Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Fies rails against what Fies calls the “a broken promise” at the heart of the “millennial complaint, “˜Where’s my flying car and jetpack?’” The Author’s Note lays out the basic thesis: Fies grew up believing in the utopian future presented in Space-Age mass-market American culture, and feels the actual future didn’t live up to his” and his generation’s” expectations. Optimism has been replaced by cynicism; World of Tomorrow is, Fies tells us, “an appreciation of, and an argument for” the creative, ambitious, inspirational, and romantic future he believed” and believes” in.

Detail from Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow © 2009 Brian Fies

Today on Graphic Novel Review, our own John Barber looks at Brian Fies’ sophomore effort, the follow-up to his Eisner Award winning first book, Mom’s Cancer. After the break!

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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.

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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Following up on last week’s feature review.

Many of the online reviews of The Best American Comics 2006 appear to have been posted by fans of superhero comics, disappointed that their favorite genre wasn’t well-represented in the volume. While I share a desire to see a wider range of styles and genres in future volumes (not necessarily superheroes, but, you know, whatever happens to be good in any particular year, with no special concern for genre), there’s an angry, or at least melodramatic, undertone to most of the complaints that is not likely to change any minds at Houghton Mifflin, or anywhere else, for that matter, about the advisability of attempting to cultivate the traditional superhero comics audience alongside the newer audiences for other kinds of comics. Maybe the opposite. Too often, the genre’s most passionate defenders are its greatest liability, when it comes to wider mainstream acceptance, and pleasing the current crop of superhero fans can be seen as a dangerous game, from the publisher’s perspective — sure to scare away the casual reader that truly large houses like Houghton Mifflin depend on reaching.

Watch how Neil Shyminsky plays the entitlement card over at Comic Boards, for example. First, he notes that literary comics have “until recently depended on the creators and publishers of superhero comics to supply them with distribution, venues, conventions, and readers.”

Now, see, here’s the thing. I’m not sure if that’s true. And even if it is, I don’t see how a comic book distribution history lesson has, or should have, anything to do with whether or not this or that or the other story belongs in a “best of” anthology.

Seems kind of tangential, to me.

And kind of weird.

Literary comics are supposed to drag superheroes along with them everywhere they go, for now and forever, just because … literary comics … um … owe this to superhero comics? Somehow? Because most comic book stores are all about the superheroes? Or something? What’s that again? I don’t get it.

Shyminsky then goes on to complain that, thanks to Pekar’s bias:

[S]uperhero readers get a subtle slap across the face with the superhero stuff that is included. The collection’s first story, “The Amazing Life of Onion Jack”, is a cute contribution and one of only two superhero stories included, but its satire of all things held dear to the heart of a sincere superhero fan is just as likely to leave a sour taste as it is to cause a chuckle.” … more

One wonders if all superhero parodies, from the “golden age” Red Tornado, to the Tick, to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie that hit the theaters a couple of weeks back, strike Shyminsky as “slap[s] in the face” that leave “sour taste[s] in the mouth” (some slaps!) or if he’s just posturing, maybe, a little bit, for his audience of fellow superhero fans. Well, actually, one doesn’t wonder much.

But I don’t mean to come down too hard on Shyminsky. I chose his post as an example of the fannish entitlement position because, unlike so much else of what I found, his writing wasn’t completely comprised of defensive, reactionary posturing, and he does have other things to say, too, some of them thoughtful. It’s interesting to watch him realize, as he’s writing, that the author of a literary story, as opposed to the author of a story about Wolverine and Collosus, has to, you know, actually develop interpersonal relationships and nuances of characterization right there in the moment, without depending on knowledge that the reader brought to the table beforehand. (Which reliance may be why the stories superhero fans like so very, very much fall flat when read by people who aren’t immersed in the culture — and, maybe, just maybe, explains their routine exclusion from anthologies like these, aimed at readers who aren’t, necessarily, familiar with comics at all, much less in possession of an understanding of X-Men continuity from 1975 to the present?) Follow the link.

Kristian Williams at Mind Buck Books worries a little bit, at first, about the lack of superheroes and other genres (such as horror and funny animals), but manages to move on from there in fairly short order:

[M]aybe no one needs to speak up for the genres. Superheroes still predominate. (Don’t believe me? Just visit your local comics shop.) And it’s not like anyone needs a highbrow anthology to introduce them to the Green Lantern — whereas how many of us have ever seen an issue of Jesse Reklaw’s Couch Tag?

That’s the real virtue of this collection. It showcases work that even an enthusiast might not have ever seen, or for that matter, even heard of. This is especially true of the short pieces that originally ran in magazines, newspapers, or self-published zines. The ephemeral nature of periodical publishing makes it exceedingly easy to miss good work, to let it slip into undeserved obscurity — unless, of course, it gets reprinted, collected, anthologized. And for this service, we owe Harvey Pekar and series editor Anne Elizabeth Moore a very large debt. … more

At Bookslut, Jeff Vandermeer cherry-picks a few of his favorite (and least favorite) stories for brief reviews, then interviews the creator of one of his favorites, Rebecca Dart, whose “RabbitHead” story, frankly, gave me a little bit of a headache (I think it would work great on the web, as a McCloudian “infinite canvas” sidescroller, but is not suited at all for print).

Of “RabbitHead,” Vandermeer says:

This mind-blowing sequence of surreal adventures begins as one narrative thread and branches out into seven threads before collapsing back in on itself. RabbitHead demonstrates a twinned playfulness and seriousness that hooks into your thoughts for days after reading it. … more

Writing for the Silicon Valley alt-weekly MetroActive, Richard von Busack also provides brief reviews of several of the stories, then concludes:

All our popular arts are enamored with stories of lost childhoods and inner children. Still these artists transcend the commonplace, with sensitivity and absolute honesty [...] this anthology will strengthen the art of comics immeasurably. … more

I couldn’t agree 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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