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.

Megan Kelso, though well-known enough among literary comics aficionados, wasn’t quite as familiar to casual readers when The Squirrel Mother and Other Stories came out eight months ago (I’m that far behind! I started writing my review when the book was new! I swear!) as she has become since. Having your next comic serialized in The New York Times Magazine — and made available for reading online at the GooglePageRank-arrific nytimes.com domain — will do wonders for any career.

I was able to find quite a bit of conversation out there, more than I’ve found for many of the other books I’ve reviewed to date, precisely because I’m so far behind. That’s one advantage to taking such a long hiatus; the rest of the web has had plenty of time to speak its mind.

Much of what I found, though, struck me as strangely curt and cursory, regardless of whether the opinion proffered turned out to be positive or negative in the end. Maybe Kelso’s minimalism has rubbed off on the reviewers? (No danger of that here at GNR, my friends, never fear! We never saw a ten dollar word we wouldn’t gladly pay you twenty for).

For example, there’s this from Larry Hosken:

Here is my Book Report on The Squirrel Mother: I didn’t understand these Megan Kelso comics. … more

Don’t bother following the link. There’s not a lot more to it than that. I only included it because the stilted diction, for some reason, pleased me. Kind of Andy Kaufmanesque or whatever. I can just see him staring at the floor, clearing his throat, standing up on his tiptoes, then coming back down, before delivering his solitary line. Maybe in a fake eastern European accent, even.

From Hebdomeros, a subdued appreciation:

[T]hose readers willing to dig into the layers of subtext will find a unique vision well worth experiencing. … more

Precocious Curmudgeon:

Kelso varies her storytelling approach as well. Sometimes a piece is a straightforward examination of an experience. In others, she invests them with expressive visual imagination, taking the mundane someplace wilder. The book as a whole shows Kelso to be a storyteller of wonderful range. … more

red / radio / music:

It’s too bad that the writing was not up to the level of the art. … more

Earth Minds Are Weak:

The book is named after the first story in the collection, a gorgeously depicted piece about… well, it’s a bit hard for me to say. … more

See what I mean? Lots of people are talking … but they’re not talking a lot. That doesn’t mean that the book didn’t have an impact on them, of course. Sometimes the best works of art leave us without words. For example, Justin Fox, the “Earth Minds are Weak” blogger quoted immediately above, went on several months later to declare the book his #1 favorite comic of 2006.

Kelso’s collection makes it to # 4 in the Panels and Pixels countdown:

This collection of short stories proves she’s not a “promising new artist” but someone new cartoonists can look up to. … more

… and nabs the # 5 spot at Comics Comics:

Pitch-perfect cartooning and closely observed tales of family, history and America make this a gem-like volume. … more

The Seattlest screams, in its headline, that “Squirrel Mother Screams with Subtlety,” then goes on:

Far too many semiautobiographical graphic stories fail to connect with their audience, adopting an artistic style incongruent with the subject or navel-gazing to a degree that renders the story largely masturbatory. Kelso avoids those trappings and creates a collection that resonates with the audience on an undefinable level, plucking emotional strings through simple artwork and in most cases a minimal amount of text. … more

Spurgeon puts it at # 34 in his own year-end round-up:

Kelso is our greatest working choreographer of cartoons, the way she makes her figures move and relate to one another while in conversation. …more

He also interviews Kelso, though all they talk about is Seattle, and also, a little bit, about how she doesn’t draw a lot of outdoor scenes. Blah. The interview was apparently commissioned by a Seattle tourist rag, so that’s probably the reason for the lack of depth. It would have worked fine in its originally intended context.

CindyCenter.com offers a choppily-edited audio interview in MP3 form where she talks about not discovering comics, and the need to create them, until she was in her twenties — something of a rarity in the field. Most cartoonists know from adolescence or earlier, it seems. It’s too bad that the questions sound like they were recorded separately from the answers, and the answers sound like Kelso is responding to deeper, more penetrating questions than the ones we actually hear the interviewer asking (though, to be fair, the interviewer does warm up later in the course of the interview, and sound like he’s from the same planet as his subject, maybe even in the same room, or at least on the same phone call, so there was probably just a recording glitch at the beginning that made him re-record, and in the process simplify, his half of the conversation; I’ve done it; every podcaster has).

Finally, Rob Clough, over at SeqArt, gives us a nice, thick review to chew on, the deepest and most compelling analysis I could find (other than my own, of course), placing the book in the context of Kelso’s career so far, declaring Squirrel Mother to be the end of her apprenticeship, the beginning of her mastery:

What was the key that allowed Kelso to go from being good to great? I would say that it was a simple refinement of her style. She works in the clear-line tradition but like many young artists, didn’t always trust in that economy of that line. Some of her earliest work (like the “Bottlecap” stories from GIRLHERO) is overrendered, and she relies on extraneous blacks in some other panels. In The Squirrel Mother, those early process difficulties disappear. [...] I read the collection three times before writing this review, and I found myself getting more out of not just the stories themselves each time, but finding myself impressed by how the stories were sequenced. … more

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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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Detail from De:Tales © 2006 Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

The authors of De: Tales: Stories of Urban Brazil, fraternal twins Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, take themselves — their daydreams, their art, their sexuality, their drunken enthusiasms, their more sober hopes and wishes, and even (or maybe especially) their twinship — very seriously, in the same way that, say, a fourteen-year-old girl takes herself very seriously. This is not meant as an insult. I grant that it is an odd thing to say, especially given the explicitly macho content of many of the short stories contained in this collection, their first book to enjoy widespread US distribution. The boys, it seems, are always on the prowl for female companionship, usually in bars, usually while drunk. But unlike homegrown comics in the same genre (the webcomic Butternut Squash, for example), the process of attracting and securing a one-night-stand isn’t played as a cynical frat boy joke. Here, any random encounter at a singles bar can become an opportunity for existential crisis.

In the book’s most emblematic story, “Reflections,” which is presented back-to-back in two different versions — one drawn by Fabio, with his smooth flowing brushwork, another by Gabriel, whose sharp, clean-line pen stylings remind me of 100 Bullets illustrator Eduardo Risso’s best — one of the twins (or maybe each of the twins, separately, at different times), afraid to talk to a girl across the bar who has been watching him, flirting with him, ducks into the restroom to take a piss, where he meets a couple of different future versions of himself: a mopey one who never worked up the nerve to talk to the girl, and a happy one who did. And they talk about the main character’s quandary. A lot. “There you are,” says the happy, about-to-get laid version of himself, “thinking about your encounter, freaked out … can’t even take a leak … and the girl outside is gonna get tired of waiting … and she’s gonna find another loser. I didn’t freak, but went right back … it’s already happening. It’s in your eyes. There’s no other way.” By the end, it becomes clear that the protagonist, himself, will become/has become the mopey version seen previously, the one who never went back outside to talk to the girl. This is treated as high tragedy. In these stories, the struggle to get laid for the night, any night, is as deeply convoluted, as momentous and perilous, as the adventures of any contemporary grim’n'gritty superhero. Again, that is not meant as an insult. Moon and Ba redeem their penchant for melodrama, their self-absorption, and their, let’s face it, celebration of a fairly careless and promiscuous lifestyle, with some valuable coin indeed: sincerity. Even when one of their protagonists, in the story “All You Need is Love,” ducks out on a one-night-stand with a lie and an excuse the morning after, consciously hoping that he will never see this woman again, he still has his head in the clouds: “And the boy-nothing left the girl-nothing with whom he’d had sex-nothing the previous night and spent the rest of the day thinking about love-everything.” It’s difficult to read that unironically — but I’m fairly certain that that is how it’s meant.

To be fair, it’s not all about drinking, carousing, and one-night-stands. One of my favorite stories, “Happy Birthday, My Friend!” is about how the boys resurrect a dead friend of theirs (by peeing in a circle on the floor of their studio with some of their other friends, while thinking of him) for one last night of — well, okay, drinking and carousing. Once again, there’s a charming sweetness here, a lack of guile, that would not stand up to any sort of ironic reading.

Moon and Ba demonstrate a tremendous amount of artistic skill and storytelling talent. I hope that their next works might, maybe, be a little less self-indulgent. Ba is working on the latest Matt Fraction project, Casanova — and I think that’s probably where both of these guys will find their biggest success: illustrating the work of other writers with less personal stories to tell. Maybe that’s an evil thing for me to say. One shouldn’t discourage personality, or even selfishness, in artists, surely? I dunno. Their writing isn’t incompetent — it’s just too, well, twee, in a strange, “macho dude who gets too huggy with his man-pals when he’s drunk, and he’s drunk a lot” kind of way.

Ultimately, whether you will enjoy this book or not depends a lot on your own tolerance for and/or appreciation of, people who wear their hearts on their sleeves. You might find it charming. But it could just as easily be grating to the nerves (I can imagine hating it utterly, if I hadn’t been in exactly the right mood — on vacation, hanging at the beach, very relaxed, mostly drunk myself — when I read it). It’s good for what it is, I guess, but it’s definitely not the kind of book that I would press into the hands of my best friends, demanding that they read. And that’s what it seems to want, very much, to be.

Title: De: Tales: Stories of Urban Brazil Authors: Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba Publisher: Dark Horse

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Whatever else anybody might say about it (and most people who’ve written about it so far seem pretty confused and startled by the damn thing), Eddie Campbell’s The Fate of the Artist is indisputably a major new work by one of the most important figures on the graphic novel scene (probably best known to casual graphic novel readers as the illustrator of Alan Moore’s From Hell, which itself is finally back in print from Top Shelf, by the way). I’ve read Campbell’s strange new, um, post-autobiographical (?) tale twice now, if “reading” is the right word, but haven’t yet come up with any clear thoughts about it myself, one way or another. Don’t take that as a bad sign — it isn’t, necessarily. I expect I will figure out what I think about it at some point, and will write a review here. I pretty much have to. It cannot be ignored. It’s that kind of book. In the meantime, here’s some of the more interesting first reactions from around the web:

Mark Fossen (Focused Totality):

But is [The Fate of the Artist], the standard bearer for the Great March To Acceptance, even a graphic novel?

I don’t know that it is … I don’t know that it isn’t.

I don’t know that I care … read more

Christopher Butcher (Comics212.net):

The weight of Campbell’s publishing efforts, his art, and his life in comix, is felt on every page. It’s felt on the very first page in fact, on which the artist tells us to “all go to fuck,” sick of comics and himself and you too … read more

Rob Salkowitz (Emphasis Added):

You don’t get the sense that [Campbell is] trying to impress anyone with mere formalism or keep his audience coldly at a distance, as in the arch and constipated work of someone like Chris Ware. He’s not trying to appear Artistically Serious by asking Important Questions in Difficult and Challenging Ways – or at least, that’s not all he’s doing … read more

Campbell himself attempts to explain what he was doing, in characteristically self-effacing fashion, in this interview conducted by Jen Contino at Comicon Pulse:

“On the surface I was trying to wrestle with the terrors I experienced after becoming a too-visible person in the world,” Campbell said. “While I certainly was never anywhere near famous or anything like that, after the From Hell experience, with the movie and the colossal success of the book, I came to feel very vulnerable and exposed. Taking an introspective look at myself is what I was doing all along remember. It’s just that I had always done it safe in the knowledge that nobody would ever read the damn things. Now I learned to the contrary. It must be worse for my kids. My daughter started working in a DVD store a while ago and somebody there was familiar with the page I drew way back in 1988 on the subject of her toilet training. That must have a worrying effect on a young lady. So in Fate, I’ve given her the microphone to talk about me for a change.” … read more

Title: The Fate of the Artist Creator: Eddie Campbell Publisher: First Second

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