I swear I didn’t read A Thousand Crows’ review of Supermarket, before writing my own. I especially didn’t read the comments below the post, where somebody named AngelVision wishes that the series had been six or eight chapters. Honest. Anyway, here’s an excerpt, with which I’m in complete agreement:

The story itself has a anti-consumerism tilt to it, but it’s mostly violence, action, and humor. I really loved the world that everything was set in, with all it’s towering buildings and beautiful toxic sunsets, and I could look at Kristian Donaldson’s depictions of it forever. What didn’t feel as strong to me were the characters inhabiting that world: they didn’t make a huge impression on me. That’s not to say that Supermarket isn’t entertaining – it’s awesome – but there are better examples of Brian Wood’s writing. …more

Chris Arrant, on the other hand, liked the book a lot — enough to place it at number six in his top graphic novels of 2006 list.

Like me, Ian Brill was taken with the book right up until the very end, and has particularly interesting things to say about Wood’s ability to build a character, and then to build a story and a thematic structure around that character’s, um, characteristics:

There’s a scene early on in Supermarket that defines the book’s star, Pella Suzuki, and the book itself. Coming downstairs for breakfast the teenager lectures her mother about the plight of farmers who never see any real money from the billion-dollar coffee industry. After taking that first sip in the morning Pella’s sermon is interrupted so she can ask her mother “Is this Sumatran? S’good.” That uneasy co-existence of two contradictory notions, enjoying the spoils of the industrial world while still knowing the injustices behind those spoils, is at the heart of both Pella’s character and the book. Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson have created a comic that stars a would-be revolutionary who decries her urban surroundings while reveling in the almost sci-fi aesthetic of today’s cities and their cultures.
…more

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This is a follow-up to my feature review of Planetes Book 1 by Makoto Yukimura

On SF Site, Susan Dunman had this to say:

As author and illustrator, Makoto Yukimura creates a believable near-future that’s filled with the excitement of discovery on both personal and planetary levels. It doesn’t shrink from the many dangers faced by those exploring space, yet the overall tone is upbeat and positive, assuring those with big dreams that the adventure is worth the risks. In true manga style, the book reads from back to front, right to left. Because it’s so easy to get involved with this story, you may forget you’re reading the book backwards. That’s a very good sign. …more

And from the late, lamented Ninth Art comics review blog:

One of the most engaging aspects of PLANETES is how much emphasis is placed on the danger of living and working in space. Between showing how the lower gravity can alter your muscles and bone structure, to the radiation levels that cause cancer, to the just unbearable fear of the vastness of space, Yukimura presents space as a hostile and dangerous place in a way that most science fiction makes a point of avoiding. …more

Khaled Abou Alfa loves the book, but isn’t a fan of its American publisher, TokyoPop, better known, perhaps, for flooding the market with less literate works:

I have no idea how this little gem of a comic got through the Viz and Dark Horse net to be honest, because it is easily one of the best manga series I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot of manga series. …more

The Village Idiot Savant picked up the book on the cheap. Lucky:

You never quite know what you’ll find in the bookstore bargain bin. Most times, it’s really marked down overruns that nobody wants; and on that rare occasion, you get a little gem whose value outshines its full price counterparts. …more

Otaku Champloo finds the book to be deep, indeed:

I may sound like a lunatic to say this, but reading Planetes is like reading Descartes and Marcel. It talks about man’s journey: from his self-centered beginnings, to one that is truly historical. Before this leaps into a philosophical paper (which I myself am evading as my head still hurts from last semester’s reflections), maybe we could place ourself further into the manga by looking at the importance of space. …more

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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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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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Following up on this week’s feature review of Jessica Abel’s La Perdida:

Andrew Arnold of Time Magazine’s online comics column finds a particular strength where I saw a fatal flaw (and, no, I didn’t happen to read his review before writing my own):

Abel’s focus on relationships and Carla’s changing sense of self makes La Perdida one of the strongest and most challenging works of character study in the medium. Why challenging? Because Abel makes a gutsy move of creating characters that you can’t automatically like, and to whom you never warm up in the course of the story. Even Carla, the most sympathetic of the cast, seems naïve at best and stupidly unaware at worst. She keeps company with a spoiled snob, an arrogant blowhard and a fantasy-filled ne’r-do-well. Among its other themes, La Perdida examines how and why people form relationships with others that they don’t like very much because of how they fulfill other, sometimes self-destructive needs … read more.

The unlikeability of the protagonist comes up again (and is again excused) in the Chicago Sun-Times’ review, by Jessa Crispin (who also reviews Renee French’s The Ticking in the same round-up style article, another book that I’ve reviewed recently, myself):

La Perdida is deceptively complex. At first the book seems to be a simple coming-of-age tale, something along the lines of Abel’s shorter fiction. But as the story unravels, the politics become more nuanced and Carla, who in the beginning seems almost one-note in her naivete, becomes something difficult to pull off in fiction: the unlikable character you hope makes it safely to the end … read more.

I’m starting to wonder if I was maybe too harsh, or if, instead, Abel is being excused this flaw because of the fact that, in terms of ambition and technical achievement, and only those criteria, La Perdida dwarfs most of Abel’s contemporaries on the realistic/literary graphic novel scene. I suspect the latter, but am willing to be convinced of the former. I may have to reread the thing.

Meanwhile, veteran cartoonist Trina Robbins, ever the crusader for acknowledgement and celebration of womens’ roles in the history of comics (and rememberer of past slights), ends her glowing review at BookForum on a sharply ironic note:

The publication of La Perdida comes at an interesting time. Graphic novels such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis are alerting the reading public that women are producing important comics. Yet the current touring exhibit “Masters of American Comics,” organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, argues for the significance of fifteen twentieth-century cartoonists — all of them men. In an Art News article on this dearth of women artists, Abel, who may or may not know her comics history, noted that “there were women comics artists, but they were not as important.” La Perdida may prove her wrong … read more.

A very long and worthwhile “author to author” interview from Beatrice.com, in which Abel interrogates Alison Bechdel (author of the “it” graphic-novel-of-the-moment, Fun Home, which I own, but haven’t yet had time to read and review), and vice versa, yields this tasty excerpt about craft, and how craft relates to theme (normally I wouldn’t pull such a long excerpt, but the interview itself is so much longer that I feel okay doing this):

Jessica Abel: I realized at some point in the 90s that the vast majority of my comics had to do with people trying to communicate with one another, trying to know themselves, but usually failing. I think it may come out of an earlier interest in authenticity: That is, wanting to be a punk rocker, but since I was born late (my prime teen years were 1984-1987, six sad years too late to have BEEN THERE!) I always felt like a poseur. This kind of rule-making seems to me a crucial method people (young people especially) draw lines for themselves—I knew that band when, I grew up in the projects, I was in the movement before there was a movement—it’s so destructive, yet so appealing. This is what Carla’s struggling for, and it’s by definition impossible. Her realization of that is what enrages her about Harry’s lack on interest in the same standards, and what makes her feel superior to him. Acknowledging that these standards of authenticity are valid, and defending them is the next best thing to fitting the standards.

So, going back, in my earlier short stories, I was deeply interested in getting it right: the right slang, the right details in places, and most especially, the right body and facial expressions. I wanted to convey all that unspoken code that revealed both the characters’ true thoughts and how they showed and hid them, and, probably a little sadly, my authentic and deep knowledge of the kind of people and scene I was writing about. The drawing style I used was very tight, very picky. I wanted to draw every detail. When I collected the stories, I came up with the title “Mirror, Window” as a way of referring to just these ideas of seeing—seeing oneself, seeing others; seeing truly, or only a pale or distorted reflection.

Meanwhile, my drawing style was growing increasingly frustrating to me. In my effort to get everything exactly right, I was driving myself bananas. Among other things, I realized that, when you draw in such a tight, controlled style, you open yourself up to criticism (in my case, my own) that things aren’t quite right. When a room is drawn so carefully, when a detail is wrong or missing, your imagination doesn’t add it in. Readers are restricted to seeing the elements that are right there in front of them. Then, of course, there’s the time issue. Those pages took me forever, and gave me major hand/arm pain.

So when I was living in Mexico, and started questioning the subject matter of my previous work, I started reassessing my drawing style as well, and plunged into a period of doing exercises and research to develop a new way to draw. I had Matt give me assignments, like redrawing an existing page of comics at print size, at 50% of print size, and at 200% of print size, then photocopying all to the same size and comparing them to see how comfortable you feel drawing at different scales. Or redrawing a relatively complex existing panel in progressively simpler styles

The result was a style that implies more than it shows, and so, ironically, feels more “true” to the scene I want to draw than a style that is more specific. It seems to me that the reader’s imagination is able to fill in the gaps more effectively than I ever could. Plus it’s a lot faster and more fun to do. Of course, I preserved my interest in facial and body gesture in this style as well, it’s just a bit more fluid … read more

Note: I’ve only linked to the first page of the above-excerpted interview (the excerpt itself occurs on page 3) — be sure to find and click the “part 2,” “part 3,” etc., links, which are near the top, middle part of the page — it’s kind of confusing. The whole interview is definitely worth reading.

Title: La Perdida Author: Jessica Abel Publisher: Pantheon

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