The third volume of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s much-beloved Scott Pilgrim series, Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness, hit the shelves of specialty comic book stores a few days ago. As usual, mainstream bookstore distribution takes a bit longer, and since I’m putatively writing for the casual reader, I try to time my own reviews to a book’s wide availability outside the specialty market (meaning: when Amazon has it). Also, um, I’m sort of back-logged on books to read and review, and I’ve been kind of lazy and kind of busy, simultaneously, lately (note: pay no attention to the real reason behind the curtain — it’s all Amazon’s fault, I tell you! Amazon!) Anyway, a new Scott Pilgrim is too big an event to ignore, even if I don’t have my hands on it yet, so here’s a round-up of what some of the more plugged-in and industrious writers (more plugged-in and industrious than I am, that is) around the web have to say about the book. Interestingly, many of them seem to be music bloggers, rather than comics bloggers, primarily. I kind of expected videogame bloggers to take note of it (they didn’t, as far as I can tell; they’re all mostly recapping E3 press releases, for the most part) — the music angle surprised me (it shouldn’t have).

Mark Fossen (Focused Totality):

It’s hard to make the argument that any book which starts off with a not-nearly-sly wink to Japanese RPG save points is “mature”, but Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness is an evolution, with new storytelling techniques, new structure, and a more complex look at relationships … more

Nick Brewer (CMJ):

Fans of the Scott Pilgrim series will enjoy the instant action of this installment, and people who have not discovered its genius yet should definitely pick up the entire set and enjoy it from the beginning … more

Jeffrey Radcliffe (Tinctoris):

I envy Scott. I don’t envy the messed up elements of his life, but I do wish that I could apply my Street Fighter II skills to solve problems. I can’t fight my way out of my problems, but I certainly enjoy watching him do it … more

Gordon McAlpin (Chase Sequence) actually interviews O’Malley, and gets him going on the topic of “OEL manga” (my own riff on this phenom-du-jour can be found in this week’s feature review of East Coast Rising):

Do you consider Scott Pilgrim to be manga?

Um … No, I think I was just thinking about that today. I guess I was just thinking about the whole OEL thing. I think it’s influenced … I like the term “manga-influenced comics,” but I only like it because no one else likes it.

I don’t know that I want the term “manga,” really, anymore. I mean, my own thing is derivative in a way, but it’s not completely derivative like I consider OEL manga to be completely derivative. I don’t think it has that much room for originality, like, at all. I mean, I used to do it, so I feel like I have a little bit of authority on the subject. I just think they should grow up, get out, and get over it. But maybe I’m just being a jerk. I don’t know … more

O’Malley was also interviewed by Tabassum Siddiqui in the Toronto Star about the book, and the movie deal (apparantly Scott Pilgrim has been optioned by Universal). Here’s something funny he says about that:

“I didn’t originally have the whole thing planned out, but when the movie people came calling, I had to sketch out the rest of the ideas, which I think was a good thing,” O’Malley says. … more

Jeff Lester (Savage Critics), who used to ring up my comic book purchases (and put them in those annoying plastic bags), back when I used to buy comic books, hits the first, and only, sour note in this round-up (though he does go on to recommend the book as his pick of the week, ultimately):

I loved (as I always do) the videogame stuff, the witty dialogue and particularly the boss villain who’s unbeatable because he’s a vegan. (Fucking. Hilarious.) On the “yeah, but…” side, the ambitious alternating flashback structure didn’t work as well as it should have (why did Kid Chameleon fall apart again?), too many of the characters looked alike (despite O’Malley’s thoughtful attention to design) and the endless number of new characters felt less like a rich and bustling world and more like a confusing parade of in-jokes and shout-outs … more

Title: Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness (Scott Pilgrim Series Volume 3) Creator: Bryan Lee O’Malley Publisher: Oni Press Cover Price: $9.20 Format: B&W Paperback Digest

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English translations of Japanese comics for children have become something of a phenomenon in the North American market, to the point where at least one generation of readers (maybe more) has learned to love cartoon art almost solely through a love of black and white manga digests. Yu-Gi-Oh! and Fruits Basket occupy far higher positions in the hearts and minds of today’s kids than do, say, Superman or Wonder Woman, or even Scooby-Doo. Since each generation of comics readers becomes the next generation of cartoonists, we’ve inevitably begun to see the influence of Japanese storytelling conventions and art styles bleed into the mainstream of American cartooning, on every level, from the comic strip, to the Saturday morning cartoon, to the comic book. Like many major shifts in the tectonic plates of culture, this one started slowly, with subtle tremors and minor effects. In the eighties, for example, we saw Frank Miller channeling Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima (and acknowledging their influence, um, vaguely) while making comics that were, all the same, still quite firmly entrenched in the Western tradition, like Daredeviland Ronin. Later early adopters, like Lea Hernandez, also managed to develop impressive bodies of work which, though clearly informed by a love for manga, continue to try to reach out to the traditional American fanboy and his traditional heroic-fantasy preoccupations, more or less (I suspect that Lea, who is a personal friend of mine, would probably disagree on this last point, not because she hasn’t tried to reach out to the Direct Market reader with every muscle in her body, but because the Direct Market itself has remained so disappointingly closed for so long to her and her kind of comics). More and more often, the new breed of comics, and their creators, choose to ignore the traditions of Western comics, and the limitations of the Direct Market comics culture altogether, spending their time and energy instead emulating the styles, genres, and formats, and chasing the happier marketplace realities, represented by manga translations. One might even say that many young creators have broken with the Western tradition altogether, and are crafting works that should rightly be classed, historically, as extensions of the Japanese branch of the medium, as if there had been no Western tradition at all, and the very idea of commercial comics had been imported whole hog to our shores from Japan. That’s maybe overstating the extent to which young creators are drawing from the manga experience, but not by much.

The latest publishing fad, “Original English language manga” (called “OEL” — and basically meaning, “comics by Western creators which look and act sort of like manga, and which are presented to readers in the black and white digest form made popular by publishers of manga translations, in hopes that kids who like to read translated Japanese comics will also like to read these homegrown productions”) owes more, I think, to the existence of this new kind of cartoonist, the one who cut his or her baby teeth on manga — than it does to any marketing imperative or publisher’s whim (though these factors do certainly have some play). Of course these are the kinds of comics this generation of creators would make, and of course this is the format they’d prefer to see their work published in, and of course these are the publishers they’d be excited to work with. For these cartoonists, comics are black-and-white digests, and being racked beside Tsubasa : RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE in a Waldenbooks store at the mall is a more desirable and natural kind of placement than getting the cover in Previews or a poster in the window of a comic book shop.

And they’re right, of course.

The most ambitious OEL publisher to date is surely TokyoPop, better known for popularizing translated manga in the first place (along with Viz, the Pepsi to TokyoPop’s Coca-Cola, or is it the other way around?). Their recently-launched OEL line consists of more than a dozen titles, ranging from new works in the manga style by American comic book industry veterans like Keith Giffen all the way through to the solo print debuts of relatively unknown webcartoonists like Svetlana Chmakova and Amy Kim Gantner. Becky Cloonan falls squarely in the middle of that range, having broken out as a “name talent” a couple of years back during the course of her Image-published, Eisner-nominated collaboration with Brian Wood, Demo, and currently employed as illustrator on one of DC’s higher-profile Vertigo series, American Virgin. As such, she isn’t exactly the best poster-child for the revolutionary ignore-the-American-mainstream kind of creator I posit in the first paragraph of this essay (she’s sort of a third breed — casually mixing manga influences with Western influences, as if she didn’t know, or care, that there was “supposed” to be a “difference”), but hers is the name that caught my eye the most quickly out of TokyoPop’s OEL catalog (excepting Svetlana, with whom I work professionally, on Girlamatic – and therefore can’t review, in good conscience). To be fair, I am, first and foremost, an American fanboy, albeit a fairly snobbish one, so Eisner noms and Vertigo assignments carry more weight with me than they do the typical member of TokyoPop’s target audience, I would guess. (I’ve heard from a friend in the publishing industry that Svetlana’s book seems to be the actual break-out success story of the line, so far). Anyway, since Demo is one of my favorite graphic novels, ever (see my review of that book from a while back), since I’ve also been enjoying American Virgin, and since the whole OEL thing looks interesting, from the perspective of somebody who enjoys watching the American comics industry get shaken up a bit, I decided to give the first volume of Cloonan and TokyoPop’s new franchise, East Coast Rising, a read.

The premise: the oceans have risen, submerging all but the highest points of the eastern seaboard (we’re not told exactly what happened, or when, or why). In the new post-apocalyptic world order, rival gangs of tattooed, pierced, happy-go-lucky hipsters play semi-seriously at being old-school movie pirates, complete with peg legs, eyepatches, and vicious facial scars, living on large, anachronistically wooden ships, fighting one another, and the random monster or two, in the treacherous waters between the archipelagoes of New Jersey and the former New York City. There’s a young stowaway whose map to a legendary buried treasure (the ill-gotten gains of the corrupt Last Mayor of New York) is stolen from him, by the villain, in the first few pages. There’s lots of ship-to-ship fighting. There’s giant, trained, man-eating sea turtles, and a monster with a human skull (one hundred times too large, of course) for a head, and octopus arms for a body. And so on. More than anything, the story structure reminds me of a videogame — not the two-dimensional fighting games that inform, say, Sharknife, nor the coin-collecting platformers that provide the underlying metaphor for Scott Pilgrim, but rather the lavishly-produced, heavily-scripted, so-called role playing games (”so-called” because the role the player gets to play, unfortunately, is almost always fairly cut and dry) of the Playstation 2 era. Like those games, the widescreen action sequences are separated by a series of quieter, introductory “cut-scenes,” wherein our protagonist (the stowaway I mentioned earlier — name of Archer) explores his new environment, is introduced to the rest of the cast, one or two characters at a time, and figures out what his next objective will be, in incremental stages. You’ll even find a couple of “mini-game” sequences, like when Archer goes fishing off the bow of the ship with his soon-to-be love interest, or when he chases “seachix” across the deck, for their eggs, so he can help the galley cook make omelettes for dinner. Like most of those kinds of games, the story itself isn’t particularly original. In fact, in this case, it’s completely derivative (of Pirates of the Caribbean, of Waterworld, of Robert Louis Stevenson, of a million million other high-seas and/or post-apocalyptic adventures), but not offensively so, in large part because of its sheer, unadulterated charm. Wherever a lesser modern pulp creator might go for the high-pitched insincere squeal of melodrama (in the final monster battle sequence, for example), Cloonan deftly cuts in light, easy sub-scenes, warm and strangely non-urgent personality bits between the characters, while the climax rages around them. “Hey, I found your leg.” “Sweet! I was wondering where it went!” These moments live in a sort of calm bubble of time, almost separate from the main storyline, and are often drawn that way, over in the margins, with deliberately scribbly renderings of the characters. The banter between the heroes and the villains, who are obliged to work together to defeat the final “boss,” comes off as almost affectionate chiding, more like the fans of rival local bar-bands shouting at each other across an East Village avenue at closing time than like the usual seething cliches of high adventure back-and-forth. “You guys so suck!” “I said we gotta work together!” “Pork forever? Joe, you’re not making any sense.” In the context of the book itself, that stuff is a lot of fun, and not (I feel compelled to add) lame, or Stan-Lee-like, in the least, though it probably comes across that way, reading it here in prose form. This kind of charm goes a long way toward fending off the dreadfulness of cliche.

As you might expect, if you’ve seen her other works, the standout element here is Becky Cloonan’s artwork. The same thick, sinuous, oily line and inventive storytelling trickery I noted in Demo can be found in these pages, though the style stays more consistent (in Demo, Cloonan drew every chapter in a different style; East Coast Rising is rendered in a lighter-hearted version of the style she used in one of my favorite stories from Demo, the one called “Stand Strong,” which sported a similar collection of Elvis-sneering fat-lipped, huge-foreheaded hipsters). Though a manga influence is evident, it’s not just about big eyes and speed lines (in fact, the eyes aren’t particularly big, and the speed lines aren’t any more in evidence here than in, say, Carmine Infantino’s 1960’s superhero stories). More than virtually any Western artist I’ve seen yet, Cloonan shows a particularly deft hand with some of the Japanese storytelling tricks that look completely alien to the Western comic book reader — like the tradition of suddenly rendering characters in “superdeformed” mode from time to time, to emphasize an emotional point or silly punchline. Usually that kind of thing throws me right out of a story, because of the unfamiliar artifice. When Cloonan does it, she does it well enough that it actually makes sense, adds to the story, and seems perfectly meaningful and logical without calling attention to itself, all at the same time.

Finally, though, the artwork, the storytelling tricks, and the charming character asides, though well done, are not enough to make me want to read more of this fairly conventional, fairly thin, completely derivative boys-adventure story, so I don’t plan to pick up Volume Two.

Don’t get me wrong. Cloonan’s a major new talent, who approaches all of her efforts, including this one, with the kind of joy and care that radiates off the page — the kind that is all too lacking in most comics coming out of any tradition, Western or Eastern, these days. The kind that should probably be encouraged at all costs.

It’s just not my cuppa.

Overall, if I were to have to decide if this is a “good book” or a “not-good book,” (which, I guess, since I’m writing a review here, and all, I do have to do), I’d fall completely on the “good book” side of the question, without hesitation. If I can’t really recommend it, though — and, ultimately, I cannot — that’s probably just because East Coast Rising isn’t targetted at the grown-up casual reader of graphic novels (like myself, in other words), which is who I try to write for here at GNR. If there’s a younger teen in your circle of acquaintance — particularly a boy, or a tomboy, who isn’t cynical enough to laugh at the very idea of a pirate yarn with a stolen treasure map for a macguffin — then you might want to pick this one up to pass along. But even there, I’m pretty sure your money might be better spent on a “genuine” pirate-adventure manga, like One Piece, given the difficulty I’ve experienced in the past couple of weeks trying to convince my fourteen-year-old niece, a big manga reader of the sprawled-on-the-floor-at-Barnes-and-Noble variety, that this book might be worth her time (I was, um, trying to trick her into writing my review for me, actually). “It isn’t real manga,” she would say, rolling her eyes at me, and then away from me, and then up with the hand. “I can’t read comics left-to-right because that messes with me! Guh! It’s just not right.” Apparantly I’m the biggest idiot, ever, for even suggesting she attempt such a thing. Whether this bodes ill for TokyoPop’s ambitious OEL line generally, and Cloonan’s franchise specifically, or whether my niece is just too contrary for her own good, is not for me to say. Because I don’t know.

Title: East Coast Rising Volume One
Creator: Becky Cloonan
Publisher: TokyoPop
Cover Price: $9.95 (paperback digest)

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The Challengers of the Unknown, as a franchise, dates back to February, 1957, debuting in Showcase Comics # 6 (the so-called “Silver Age” of comics is often said to have started just two issues prior, with the first appearance of the revamped version of DC’s superhero The Flash in Showcase Comics # 4). This original version of the team, in subsequent Showcase appearances, and then, later, in its own series, lasted until 1970 (at which point little Joey Manley came along as a comic book reader and completely ignored them, because they weren’t nearly colorful enough to hold his attention against, say, Wendy the Good Little Witch or Richie Rich and Jackie Jokers Digest). A revival in the late seventies quickly faded (not-quite-so-little Joey hated the stupid purple-and-gray costumes, if I recall correctly). The team has been revived and re-imagined a few more times since then, first by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale (The Challengers of the Unknown Vol. 2, 1991), then by Steven Grant (The Challengers of the Unknown, Vol. 3, 1997), and most recently by Darwyn Cooke in his outstanding DC: The New Frontier, 2004 — currently available in the form of two trade paperbacks. As often happens in the comic book world — where D-list characters are concerned, anyway — Howard Chaykin’s new version of the Challengers chucks all of that out the window (well, not completely — Chaykin “retcons” the old comic book stories as an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the new version’s primary villain, on characters who have the same names as the original Challengers; she had been obliged to embroil them in bizarre fantasy adventures to keep them out of her hair; it’s a nice little touch, for those who care about the history of these characters, but doesn’t get in the way, or explain itself overmuch, for those who don’t).

In this version, the Challengers have lived their lives until now as cold-blooded killing machines, political assassins whose identities and free will have long been compromised and controlled by the same secret organization of immortal billionaires who pulled the strings for Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Timothy McVeigh. They’re allowed by their overlords (well, their overlady) to live normal lives in the downtime between missions, unaware, themselves, of who and what they really are. And so on. In the first chapter, something goes wrong with the technology (surprise!) and the new Challengers are accidentally let off their leashes, dangerously in control of their own faculties, for the first time since they were turned into killing machines. And they’re mad as hell. Yeah, so, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I’m not completely unforgiving of less-than-original setups in my action/adventure entertainments, but when it happens, I hope and expect that the author will bring something new and twisted to it, in the margins and the sidelines, at the very least. Chaykin doesn’t. It’s like he used a computer program to generate a generic action/adventure franchise with randomly-spaced blanks for the author to fill in. What’s worse, he doesn’t trust his reader to follow his very basic, very overdone storyline. He approaches it as though it were the most complex and difficult-to-understand thing in the world. Ninety percent of the dialogue is exposition — I am not exaggerating — most of which is repeated, numerous times, from the mouths of different characters, just in case we didn’t catch the setup the first four or five times we heard it. (Another 9% of the dialogue is liberal agitprop — I’m as loud a liberal activist as the next guy, and it even annoyed me).

But that’s ultimately neither here nor there. Even if the setup were original, and even if the exposition wasn’t so prominent, or so clunky, or so repetitive, the plot would have killed this book anyway. It has bigger holes than any action/adventure plot I’ve ever seen (and, yes, I’ve seen all the Star Trek movies). I won’t go into them all, because a). it’s not worth the time, and b). you might want to read the book anyway, and pointing out plotholes necessarily means spoiling the plot points they represent. Here’s the big one: the villain’s secret, evil plan (which she spells out for them in minute, damaging detail, after capturing them, but before they inevitably escape) is, well, anticlimactic and weirdly counterproductive. I suppose it couldn’t help being that way, since, at the start of the book, she already rules the world (the more traditional goal of the supervillain), and has done so for decades. There’s not really much left for her to scheme about. But if you look at what she says she wants to do — take herself and her organization into outer space, leaving earth and its inferior mix of “mud races” behind — it seems to me that the Challengers should leave her alone and let her go. “And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out!” Why force her to stick around (which means that she will keep ruling the world with an iron fist)? I dunno — except that thwarting evil plans is what the heroes are supposed to do, in stories like this, I guess, even if the evil plan hasn’t been thought out very well, and is counterproductive to the villain’s own, um, villainy.

This book is crap.

But it is beautiful crap, when looked at only on a page-by-page, panel-by-panel basis.

That makes it (for me, anyway) worse.

Howard Chaykin is a master storyteller and an illustrator of the highest order, whose lines may be wobbly, and whose draftsmanship may seem unwieldy when individual figures are contemplated in isolation, but who knows how to lay out a page, establish an evocative setting, introduce an “actor” with a couple of quick, uniquely human and distinct facial expressions or gestures, and (in the meantime, with his left hand tied behind his back) cut seven different, tangentially-related scenes together in alternating beats, using powerful graphic design and even more powerful chutzpah to hold it all together. Watching him do his thing takes your breath away. When it comes to technique, Chaykin makes the work of run-of-the-mill action/adventure comic book creators look like those slow-footed oil paintings by elephants. But all the storytelling mastery in the world cannot salvage a deeply unworthwhile story, which is what Challengers of the Unknown : Stolen Moments, Borrowed Time ultimately turns out to be.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not slamming it because it’s a genre story (spy thriller, in this case). When they’re well-done, when the creators take the time, and/or have the emotional investment in the work, the respect for themselves, the characters, and the reader, to connect all the familiar dots in new and interesting ways, I like genre stories quite a bit (see my feature review of Deep Sleeper). I even have a particular soft spot for the spy thriller: The Bourne Identity (from which Chaykin’s version of the Challengers steals a central conceit) is one of my favorite movies of all time; Queen & Country, one of my favorite current comic book series. The problem is that Chaykin seems to be bored — he’s given us nothing new, despite its shiny, interestingly-crinkled wrapper, and he hasn’t even paid enough attention to his trite storyline to make sure that it at least, on its own terms, makes sense. If he wasn’t so good on a surface, technical level, if I hadn’t been hooked by his mad page design and scene-moving skills up to the point when the Challengers are captured by the primary villain, and she starts to spout exposition while posing (which is when I started to realize how old-fashioned and stupid it all was, and had been, all along), I’d probably be more forgiving.

But he was, and I was, and I’m not. It actually makes me angry, that this man, who has more raw talent, and more serious entertainment industry storytelling experience, than just about any of his peers (or, for that matter, than anybody who has ever worked in comics, period), has chosen to throw his energies away on garbage like this.

Do I have to say it? Not recommended.

Title: Challengers of the Unknown : Stolen Moments, Borrowed Time
Creator: Howard Chaykin
Publisher: DC Comics
Cover Price: $16.99

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Comics aren’t known for straight-up realism. Setting aside the so-called “mainstream,” where superheroes dominate the bestseller lists, even the so-called “artcomics” crowd sometimes seems more interested in the over-the-top, the outre, the joyously vulgar, and the anarchic, than in the ordinary. I’m not saying that this is a good or a bad thing. I’m just saying. Maybe it’s because bizarre milieux can be rendered more easily and inexpensively in comics than in other forms of visual narrative, so the field attracts those who fiend for that kind of thing in particular. Maybe it’s because the heyday of the commercial children’s comic (which, venturing an uneducated guess, probably stretches from about the time of Little Nemo through the 1960s go-go Batman) showed us, in ways we hadn’t been shown before, and haven’t been shown since, the strangest reaches of our imaginations — to the point where that’s almost the only thing we remember to turn to the medium for, civilian reader and haughty artiste alike. Maybe it’s because “artcomics” have, until very recently, been sold almost exclusively in comic book stores, venues built for, and by, superhero fans, so that any chance these literary works have had to attract an audience has required reaching out to superhero readers with some sort of fantastical element mixed into the story, like whisky in an otherwise undrinkable punch at the prom. Or maybe a fantastical streak is inherent in the art form, a result of the local genius of this field, for no reason except its own whim (field genii being arbitrary as a matter of course), choosing to shun the pedestrian in favor of the fancy, and that’s that. Or not. I dunno. Hard to say. Granted, there are well-known exceptions: Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Eddie Campbell’s Alec: How to be an Artist, Derek Kirk Kim’s Same Difference & Other Stories, etc. Their presence on the scene, and the critical acclaim they have received, have not been well-tolerated by all, though. “I get enough of the everyday every goddam day,” a friend of mine (not a superhero fanboy, by a long shot) told me recently, in the course of griping about the “self-masturbatory” (his word, not mine) American Splendor movie and the comics that inspired it. “When it comes to comics, I want bigger-than-life!”

So, yeah, he probably wouldn’t like R. Kikuo Johnson’s debut book, Night Fisher, which is just about exactly life-sized, and not one inch taller or fatter than that. If it had been a prose novel, it would be called “mainstream” — but this is comics, so it’s fairly unusual in its focus on the ordinary, even on the highbrow end of the graphic novel bookshelf. Here’s the setup: Loren Foster, the geeky, overachieving son of a geeky, workaholic father, finds himself, just a few weeks before high school graduation, becoming a casual user of the currently hyped “epidemic drug,” crystal meth. Contrary to what you might expect if you watch Oprah, or even the local news, this does not affect his life in any catastrophic way, though the adults around him do start to notice that he is slipping a bit, and he does eventually get arrested for a petty theft related to his drug use (since this book doesn’t depend on its plot for its effect as much as, say, a spy thriller would, I won’t worry about “spoiling” the story — in literary work, it’s often the execution, the moment-by-moment reading experience, not the plot, that counts — everybody knows, for example, that the entire cast of Hamlet, pretty much, dies in the end, but people still go to the play anyway). Even the arrest turns out to be no big deal, adding another layer of tension to his relationship with his father, but since that relationship, and that tension, are presented in a flat manner, suffocating, but undramatically so (perhaps because both father and son are, themselves, affectless and passive in their dealings with one another — which is as true a portrait as any of father-to-son family dynamics in the suburban era, I suppose), there’s no explosive climax. There is very little resolution at all, if any, in the work as a whole. Though the back cover blurb from the publisher calls this a “coming-of-age” novel, Loren doesn’t do any such thing. Coming-of-age novels, as a genre in and of themselves, rotate around the one epiphanic moment where the protagonist puts away childish things and takes upon himself or herself the power and responsibility that comes with adulthood. Loren, though, simply lives through the last few weeks of high school, does some drugs (he had already been doing some drugs — he does different, famously more dangerous drugs), has some fun, gets into some trouble, gets out of some trouble, then rolls around in the grass on a hillside as the credits (not really) roll, and the music (not really) swells. The end. All of the catch-points of a coming-of-age story are put into place, but the author, and the protagonist, willfully refuse to spring those traps. The guy rolling around in the grass at the end is as much of a cipher, and as much of a child, as the guy driving his truck recklessly home from a night fishing trip, speeding so that he can get his homework done, at the beginning: maybe moreso.

And that’s just fine. Unsettling, yes, but fine. Like I said, the execution, not the plot, carries this kind of book. The execution is, in a word, elegant. Each character– the cocky, self-assured best friend, who is always running ahead of Loren, whether it’s in drug use, academic achievement, or, literally, on the track; the preoccupied but proud dentist father; the genial thirty-something loser who deals the meth (when his woman and infant child aren’t around, anyway) — comes to life immediately, thanks to solid character design, smoothly minimal dialogue, and fine “acting” on the part of the “players,” in terms of their body movements and facial expressions. The artwork generally has an accomplished, easy flow to it, even when Johnson uses difficult and unexpected camera angles (or maybe because of same). The story, or the lack of story, impels itself along, despite its lack of affect, through the power of dangled, then withdrawn, cliche — when Loren’s father complains about his grades, or when Loren starts using “hard” drugs, we imagine that we’re about to see something like, say, The Basketball Diaries play out — but then we find out that the grade his father is complaining about is a “B” against a straight-A backdrop. “You can do better, right?” says his dad. When the arrest happens, we imagine we’re about to see the beginning of a downward druggie spiral — but then we don’t. And so on. We’ve been teased with the beginnings of a story we didn’t really have any deep interest in reading again, but our ears had pricked up anyway at the signs of a predictable potboiler building up steam, because that’s what they’ve been trained to do by the thousand drug-related-downward-spiral stories we’ve read before. This generates something like suspense, a kind of friction between the story-that-is-here, such as it is, and the story-we-thought-would-be-here, which replaces the usual kinds of dramatic tension that drive stories along. It works surprisingly well, as a means of driving a frustrated coming-of-age story in a culture where, for the most part, we avoid adulthood as long as possible (haven’t you heard that 40 is the new 30, which age, ten years ago, of course, was the new 20?), and where all the stories one can imagine — especially about teenagers, and about drugs — have already been told.

Some of Johnson’s tricks don’t work quite so well. Under the large half-page panel that opens the first chapter, the author displays instructional diagrams for tying knots in string. These diagrams occur in a couple of other places in the book — places where an actual knot is being tied, or untied, by one of the characters. Loren exhibits a particular interest, for example, in the knot that his father ties to hold up a tree in the front yard. One would imagine that he was something of a knot-tying hobbyist, or that, at the very least, the tying of knots is meant to serve as a metaphor for what’s going on in the character’s psyche. If it does, it is only the most rudimentary of metaphors, the obvious one (that Loren is maybe being “tied in knots” by the people and events surrounding him), but it isn’t played out well enough or interestingly enough to make the effort worthwhile, or to justify the unusualness of the knot diagrams scattered throughout the book. It’s just left there on the page, without development. Ultimately, you end up suspecting that the knot diagrams were simply cribbed from The Shipping News, a prose novel, of all things, where E. Annie Proulx used the exact same device much more effectively.

Similarly, Johnson attempts to make much of the book’s Hawaiian setting without, finally, convincing us that it matters. Before the proper start of the story, we’re treated to four pages’ worth of geological maps, charting the development and decline of Hawaii’s actual landmass over the past dozen or so million years. Via one of Loren’s teachers, droning in the background of a scene, we get a treatise on the slow accumulation of Hawaii’s local flora and fauna, blown thousands of miles by breezes from Asia, or shit by migrating birds, and the effects on that unique ecosystem of the introduction of humanity and humanity’s workaday livestock to the islands, approximately 1200 years ago. That would stand only as background noise in the story (which is, after all, set partly in a high school, where teachers are always droning on about meaningless things), except that Johnson introduces finely-detailed drawings of some of Hawaii’s flora into the margins of later, seemingly unrelated, scenes. They’re supposed to mean something, one supposes, but one isn’t sure what. An ancient deed to a piece of land, hidden away in the porno stash of the thirty-something meth dealer, is reproduced in full on one page — giving the characters an opportunity, while waiting for their drugs, to muse on the way that the pineapple corporations grabbed a lot of privately-held land, and invalidated legal deeds, after the United States took over. But even this goes nowhere, unless we are supposed to believe that it points out a reason for the allegedly “epidemic” drug use among Hawaii’s native population; if so, that’s never really expanded upon (and rightly so — I hate it when books get all preachy, like Dixie Carter in the last ten minutes of a Designing Women episode — but, still, it’s a loaded gun shown to us that never, ever goes off). I don’t bring these things up because I believe that books set in Hawaii have to make their setting mean something special: I bring them up because it’s clear Johnson wanted the setting to mean something special, that he is attempting to show us something unique about Hawaii which affects Loren’s life and the final point of the story, and he fails in that effort. The story could have been set in an affluent suburb of Minnesota just as easily.

Which is not to say the book is a failure overall. Far from it. It is a first novel by a talented young author, with all the limitations, and all the strengths, that one would expect from such a thing. With his accomplished traditional drawing skills, his easy brushwork, his ability to frame and block a story, his subtle but high-flown ambitions, and his way with character “actors,” Johnson could someday be as well-known among casual readers as, say, Craig Thompson, or as masterful a High Artist as, say, Jaime Hernandez, or even — and this would be fortuitous indeed — both at the same time.Meanwhile, Johnson is clearly an author to watch for. I expect his second book, or maybe his third, to knock my socks off. Potential is a frustrating thing, though, and comics is a frustrating medium. We’ll see how it works out.

Recommended, but not essential.

Title: Night Fisher
Creator: R. Kikuo Johnson
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Cover Price: $12.95

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Whenever a storyteller invokes a primary motivation so obviously and universally alarming as “family in danger,” there’s always the likely possibility of laziness and/or cheese. The storyteller should always have to work hard to make us believe, to make us care, to make us understand. That’s the point. Too often, when invoking the so-called “universal verities,” like, say, love for family, a weaker creator or creative team may assume that there is no need to flesh out the motivation. It’s obvious! The man’s family is in danger! Now on with the story! But there’s no point in bringing those kinds of motivations into play, unless they are going to be explored well enough to be understood in a new light, or at least in the new context of the particular character and the story in question. Otherwise, they’re just a plot device, which cheapens both the character feeling the emotions, and the audience vicariously living through that character. Even the popcorniest popcorn flick depends for its effect on our ability to respect the reality of the character’s situation. And reality, like the devil, is always in the details. “Man with a family in danger” is a generic yawn. “This specific man, with these unique characteristics, participating in this carefully-delineated set of relationships with these individual and well-rounded characters, who happen to be his family, and who happen to be in danger” is the basis for a damned good story. In Deep Sleeper, a damned good story, Phil Hester and Mike Huddleston play “the family in danger card” smartly enough to avoid sentimentality and cheap melodrama.

That’s no mean feat, especially for a work that lives within an easily definable genre (working within a well-defined genre has a way of tempting artists toward cliche) — in this case, the genre is fantasy/horror, a genre in which some of the most successful creators in the field, like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison, have done their best work. That, of course, adds to the challenge immensely. The set-up, for example, reads like something out of early Sandman or Hellblazer: struggling freelance writer Cole Gibson discovers that he is capable of stepping outside of the everyday, mundane world, into a shadow-world of space-faring demons, sad lost souls, and astrally-projecting tourists, superimposed upon our own reality. He also learns that he has become something of a superhero to the inhabitants of the shadow-world, thanks to his incredible adventures fighting demons and monsters every night, which he had always thought were simply bad dreams. There is an ancient villain whose plans put all of “real” reality in danger, and who has specific designs on Cole himself, and, as I’ve mentioned, Cole’s family. And so on. Blah, blah. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? That’s because, a). you’ve read stories like this before, and b). when you’ve read stories like this before, the creators, more likely than not, depended on the trappings of the genre, and your own understanding of those trappings, the knowledge you bring to the table about “how these stories work,” to set the scene and lay the foundations of their tale. Hester and Huddleston don’t allow themselves that luxury: they take the time to develop their own milieu, and make it seem real in and of itself, rather than relying on the fact that you’ve probably already read enough Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman (or Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, for that matter) to fill in the blanks. Nothing is easy here. They flesh out their fantasy world on their own terms, and expose the rules it runs by, as thoroughly and carefully as they flesh out their characters and reveal their plot. That’s something that we should take for granted in our fantasy entertainments, but, especially in comics, we cannot.

Huddleston draws the scenes in the “mundane” world in a style that I can only describe as clip-art-like: here’s a generic cityscape; here’s a generic woman holding a bunch of papers; here’s a generic man on the phone. Expressions, especially of the characters in the backgrounds, are deadpan and happy-happy, precisely what you’d see in the illustrations that accompany a typical PowerPoint presentation, or an ad in a cheap magazine. And the overuse of zip-a-tone (or whatever they call it these days) is downright suffocating — deliberately, I think. The generic drawing style and 1970s shading effects add a filter of stiff ugliness on top of the “mundane” world, reinforcing the set-up. Thematically, as the story progresses, Cole begins to feel that the everyday world has become (or has always been) shallow and meaningless, a hollow mockery of what matters, easily dismissed (even when it comes to the “family in danger” storyline, surprisingly enough, but I can’t talk about that too much more without spoilage — I may have overstepped the line already). It is only the fantastical world that engages his attention. Huddleston renders that shadow world with a lush, painterly line (excepting the villain, who often appears, even in the shadow-world, surrounded by the dreaded, crisp, zip-a-tone). The contrasting art styles push the underyling meaning of the story to the forefront, yet somehow manage not to call undue attention to themselves. Besides that little trick, the man has serious storytelling chops anyway, in either style. It’s beautiful work, very nicely done.

But, well, okay. Let’s put the brakes on. My praise has been effusive. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Let me be clear: this is not “the Citizen Kane” of comics, by a long shot. We’re not talking about a soul-shattering work of literary genius (though it does have some ambitions in that direction). It’s more like the “original Matrix” of comics, or “The Bourne Identity” of comics: a solid, tightly-constructed genre entertainment that takes its characters and its themes seriously enough to make them seem to matter, in a big, philosophical kind of way, while also offering up plenty of good, old-fashioned quasi-superheroic action/adventure at the same time. And that’s enough. That’s more than enough. Most non-literary, genre comics never even come close to this level of serious goodness.

Highly recommended.

One complaint: my book had a page missing, followed by two copies of the next page. It didn’t matter much (world-swapping, psychedelic stories like this can get by with an occasional weird transition, which is what I thought was going on, at first), but it is worth noting. I don’t know if this was a problem with my individual copy (not likely), or if all the books in this batch were also flawed (likely). Like I said: not a big deal, but I wouldn’t feel right not mentioning it. Maybe they’ll solve this problem in future printings, if there are any.

Title: Deep Sleeper
Creators: Phil Hester and Mike Huddleston
Publisher: Oni Press
Price: $12.95 (trade paperback)

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