PlanetES: Book 1 by Makoto Yukimura inhabits that rarest of niches in comics, the so-called “hard” science fiction niche, which is to say that real-world scientific discourse provides the foundation for Yukimura’s extrapolative storytelling. As such, the book will remind you more of a Gregory Benford or Frederick Pohl novel than Sailor Moon, or even Star Wars. Key moments hinge on such obscure concepts as “Kessler’s Syndrome,” say, or the effects of the moon’s gravity on sunspot radiation flare-ups. That doesn’t mean that you’ll find only dry edutainment here, though. It’s true that our protagonists, Yuri, Fee, and Hachimaki, young astronauts assigned the most tedious job in space — trolling for, picking up, and recycling the bits of wreckage and deliberate litter that have, by the middle of next century, accumulated in Earth orbit, thanks to the over-commercialization of near outer space — see very little pulse-pounding action. But neither does anybody else. It’s just not that kind of a future. Instead, our heroes fight their way through such real and human challenges as osteoporosis (caused by living in zero gravity for extended periods of time), boredom, nicotine addiction, the emotional damage caused by recently-deceased and/or otherwise problematic family members, and the frustrations of unmet career potential.

In other words, PlanetES is utterly gripping.

Yuri’s story arc, in particular, represents one of the most mature, nuanced, and subtle portrayals of bereavement that I’ve seen in any comic, of any genre.

There is some small amount of the old slam-bang razzle-dazzle, too. The female member of the team, Fee, headlines the book’s sole action/adventure storyline, semi-accidentally saving the world from an eco-terrorist plot — but only because she needed a good place to relax and smoke a cigarette.

But the real story here is Hachimaki’s outsized ambition, which everyone (including Hachimaki) agrees will only lead him to disappointment and self-destruction someday. We don’t get as far along in the development of his story arc as we do the others, but that’s perfectly appropriate for the hero of this kind of limited but serialized work, whose arc has to stretch across the entire set of books, and come to a resolution in the final volume.

The artwork is realistic (for manga), attractive, and effective. I am prone to get confused reading manga, occasionally losing the through-line on this or that sequence of images on some arbitrary page or another, probably just because I’m not used to the right-to-left reading pattern, but that didn’t happen even once, reading Planetes. Occasionally — like when Hachimaki walks out onto an “ocean” on the moon with a strange girl he just met — the art can be downright astounding in its quiet power. You can appreciate, in these moments, the blank silence that, statistically speaking, anyway, comprises the entire universe. Everything we care about, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, is so rare, so unique, and so tiny, in the face of the light-years and light-years and light-years of emptiness around us, that we really don’t even count.

And that’s beautiful. So is this book.

Highly recommended.

(The image in this post, a detail from PlanetES Book 1, is copyright (c) 2007 Makoto Yukimura. The English text contained within said image is copyright (c) 2007 TokyoPop)

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It is impossible to overstate the influence of Elzie Crisler Segar (1894 – 1938) on the cartoonists who followed him. Take the underground comic book creators from the 1960’s for example, like r. crumb and Bill Griffith: their rounded, gravity-aware, cross-hatched, rubber-limbed figures, their wobbly lines that don’t always connect quite exactly where you’d expect them to, their off-balance character blocking and camera placement, etc., are all signs of Segar’s influence. But then, Thimble Theater (also known as “that comic strip with Popeye in it”) was probably still running, in some form, in the funny pages of their childhoods. So that explains that. Even today, though, when other cartoonists of Segar’s era have long been forgotten (quick — who drew Toonerville Folks?), young, up-and-coming figures ranging from Kevin Huizenga to Manu Larcenet have obviously studied, and internalized, his style. For the most part, the strips collected in Popeye Vol. 1: “I Yam What I Yam,”, originally published at the tail-end of the “flapper era,” appear as fresh and vital as if they had been drawn yesterday, by the hottest of the cool alternacomickers.

Which is not to say that a taste for Segar comics is a rarefied one. Quite the opposite. From his first appearance in Thimble Theater, about ten years into the strip’s lifetime, Popeye was, and has remained, a mass market phenomenon, popular with children and adults alike, almost as famous as his contemporary Mickey Mouse (who is, in turn, more popular than Jesus). His star has faded a bit since my own childhood in the late sixties and early seventies, due to changing cultural priorities and the emergence of more guilt-ridden (and therefore more intrusively concerned) parental units. Popeye, after all, smokes. He smokes a pipe. According to one panel collected here, he actually smokes his pipe while chewing tobacco. He beats people up. What’s worse: he beats people up in order to impress a woman and win her favors. And so on. Even so, except for the pipe smoking, the humorously violent understanding of courtship and love, and a small number of very unfortunate panels showing dehumanized monkeyfied African tribesmen hunting human prey in the bush, there is very little in these pages that will strike the modern reader as completely alien; there’s much less of that kind of stuff than you would find in just about any other specimin of popular entertainment from the era. These strips actually seem more contemporary than the much more famous and widely-distributed animated cartoons featuring Popeye, for example. For one thing, Popeye’s relationship with Olive Oyl, and his rivalry with her other suitors, is not at the center of the story (this may change in future volumes, I don’t know). There’s no spinach. There’s no Bluto. Or Brutus. Or whatever his name was supposed to be. There’s more than one, you know, plot. Characters have interesting motivations and relationships. And so on. The stories collected here are generally more complex, less predictable, and, well, just a whole lot better, than the animated cartoons — more like Seinfeld with a crusty, seafaring, middle-aged, super-powered protagonist, and without the urban focus and the laugh-track, than like anything else. Um. Yeah. I think that made sense. Anway, before Popeye came on board, Thimble Theater was apparently a kind of hybrid between an adventure strip, a family situation comedy (featuring the Oyls — Castor and his sister Olive, their parents and hangers-on), and a romance/dating gag strip — and at least through the duration of this volume, it remained so. That’s a good thing. If you like comics at all, of any kind, you’ll like these comics. They’re a lot of fun to read.

That said, I can’t recommend Popeye Volume 1 to the casual reader. The presentation and format are just entirely too damned deluxe. It’s a big, big book. You can’t take it to the coffee shop, or read it on the bus. It fits no bookbag. You can’t even easily carry it under your arm. If you sit it down on a table or a desk to read it, you have to kind of stand up and hover over the pages, leaning on your hands, craning your head left and right, like a navigator on a wooden frigate, contemplating a map of the stars (which, okay, I guess may be kind of appropriate). Leaning back in your Laz-E-Boy and propping it up on your lap is the only relatively comfortable way to read this monster, and even then you’ll find that it cuts off the circulation below your knees after a couple of hours. I’m totally serious. Or maybe I’m just getting old. I don’t know. Whatever. Given the historical value of the material, and its difficult-to-find status over the past several decades, I understand and appreciate the need to make Segar’s work available in a high-quality, archival, durable edition. Collectors, aficionados of the cartooning form, serious-minded cartoonists, historians, and, especially, libraries should not hesitate to purchase this edition. It is clearly intended for them, and serves their needs well. The oversize format is probably the only one that could have done justice to the Sunday strips printed in the back, for example, allowing them to be seen at their huge original size, along with the extra matter (a secondary strip of Segar’s) that originally accompanied them in the papers. I understand this. I know. Segar’s work must be made available to future generations in as faithful a manner as possible. But, yeah, the interests of the average reader would best be served by something smaller, more convenient, and maybe a lot less expensive. Popeye belongs to the people. The people demand their Popeye! Let’s hope that, in addition to continuing this fine, archival project, Fantagraphics, or someone else, is able in the near future to put out some reasonably-sized paperbacks collecting the same material. Yes, I know they did so in the nineties. Maybe they can release those again? Pretty please.

The image in this post, a detail from Popeye Volume 1 by E. C. Segar, is copyright (c) 2007 King Features Syndicate.

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The posts where I link to other reviews of books I’ve reviewed myself have turned out to be the most popular things on this blog (I don’t know what that says about my own writing skills … hurm). Since I can’t possibly write a good, solid, in-depth review of every notable book that comes out, and since there are actually some fantastic graphic novels that I won’t be reviewing as a matter of policy (more on that in a minute), I’ve decided to expand the link-blogging to reviews of books that haven’t actually appeared on GNR. I still hope and plan to post at least one in-depth review of my own every week, too. Plus more. Um. Maybe.

Yesterday, Don McPherson posted a decidedly mixed review of K. Thor Jensen’s Red Eye, Black Eye on his Eye On Comics blog:

Red Eye, Black Eye is a surprisingly engaging read, but it’s also a surprisingly quick one. I powered through the entire volume rather quickly as I killed some time waiting for the girlfriend to arrive home for supper one evening. With a price tag of almost 20 bucks US, readers will likely expect something a little meatier, something that will occupy a little more of their time. [...] Mind you, while it may not occupy time, it does occupy the mind. … more

Last Tuesday, Brian Heater did the comparative review thing over at Daily Cross Hatch: Nick Bertozzi’s The Salon vs. Jason’s The Left Bank Gang. Bertozzi wins this round:

Nick Bertozzi’s The Salon has a lot with The Left Bank Gang, centering around a fictionalized account of a group of avant-garde painters (art patrons Gertrude and Leo Stein also play pivotal roles, the former of whom, incidentally has a minor part in Jason’s book), living in Paris in 1907. Where Jason’s book abruptly transitions into a noirish robbery caper, the action in Bertozzi’s is more akin to a supernatural murder mystery. The Salon is also more successful in framing its own plotline—unlike Jason, Bertozzi feels fairly confident in the direction that his story is going to go in, from the outset. … more

I won’t be reviewing Red Eye, Black Eye or The Salon here at GNR, because both of these graphic novels were originally serialized on a website that I happen to own, and I try to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest when that happens. At some point I will probably get over myself and break that rule. But not yet.

I also won’t be reviewing Leland Myrick’s Missouri Boy, but not for the same reason. I read it; I liked it okay, I guess; I just couldn’t think of anything interesting to say about it.

Fortunately, Elizabeth Chou, also writing for Daily Cross Hatch, comes through with a lengthy review:

Leland Myrick’s autobiographical Missouri Boy is like a shoebox of snapshots, chronologically organized and punctuated subtly by various coming-of-age moments in his life. Each story is awash in the subdued tones of nostalgia and set at a distance by dreamy, poetic narration and sparse dialogue. … more

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Like a movie director assigned the first film in a high-profile superhero revival franchise, Matt Wagner pretends to assume that you know nothing about Batman, which gives him a license to reinvent the character for his own purposes in Batman and the Monster Men, his (reasonably) recent graphic novel from DC Comics. Set one year after the costumed vigilante first appeared in Gotham (and therefore, presumably, a sequel of sorts to Miller and Mazzucchelli’s classic graphic novel Batman: Year One, though the connection has been left vague), this book stands pretty much alone. It does end on a note that promises a sequel, but that just makes it feel even more like a well-done Hollywood film treatment.

The original Batman stories have to be among the most amateurishly executed of any popular comics that came out of the late thirties and early forties, an era known to hardcore comics fans as the “golden age,” but not for any tendency toward visual sophistication or storytelling finesse: young, mostly untrained assistants cranked out the Batman feature under the “Bob Kane” byline in those days, for next to no pay, and zero recognition, and it shows. But even in the earliest, ugliest appearances of the character (when Kane — reputedly less skilled than many of his own assistants — may have actually drawn more of the pages than he did in later years), there was something just right about the crude visual style, a kind of thick, wavy-outlined, mostly-gray energy signal that drilled directly through the eyeballs and into the brains of our pre-adolescent grandfathers, forcing them to surrender their pocket change every month. Wagner picks up and magnifies and refines that signal, taking on, very consciously and deliberately, the clunkiness of the earliest Batman pages (the blunt, imprecise line, but not just that; the oddly “off” faces and bodies; the stiff poses; the goofball layouts; the heavy-figured, gravity-encumbered, muddy action sequences; etc.), imitating every one of Kane’s (or “Kane’s”) visual mannerisms perfectly, but transforming them at the same time, making them work and mean and move where Kane and his assistants could not, finally delivering something severely beautiful and new. The cartooning on display here is something that you just have to see — a bravura performance that only a true master of the action/adventure comic book form could pull off, or, for that matter, would even contemplate trying.

The story, about gangsters, a doting father, a mad scientist, and his monsters, also takes its cues from those Depression-era comics, but is not transformative in quite the same way, or, really, in any way. It’s predictable, boring stuff. An Alan Moore could have maybe created a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that was the source material (see Moore’s work on Tom Strong, for example, where he uses a different set of 1930’s pulp fiction conventions, for a different kind of character, making them vital and new, without actually “updating” them in any obvious way that you can put your finger on), but there aren’t a lot of Alan Moores out there, and it seems unfair to ask Wagner to be one, on top of everything else that he has proven himself to be.

I do recommend buying the book, and reading it slowly — but backwards, last page to first, so that you won’t be distracted by what passes for a story, and you can fully appreciate the magnitude of Wagner’s cartooning achievement here.

(The image in this post, a detail from Batman and the Monster Men by Matt Wagner, is copyright (c) 2007 DC Comics).

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Despite a minimal drawing style, a mostly anecdotal, plot-free set of scenarios (one hesitates to call them “stories” — more on that in a moment), and the flat, affectless dialogue spoken by her all-too-familiar, everyday characters, Megan Kelso manages to pack a tremendous amount of meaning, weight, poetry, detail, whatever you want to call it, into this slim volume of short works. Any one of these panels, not to mention the spaces between each and each, can explode with heartbreaking possibilities — but often only after you’ve looked at the thing for the ninth or tenth or twentieth time.

The only way to love this book, in other words, is to read it closely, or repeatedly.

The difference between art and entertainment is that art abrogates to itself the right to kick your ass, to make you work hard for the privilege of approaching it. Not every artist exercises this right every time pen touches paper (it’s a right, after all, not an obligation). Kelso does. Which is not to say that the book is “difficult,” in the same way that, say Ulysses is difficult, or even Jimbo in Purgatory is difficult. You won’t be confused or frustrated at any point along the way, if you choose not to be. You can read The Squirrel Mother and Other Stories as a standard coming-of-age kind of a joint, the author looking back on her childhood with nostalgia, a Lynda Barry comic without quite so much of the spazzy hurting. But then you’ll miss out on Kelso’s real and fine (in every sense of the word) accomplishment.

Like the short works of Raymond Carver or Grace Paley, the best of Kelso’s pieces don’t contain within themselves stories — sequences of moments, actions, and characters with easily-divined intentions, in conflict but moving toward resolution, all neatly wrapped up inside an explanatory theme — so much as they highlight random, minimal incidents from which a thousand stories could be imagined. The author refuses to be so indiscreet as to try to push you toward any final “take-away point.” They are nothing more and nothing less than the beginnings of stories, fraught with implication, but without the kinds of answers, or even the kinds of easily-expressible questions, that a more typical story in a more typical manner might provide.

To summarize the appeal of these works, then, is to write a bunch of open-ended essay questions, because it’s the act of extrapolating beyond what’s actually printed on the paper in front of you that provides the real pleasure here. My extrapolations, as well as my questions, will be different from yours.

To wit:

Why is the house in “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” for sale, and do the family politics and circumstances behind that fact inform the mother’s dreamy mood, especially in the last panel? If so, do they add lightness, or weight, to that mood and that panel? If not, why not?

In the title story, does the defacement of the daughter’s new dress, the one her mother has been working on all day, precipitate the life-changing decision the mother will be making after the story has ended — or is it one of those crazy childhood sins, irrelevant in truth, that will nevertheless haunt the imagination of the daughter for ten, twenty, thirty years, until she gets old enough and crabby enough to forgive herself and her mother, and the rest of the world, for that matter, for the things that happened to her when she was a child? Who is speaking in the rounded-off captions on that last page? The mother, the daughter, the chipper, capable aunt, Kelso herself, or some unnameable narrator? Also, if the squirrel mother has many children, why does the human mother have only one? Are there others, or is the mother the narrator after all, assuaging her guilt by exaggerating her circumstances?

When the vacation slide-show is over, and the father turns to his family, why can’t we see the rest of the family in that panel? And why, in the following panel, when the lights have come up, and we see the family, can’t we see the father? How do the snapshots from the previous pages add significance to, or defuse, this juxtaposition of images at the end?

Is the little girl who lynches her teddy bear a future serial killer in the making, a victim of child abuse (her dad did look awfully unhappy, paying the bills in the first few panels), or just a normal kid performing arbitrary, meaningless violence on something that she knows can’t really feel any pain anyway? That last possibility, of course, would be the most likely in the real world, per Occam’s razor, but stories don’t always act like the real world — stories always don’t act like the real world — and the hanging of the teddy bear, despite the fact that real-world kids do this kind of thing all the time, is the equivalent of a Chekhovian loaded gun when presented in the context of story. Which is fine. Which is fine.

Does Mrs. Winston really need her cigs, or is she just pining for attention? How does the narrator know that Mrs. Winston doesn’t like Neil Diamond, anyway? What have we not been told? Are those cigarettes in the candy bowl that Mr. Winston is offering to the trick-or-treaters? They look like cigarettes. That last name, come to think of it, is mighty suspicious.

Often, the impact of any story depends on, to use creative writing workshop jargon, “whose story it turns out to be.” If you read the wife as the protagonist of “The Pickle Fork,” for example, which you’re tempted to do at first, it’s a very different thing than if you read the housemaid, or the museum curator, or even the administrative assistant as the protagonist. I picked that piece on purpose to make my point easy — the structure of the narrative forces us into a surprising direction in that regard at the end — but it could apply to almost any of these stories.

Speaking of “The Pickle Fork,” anyway: whose circumstances do the items of honeymooning flatware on the cruise ship represent, and what does that metaphor actually say about the “real-life” story?

Um. And aside from all that, there’s also Alexander Hamilton/James Madison slashfic to be found here. Need I say more?

Loving this book is worth the effort it takes to do so. But it does take effort. And there will, if you are diligent, be love.

Highly recommended.

(The images in this post are details from The Squirrel Mother and Other Stories, copyright (c) 2007 Megan Kelso)

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