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

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!