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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A while back, I loaned my fifteen-year-old niece a copy of Demo: The Collected Edition by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan, and she loved it. She loved it, loved it, loved it (as did I). Or, at least, she said she loved it. Who can know? Maybe she was just humoring me. I had been trying to foist Western comics on her for several years, with no success. In her natural habitat, undisturbed by unclish enthusiasms, she’s a fan of xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, etc. Now I’m wondering if I’ll give her my copy of Supermarket, by Wood and Kristian Donaldson (who is sort of a latter-day Cloonan, drawing the same slouching, sneering, manga-influenced-by-way-of-Paul-Pope, too-cool-to-be-hip cigarette smokers with consciences, utilizing the same fat, confident linework that Cloonan and Pope made famous, all elegant and choppy, realistic and design-y, Vertigo and Kodansha, at the very same time).

I think I probably won’t.

It’s not that the thing doesn’t have its moments and its qualities. The first chapter, in fact, rocks. In it, we meet our protagonist, Pella, a self-righteous, cynical, but unselfaware teenaged girl from the richest side of a scary future metropolis, the “Supermarket” of the title, rendered by Kristian in gorgeous neon noir, a place and a time exactly halfway between right now and Blade Runner. By the end of that chapter, Pella finds herself homeless and in hiding from the most dangerous criminal gangs in the city, cut off from her fundage and her family, and required, simply, to stay alive. On the last page of that chapter, she’s rolling into the worst parts of town on a dark, crowded bus, with the drunks and the punks and the other anonymous losers who populate all “less than Platinum” levels of this socioeconomically segregated city, trying to figure out what has happened to her, and what she should do next. We have been given a glimpse at just enough of her spoiled self-righteousness to want to watch her suffer and learn. We have been given a glimpse at just enough of her intelligence and conscientiousness to want to watch her thrive.

“Oh boy,” I said to myself. “This is going to be good.”

And for a while, it is.

From a certain point forward, though, you find yourself watching a third-rate Quentin Tarantino film on paper, this agonizingly choreographed action sequence after that agonizingly choreographed action sequence, and then another and another, each ratcheting up the artificial “Oh My Fucking God” factor one mechanical notch at a time. There’s a lot of raw material here — the kind of High Concept Hollywood pitch fodder that works well when described in the most nugatory way, but only then. The Yazuka with a Samurai sword who poses, and says, calmly, “Submit to me,” before he charges, not waiting for a response. The bloodthirsty underworld gang comprised of Swedish porn models. Etc. Blah. High Concept can’t always carry the day. High Concept can’t ever carry the day. Just ask the guys who made Snakes on a Plane. It’s always about the execution.

Don’t get me wrong: on a moment-by-moment basis, every page, every panel, is eye-poppingly well-crafted, even the most violent ones (maybe especially those). The fatal flaw here is hardly a lack of what we call, in the technical parlance, chops. Wood and Kristian have both, assuredly, got chops, and chops to spare. On the strength of his other projects, Brian Wood is one of my favorite writers. Kristian Donaldson, whom I’d never heard of before this, knocked me out. That’s an artist I’ll be watching in the future, for sure. If the last chapter or two of Supermarket had been stretched out into, say, three or four more, allowing for better character development and more thoroughly extrapolated stakes-raising, if the slam-bang action sequences had been less archly imagineered, if the ending hadn’t been entirely too easy and abrupt after all that rigamarole, etc., then I’d probably have been able to recommend this book to you with enthusiasm.

It’s not, I should mention, a complete load of crap, like so many contemporary action-adventure comics. There was almost something very special here, it just wasn’t given the space it needed to come together at the very end.

(The image on this page is a detail from Supermarket, copyright (c) 2006 Brian Wood, Kristian Donaldson, and Idea and Design Works LLC)

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Assumption: people expect cartoon entertainment (static or animated) to be out of the ordinary. I’m not just talking about hardcore comic book readers, who, as a group, tend to be more appreciative of otherworldly genres and whacked-out premises than the average entertainment consumer (though that’s changing over time; we’re at the earliest stages of a geekification of all culture, which is a subject for another day). Even non-fans expect a wild ride from a comic book or graphic novel. Comic books just do things a little more strangely than other storytelling forms, and they always have. Imagine a prose novel about a family of ducks who dress in sailor suits, live in houses, drive cars, eat at the dinner table with forks and knives, and are best friends with a couple of mice. Without the existence of Disney cartoons and Carl Barks comics running in the background, as points of reference, such a work would be impossible — or, at the very least, extremely avant-garde. A writer would have to work pretty hard to set up a world where that kind of thing could be taken for granted. A cartoonist, on the other hand, can just put it on the page. The reader sitting down with a comic is almost always in the mood to test the limits of his or her disbelief suspension skills. Barks doesn’t have to make us believe in anthropomorphic ducks. They’re just, you know, there. And we expect no more, no less. That’s comics.

You don’t have to buy into my assumption. I’m perfectly willing to be wrong. But let’s run with it for a minute. Let’s say the above holds true — not just for habitual comic book readers, but for anybody who picks up a comic. And let’s say you are a writer with a relatively non-fantastical set of crime stories to tell, the kind of violent, edgy, but still artfully character-driven “caper” stories, for example, that fill up the programming schedules of IFC and most independent film festivals, made by the kinds of young directors who hope to go on to produce big-budget thrillers later in life. You want to reach out to the comic book reader, who hasn’t generally bought into that kind of material. What do you do?

Well, you say to yourself. Hm. Let me see. Let me think. Let’s make everybody a robot.

I’m making this sound bad. I don’t mean to. In the case of NYC Mech Volume 1: Let’s Electrify by Ivan Brandon, Miles Gunter, and Andy Macdonald — a crime book set in a version of New York City where everybody is a robot — this little trick actually works very well, mainly because it isn’t explained or explicated. There’s no “world-building.” This is the same New York City we know from a million television crime dramas: tenement buildings, pizza joints, bodegas, trendy nightclubs, crazy cabbies, etc., etc. Just as Disney and Barks don’t try to make us believe in the world that Donald Duck inhabits — they don’t really imagine the society that ducks would create if ducks could talk — NYC Mech doesn’t try to explain its own weirdnesses and inconsistencies. In fact, these weirdnesses and inconsistencies provide much of the texture of the book. For example: why would robots eat eggs for breakfast (a key plot point in the first story arc)? They wouldn’t. But these do. And that’s fine. I can imagine some “real” science fiction author setting up a scenario like this and wasting a lot of pages, and energy, figuring out every detail of how a robot version of New York City would operate. In NYC Mech, the robots, like Barks’ ducks, serve as simple stand-ins for humanity (and for other animals — robotic dogs and sharks both make appearances). That said, the surface non-humanity of the characters does provide a bit of distance between the reader and the material — which, ironically, makes the work even more believable. It’s a subtle effect, and one that I can not describe in great detail without spoiling some of the best moments in the book (like the denoument of the first full story), but, basically, in too-simplified form: anything that might have seemed over-the-top or outrageous in a crime comic about human beings becomes much more easily digestible in a crime comic about robots. The robot conceit also makes the violence easier to watch, which doesn’t matter to me, but might help with marketability, especially if there’s ever a movie. And, finally, it’s just, you know, a cool visual effect, seeing robots in hipster clothes, lounging around their filthy, tiny New York apartments, smoking cigarettes and crank. That’s comics!

There are two complete stories here, spread out over six chapters (originally six issues of the comic book). The first two chapters serve mostly as an introduction, but also give us a cute little revenge story with a twist ending. The second story, the last four chapters of the book, is the real thing, though: a “secret identity” tale that has us rooting for the bad guy, which is as gripping as any genre comic I’ve read since Sleeper (and that’s really, really good). Ivan Brandon and Miles Gunter share the writing credit. Andy Macdonald’s artwork is adequate — really good in places, a little confusing in others (especially the action sequences).

I liked it.

Title: NYC Mech Volume 1: Let’s Electrify (NYC Mech) Creators: Ivan Brandon, Miles Gunter, Andy Macdonald Publisher: Image Comics

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It’s not set in stone, but the routine I’m trying to develop here at GNR is to offer a substantial review of one graphic novel at some point over the weekend, then, mid-week, link-blog the same book — that is, post links to other people’s reviews, along with creator interviews that have been done in support of the book, and so on.

The idea is to put my own review in context, and to provide a broader, maybe more objective, sense of what the book might be like than I can possibly offer in my own, necessarily subjective, review.

In some cases, (La Perdida, for example), there’s so much information and conversation out there on the web that I am able to be very selective in my linkage, pulling only the deepest and most intriguing stuff out of the ether for you to consider. I don’t want to just feature the books everybody’s always talking about, though — where’s the fun in that?

Night Trippers by Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor, the subject of this week’s feature review, hasn’t been as widely-discussed as many of the other books I review here. In fact, I had a hard time finding anything at all about it out there in the blogosphere. Most of the mentions of the book I did find took place before it came out: bloggers saying that they were looking forward to it, etc. Now that it’s hit the shelves, there’s not much being said. This may be because I’ve picked up this book more quickly, in terms of its conversation-generating lifecycle, than some of the others (La Perdida has been out a good, long while, for example). Or it may be that the book has had a fairly flat response all around, and the general politeness and supportiveness that “team comics” (maybe rightly, maybe wrongly) observes for non-corporate productions is mandating the silence. “If you can’t say something nice …” I dunno.

Here’s what I did find:

The Fourth Rail:

“[T]hose looking for something different in comics literature that sacrifices nothing in sheer entertainment value ought to take a look” … read more.

IGN:

“Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor’s Night Trippers offers a refreshing take on nosferatu, one that should delight every blood-sucking fan” … read more.

WordBalloon Podcast

“We turned the WordBalloon show over to Ricketts to produce this psychedelic pastiche of music and our interview to promote his new GN Night Trippers” … read more or download the MP3.

There’s a 22-page excerpt of the book over at Newsarama.com.

Mark Ricketts was interviewed by fellow comics writer Robert Tinnell (Sight Unseen) on the Image Comics blog. Surprisingly enough (to me, anyway), Ricketts says that his primary motivation wasn’t the desire to tell a vampire story, or to create a quasi-superheroic franchise:

When I started this book, I mostly wanted to write the story of a fabricated pop idol. Not like the corporate creations of today, but the artistic visions of some Svengali. Like when Justin De Villeneuvre transformed a skinny young schoolgirl into a world-wide sensation named Twiggy. Or like Brian Epstein who packaged four scruffy, leather-jacketed, working class Liverpool lads as tailored, mop-topped teen dreamboats. … read more

Title: Night Trippers Creators: Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor Publisher: Image Comics

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The first time I read Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor’s Night Trippers, three days ago, it slid without friction across my consciousness so smoothly that, flipping through it again this morning, preparatory to writing this review, I found that I had pretty much forgotten everything about it, except for the largest details. It’s about vampires in London during the swinging sixties. The characters have big heads and big eyes, but otherwise look more P. Craig Russellish than mangaesque. And, um, well, that’s about all that I could remember.

Detail from Night Trippers © 2006 Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor

Even re-reading random pages to try to catch the drift of the story again didn’t help. What was supposed to be happening here, and here, and here? It’s not that the story was too complicated. It’s that the story wasn’t complicated enough to make any lasting impression. To be fair: the problem might be mine. I’ve been reading too many graphic novels lately. For every one I actually end up reviewing, I’m reading four or five that I can’t think of anything to say about. So there’s that. Reading the book all the way through again a couple of hours ago, I found it reasonably enjoyable, just like I think I did the first time, but I’m still not sure that I’ll remember it in three more days (except that I’ll remember writing this review, which will probably cause it to stick out in my mind more than it would otherwise).

There’s novelty packed into the edges and margins and interstices of this book, cute ideas and miniature high concepts that sound cool when described, but which don’t really serve any purpose within the larger (fairly predictable) story, except, well, to sound cool when described. For example, vampiric Beatles, mumbling “All you need is blood. Blood is all you need.” Or a bumbling octogenarian pair of vampire-hunters, who stumble out of the nursing home, and onto the scene, long enough for one of them to get killed, performing no real work in the story that couldn’t have been handled more efficiently without them. Even the most interesting character, the quasi-superhero, a vampire-killing “teddy boy” who idolizes Elvis and talks in a sort of Lenny Bruce “beatnik hip” patois, when he’s not just shouting rockabilly lyrics verbatim, is, like the two old guys, only interesting because of surface characteristics — specifically, the surface characteristics I’ve just listed. That’s pretty much all there is to him. The protagonist (or, at least, the character with whom we spend the most time throughout the course of the story — I’m not sure if she can be called a protagonist, because she’s entirely too passive and unreadable to do any agon-ning, pro- or otherwise), a working-class girl who finds herself promoted into a Twiggy-like pop star by an ancient, wealthy vampire, for reasons that are never entirely clear (he says he wants to create a legion of undead superstars for the kids to emulate, so they’ll beg to be made vampires; but then he never bothers to make our heroine a vampire — he deliberately avoids doing so, as a matter of fact), fails to engage. Until the very end, she’s nothing more than a MacGuffin for the other characters to fight over. Inexplicably, in the last couple of pages, she becomes a vampire hunter herself, complete with an unusual weapon, and an outfit that doesn’t really qualify as a superhero costume — but only just barely doesn’t qualify.

As in the very weakest of Warren Ellis (whose work, I should mention, I mostly adore, but who does misfire occasionally), the high concept and clever conceit, the “hey, look, I’m playing with genre conventions while standing above them — here’s a cool scene, explodo, whatever, and look how funny this character talks while making the fisticuffs” attitude, though cheeky enough to divert one’s attention briefly, cannot stimulate the mind longer than it takes to read through the book.

Detail from Night Trippers © 2006 Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor

Other than that, there’s nothing in particular wrong with Night Trippers. And there’s quite a bit that’s right. On a moment-by-moment, panel-by-panel basis, you’ll find yourself more or less pleased, while you’re reading it. The pencil-and-paint artwork, though it has its awkward moments, also possesses a kind of angular stylishness that works nicely for the vampire genre. One especially outstanding little touch is purely formal: the way that interior monologues are handled — inset panels, colored in a reddish tone to distinguish them from the “real-time” story, featuring the characters speaking directly to the camera about what they are thinking, like they’re in a Shakespeare play, or a reality television show — allows the use of verbose and expository “thought balloon” language without coming across as cheesy or old-fashioned (imagine the scene above if the thoughts were coming out of the old man’s head in the form of a thought balloon — it would have been too much, Stan Lee City all the way, daddy-o).

There’s something here, to be sure. It just hasn’t quite come together yet. It’s entirely possible that, freed from the demands of introducing their milieu and creating an “origin story” for their quasi-superhero, Ricketts and Farritor could potentially return to their franchise (if such it is to be) and enlarge, expand, and deepen it so that it could become very interesting indeed (in the same way that Bill Willingham’s Fables, for example, has become a much more well-written, engaging series, over time, than its first volume — an easy-to-solve, cliched murder mystery with a fairy tale twist, complete with an Ellery-Queen-like “parlor scene” — seemed to promise).

If you read a lot of graphic novels (like I do), there’s no reason not to pick up this one. It’s a decent enough way to spend some time; it’s not very expensive, as color trade paperbacks go; and the creators are probably going to go on and do even more interesting work in the future, either together or separately, either within this series or not. Otherwise, if you’re only going to read one graphic novel this year — or even this month — this isn’t necessarily the one I’d recommend that you snatch off the shelves first.

Title: Night Trippers Creators: Mark Ricketts and Micah Farritor Publisher: Image Comics

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