Comic Reviews: Hair Shirt & Black Paths

Hair Shirt

There is a saying that “no one gets out of life alive”.  I have long believed that there is a corollary to that saying and that would be “no one grows up without getting messed up.”   We all come out of our teenage years with emotional baggage that needs to be dealt with in our early twenties before we are ready to pass on to adult hood.  Hair Shirt is a new graphic novel by Eisner Award-winning artist Patrick McEown that follows the course of two young college students as they try to reconnect and rekindle a childhood romance.

John is a college art student coming to grips with a bad break up who is plagued by terrible dreams (mostly involving a dog with a human face) that are a manifestation of his long-ignored personal problems.  Naomi, on the other hand, at first seems to have shed the emotional baggage thrust on her by an abusive, alcoholic father and a brother who can only be described as sexually abusive but as the story progresses both we and her come realize that even though she has seemly pushed through her experiences the past will not let go of her that easily and are causing her to almost subconsciously sabotage relationships to protect her from further hurt.

Reading this book my mind kept thinking that if this were a movie instead of a graphic novel the only words to describe it would be “indy” and “bleak”.  There is no happiness in these characters’ lives, there is no joy, there is no light; there is only the business of living hopeless lives.  Despite the darkness, McEown gives us and the characters a faint, silvery ray of hope off in the distance in that both characters realize that they need to confront their past before they can move forward.

Can John and Naomi face their past and come back together, or at least move forward with their lives?  The book never says but I don’t think that is what McEown is striving for.  Life rarely has nice, neat, happy endings and like this book sometimes all we can do is recognize we need help and that can be victory enough for us for now.

Over a year ago our webmaster Adam’s love of indy comics inspired me to take my own journey on seldom-travelled roads and this book makes me glad I did.  Books like Hair Shirt are the reason I read comics now.

Black Paths

Time for a quick history lesson.  During WWI Italy signed the Treaty of London which promised to give them the Austrian Littoral (which now forms parts of Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia) but NOT the city of Fiume.  Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio marched into the city with 2600 Italian troops in late 1919 and in 1920 he declared the city of Fiume an independent state with himself as the dictator.  This independent state lasted for four very uncertain years until D’Annunzio was ousted from power and the city was annexed into Italy and it is during this period of history that writer/artist David B sets his latest work Black Paths.

The set up for the story is very simple: writer/soldier Lauriano and his band of soldiers are hanging out in ravaged port city of Fiume and one day he meets and falls in love with a beautiful singer named Mina.  Sensing that he has finally found what he is looking for in life he decides to “get the band back together” and stage an art heist that will set him up for the new life he hopes to have with her.  But how can he succeed when everywhere he turns there are people driven mad by war?  I can’t really say whether he succeeds or not without spoiling it for you but let’s just say that there are some books where the ride to the end is so good who cares what the ending is?

French small press artist David B has taken story elements from World War 2-set spy thrillers such as Casablanca, The Third Man, and mixed it with a kind of pulp-art/primitive wood carving style that gives the story a setting and sense of time all its own and the two mesh wonderfully.  The only problem I have with this book is I am going to now have the find the money to purchase the English translations of his other works.

Announcement: Comics Elimination Challenge 2013 - Predict It!

No show posting this week, but we have the Dollar Bin Comics Madness Elimination Challenge 2013 up and ready for your predictions:  Comics Madness Elimination 2013

The challenge is to predict how we, on the Dollar Bin podcast will vote the winners of the match-ups.  I went ahead and did 128.  The deadline to get your predictions in is April  16 and we’ll start posting each round’s results over the next few weeks starting on April 17.  Highest score wins a Dollar Bin Prize package.  I’ll announce the contents of the prize package shortly.

Feel free to listen to last year’s challenge shows to get some ideas, or you could ask last year’s winner, Matthew Guy

Its not to bad of a sign up.  You don’t get any junk from the site.  It took me a while just to find it again from last year.

Book Review: Superman Is Jewish?

Tell me if this story sounds familiar: in order to save their child’s life desperate parents put their infant son into a small craft and him adrift.  That child is then found and raised by a loving couple as their own and this child will one day grow up to be a protector of people.  Did I just give a brief summary of the story of Moses or Superman?  Harry Brod’s new book “Superman is Jewish?” poses such questions in an attempt to answer the question of not only if Superman is Jewish but what makes a character Jewish.  How about if I throw in that his creators were both Jewish?  How about if Kal-El is very similar to the Hebrew words for “voice of God”?  How about if you look at the character as the wish fulfillment of displaced European, Jewish boys in the 1930’s and 40’s?  Clark Kent is a first-generation outsider who appears as a weak and book-worm like figure who in all reality sheds this image to become a fountain of power.  NOW is Superman Jewish?  Or is he not Jewish because it’s never specifically stated in the comics?

Mr Brod’s book starts focused like a laser and then slowly diffuses outwards becoming more and more broad as you continue to read.  After discussing Superman specifically he moves on to such characters as The Thing (what is The Thing if not a retelling of the Jewish story of the Golem a creature of mud to protects his people), and Spider-man (a character who is driven by a guilt because his inaction caused the death of his Uncle Ben, who lives in Forest Hills a mainly Jewish area of NYC in the 1960’s, and is a glasses-wearing, nerd-like social outsider who was created by Jewish Stan Lee with possible input by a Jewish Jack Kirby).  He then takes a tour of a few of the most prominent Jewish creator’s works such as Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman, and finally finishes up discussing Jewish comics in general.

Let’s be honest here, books such as these are in essence very long, (hopefully) well-researched, thesis papers so in my mind there has to be a compelling reason to read a book like this.  So, is the book worth reading?  I believe it is.  I suppose the casual reader might be happy just reading their comics and taking them at face value.  But for a group of people who claim to be passionate about an art form as most comics readers proclaim to be, to not want to dig deeper and find a possible hidden influence on some of comics’ most popular characters strikes me as wrong.

I enjoyed this book.  It was never dry but instead came across as almost conversational in tone which always makes it easier to read a book of this type.  The author does an excellent job of exposing the bedrock upon which comics has been founded and this book is worth reading just for the chapter on Art Spiegelman’s Maus alone.  The analysis in that chapter and the details in story structure, panel layout, and background details will give any reader of that seminal work a reason to go back and reread.  I can recommend this book to any reader who wants to gain a deeper understanding of this art form we all claim to love so much.