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

On SF Site, Susan Dunman had this to say:

As author and illustrator, Makoto Yukimura creates a believable near-future that’s filled with the excitement of discovery on both personal and planetary levels. It doesn’t shrink from the many dangers faced by those exploring space, yet the overall tone is upbeat and positive, assuring those with big dreams that the adventure is worth the risks. In true manga style, the book reads from back to front, right to left. Because it’s so easy to get involved with this story, you may forget you’re reading the book backwards. That’s a very good sign. …more

And from the late, lamented Ninth Art comics review blog:

One of the most engaging aspects of PLANETES is how much emphasis is placed on the danger of living and working in space. Between showing how the lower gravity can alter your muscles and bone structure, to the radiation levels that cause cancer, to the just unbearable fear of the vastness of space, Yukimura presents space as a hostile and dangerous place in a way that most science fiction makes a point of avoiding. …more

Khaled Abou Alfa loves the book, but isn’t a fan of its American publisher, TokyoPop, better known, perhaps, for flooding the market with less literate works:

I have no idea how this little gem of a comic got through the Viz and Dark Horse net to be honest, because it is easily one of the best manga series I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot of manga series. …more

The Village Idiot Savant picked up the book on the cheap. Lucky:

You never quite know what you’ll find in the bookstore bargain bin. Most times, it’s really marked down overruns that nobody wants; and on that rare occasion, you get a little gem whose value outshines its full price counterparts. …more

Otaku Champloo finds the book to be deep, indeed:

I may sound like a lunatic to say this, but reading Planetes is like reading Descartes and Marcel. It talks about man’s journey: from his self-centered beginnings, to one that is truly historical. Before this leaps into a philosophical paper (which I myself am evading as my head still hurts from last semester’s reflections), maybe we could place ourself further into the manga by looking at the importance of space. …more

Demo: The Collected Edition

xxxHOLiC

Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle

Supermarket

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)

It took me a while to pick an excerpt from One of the Jones Boys’ excellent discursive review, which delves into the history and anthropological implications of the zombie genre, as well as its recent resurgence in comics of all kinds, before getting down to the specific book in hand, but I finally settled on this one:

[…] Jason’s characters are uniquely well-placed to survive the apocalypse. The devil himself could appear on the page, rape a thousand schoolchildren and destroy the universe. At most, Jason’s characters might show a few flying sweat beads in alarm; the final panel would matter-of-factly show the earth exploding, seen from outer space. Dealing with a horde of zombies out for their flesh? Child’s play. …more

Jones writes the kind of criticism I’d like to be able to provide, here, at GNR — connecting the contextual dots around the endeavor in an unpretentious, meaningful way, while, at the same time, doing the simpler work of a thumbs-up thumbs-down analysis, too. He is, in other words, one of the best critics on the scene, making my own efforts look weak and drab by comparison. I must unpleasantly destroy this man at some point, if man he truly be.

Over at the Daily Cross Hatch, Brian Heater complains a bit about how quickly the book can be read, at a flimsy fifty mostly-wordless pages, though his final judgment falls onto the “positive” side of the scale:

Prostitutes, shitty jobs, blood thirsty zombies—by the end, all of the pieces fit neatly in place, an achievement that has as much to do with Jason’s skill as a storyteller, as it does with the ultimate dose of earnest humanity that he is able to bestow upon his undead subjects. …more

On the other hand, Dylan Kurlansky, writing for the collaborative pop culture review site Undress Me Robot, enjoys the silence:

It is a nearly silent book (there are only seven lines of dialogue total), which in and of itself can be dangerous. However, Jason’s minimalist artwork shoulders the burden and soars. …more

And, in what is becoming an “Elsewhere on the Web” tradition, the indefatigable Tom Spurgeon has posted an insightful but brief interview with everybody’s favorite deadpan Norwegian cartoonist, which includes several full-page scans from the book.

SPURGEON: What effect did you hope to achieve through the silent movie-style panels of dialog, as opposed to, say, going with an all-silent approach? Why is that effect dropped after a certain point?

JASON: I’ve already done completely wordless strips, like “Shhh!”, so that was no longer a challenge. I wanted some dialog in the beginning, mostly to say something about the characters. After that introduction though that was no longer necessary. When the zombies show up it’s pretty much all action, one big chase sequence, that worked better with no words. …more

I said I couldn’t think of much to say about the book. I did think of one thing. I love the casual, distracted way the zombies eat human flesh — like they’re munching on popcorn while staring at a movie screen. I think you’ll agree that that’s not enough to hang a review on. But that’s all I got! Woe!

(The image in this post is a detail from The Living and the Dead, copyright (c) 2007 Jason)

PlanetES: Book 1

In other words, PlanetES is utterly gripping.

Yuri’s story arc, in particular, represents one of the most mature, nuanced, and subtle portrayals of bereavement that I’ve seen in any comic, of any genre.

There is some small amount of the old slam-bang razzle-dazzle, too. The female member of the team, Fee, headlines the book’s sole action/adventure storyline, semi-accidentally saving the world from an eco-terrorist plot — but only because she needed a good place to relax and smoke a cigarette.

But the real story here is Hachimaki’s outsized ambition, which everyone (including Hachimaki) agrees will only lead him to disappointment and self-destruction someday. We don’t get as far along in the development of his story arc as we do the others, but that’s perfectly appropriate for the hero of this kind of limited but serialized work, whose arc has to stretch across the entire set of books, and come to a resolution in the final volume.

The artwork is realistic (for manga), attractive, and effective. I am prone to get confused reading manga, occasionally losing the through-line on this or that sequence of images on some arbitrary page or another, probably just because I’m not used to the right-to-left reading pattern, but that didn’t happen even once, reading Planetes. Occasionally — like when Hachimaki walks out onto an “ocean” on the moon with a strange girl he just met — the art can be downright astounding in its quiet power. You can appreciate, in these moments, the blank silence that, statistically speaking, anyway, comprises the entire universe. Everything we care about, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, is so rare, so unique, and so tiny, in the face of the light-years and light-years and light-years of emptiness around us, that we really don’t even count.

And that’s beautiful. So is this book.

Highly recommended.

(The image in this post, a detail from PlanetES Book 1, is copyright (c) 2007 Makoto Yukimura. The English text contained within said image is copyright (c) 2007 TokyoPop)

Unlike me, Robert Dayton of the Discorder blog likes the bigness and deluxe packaging:

Designed by Jacob Covey, the hardcover package features a cut-out word balloon title—it’s literally cut out of the hardbound cover. Fantagraphics has made excellent use of digital technology to render these strips in crisp glory; the full page colour newspaper strips are lush, soft washes. As such an integral part of comics history, these strips should always be in print. Before this book, one had to desperately seek out Fantagraphics’ previous re-printings from the early 90s, unassuming volumes that, even in soft cover, were less economical and not as advanced in design and layout. This book is a steal at approximately thirty dollars, an investment of joy. … more

Bill Sherman likes the packaging, too, and declares it “book of the year“:

There’s a lotta reading in this volume of strips. Unlike today’s newspaper funnies, Segar had the room to tell each day in five to six panel offerings, which he crammed with colorful dialog. The pacing is subsequently much more leisurely than most modern comics readers are accustomed to, but it pays off in the strip’s delightfully quirky characterization. … more

Writing for City Pages, Zak Sally admires the badassedness and chaotic amorality of it all:

[F]ar from quaint and staid, these strips are badass. People insult each other, beat on each other, love each other, and screw each other over in a way that’s a little shocking in this day and age. There’s a scene—one among many, really—of a typical bad guy throttling the living hell out of Olive (note to modern cartoonists: Do not show women being beaten), threatening to “shake her teeth out.” Meanwhile, Castor sneaks up behind him preparing to unload a gunful into his head at point-blank range. Yeowch. Still—funny stuff. …more

On the other hand, Elgin Carver at RackRaids sees moral truth and epic scope:

If the animated version of Popeye the Sailor Man is the sum total of your knowledge about this misanthropic hero, then you know him not. Epic in scope, deep in moral truths, as imaginative as any character ever invented, Popeye moves through these strips with a grace that movie stars of that era could only envy. If you have never read any of these strips, or if you are so immersed in them that you can recite dialogue from memory, you owe it to yourself and posterity to stop reading this review immediately and either go on-line or to the nearest brick and mortar bookstore and buy this book. Remember, Fantagraphics has striven to bring us other works in their complete grandeur, Little Orphan Annie comes quickly to mind, only to fall into financial trouble due to slow sales. They deserve better. Popeye deserves better. This is as good as it gets. Do your duty. …more

Finally, Tom Spurgeon conducted a long and insightful interview with the book’s designer, Jacob Covey, who, it must be said, did a great job creating a beautiful and entirely appropriate object, given the apparent goals of this project — and my complaints were not meant to disparage his high level of craftsmanship and artistry in the least. I’d just have preferred a cheap little pocket-sized paperback.

But that’s apparently just, you know, my problem.

And I’m cool with that.

Which is not to say that a taste for Segar comics is a rarefied one. Quite the opposite. From his first appearance in Thimble Theater, about ten years into the strip’s lifetime, Popeye was, and has remained, a mass market phenomenon, popular with children and adults alike, almost as famous as his contemporary Mickey Mouse (who is, in turn, more popular than Jesus). His star has faded a bit since my own childhood in the late sixties and early seventies, due to changing cultural priorities and the emergence of more guilt-ridden (and therefore more intrusively concerned) parental units. Popeye, after all, smokes. He smokes a pipe. According to one panel collected here, he actually smokes his pipe while chewing tobacco. He beats people up. What’s worse: he beats people up in order to impress a woman and win her favors. And so on. Even so, except for the pipe smoking, the humorously violent understanding of courtship and love, and a small number of very unfortunate panels showing dehumanized monkeyfied African tribesmen hunting human prey in the bush, there is very little in these pages that will strike the modern reader as completely alien; there’s much less of that kind of stuff than you would find in just about any other specimin of popular entertainment from the era. These strips actually seem more contemporary than the much more famous and widely-distributed animated cartoons featuring Popeye, for example. For one thing, Popeye’s relationship with Olive Oyl, and his rivalry with her other suitors, is not at the center of the story (this may change in future volumes, I don’t know). There’s no spinach. There’s no Bluto. Or Brutus. Or whatever his name was supposed to be. There’s more than one, you know, plot. Characters have interesting motivations and relationships. And so on. The stories collected here are generally more complex, less predictable, and, well, just a whole lot better, than the animated cartoons — more like Seinfeld with a crusty, seafaring, middle-aged, super-powered protagonist, and without the urban focus and the laugh-track, than like anything else. Um. Yeah. I think that made sense. Anway, before Popeye came on board, Thimble Theater was apparently a kind of hybrid between an adventure strip, a family situation comedy (featuring the Oyls — Castor and his sister Olive, their parents and hangers-on), and a romance/dating gag strip — and at least through the duration of this volume, it remained so. That’s a good thing. If you like comics at all, of any kind, you’ll like these comics. They’re a lot of fun to read.

That said, I can’t recommend Popeye Volume 1 to the casual reader. The presentation and format are just entirely too damned deluxe. It’s a big, big book. You can’t take it to the coffee shop, or read it on the bus. It fits no bookbag. You can’t even easily carry it under your arm. If you sit it down on a table or a desk to read it, you have to kind of stand up and hover over the pages, leaning on your hands, craning your head left and right, like a navigator on a wooden frigate, contemplating a map of the stars (which, okay, I guess may be kind of appropriate). Leaning back in your Laz-E-Boy and propping it up on your lap is the only relatively comfortable way to read this monster, and even then you’ll find that it cuts off the circulation below your knees after a couple of hours. I’m totally serious. Or maybe I’m just getting old. I don’t know. Whatever. Given the historical value of the material, and its difficult-to-find status over the past several decades, I understand and appreciate the need to make Segar’s work available in a high-quality, archival, durable edition. Collectors, aficionados of the cartooning form, serious-minded cartoonists, historians, and, especially, libraries should not hesitate to purchase this edition. It is clearly intended for them, and serves their needs well. The oversize format is probably the only one that could have done justice to the Sunday strips printed in the back, for example, allowing them to be seen at their huge original size, along with the extra matter (a secondary strip of Segar’s) that originally accompanied them in the papers. I understand this. I know. Segar’s work must be made available to future generations in as faithful a manner as possible. But, yeah, the interests of the average reader would best be served by something smaller, more convenient, and maybe a lot less expensive. Popeye belongs to the people. The people demand their Popeye! Let’s hope that, in addition to continuing this fine, archival project, Fantagraphics, or someone else, is able in the near future to put out some reasonably-sized paperbacks collecting the same material. Yes, I know they did so in the nineties. Maybe they can release those again? Pretty please.

The image in this post, a detail from Popeye Volume 1 by E. C. Segar, is copyright (c) 2007 King Features Syndicate.

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

The blogger who signs his work “Jeb D.” over at RackRaids.com liked the story more than I did (I liked the book, but pretty much only for the artwork). Here’s some of what had to say:

Wagner has an excellent grasp of story structure, and even though this series was originally released as four issues, the story unfolds in a nice three-act arc, reminiscent less of modern comics writing than a good action movie or mystery novel—and action and mystery are both elements that this story delivers big-time. It’s pretty rare for a comic to give us a sense that Batman’s truly in over his head—too many writers make him impossibly smug and ridiculously over-prepared. Wagner plays on Batman’s inexperience at this point in his career to make his eventual meeting with the Monster Men as gripping a fight as I’ve seen Batman get into in many years. …more

One of the Jones Boys didn’t like the book much. But it’s not Wagner’s fault. It’s Frank Miller’s. Apparently. See here:

Since [Miller’s Batman: Year One], we’ve seen the early days of Robin, the early days of Batman and Robin, the early days of Commissioner Gordon, the early days of Catwoman, the early days of the Joker, the early days of Two-Face, and no doubt also the early days of Bat-Mite, Ace the Bat-Hound, the utility belt, and the aftershave Batman uses when he’s out on “patrol”.

And now, thanks to Matt Wagner, the early days story we’ve all been waiting for in Batman and the Monster Men, the early days of Hugo Strange.

Hugo who? …more

And … that’s all I found for Batman and the Monster Men reviews. I’ll bet there were more, and I just didn’t look hard enough. Surely.

Batman and the Monster Men

Batman: Year One

The original Batman stories have to be among the most amateurishly executed of any popular comics that came out of the late thirties and early forties, an era known to hardcore comics fans as the “golden age,” but not for any tendency toward visual sophistication or storytelling finesse: young, mostly untrained assistants cranked out the Batman feature under the “Bob Kane” byline in those days, for next to no pay, and zero recognition, and it shows. But even in the earliest, ugliest appearances of the character (when Kane — reputedly less skilled than many of his own assistants — may have actually drawn more of the pages than he did in later years), there was something just right about the crude visual style, a kind of thick, wavy-outlined, mostly-gray energy signal that drilled directly through the eyeballs and into the brains of our pre-adolescent grandfathers, forcing them to surrender their pocket change every month. Wagner picks up and magnifies and refines that signal, taking on, very consciously and deliberately, the clunkiness of the earliest Batman pages (the blunt, imprecise line, but not just that; the oddly “off” faces and bodies; the stiff poses; the goofball layouts; the heavy-figured, gravity-encumbered, muddy action sequences; etc.), imitating every one of Kane’s (or “Kane’s”) visual mannerisms perfectly, but transforming them at the same time, making them work and mean and move where Kane and his assistants could not, finally delivering something severely beautiful and new. The cartooning on display here is something that you just have to see — a bravura performance that only a true master of the action/adventure comic book form could pull off, or, for that matter, would even contemplate trying.

The story, about gangsters, a doting father, a mad scientist, and his monsters, also takes its cues from those Depression-era comics, but is not transformative in quite the same way, or, really, in any way. It’s predictable, boring stuff. An Alan Moore could have maybe created a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that was the source material (see Moore’s work on Tom Strong, for example, where he uses a different set of 1930’s pulp fiction conventions, for a different kind of character, making them vital and new, without actually “updating” them in any obvious way that you can put your finger on), but there aren’t a lot of Alan Moores out there, and it seems unfair to ask Wagner to be one, on top of everything else that he has proven himself to be.

I do recommend buying the book, and reading it slowly — but backwards, last page to first, so that you won’t be distracted by what passes for a story, and you can fully appreciate the magnitude of Wagner’s cartooning achievement here.

(The image in this post, a detail from Batman and the Monster Men by Matt Wagner, is copyright (c) 2007 DC Comics).