Water Baby

Ross Campbell, writer/artist

DC/Minx, July 2008

176 pages

$9.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Ross Campbell is the cartoonist laureate of skanks. For real, when one of the characters in his latest saga of kinda hot, kinda sexy, kinda goth, kinda punk, kinda slow, kinda gross young people uses that term to refer to another, it was a real eureka moment for me. At last, the proper term to describe these beautiful, languid losers! Campbell doesn’t judge them for it, neither do I and neither should you.

The central skank (you’re unlikely to hear her referred to as such in the marketing materials!) here is Brody, a surfer girl whose leg is bitten off in a shark attack. Plagued by recurring nightmares in which shark-creatures consume her, she spends a lazy summer with her best friend and her slutty ex-boyfriend, until she gets fed up enough with the latter to drive him from her Florida home back to his mom’s place in upstate New York. Along the way they pick up a sexy-‘rexy hitchhiker girl and eventually receive a good-samaritan ride from Mario Van Peebles (not kidding)…and that’s basically it. For what it’s worth, the only real difference in tone or style between this project for mighty DC’s young-adult-female imprint Minx and Campbell’s indie series Wet Moon and Tokyopop zombie OEL The Abandoned, both of which are very good, is a lack of bare nipples, as far as I can remember. (BTW the horror material here, as in The Abandoned, is very gory and very effective.)

Mostly, what I take away is a sort of dazed awe over what a demimonde it is that Campbell has chosen to chronicle and the way he’s chosen to chronicle it. From the dawn of my self-identification with fringe culture, I’ve never had what it takes, be it gumption or a near-total lack thereof, to simply drift–to go for weeks without showering, to not for a second worry whether my rattiest most offensive t-shirt is appropriate grocery store attire, to wake up in a vomit-soaked apartment and immediately go on an overnight road trip with no planning and without telling anyone, simply coasting on the waves provided by sketchy friends, horror films, metal, lust, and junk food. That Campbell lets his characters go there is impressive to me. That he does so in such an almost anti-plot fashion–no multi-act structures, no real character arcs, no big climaxes–is the kind of thing that no one would pay any mind to were his art style more firmly in the altcomix tradition as we know it, but drawing in a beautiful, mainstream-accessible, hotsy-totsy style as he does, with each character drawn for maximum realistic sexiness and trashiness, it’s almost a revelation. Like, people really live this way. I really liked living with them.

Neverland

Dave Kiersh, writer/artist

Bodega, 2008

32 pages

$6

Buy it from Bodega

Dave Kiersh’s visual representation of our mutual home-area/zeitgeist of Long Island doesn’t match up with my experience of it. He puts together vistas of water towers, telephone poles, stores, and parking lots in an almost map-like fashion, giving the suburbs a depth and dimensionality that I’ve never really felt from them. I see Long Island as flat sets, buildings and houses glimpsed while passing them horizontally in innumerable car rides and Long Island Rail Road commutes. I certainly don’t see the swirling repleteness that Kiersh conveys with his increasingly accomplished linework.

Yet it all still feels true, somehow. His observations of teenage and immediately post-teenage life on Long Island are spot on: convenience stores and driving, “the video store is my culture–Saturday nights in front of the TV,” walking through a parking lot at night and remembering girls you hooked up with. The main theme of Neverland–split up the compound word, as the cover design does, and you’ll see where he’s going–is not the romantic escape from this sensual boredom he yearns for in sexualized Peter Pan fantasies and idealized relationships, but that yearning itself, that desire itself, inextricable as it is from staying right where you are and not actually escaping. A coda likening any future success he and his beloved might have to a forgotten tourist attraction I myself patronized as a little boy adds a further complication of comfort in futility. This is a sophisticated comic that nearly tricks you into thinking it’s twee and easy, which is no mean feat.

Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight

Ralph Cosentino, writer/artist

Viking, 2008

32 pages, hardcover

$15.99

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I stumbled across this book purely by accident at my day job, and golly am I glad I did. A for-kids distillation of the sort of ur-Batman mythos–the basic origin, accoutrements, methods, villains and such that everyone recognizes–it boasts sumptuous art from Cosentino that comes off like a cross between the Bruce Timm animated look and high-end commercial illustration. I pretty much love his version of every character he draws–Thomas and Martha Wayne never looked like a better mommy and daddy, just for example, while Batman is square-jawed to the point of iconography rather than portraiture. It’s basically the most sophisticated art you’ll ever see in a potentially throwaway licensed book for ages eight and under. Like Tim Burton’s first Batman film or The Animated Series, the book’s a grab bag drawn from any and all of Batman’s appearances: ’40s-style crooks in fedoras, very very old-school-looking Joker and Catwoman, DeVito-inflected Penguin, non-1966-TV-series baddie Two-Face, a cameo from Killer Croc at his most reptilian, those preserved suits of armor from the Burton Batman‘s Wayne Manor–anything that works and creates a kid-friendly portrait of a guy who works really hard to stop crime by scaring and/or beating the stuffing out of bad guys. Its unusual and notable emphasis on young Bruce Wayne’s years of physical and mental study even impart a valuable lesson about hard work, not to mention not being afraid to pursue your really weird dreams. It’s great. I’m gonna give it to my nephew.

Pizzeria Kamikaze

Etgar Keret, writer

Asaf Hanuka, artist

Alternative Comics, 2006

100 pages

$14.95

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Now this is kind of weird–here’s a comic I appreciate almost purely on a plot level. Adapted from the short prose story of the same name by Keret, Pizzeria Kamikaze is hamstrung by its bland, depthless characters, the sort of twentysomethings cartoonists use to show how boring and purposeless life is for twentysomethings. The flickers of difference that some of them display frequently just flicker out due to storytelling inconsistency–asshole party-boy Uzi’s sweet fondness for his family, for example, is demonstrated through repeated calls to them during his and main character Mordy’s road trip, until at a later point he apparently forgets about them entirely. Meanwhile, Hanuka’s silvertoned black and white art is easy enough on the eyes but more functional than anything else. And in terms of the high concept–the afterlife for suicides is pretty much like the regular world, except maybe even more aimless and dull–certain aspects took me out of the story as much as pulled me in. (If everyone bears the marks of their method of self-destruction, shouldn’t the suicide bombers be a lot more fucked up? Shouldn’t Uzi’s musician friend Kurt have a giant fucking shotgun hole in his head?) If there’s some sort of “inner meaning or ‘message,'” to quote Tolkien, it’s not a particularly powerful one. (Life can devolve into rote and routine, didn’t you know? Young men can invest all sorts of their own issues into an idealized female who inevitably fails to warrant such objectifying devotion, also.)

But the book’s relentlessly deadpan tone pays off when the story takes a turn into left field during the final act. Within fairly short order the main character relationships are upended (mostly in amusingly vicious ways) and the world-building expands in an unexpected and refreshingly sudden fashion. What seemed like an exercise in seen-it-all-before ennui suddenly perks up, plotwise, and in the process becomes a more judgmental and therefore more punchy (and more entertaining) little tale. It’s still on the slight side–it really does feel more like a short story than a graphic novel–but that ending is a hoot.

Bacter-Area

Keith Jones, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, 2005

80 pages

$9.95

Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly

Mostly a small art book (part of D&Q’s series of such, called Pétits Livres) than a comic, Bacter-Area spotlights Keith Jones’s brightly colored, perspectivally flattened, manically busy drawings and sculpture. Spiritually it’s akin to things you’ve seen from Elvis Studio and Marc Bell–little Where’s Waldo-style depictions of town squares filled with non-sequitur billboards and weird looking monster-people and lots and lots of lines, a satire on the riot of visual information inherent in the modern urban landscape, that kinda thing. Jones’s personal spin involves lots of tubular birdies, people shooting solid beams out of their eyes at other people, the occasional Guernica allusion, rubbery macaroni-like arms, and sometimes bands of shrouded faceless Brinkman-esque figures. With the possible exception of one imposing, almost Pentacostal portrait of a group of that last element, it doesn’t hold together or add up to anything for me. The strung-together over-formal corporate nonsense he uses for dialogue is meaningless without being particularly meaningful about it, the color choice is bold but not particularly pleasant or powerful (a lot of Lee Loughridge-y greens), the character designs seem undercooked, and the big riot-of-detail vistas don’t really have any “ins” for the eye. Ah well, I suppose at some point it was inevitable that even someone with my limited exposure to this sort of work would come across some that was less than impressive to me.

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms

Fumiyo Kouno, writer/artist

Last Gasp, 2006

104 pages

$9.99

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Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms is an exercise in addressing a bottomlessly complicated subject in a breezily simple fashion. That complicated subject is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and its lingering physical, psychological, and sociocultural side-effects on residents of the town and their families. That simple fashion is Kouno’s writing, which sort of brushes against the topic like a breeze while telling stories of romance, friendship, and family, only to occasionally slam into it with gale-force intensity; and Kouno’s art, the pictorial equivalent of young-adult prose, warm and just so. (And it takes some kind of mental masterstroke to make your characters look like Peanuts when you superdeform them.)

As such it’s perhaps fitting that simple things keep the book from really doing all it might otherwise be capable of doing. For one thing, in both of the stories (one set in the ’50s, the other in the ’80s and ’00s) the main characters simply look like little kids even when they’re supposed to be in their 20s. Since so much of the plot is driven by looking into the past and contrasting children with adults, it’s becomes a major obstacle to understanding just what’s going on–particularly in the second story, which was already too loosely constructed by half. Another flaw, and this is maybe nitpicky, is the typeface used for translated Japanese text. Comic Sans? The cover is lovely so I know someone at Last Gasp makes good design decisions, but that wasn’t one of them, and it knocks me out of the story whenever it shows up.

But those complex moments…they hit hard. The first story, “Town of Evening Calm,” could with minimal tweaking become a first-rate horror story, so powerful is the way its sense of impending, at-any-moment suffering and death sneaks up on the reader. Two moments in particular–I don’t want to spoil them–practically reach out of the book and punch you in the face, a testament as much to Kunuo’s pacing as to the horror of the topic itself. The second, two-part story, “Country of Cherry Blossoms,” relies more heavily on knowledge of the stigma victims of the Bomb (and even their descendants) face in Japan for its power, knowledge I didn’t really have, sad to say; but the way it develops the ticking-time-bomb themes established in “Town” creates a satisfying sense of connectedness that the two otherwise unrelated stories lack. The flaws irk, the strengths stick.

Worn Tuff Elbow #1

Marc Bell, writer/artist

Fantagraphics Books, 2004

40 pages

$4.95

Buy it from the Beguiling

Originally written on January 3, 2005 for publication in The Comics Journal

Marc Bell is commonly associated with the deliberately lo-fi cartoonists centered around institutions like Sammy Harkham’s Kramers Ergot and Tom Devlin’s nigh-irreplaceable Highwater Books (of which the publication of Bell’s great graphic novel Shrimpy & Paul and Friends is arguably the crowning achievement). But like a pre–VH1 Fashion Awards Lenny Kravitz, Marc Bell is a man out of time, and I mean that in the best possible way. (Seriously, have you heard Mama Said?) With its maximalist energy, idiot-savant detail, and high-spirited insanity, Bell’s art is much more at home amid the 1960s undergrounds, right down to the Fleischeresque eyes of many of its characters and the ragtimey shuffles they frequently perform. But Bell’s comics have the added benefit (at least that’s what I think it is) of being largely gratuitous-obscenity-free, which basically means (like if Gary Panter’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse sets had their own book) they’re the most enthusiastically, wondrously weird kids’ comics ever. You’re just unlikely to relinquish any copies you buy to an actual kid, is all.

Worn Tuff Elbow #1 is Bell’s latest sequential-art effort and the first issue of his new ongoing series at Fantagraphics (Bell being one of the House That RAW Built’s promising outreach efforts to the under-35 generation). The fact that it demonstrates Shrimpy & Paul was not a blow-your-wad burst of brilliance alone makes it notable, even if the comics weren’t so enjoyable on their own terms. Every page is packed with eyeball kicks both visual (a little fellow labeled “Just passin’ thru” appears in one panel, only (sure enough) to be gone by the next) and verbal (an inside-cover preview of book’s contents begins with the rib-ticklingly staccato intro “COMING SOON!!!” “(i.e.: in about 4 pages)” “TO THIS HERE COMIC BOOK” “(THAT IS IN YOUR MITTS RIGHT NOW!)”). Panels lengthen vertically to accentuate the larger-than-life owner of the titular elbow, and flatten out along the pages’ bottoms to depict the ground-level life of the little people whose oppression at the hands of a mad Frenchman (it’s that kinda book) form the core of the story. (Yes, there is a story!) Nonsensical, delightful, restorative comics.

Olde Tales Vol. II

Lane Milburn, writer/artist

Closed Caption Comics, 2007

38 pages

$5.00

Buy it from Atomic Books

This effective little minicomic draws strength from combining a satisfyingly crude pair of short, silly stories with a surprisingly sophisticated visual approach. There’s no doubt that the CCC collective is indebted to Fort Thunder and related artists, but like the best of that crew, Milburn isn’t just throwing marks on a page, he’s building something out of them, describing an inhabitable physical space. Loose figurework that suggests a rock-solid skeletal structure beneath the surface, deftly chosen camera angles–particularly in the second story, “Wasteland”–and a willingness to fill the panels with information from top to bottom, even if just with thick blacks or hatching (this is the kind of comic that makes you realize how frequently artists waste the top third of a panel) give the book the oomph it needs. The two stories play different gross-out notes, one just cute and goofy and the other sexualized and violent–and god help me, I just realized that the common link is, in a sense, sausage-eating. You can connect the dots, I’m sure. They’re unassuming little things to be sure, but the basic ideas–an old Yoda-like lady-creature telling the younglings about the time she won a competitive eating contest against a bunch of other monsters, and three fratboys whose drunken perambulations lead one into coitus with a hag-thing and the other to be literally skullfucked to death by a minotaur–are rolled out with minimal fuss or pretension and a great deal of self-evident enjoyment. Funny punchlines for both, too. Not for everyone, then, but certainly for me.

Kramers Ergot 5

Sammy Harkham, Ron Rege Jr., Mat Brinkman & Neil Burke, Souther Salazar, David Heatley, Chris Ware, Elvis Studio, Gabrielle Bell, Kevin Huizenga, Anders Nilsen, Gary Panter, Jordan Crane, Leif Goldberg, Paper Rad, Fabio Viscogliosi, J. Bradley Johnson, C.F., Marc Bell, Dan Zettwoch, Tom Gault, writers/artists

Sammy Harkham, editor

Gingko Press, 2004

320 pages

$34.95

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Can anyone here tell a story? You bet your ass. Unlike the preceding, breakout volume of Kramers, where narrative and non-narrative work were on more or less equal footing, the conventional comics hold pride of place in this installment. I mean, that’s a judgment call, obviously. Maybe it’s just me not liking the way a lot of the fine-art-inflected work here–the humor-strip-via-collage by Souther Salazar, Leif Goldberg’s paintings–look on a two-dimensional printed page. Or maybe it’s just me thinking that the more far-out sequential art–J. Bradley Johnson’s non sequitur-laden gag (?) strips, Fabio Viscogliosi’s T. Rex-quoting series of epigrammatic illustrations, even work from the usually reliable and hilarious Paper Rad and Marc Bell–is sort of unfocused and not quite up to snuff. Heck, Gary Panter’s contribution is just thirty seemingly random pages from thirty years’ worth of his sketchbooks–an impressive achievement, to be sure, but the sort of thing that would be just as interesting as a blog post as it is in an avant-garde anthology.

So the spotlight is stolen by the storytellers. Two contributions in particular are real world-beaters, strips that leapt right out at me during my first flip-thru of this book years ago and continue to set a standard for my appreciation of short-story comics. The first is David Heatley’s apocalyptically revealing “My Sexual History,” a complete rundown of every embarrassing/erotic/both detail of Heatley’s sex life from his childhood through his marriage (excepting some stuff with his wife he chose to keep private). I’ve seen this dismissed, by Johnny Ryan’s parody strip for example, as mere exhibitionism, but that ignores the sophistication of Heatley’s approach to designing the strip: the uncomfortable avalanche of intimate details is conveyed through an eye-oppressing 48-panel grid (!) on each page.

The second hall-of-famer here is Kevin Huizenga’s “Jeepers Jacobs,” the story of a preacher grappling with both the concept of Hell–which he’s defending the literal truth of against less orthodox theologians–and how to deal with his new golf buddy, non-believer (and Huizenga’s trademark everyman) Glenn Ganges. Huizenga handles the sort of suburban-fundie character that 99% percent of his audience presumably loathes on sight not just with sympathy, but with intelligence, setting up his arguments and weaving his faith throughout his daily routine in a fashion we’d recognize from our own political or aesthetic pursuits. The ending’s a killer too; I know others had a different experience, but I didn’t see it coming at all.

And there’s more. Jordan Crane starts down the road of violent morality plays he’s still fruitfully pursuing today; Chris Ware’s segment from Building Stories feels a bit too much like a chapter from an ongoing serial but it’s still, you know, Chris Ware’s Building Stories; comparatively linear work from Elvis Studio and Mat Brinkman alternately tickles and horrifies; Tom Gauld has a series of knee-slapper vignettes involving the writing habits of famous authors; Dan Zettwoch’s lengthy story about a church-group field trip that may or may not end in disaster doesn’t hold interest for its duration, but I kind of appreciate its ambition. Overall, the avant garde tag means less for this volume than the more apt description of “very good.”

Cartoon Dialectics Vol. 1

Tom Kaczynski, writer/artist

Uncivilized Books, 2007

26 pages

$5

Buy it from Robot26.com

This minicomic collection of strips culled mostly from magazines by MOME contributor Tom Kaczynski is a showcase for both his humanistic critiques of techno-capitalist society and his almost horrifyingly proficient use of color. Seriously, has he done any color work in MOME before? Because this stuff knocked my socks off. Give this man an Eisner for his fruity red-oranges alone!

The comics themselves are a strong selection, packing a lot of variety and value into a five-buck mini. Cartoony cover character Ransom Strange kicks things off by exorcising a corporate Cthulhu knockoff that had been plaguing some poor modern man with credit card debt and body image issues. (If only it were that easy!) It’s a funny, fun little metaphor, one I actually think could be expanded upon.

Next up is a lengthy, luddite comics essay pitting the Web-based post-print world against Kaczynski’s preferred realm of “meatspace,” which here comprises everything from printed books to taking a dump. While I agree with Kaczynski that anti-print evangelism gets tedious, anyone who’s blogged as much (and enjoyed it as much!) as I have should be able to tell you that you can get a lot out of not being an ink-stained wretch and not idealizing the pre-Internet age. (Would something like MOME be as successful as its been without the Internet to pass the word around?) The strip kind of confuses its case by lumping advertorial in print magazines in with the evils of the digital age, as though a) that’s new and b) one has anything to do with the other. If you’re going to create a good-evil dichotomy between analog and digital, you can’t have it both ways. Still, though not quite successful on a philosophical level, it’s a lovely-looking strip, with judiciously chosen images representing the various ideas and idea-spouters and Kaczynski’s precise use of thicker blacks creating a memorable Easter Island sequence.

The collection is rounded out by five one-page strips that really showcase Kaczynski’s color palette to a range of affect. There’s a pair almost Julius Knipl-style anecdotes about a just-shy-of-believable quirks of our commoditized ideas and emotions–a resort community designed to provoke existential ennui called Taedium Plains, and “Boris Lecture, the famous architecture critic,” who can’t quite bring himself to completely purge his book collection Zizek-style every couple of months. A third strip preserves Kaczynski’s trademark linkage of phsyical and mental artchitecture in depicting how the male member of a couple compartmentalizes his memories according to the bedrooms in which they took place. A fourth recounts the domestication of the cat with adorable clarity, and the fifth and final strip is a tale of excessive consumption of gross junk food on a road trip familiar to anyone who’s ever grabbed a bag of Combos in a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. Lovely, enjoyable, occasionally provocative stuff, all in color for five bucks.

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer

Ben Katchor, writer/artist

Little, Brown & Company, 1996

106 pages

$12.95

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Glimpses of lost New York City are both thrilling and sad. The times I’ve encountered them–the absurdly ornate urinals in the Marvel Comics lobby a few office buildings ago, an elaborate and unused pneumatic tube system in an office I once visited while working as a production assistant on a short-lived David Milch cop show, tiny mom and pop repair shops with Eastern European names on small streets buried beneath bridges or behind the entrances of tunnels–have left me wondering how wonderful these things must have seemed in their heyday, and how futile the enterprises must seem now.

What a stroke of genius, then, to create an entire comic strip about lost New York–the lost past of anyplace really; no need to be chauvinistic about it. Double-genius to make it about an imaginary lost New York–eerily, surreally plausible business that never existed but might have. Licensed expectorators with the proper permits to spit in the faces of whoever those who hired them designate. A tripwire system running from the graveyard to the apartments of the bereaved, to alert them if their loved ones have risen from the dead. A bus line-slash-roving theater that strategically places actors along its route for the viewing enjoyment of its riders. A system of cattle ranch-style marks on the collars of laundered work uniforms to stake out the turf of rival commercial laundries. The niche businesses that Katchor’s everyman protagonist Julius Knipl encounters on his perambulations (that’s really the best word for his long-strided journeys through the city) fit neatly in the cracks of our waking life amid the uncountable multitude of sights and sounds in the city, to the point where it’s easy to convince ourselves we really have seen the brand of the Mansoyl Towel and Apron Supply Co. on the sleeve of the busboy at the restaurant where we spent our lunchbreak.

What I’m trying to get at is how well Katchor conjures up the repleteness of the city. In a town conjured from the accrued history of millions of people over decades of time, there is, almost literally, something for everyone. A big part of this is the way he frames his panels, using odd angles halfway between a normal stage view and the cantered frames of Expressionist film, disorienting us, showing us not just businessmen and their stock in trade but suggesting their showrooms’ dusty corners and the chipped paint of their ceilings, the airshafts of their tenements and the shadows cast by their radiators as the afternoon light strikes them through a lead-painted windowframe. It’s a tactile environment, one you can dive right into with no sense that beyond the panel border, there’s a calm cool nothingness.

But the best way to get across what I’m saying, I think, is by pointing out one of the strip’s recurring devices: Experts who can interpret minute variations of everyday human behavior to further their business ends. There’s one who can predict the turns of the economy based on the frequency and severity of brassiere-strap slippage. Another has set up a rooftop observatory to pinpoint the degree to which everyone limps. In the collection’s climactic, longer piece, “The Evening Combinator,” a newspaper publishes accounts of people’s dreams, the details of which are gleaned from studying the grooves in their mattresses, the cadence of their snoring, how their eyes look as they wake up.

What comes across from these strips is the sort of dizzying impression that the city is big enough and full enough for someone to have devoted a lifetime to the refined research of this sort of arcana, and that there’s enough demand for it to make a living. For me it triggers memories of the first time I realized that everything that gets done on planet Earth gets done because someone does it–a trip to Disney World, when it occurred to me that it’s someone’s job to clean one specific bathroom at one specific ride in one specific section of one specific park…and so on and so on and so on…To conceive of a world, an environment large enough to accommodate the minutiae we see in Julius Knipl is exhilarating, and a little frightening, like looking at an ocean made of rumpled men in shirtsleeves, men offering a handshake, men you can do business with.

Alex Robinson’s Lower Regions

Alex Robinson, writer/artist

Top Shelf, October 2007

56 pages

$6.95

Buy it from Top Shelf

The kind of comic for which the phrase “your mileage may vary” was invented, Lower Regions (its official title; I went with the long version above to preserve the obvious pun) is Alex Robinson’s loving tribute to the pulp-Tolkien fantasy hodgepodge of the Dungeons & Dragons games of his youth. As such I really enjoyed it. I didn’t play D&D as a kid, mind you–not until after my freshman year in college, and then only for one glorious, Sam Adams-soaked summer–but as an avid Tolkien reader since kindergarten and a He-Man action-figure fan extraordinaire, I kind of get the D&D aesthetic through osmosis via its antecedent and offspring. Robinson develops an impressive assortment of monsters and thugs for his pneumatic barbarian heroine to bloodily dispatch, throwing in the buckets of gore and hint of gratuitous, seedy sex/nudity that was a big unspoken part of the attraction of the earthier brands of heroic fantasy for nerdy adolescents. (What’s up, Xanth?) The comic is wordless, as these kinds of things tend to be, and if that means that the action choreography and (particularly) the attempts at conveying thought or speech are occasionally muddled, well, you really only have to get through a page or two max before you come to the next axe getting lobbed at an ogre’s head. Robinson’s goofy character designs, which have kept me away from his straightforward comics, obviously work quite well here. I’d say that the opening image of a band of goons and creatures led by some kind of sexy topless demon-priestess will tell you all you need to know about whether you’ll enjoy the rest of the book.

Paradise Kiss Vols. 1-5

Ai Yazawa, writer/artist

Tokyopop, 2002-2004

Approx. 180 pages each

$9.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

Originally written on September 28th, 2004 for publication in The Comics Journal

I never really understood the notion of style (as opposed to fashion) until the lead singer of the Dandy Warhols explained it to me. Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the ectomorphic frontman for the Portland-based purveyors of retro-decadent glam pop, told me during an interview that style is merely the outward manifestation of a person’s insides. “How should my clothes fit and how should my hair look [is determined by] which look for me will better represent, at first glance, what I am about,” he said. (A fringe benefit, he later added, was that this acted as a filter against meeting people who don’t already like you, so you end up involved in fewer dead-end conversations.)

Coming as it did at a point in my life where I was in the throes of an obsession with David Bowie, Roxy Music, Velvet Goldmine, and the entire glitter aesthetic (one which continues to this day), Taylor-Taylor’s words were a revelation to me. Though a combination of poverty and laziness has kept me from perfecting the type of personality-in-wardrobe-form the rock star was advocating, I continue to applaud those with the creativity and willpower to make a go of it.

It’s undoubtedly this reverence for style, combined with a comics fan’s appreciation for a unique story well told, a singular artistic sensibility, and stories about and for teenagers that condescend to neither character nor reader, that leads me to dig Paradise Kiss. Published by manga giant Tokyopop and prepared for the English-language audience by a bevy of translators and adaptors, Parakiss (to crib a familiar abbreviation the characters themselves use when referring to both the clothing design studio around which the comic centers and, in regular breakings of the fourth wall, the comic itself) is a pip of a series, five volumes of angst, lust, and fabulous, fabulous clothes.

Yazawa’s art serves as a wonderful descriptor of all three. Fans of the McCloudian notion that art and story are indistinguishable in comics will find much to love here, since (to these relatively inexperienced eyes) the graphic conventions of shoujo manga (the razor-thin line against acres of white backgrounds, the effete, wire-thin figures, even the riot of pseudo-dialogue and untranslated sound effects peppered throughout translated works) are for once harnessed to a story that makes sense out of them. When studious and beautiful prep-schooler Yukari gets drawn into the world of four students at a high school for the arts, Yazawa’s intricate and ornate draftsmanship does effective double duty, skillfully capturing not only the sensuous and emotional confusion our heroine feels as her world changes, but the gorgeous, Velvet Goldmine-quoting boy (George) who seduces her, and the exquisite, anachronistic clothes he designs.

Those clothes are a highlight, undoubtedly; I found myself looking forward to each chapter’s title page, since those pages boast pin-up images of Yukari (“Caroline,” to her Anglophilic new friends) and the rest of the crew in painstakingly drawn couture. Such moments also pop up in the narrative as well, as during the climactic fashion show, which is lovely enough from both a graphic and storytelling point of view that it ably bears the four volumes’ worth of weight placed upon it. In all cases it’s evidence that the apparent frivolity of Yazawa’s art is icing on a cake that’s not just substantive, but no less delicious for it.

The same can be said of her writing. We’re largely in teen soap territory here, but that’s undercut with a surprising deftness in characterization, brutal at times (George’s attention-starved ex-model mother, George himself in his egocentricity and sexual predation) and unexpectedly warm at others (gruff punk Arashi’s unechoed concern at the way Yukari is ditching her previous life more or less on a whim, young George’s gift to his budding drag-queen friend Isabella). There’s also a sexual frankness that’s quite refreshing: Sex is treated neither as an idealized pathway to spiritual perfection nor as a sweaty and sordid means of disease transmission, but as something that can be a great deal of fun and, therefore, a great deal of trouble. When Yukari walks in on her new friends Miwako and Arashi fucking on a pool table because neither of them has any privacy in their bedrooms, early in the first volume, I’m sure I’m not the only reader who thought “yep, that’s about right.” (The fact that the scenes are so opulently drawn reminds us, to paraphrase Trainspotting, that if it weren’t so pleasurable we wouldn’t do it.)

If anything, it’s this fidelity to the actual experience of teenage sexuality and gender issues that can be off-putting. At no point does Yukari (or Miwako), seem to think of her own pleasure as paramount when it comes to sex; the act is typically initiated either through pressure (in one alluded-to incident, physical) or as a surefire way to change a painful subject, and is always seen through the lens of the boy involved–how it makes him feel, about the relationship, about her; how she feels about the relationship, about him. Of course, I’ve seen little evidence that this unfortunate state of sexual affairs for Yukari is not indicative of how nearly all teenage girls are conditioned to view sex, so perhaps Yazawa is to be applauded for telling it like it is rather than chided for not setting a better example. Ditto her portrayal of Yukari’s entrée into the world of professional modeling–the poor girl is chided on several occasions to stop eating so much, a scene that will make the eating disordered in the book’s audience either cringe in horror or chuckle in recognition. (Speaking of that audience, how cool is it to read a comic book that assumes its reader is a girl? And one in which beautiful male characters are paraded around as eye candy and objects of the gaze?) Moreover, high school may suck, and we all wanted to escape from it, but if you’re a girl looking for freedom from conformity, stricture and misogyny, the fashion industry is not exactly a place I’d advise you to run to. Then again, all the characters seem to gain some awareness of this art-cum-industry’s faults, particularly in the book’s unusually nuanced epilogue, so it’s not like Parakiss is peddling the same line of bullshit as Cosmopolitan.

In other words, Paradise Kiss is about style, not fashion, despite its industry trappings (and despite appearing in serialized format in a Japanese fashion magazine). For George, Yukari, and the rest of the Paradise Kiss studio, the clothes are never about riding the crest of a trend or obeying external expectations–despite the fact that their success as designers (and as people) would be far more likely if that were the case. The clothes are about representing, at first glance, what they as young men and women (and drag queens) are all about. A bunch of precocious, horny, fucked-up 17-year-olds may not know what they’re all about, of course, but maybe that’s what makes their sense of style, and this manga, so enthralling.

Fox Bunny Funny

Andy Hartzell, writer/artist

Top Shelf, June 2007

106 pages

$10

Buy it from Top Shelf

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This very good funny-animal comic stands out from the anthropomorphized pack because its visual metaphor strengthens the impact of its more outrageous moments rather than diluting it. Anyone can get some mawkish sentimentality out of casting a cuddly critter in their tale of modern urban ennui, or flip the script and go for some guffaws by doing the umpteenth Fritz the Cat mammals-with-mammaries sex farce. Hartzell aims elsewhere in Fox Bunny Funny.

The first highlight is the violence. We meet our fox protagonist as an awkward adolescent in a broadly drawn conformist suburbia of sitcom vintage, where his fellow foxes kill and consume bunnies with gusto. When our hero is discovered hopping around behind closed doors wearing a bunny costume (I’ve gotten caught doing worse), he’s shipped off to a fox-scout camp where he’s trained to use an impressively horrible beartrap-shooting weapon on bunny-shaped bullseyes. When he proves an excellent marksman, his scoutmaster drags him along on a bona-fide hunt…to the town where the bunnies live with all the same civilizational niceities as the foxes. Hartzell depicts their rampage with disturbing imaginativeness–the foxes run bunnies in cars off bridges, plow through restaurants in their SUV, then smash their way into a bunny family’s home, burst in on their Anne Frank attic hideout, and slaughter them. Eventually the hero flees to a bunny church (the suffering of the bunnies analogized to the suffering of Christ), but when he’s discovered frolicking with the congregation by his fellow scouts, he can’t take the pressure and leads the slaughter himself. Obviously, making both predators and prey into human-style civilizations heightens the savagery of the foxes’ attacks on the bunnies. It may be a metaphor for war or racism or meat-eating or all three at once; mostly it comes across as a refreshingly harsh indictment of human brutality and stupidity in all its forms.

The second strong point is the depiction of a shared fox-bunny counterculture. After the murder in the church, we join our hero years later, where he’s a perfectly normal member of the bunny-eating masses. When a bunny prankster attacks his house, he’s led on a chase through the proverbial and literal rabbit hole into a West-Village-meets-Haight/Ashbury urban freak mecca, where bunnies and rabbits of all genders mix and mingle enthusiastically. Hartzell saves some of his most exciting cartooning for this sequence, including a Where’s Waldo/Hard Boiled-style two-page spread of the scene. What’s special here is that comics, particularly alternative comics, takes the existence of a counterculture for granted. Hartzell sets up the structure of Fox Bunny Funny in such a way that the discovery of this counterculture feels like a legitimate revelation. Do you remember when you were younger, and you first started pursuing countercultural interests and hanging out with the freaks or ‘bangers or emo kids or skaters or whatever they were where you grew up, or first journeyed to a big city and saw that people could be weird or gay and not be looked at like zoo animals for it, and this simple fact felt like both an explosion of self-liberation and a massive “fuck you” rebuke to society at large? Hartzell nails that. And then he goes one step weirder and more asseritve with the conclusion. All with impeccable, wordless kids’-book cartooning. I think I love this comic.

Aqua Leung Vol. 1

Mark Smith, writer

Paul Maybury, artist

Image, April 2008

208 pages

$17.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Here’s a book you can’t help but compare to other, similar projects that are mining this same vein of ad-hoc epic and homegrown myth(os)-making. Consider it the “A Star Wars of One’s Own” school. (I’ve dabbled in it myself.) The book I kept thinking of when reading it is Mouse Guard. This one comes out on top in virtually every way.

First of all it’s the rare independent comic that comes equipped with not one but two editors, including one seemingly solely dedicated to copyediting. And man, does it help! The story is a coming-of-age hero quest that frequently indulges in knowingly arcane dialogue, and it’s really easy to aim for “fancy” and end up hitting “gibberish.” This doesn’t happen here, which is a blessing right there.

Second, there’s Paul Maybury’s art. Don’t get me wrong, I think Mouse Guard‘s Mark Peterson is obviously a gifted illustrator, and also a better sequential artist than he perhaps might get credit for. But Maybury is something of a revelation here, his thick brush line (apparently this is his first-ever brush art!) at different times approximating the Paul Pope-Becky Cloonan art-blob vibe, the more manga-inflected Vasilis Lolos punk-action thing, some Bryan Lee O’Malley-isms in the character designs, and–out of left field–almost Fort Thunder-ish use of images-as-texture (a wall of “STOMP” sound effects, a two-page spread of arrows, a splash page consisting solely of clashing colors, and an opening map that looks like Ron Rege drew it), occasionally peeling back to an effectively crude, almost childlike minimalism. Colorist Russ Lowery is a break-out star here too, combining Lolos’s candy-coated palette with Dave Stewart’s subtlety and lushness. Smith’s script gives the pair plenty of room to play, with almost abstract combat scenes and bravura sequences like the Spaceball One-sized sea-monster whose jaws take fully four pages to traverse our viewpoint.

Speaking of Smith, he brings a most welcome sense of humor about the grandiose nature of this project to the table, something Mouse Guard lacks entirely. Will you wish he hadn’t kept The Hero with a Thousand Faces next to his laptop as he wrote this story? Sometimes, yeah. (Enough with the fucking absent father figures already, genre writers of America!) At first the epic saga-osity of the material gets the better of him–he burdens the story with something like four introductory sequences, and lets an omniscient narrator tell things that should be shown early on. But the structure smoothes out as the book goes on. Meanwhile he frequently undercuts any portentousness with a wink and a nod to his diverse sources, from the inclusion of a little octopus sidekick that feels like something out of a Japan-only video game to shots of the titular young hero peeking up girls’ skirts, flashback-sequence from Splash-style. And the approach to the violence is more Indiana Jones than Star Wars, if that makes sense–while it does move the plot and is supposed to inspire the awe of any good action sequence, it also unfolds like a choreographed routine and draws attention to that fact. What’s more, he sticks the landing with a climactic battle that feels climactic yet also naturally subservient to whatever will happen in the subsequent volumes.

Overall there’s really nothing here that leaves you feeling like everyone involve needs to get out of their parents’ basement in some fundamental way–it feels like grown-ups knowingly playing with their old action figures more than grown-ups trying to pretend that those action figures are for grown-ups. Nor does it mistake the modest aim of telling the story of its creators dreams for the delusional grandeur of Telling The Story Of Our Collective Unconscious. And oh yeah, the lettering and logo by Fonografiks is really kinda perfectly METAL. I even like the paper and cover stock. It’s a good time.

The Aviary

Jamie Tanner, writer/artist

AdHouse, June 2007

312 pages

$12.95

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I was challenged and intrigued by the idea of, and the ideas in, this debut graphic novel, comprising various interlocking minicomic and anthology strips. “The Aviary,” as we slowly come to realize, is a term for a strange, insular city peopled by various subconsciously resonant weirdos: an art-porn impresario who is also an anthropomorphized monkey, a sexy but viciously nasty receptionist, a limbless stand-up comedian, and so on. Popping up throughout is a blinking bird-headed doll/automaton called the Silent Bird-Man, alternately a symbol of reproachful authority and libidinous secrecy. Some clever shifts in the temporal order of the events being presented lead to a mobius-strip vibe reminiscent of one of David Lynch’s psychogenic fugue films; yes, it’s a shorthand way to connote depth and weirdness, but it’s an effective shorthand way to do that. On a script and story level, the project falls somewhere between Ed the Happy Clown and Asthma, not nearly as assured as either (easy anachronism is a sure-fire way to lose me, comics writers of America), but promising for how it plays with those tools.

The problem is the visuals. Tanner’s pen-and-ink line is reminiscent in some ways of Rick Geary’s–not least because of its old-timey affectations–but his overall sense of page design and panel framing lacks Geary’s inventiveness and storytelling brio. I think literally every single shot of every single character in the book is either head-on or in three-quarter profile, like they’re spending the whole book cheating to the audience. And they’re almost always shown in close-up or medium-shot–seriously, you’re as likely to see feet here as you are in a Michael Turner comic. The combined effect simultaneously makes the comic feel artificial and saps it of its energy. This is all compounded by an overuse of word balloons and figures that break the panel walls for no discernible reason, again making the images feel stagey. Meanwhile, the character designs blended together for me, making the already byzantine plot even more difficult to follow.

Overall, this is what you’d call a promising debut, but not in the blandly complimentary way that’s usually said–I really mean it’s noteworthy for the promise it demonstrates with regard to potential future works. What I’d like to see is Tanner throw this against the wall hard, to see what sticks, to see what’s broken, and to see how he can put something new, different, and better together with the pieces.

Final Crisis #1

Grant Morrison, writer

J.G. Jones, artist

DC, May 2008

40 pages

$3.99

I first read this while standing in Jim Hanley’s Universe during my lunchbreak the day it came out. My first impression was basically flat. Brief, largely undramatic scene after brief, largely undramatic scene featuring a myriad of unconnected characters from across the sprawling DC Universe–a product of hundreds or thousands of writers and artists over going on eight decades, cobbled together by corporate fiat…there was certainly a lot going on. It’s got to be the most continuity-heavy Major Event launch…well, ever. Or at least since Crisis on Infinite Earths #1.

That said, I don’t really care about whether it fails as a launchpad, jumping-on point, blockbuster, next chapter in the DCU, whatever. I just wonder if it succeeds as a Grant Morrison comic, because I don’t care about “The DCU” in the slightest, but I do care about the writing of Grant Morrison. And after that first read, I felt that I really didn’t have enough to go on. I did enjoy seeing Martian Manhunter get punked out, though. As I always say, kill ’em all. I also thought it was hilarious that Morrison was writing this mega-massive-major tentpole summer blockbuster comic the same way he wrote his weird opus Seven Soldiers–super-dense, chock full of elided dialogue and action, and necessitating multiple reads to make heads or tails of it.

Then I got a copy of it in the mail from DC, so I was actually able to sit down with it, re-read the whole thing, and flip around and re-read certain parts. And you know what? Now I kind of love this comic. It’s creepy, weird, totally jam-packed with ideas, paced in a very daring way for what’s supposed to be a popcorn comic (no big reveals, no shocking moments, no wish-fulfillment–compare it to the entertaining but comparatively straightforward “shocking season premiere” feel of Secret Invasion), it has a kind of nauseatingly blasé death for one of the DCU’s oldest mainstays, I love the Dark Side idea (Jack Kirby’s evil demigods falling to earth and taking human form), major plot points are conveyed simply through panel transitions and body language…I keep coming back to the Martian Manhunter’s death, which has more impact precisely BECAUSE it’s neither a big hero moment or a failed attempt at a big hero moment (“Not like this! NOT LIKE THIS!”). The pacing of it conveys the lack of regard for human life that these douchebag villains have. And certainly the shittiness of evil, as opposed to its grandiose awesomeness, has been a running theme of Morrison’s superhero work for a long time now.

Sometimes the art is rushed-looking–Superman looks like he’s stupid, and the table at which the Secret Society of Super-Villains parlay with mysterious asshole villain Libra changes sizes from panel to panel. But there’s a lot of great facial-expression stuff in there too, as in the Anthro vs. Vandal Savage fight, the confrontation between Boss Dark Side and Terrible Turpin, the Anti-Life kids…

Even the deadweight Monitors from Countdown seem like they have a weird society instead of just running around proclaiming shit like they used to. And who cares whether it ignores what happened to the New Gods in previous would-be event miniseries over the past year? Ignoring stuff you don’t care about is done every time a superhero writer working on a decades-old character hits a key on his laptop–so what if the thing he’s ignoring happened three months ago instead of in 1957? It’s a very good comic for me.

Kramers Ergot 4

Anders Nilsen, David Lasky & Frank M. Young, Renee French, Lauren Weinstein, Marc Bell, John Hankiewicz, Mat Brinkman, Ron Rege Jr, Sammy Harkham, Jim Drain, Ben Jones, Dave Kiersh, C.F., Stepan Gruber, Joe Grillo, Josh Simmons, David Heatley, Souther Salazar, Genevieve Castree, Allison Cole, Leif Goldberg, Tobias Schalken, Jeffrey Brown, Billy & Laura Grant, Jason T. Miles, Kenny, Andrew Brandou, writers/artists

Sammy Harkham, editor

Avodah Books, June 2003

Buy it from Gingko Press

Pre-order a fancy-sounding hardcover re-release from Amazon.com

For me at least it’s difficult to separate Kramers Ergot 4 from how it came into my life. The book made its debut at the first MoCCA festival, joining Craig Thompson’s Blankets in the “big giant powder-blue books that knocked everyone out” sweepstakes; all three events–Kramers, Blankets, and MoCCA itself–turned out to be milestones in my comics-reading life. In terms of Kramers, even for someone weaned on Highwater and NON such as myself, this was heady stuff. I seem to remember there being passionate, even angry debates on my then-stomping grounds of the Comics Journal message board over whether it should have “wasted” pages on non-comics content like collages, and then other debates about whether those non-comics pages are, in fact, comics. It all seems pretty meaningless now–I don’t even remember what side(s) I was on–but I suppose the point is that the book really introduced me to completely non-narrative comics, a strategy I don’t think I’d given much thought to until then. I feel as though in a very real way it introduced comics to non-narrative comics, at least by virtue of becoming the most high-profile and influential release of that nature to date in the then-young decade. If you look at that contributor list and compare it to people’s 2007 Best Of lists, you can probably see the power it had.

In my defense, it is a powerful book. I would say it is in fact a book designed to overwhelm, from the sheer size of the thing to its small-army contributor list to the “yes, but is it art?” nature of so many of its contents. I mean, the textless Mat Brinkman “monsters clash on the Rainbow Bridge” cover is a statement practically begs comparison to the great Hypgnosis album covers for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, even sharing a rainbow with The Dark Side of the Moon. Now that I think of it–and I promise I hadn’t, not even before my initial pass at this review–Dark Side is a great point of comparison in terms of how KE4 functions as a unit rather than as a collection of individual pieces. (There was little question in my mind as to whether I could approach talking about this anthology the same way I’ve done with MOME.)

See, one thing that struck me in giving the book a cover-to-cover read-through (the first time I’d ever done so) is that there are a surprising number of straightforward narrative strips given the book’s outré reputation. There are humor strips (Cole and Jones), autobio/slice of life (Brown), biography (Lasky & Young), underground-type sex’n’violence (Simmons), ruminative mythology-based storytelling of the kind that’s proven so popular (Nilsen), and just plain storytellin’ (Harkham). Even John Hankiewicz’s contribution has a discernible plot. Sure, they’re sprinkled throughout multimedia collages and Fort Thunder joy-of-markmaking exercises and multiple title pages and so on, but they’re there–sort of like how between the cut-up studio banter and looped analog samples and proto-ambient keyboards and psychedelic freak-outs, you can find unindictable masterpieces of rock-single construction like “Time,” “Money,” and “Us and Them” on Dark Side. Similarly, even these more easily graspable bits are, for the most part, pretty challenging in tone and content. Simmons’ contribution had me ready to put the goddamn book away the second he had a character take scissors to a puppy’s eye, Brown’s series of vignettes about dealing with the homeless, dangerous, or mentally ill is the most socially- and self-critical strip he’s ever done all at once, and Harkham and Nilsen’s contributions, “Poor Sailor” and a pair of Sisyphus strips, will no doubt make their creators’ all-time highlight reel. It’s kind of like creating a pop concept album about the pressures of late 20th-century capitalist society driving you insane until you die.

I’m not making this comparison because it’s cute. (I’m certainly not arguing that they sync up together, Wizard of Oz style.) I’m saying that Kramers Ergot 4 is put together the way it is on purpose, for the disorienting, overwhelming effect it has on the reader, how the narrative work lowers your guard for the nonnarrative, how the nonnarrative gooses your synapses and prepares you to focus on things you’re unaccustomed to focusing on in the narrative–how marks are arranged on the page, figures as symbols rather than as characters, design, the emotional impact of the strips rather than the plot-intellectual one. Instead of being a concept album, it’s a concept anthology. Hence the Dark Side comparison: In both cases there’s a sense of sprawl, of a thing you can’t possibly take in on the first pass and must return to and grab bits of meaning here and there, discovering new things each time. In both cases the material rewards repeat visits (I’m not sure I ever even read the Simmons strip before / I only figured out that the guy was saying “I certainly was in the right” a couple months ago). In both cases, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown to appreciate them more.

The Goon Vol. 0: Rough Stuff

Eric Powell, writer/artist

Dark Horse, April 2004

96 pages

$12.95

The Goon Vol. 1: Nothin’ But Misery

Eric Powell, writer/artist

Dark Horse, July 2003

136 pages

$15.95

The Goon Vol. 2: My Murderous Childhood (And Other Greivous Yarns)

Eric Powell, writer/artist

Dark Horse, May 2004

128 pages

$13.95

Buy them from Amazon.com

Originally written on July 26, 2004 for publication in The Comics Journal

‘Tis a strange fate that the breakout success story of Dark Horse’s recent attempt to craft a line of horror comics around its flagship title Hellboy turns out to be not so much Hellboy as Hellboy Junior. But such is The Goon, Eric Powell’s ongoing riot of hard-boiled noir tough guys, zombie splatstick, and Warren Comics pastiche. It’s unsurprising that its similarity to Mike Mignola’s endlessly fascinating tales of paranormal fisticuffs are both The Goon’s great strength and, by comparison, its great weakness.

The Goon takes place in what’s becoming a fairly common type of indie-genre-comic city, one that’s a melange of trash conventions thrown into a blender and poured onto the page. This one encompasses down-home hillbilly thugs, Edward G. Robinson-style gangsters, haunted houses of EC vintage, and so forth. (See also Street Angel‘s combination of mad scientists, b-boying ninjas, pirate conquistadors, and skateboarding female teen martial-arts experts.) The titular strongman (think Hellboy with a hat instead of horns, Sin City‘s Marv with a wifebeater instead of a trenchcoat, The Thing as a Tennessee redneck instead of a New York Jew) is the terror of the city’s underworld, serving as a brutal enforcer for the reclusive mob boss Labrazio. But a raging gang war against “the nameless man, the zombie priest” and his undead crime family has made the Goon and his Little Orphan Annie–eyed sidekick Frankie into the city’s unlikely saviors. As they’re all that stands between the city and uncontested zombie dominance, the Goon and his pal are forgiven their (ahem) enthusiasm for their work of roughing up lowlifes, werewolves, evil elves, giant fish people, et cetera, usually conducted with knives, Magnums, shotguns, huge monkeywrenches, talking chainsaws, et cetera.

Et cetera and ad nauseum, I’m afraid. Perhaps I’m simply armchair-editing the book, angling for it to become the type of genre fiction I personally enjoy, but the endless game of can-you-top-this splatter and silliness overpowers what could be a very interesting crime-horror concept. Now, I’m certainly not asking for the humor to be excised completely. There are moments that work hilariously–Frankie’s repeated “KNIFE IN YOUR EYE!” gag is in gloriously bad taste, and the reactions of the people of the Goon’s burned-out burg to his rampages are terrific in that “aieeeeeee!” sort of way. (“Look out!” says one bum in Volume One as the Goon gives the business to an arachnid poker cheat named (you guessed it) Spider. “He’s gone strangle crazy!”)

The problem is that when Powell gets serious, or seriously creepy, he’s clearly at his best. The Goon’s origin story, besides containing a pretty brilliant twist that alters our perception of his present-day behavior, packs a surprisingly emotional wallop. (I’m guessing Vito Andolini Corleone’s start in The Godfather Part II was the inspiration, and in this case the imitation is indeed flattering.) “What have I got to live for?” asks the Goon of his new friend Frankie as they embark on their first (and what seems at the time to be likely their last) gang-enforcer outing. At this point you’ve seen the Goon beat up, chewed up, and thrown up by nearly every monster known to man, and yet this clear-eyed (literally, for this panel only) expression of nihilism makes you feel the characters’ risk. Similar hints at a larger emotional tapestry are intriguing (a gorgeous dame whose romantic overtures the Goon thinks are too good to be true, the long and sordid history of the zombie priest), as is the fact that the hero of this story is himself a brutal criminal who looks good only in comparison to the cannibal zombies that fight with him for territory. Often these flashbacks are drawn in an evocative pencil-heavy style with far greater depth than the increasingly slick Saturday-morning cartoonisms that comprise the remainder of the series, to the flashbacks’ great benefit. But all this is inevitably drowned out by the next beheading, the next disemboweling, the next appearance of a spontaneously combusting orangutan. No, I didn’t make that last one up. Such is The Goon.

The ACME Novelty Library #18

Chris Ware, writer/artist

ACME Novelty Library/Drawn & Quarterly, December 2007

56 pages, hardcover

$17.95

Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly

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Cruelly overlooked by many year-end best-of lists (my own included) due to its late-in-the-game arrival (now a perennial occurrence) and, perhaps, a level of quality we’ve come to take for granted, the latest installment of The ACME Novelty Library is a tough book to review by virtue of the fact that it belongs at or near the top of any such list worth a damn. In trying to express what is so compelling to me about Ware’s work in general or this book in particularly I am, to quote Stephen King on Clive Barker, almost literally tongue-tied. Instead I’m rambling on about year-end best-of lists, and eventually I’ll be enthusing vapidly. (Hey, it could be worse–I could be complaining about the people who find his work cold, emotionless, and boring. Specifically I could be calling those people morons. How lucky for you, then!)

In this particular case I’m kind of floored by how Ware assembles a panoply of snippets of a lonely young woman’s life–some are lengthy flashbacks, others are day-in-the-life moments, still others are seen from the perspective of the old building she lives in–into this sort of long seamless tapestry of ache. Like the tiny diagrammatic panels Ware foisted on an unsuspecting comics world, these narrative building blocks give the material an engaging ebb and flow, and simultaneously ape the way the protagonist’s own life flows without pause one dreary day into the next, occasionally enlivened by reverie or some small humiliation. Now that I think of it, she herself looks back on her life’s more exciting or rewarding times as dreams–temporary and illusory. And in a real way this book could go on forever, or at least as long as our heroine remains stuck in this (seemingly lifelong) rut, this cycle going on and on the same way some of Ware’s pages (the knockout front endpapers, for example) are all but cyclical. This chapter itself doesn’t really end, it just stops, which is perfect.

I don’t know, what should I say? He’s the best colorist, the best letterer? Those things are both true. His line is superhuman, like a machine made it, which is why people think it’s cold, but they’re wrong because he’s using that precision to nail specific and devastating emotions and sense-memories–my god, that moment where the heartbroken heroine sinks into her dormroom bed! “I lay there, facing the fake wood wall shelf…but it might as well have been the blackness of space…” The image has the pull of a black hole. And as it turns out Ware is also quite good at cartooning sex, particularly that delirious brand of first-flush collegiate sex, daily coupling and mutual masturbation and the raw, almost manic hunger to have and give and demonstrate pleasure. Cold schmold! All with the best chops in terms of line and layout of anyone in comics. The funny thing is I don’t really think of comics when I read this, I think of my life and my wife’s life and my friends’ lives and complete strangers’ lives, which of course is what makes it the very best kind of comics there is.