatonia or psychosis without much rhyme or reason. But as soon as they discover that whatever happened to their train tunnel happened to pretty much the entire rest of the world, the backdrop of their story expands exponentially, and their characters feel similarly enlarged. Their existential horror upon realizing that the atmosphere is full of enough soot to choke out the midday sun, their subsequent dazed, fumbling search for food, water, and news of the world, and Mochizuki’s you-can-taste-the-ash-in-your-mouth art for the sequence, are just the first signs that the book’s comparatively shallow action-thriller days are behind it. Had the book continued in that vein you might have expected the pair to become a cutesy, thrown-together-by-circumstance couple; instead their bond seems deeper and truer, driven by an instinctual need to survive and see that the other survives as well.

Sure enough, the greatest obstacle to their mutual survival turns out to be other people. Once again this could have been a minefield of cliche, but Teru and Ako’s dreamily horrifying journey among the human detritus of their dead world is where the book really takes off. A group of similar kids appears friendly, if slightly off, only for our heroes to discover that they blithely worship the “demon” they blame for the apocalypse they’ve experienced in a hard-to-shake ceremony involving gas masks and fireworks. A middle-aged woman in a motorcycle helmet takes them in, carving out a quiet, stately interlude for characters and reader alike in a refreshingly un-motherly way. Even the inevitable soldiers gone feral largely steer clear of the same old poses–granted, that’s how they start out, but soon a pair of them are joined with Ako and Teru more or less as equals, behaving and interacting as unpredictably as one suspects people in the real world would.

Through it all, the spectre of Nobuo hangs over Teru in particular, sometimes all but subliminally (one tremendous four-panel sequence shows Teru lying unconscious in the distance of identical shots of a rubble-filled scene, changing only in the fourth panel when Nobuo appears out of nowhere, mockingly squatting beside the body of his rival). He’s far more convincing and frightening an enemy when he’s treated as a source of guilt (why couldn’t Teru get his act together and save the poor kid, he wonders) than as a source of law-of-the-jungle fear. Mochizuki’s attention to detail regarding the headgear of the characters whom Teru and Ako stumble across later (they always seem to be sporting earphones or gas masks or baseball caps or motorcycle helmets or something) echoes Nobuo’s self-transformed skull and hints at whatever the title may really mean (by the end of Vol. 5, the only explicit reference is in the mutterings of an apparent lobotomy victim).

The overall effect is a nightmarish picaresque, like a cross between Children of Men and Apocalypse Now. With each volume better than the one before it, the perambulating structure pays off in spades. Get through the tunnel and you’ll want to see where the journey ends up.

Jin & Jam #1

Hellen Jo, writer/artist

Sparkplug Comic Books, 2008

36 pages

$5

Buy it from Sparkplug

The first thing I thought during my initial flip-through of Jin & Jam was “Boy, this person sure likes Taiyo Matsumoto.” Then I started reading from the beginning and the first thing I saw was an epigraph from Black & White, aka Tekkon Kinkreet, by Taiyo Matsumoto. So it’s not like Hellen Jo is trying to hide the influence, which emerges not just in the wiry art and leering character designs but in the plot itself, involving various paired-off tweenage characters gettin’ in trouble and stickin’ it to the man. But we’re not in Matsumoto’s sprawling dystopian future cityscape, we’re in a cramped, just-left-of-normal version of San Jose, California. And that’s where I start to detect another, subtler influence: Jaime Hernandez and the Locas of Love & Rockets. As we watch Jam, Hank, Jin, Ting, and Terng do the shiftless-layabout teenage-wasteland thing, we observe little details about their California culture: the junk-food diets, the bike-riding cops with bike helmets and short-shorts, the angry Korean Presbyterian preachers and so on. Meanwhile, the fact that the title of the book is Jin & Jam even though when we meet Jam she’s already paired off with Hank indicates that there will be some kind of emotional shift taking place, breaking up or truncating one friendship as another blossoms. We even start to see it happen by the end of the book: As Jin and Jam take a fantastical ride on a swing set under the stars, the faces of their “friends” literally vanish, leaving Jin & Jam as the only real people in the book’s final splash page. Is this Tekkon Kinkreet or Wigwam Bam or just a jack of both trades but master of neither? Too soon to tell, but are you not entertained regardless?

First Time

Sibylline, writer

Alfred, Capucine, Jerome d’Aviau, Virginie Augustin, Vince, Rica, Olivier Vatine, Cyril Pedrosa, Dominique Bertail, Dave McKean, artists

NBM/Eurotica, 2009

108 pages, hardcover

$19.95

Buy it from NBM/Eurotica

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Gloria Leonard said that the difference between pornography and erotica is lighting; it stands to reason that in comics, the difference between pornography and erotica is linework. First Time, then, is definitely erotica. This collection of sexually graphic vignettes features high-class, high-quality European artists whose styles will be instantly familiar to readers of alt/art/lit comics here in the States, even if the artists themselves (most of them pseudonymous, I think) are not. But best of all, a couple of them are familiar. Yep, “Cyril Pedrosa” is indeed Three Shadows Cyril Pedrosa! And Dave McKean is indeed “Neil Gaiman” Dave McKean! Maybe it’s just me, but I think seeing cartoonists whose mainstream work you know and admire get smutty is one of life’s simple pleasures, like discovering the lovely but respectable actor you’re crushing on did an extensive nude scene back when everything was at its youngest and most pert.

Indeed, the reclamation of the erotic as something respectable comics creators can depict and respectable comics readers can discuss is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. Shouldn’t sex be something we tackle at least as often and as directly and with at least as much sophistication as we deal with violence and misery? Heck, shouldn’t it be something we tackle independently from violence in misery? This is a pretty terrific step in all those directions. In addition to bonafide critics’ darlings Pedrosa and McKean, every artist looks like they could have stepped out of a Petit Livre from Drawn & Quarterly or one of Fantagraphics’ Blab! storybooks or MOME guest spots.

Writer Sibylline seems to have either tailored the material to her collaborators or picked them to suit the material. “First Time,” a sweet story of a girl’s deflowering that comes with a funny twist ending, has an appropriately Top Shelf-ish vibe courtesy of the angular cartooning of artist Alfred, while the more self-indulgent topic matter of “Sex Shop” and “Fantasy” earn the more voluptuous, outwardly sexy curved lines of Capucine and Jerome d’Aviau respectively. “1+1″‘s story of a first-time girl-on-girl hook-up and the subsequent disappointment it engenders in one of its participants gets an animated look from artist Virginie Augustin, which nicely supports its initial whimsy and free-spiritedness and eventual heartbreak. “2+1”, with its tangle of bodies in a cramped apartment, slowly evolves from Tim Sale to Aeon Flux courtesy of artist Vince. Rica’s “Nobody,” the most Robin Bougie-ish of the stories what with its sex-doll subject matter, also boasts the most Robin Bougie-ish art, while Olivier Vatine’s “Club,” appropriately enough, reminds me of that New X-Men issue where Chris Bachalo helped reimagine the Hellfire Club as a strip joint in a tip of the hat to its NYC namesake. For those who’ve read the sweet, sensitive Three Paradoxes, Pedrosa’s aptly titled “Submission” may come as a shock, what with all the deep-throating and spanking and following orders to go look in the mirror with a mouth full of semen, but then again I think it was clear from that graphic novel’s bold visuals that Pedrosa could pull off pretty much anything. Dominique Bertail’s “Sodomy” has the most traditional sex comix look, I think, but its gender-reversal subject matter is strong enough that matter-of-factness is an apt stylilstic choice. Finally, McKean’s “X-Rated” combines manipulated film stills with cubist kama-sutra positioning for something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a deleted Arkham Asylum scene where the Joker watched Batman get it on with Poison Ivy over the closed-circuit cameras. The whole project is a bit undercut by slightly wooden translation work from Joe Johnson, but only a bit. Overall it made me wish that more work like this was being produced. If you like your smut smart and your art sexy, seek this out.

Asterios Polyp

David Mazzucchelli, writer/artist

Pantheon, June 2009

344 pages, hardcover

$29.95

Pre-order it from Amazon.com

An extraordinarily easy book to read, Asterios Polyp is, I’m finding, a nearly equally extraordinarily difficult book to talk about. Frankly I think I just feel out of my depth. For example, cartoonist David Mazzucchelli has a long history of making art comics in Europe, and I’ve flipped through a few in the store or off my buddy Josiah’s shelf, but the only Mazzucchelli comics I’ve read from start to finish prior to this book are Batman Year One, Daredevil: Born Again, and that little comic with the spilled jar of ink he did for The Comics Journal Special Edition: Cartoonists on Cartooning. But hey, fine, I can fake it, I can certainly locate Asterios Polyp within the tradition of alternative comics. For exaple, it uses color and, to a certain extent, character design like a Dash Shaw webcomic or MOME contribution; it mixes imagery with external narrating text like Chris Ware, only with several orders of magnitude more room to breathe on the page, like Ware filmed in slow motion. That, I get.

What I’m having harder time with, where I feel really out of my depth, is in trying to locate the book’s story content. Asterios Polyp is a highly lauded, award-winning “paper architect,” i.e. a guy whose designs are awesome but have never actually been built, who divides his time between Manhattan and the Ithaca, NY university where he is a professor. We join his story already in progress, as a fire consumes his ratty, messy, porn(?)-soundtracked bachelor pad. Asterios does not pass Go, does not collect $200, proceeds directly from fleeing his apartment in the rain with his wallet and a handful of knicknacks and watching the fire department fight the fire down into the subway and back up and out at the Port Authority, where he takes a bus to the middle of nowhere and gets the first job he can find (as an auto mechanic) and crashpad he can find (renting a room from his boss at the auto shop). From there we bounce back and forth between revelatory events in the present day and key events in the life that led him there, mostly having to do with his ill-fated relationship with the talented but somewhat timid sculptor he was once married to.

In other words, it’s very Woody Allen, very Philip Roth, very New Yorker. A sophisticated urban aesthete unsuccessfully balances the life of the mind with the life of his weiner and then wonders where it all went wrong; his life is contrasted with that of the spirited younger woman he can never quite get a handle on and various other sophisticated urban aesthetes whose arrogance and eccentricity he deplores yet cannot see within himself. And there’s my problem: I know enough about that stuff to recognize the template, but I don’t know enough of it to know if it goes beyond using the template into wholesale swiping and/or rote recapitulation. The best I can do is say “Well, this reminds me somewhat of the Woody/Alan Alda bits in Crimes & Misdemeanors.” I’m simply not well-read enough in this area to comment beyond that. Ask me to speak authoritatively about the next Neil Marshall movie and I can probably handle that, but this? Donnie, you’re out of your element.

What I can say with confidence, however, is that I enjoyed that story immensely. And a big part of that is because this isn’t a Woody Allen film or a Philip Roth novel–it’s a comic, and there’s no mistaking it. Yeah, the basic story could be told in other ways, but if you wanted an illustration of that old saw that you should be able to look at a comic and determine why it’s a comic and not a movie pitch or a short story, look no further. Mazzucchelli clearly had a blast drawing this thing.

My favorite ambitious graphic novels of recent vintage have been pretty manic and information-heavy in terms of the visual approach–Theo Ellsworth’s Capacity and Josh Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest spring to mind, and even Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button feels dense and claustrophobic compared much of his other recent work, if only for the lack of color. Asterios Polyp, on the other hand, is airy and light from start to finish, like giving your eyeballs a breath of fresh air. There are all kinds of panel layouts, splash pages, and stand-alone images here, popping right off the big white pages, and the CMYK colors are just a pleasure to look at.

Meanwhile, it’s almost unspeakably clever. Mazzucchelli gives each major character and setting its own color scheme, that’s apparent from the start–Asterios is bright blue, while his wife Hana is bright pink. But oh, the places Mazzucchelli goes with that! By the time Asterios takes Hana to meet his mother and invalid father, he’s wearing a pink checkered jacket, while she has on a blue shirt. In a passage meant to illustrate how our memories slowly refine our original experiences “because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback,” Asterios’s remembered Hana slowly morphs from having a pink shirt on against a white background to wearing a blue shirt against a blue background. And in a much later scene which I’m going to try hard not to spoil, where the two encounter each other long after their divorce and after myriad transformative experiences, the color scheme is totally different–all oranges and greens. Meanwhile, “neutral zones” in both dreaming and waking life are yellow and purple. And let me assure you that as far as the use of color goes, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Then there are the countless clever references to the history and art of cartooning. Given our hero’s occupation and preoccupations, there are quite a few mini-essays on architecture, philosophy, design, music…and they’re drawn and lettered like something out of Understanding Comics. A Latina chef swats flies on the ceiling and looks like she could have gotten off the plane from Palomar yesterday, while her band’s drummer sports a “Los Bros” sticker on his drumkit. Asterios’s dapper in-his-youth father looks like he stepped out of a Seth comic. The Midwesterners who take Asterios in–Stiff Major and his zaftig wife Ursula, and no, Mazzucchelli is clearly not above having some Vonneguttian fun with names–could be thrown up on the screen in a Disney/Pixar production tomorrow. Hana I can’t quite put my finger on, but she’s got a distinct ’50s/’60s illustration vibe, part Charles Addams part something else I’m too slow to pick up. Asterios himself is given to standing in profile and holding a cigarette like Eustace Tilley holds his monocle. His teaching career reads like Art School Confidential from the professor’s perspective. (Student: “I’m thinking about adding fenestration to this planar surface…?” Asterios: “How about just putting a couple of windows in that wall?”)

None of this would matter, or at least it would matter very little, if the comic weren’t a series of emotional hooks and twists and high points and explosions, which it is. The dream sequences are uniformly strong, with one involving a flooded subway station-cum-dock so evocatively drawn–thick washes of purple ink, rough crosshatching for one of the first times in the whole book–that I could practically hear the echoing slosh of the water in the tunnels. Asterios’s unique, virtually constant headshape (how have I not talked about this until now?) essentially requires him to be drawn in profile, so the few times we see him turn toward us (again in a dream sequence, notably!) are stop-and-pay-attention moments. The book’s bravura sequence (you’ll hear about this a lot) condenses the couple’s entire life together into a series of snapshot images of Hana’s various movements and bodily secretions; here’s one case where my familiarity with this technique bred nothing but admiration for seeing it so well done. The ending…I’ll say I imagine it will be controversial and leave it at that, but I got a kick out of it.

The real knockout moment for me, though, came during the pivotal argument that stories like this inevitably include, the storm that built for years yet ultimately came out of nowhere and nothing was the same after that. You spend the build-up to it noticing that something is awry, something in the way Hana has been drawn, something in the way there seem to be two or three things going on at once in the interactions between Hana, Asterios, and the other characters involved (including a memorable little imp named Willy Ilium in the book’s Clare Quilty role). Once it gets going, once the pink-and-blue color scheme starts shifting appropriately and the linework and coloring get scratchier and choppier and angrier, you’re rooting for Hana all the way, you think that finally the beef you’ve been accumulating on her behalf is going to get the apocalyptic airing it deserves. And then…and then…BAM, a line you just did not see coming at all, making it all the more devastating, because after all, neither did Asterios. I think this particular exchange may open the book up to charges that it embraces the same sexism it nominally deplores in its characters, but to me it’s the human element that comes through, not the gendered one. I read this scene and said “My God” out loud on the train. (You really need to read the book to get what I’m talking about, I suppose, and it doesn’t come out until June so unless you somehow ended up with a review copy months ago like I did I guess that’s difficult, but do me a favor, bookmark this and come back later and see if you think I’m right, okay?)

I may not know ahhht, is I suppose what I’m saying, but I know what I like. And I like Asterios Polyp a lot. It’s certainly a book to savor. I suspect it’s a book to treasure. I guess it wasn’t that hard to talk about after all.