Comic Reviews: A Grab Bag of Stuff

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Betty Blues

    Renaud Dilles serves up this auburn-hued, smoky-shaded story of a hot-headed, jazz playing duck named Little Rice Duck.  And while his trumpet playing may be hot his dedication to playing has left his (literal) chick Betty ice cold.  Betty wants more from life than a jazz club trumpeter can give her and when you add in Duck’s inattention she is primed to leave with a fat cat who promises her the good life of champagne every day she leaves him.  Giving up the life of music Little Duck becomes a wanderer to find himself again.  Dilles has written a wonderful tale of self-realization but the stand out here is the artwork.  Each panel is draped in gold and dim orange hues that lend a heaviness to the story.  If you are looking for something a little different I recommend you give this a shot.

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I Think I Am in Friend-Love With You

    Go back in your mind and try to think of that special someone in your life.  I’m not talking about your current wife or girlfriend of boyfriend or whoever (but it can be).  I mean that one person you touched you in that special way.  That one person who, even though you knew you could never have, still gave your life meaning.  That one person who you just enjoyed sitting and talking with, sharing corny jokes with, and looked forward to getting calls from.  We all have that someone and this book by Yumi Sakugawa is dedicated to them and she uses odd, alien creatures of a non-specific gender and race so all readers can identify with them.
    The only word for this book is "cute".  If you happen to find a picture online of a baby kitten and rabbit cuddled up asleep on a fuzzy blanket in a meadow of yellow dandelions that MIGHT be cuter than this book but I doubt it.  If you are lucky enough to still have that person in your life you just want to be with and not “be with” buy this and share with them.

Madison Square Tragedy

    Rick Geary has found his niche and he works it like no one else.  What Ken Burns does for PBS documentaries Rick does for historical comics.  Rick has a talent for picking juicy, salacious tales of murder and mystery from history and presenting them in a documentary format that I love. 
    Older men love being around young, beautiful women.  That was true today and it was true 100 years ago.  Stanford White is one of New York City’s most famous architects and he loves his women young and beautiful and there is no girl more beautiful than Evelyn Nesbit.  She is a young aspiring actress and the first true supermodel.  Her face was a muse to men, capturing both a youthful innocence and a pouty sexiness that could not be ignored and Stanford White had to have her, and if that meant getting her drunk and drugging her in his private apartment (home of the now famous red velvet swing) then so be it.
    Unfortunately for Stanford White, Evelyn soon married a man named Harry K Thaw who was both insane and rich.  Harry Thaw for some unknown reason saw Stanford White and the very embodiment of everything that was wrong in the world and had for a long time.  And when he found out that his one evening that his wife had been taken advantage of by that very man something completely snapped in Harry and when the opportunity presented itself he shot Stanford in the face multiple times in public, in front of dozens of witnesses and was found not guilty.  If you love history as well as comics track down anything by Rick Geary but start with Madison Square Tragedy.

Little Fish

    People change.  The person you were is not who you are and who you are is not who you are going to be.  When you leave high school for college you get the chance, if you wish, to reinvent yourself.  Who can be whoever you want.  If you were the social outcast in high school nobody at college needs to know that you weren’t the homecoming queen and voted most popular.  The dark side of this freedom is that you will inevitably leave behind not only the life you had but those who were a part of it.  Sure, you promise to keep in touch and initially you do.  But as you begin to grow in one direction your friends grow in others and the calls become less frequent and more superficial.  
    Little Fish by Ramsey Beyer does a very good job of being written at a level for high school kids and hopefully preparing them for the upheaval that is about to come.  The problem I have is with the gimmick she uses.  You see, Ramsey likes to make lists.  She makes lists of everything, favorite rock bands, things that scare her, whatever happens to cross her mind and the book is constantly interrupted by these lists.  I counted them up and 42% of this graphic novel are pages of these lists.  I’m not sure what the official text page percentage is when a graphic novel turns into a regular book but it’s got to be around 42%.
    If this had been used less and less as the book went on to show Ramsey becoming more confident and needing the security and structure that these lists gave her than I would have applauded her creativity.  What story is there is well-told, but I am going to spend $16.00 I don’t want to just read lists.

Comic Reveiws: Anomaly

I can just imagine what it must have been like to pick up a copy of The Fantastic Four #1 off the stands or The Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns.  To sit there and read them and just know that the game has changed.  That from that moment on the art form of comics had just taken a giant leap forward and could never go back.  That is the feeling I had reading Anomaly, the original graphic novel written by Skip Brittenham and Brian Haberlin with art by Brian Haberlin and Geirrod Van Dyke.

If Avatar and The Lord of the Rings had a love child it would be named Anomaly.  The year is 2717.  Having stripped the Earth of it’s resources a handful of power companies under the banner of The Conglomerate have banded together to exploit distant planets.  The Conglomerate controls a powerful army lead by Enforcers and the best of them is Jon, at least he was the best until an accident on a planet leaves many of his men dead.  Years later he is given the opportunity to redeem himself by accompanying a group determined to try to peacefully contact another planet.  A betrayal by the Conglomerate leaves this group of humans stranded on a planet controlled by dangerous mutants and it is up to Jon to figure out how to gather the free “people” of the planet together to battle the mutants.

If the story seems a little bit basic and “been there read that” it is.  The idea of the outsider coming in and leading the natives has been in used in so many books and movies by now (the latest being Avatar) that it is almost a cliché and that’s not a bad thing.  If the formula works why change it?  The story is there only to serve as the hooks to hang all of this beautiful artwork on and after 7 or 8 pages I stopped actually reading the story and just experienced it.  It was like watching a big screen epic play out in front of me and I just had to hang on for the ride.

When you buy the book you get a free UAR (Ultimate Augmented Reality) app to download.  Just point it at certain pages and the creatures pop off the pages and perform some basic animation.  Since we are on an alien world the UAR segments didn’t feel out of place but instead kind of functioned as a moving encyclopedic guide to the strange creatures on the planet.  Click on THIS LINK for a demo to get a taste of what I’m talking about.  If you don’t have the ability to use the app don’t worry as this will not affect your enjoyment one bit.

While the book might set you back $75.00 every bit of this 12 x 16.5”, 6 pound, 370 page book is worth the price you pay.  And even though it is the longest original graphic novel ever published when it ends it STILL feels like it ended too soon.  This is easily the best graphic novel of the year hands down, period, end of sentence.  If you love comics you owe it to yourself to make sure this is at the top of your Christmas list.  

Comic Reviews: Delilah Dirk & Fairy Tale Comics

Delilah Dirk & The Turkish Lieutenant

She first causes his execution and then saves his life.  To repay that debt Selim the mild-mannered Turkish Lieutenant joins firecracker Delilah Dirk on her adventures, and thus a partnership is started on page 30 and they (and the reader) are off and running at breakneck speed on an adventure that sits squarely at the crossroads of Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, Moonlighting, the Hope/Crosby Road movies, Buffy, and Robin Hood.  

In a wonderful inversion of the normal roles Delilah is the skilled thief who acquires a diamond-in-the-rough distressed damsel sidekick in the form of Erdemoglu Selim who prides himself on his ability to make great tea.  They steal treasure, are pursued, lose treasure, steal more treasure, and each comes to the conclusion by the end that the greatest treasure is the adventures themselves.  The story such as it is exists only to move along our “heroes” from one adventure set piece to the next.  While the pace may be fast author Tony Cliff still manages to sneak in enough character bits to give us fully fleshed out characters and not just cyphers.

Lately it seems to me that the big two are putting out nothing more than complex cross-connected stories you need to have read the last five years of continuity to understand.  And the violence, blood, and language would rate at least a PG-13 rating on the big screen it is nice to find a self-contained, fun book suitable for all ages.  This is a summer blockbuster of a book and I mean that in the nicest possible way.  And speaking of younger readers…..

Fairy Tale Comics

“The reason we have smaller numbers of comics readers is because we don’t have any comics for kids.“  How many times have you heard this?  Despite what you’ve been told there are comics for kids, you just have to look a little harder to find them.  And if you did find suitable titles what kind should they be to hook the little rugrats and breed a whole new crop of readers?  My suggestion would be to take a bunch of stories that should be familiar and put them in a comic format that is perfect for parents to read to their kids before bed.  And better yet let’s make it an anthology with a whole bunch of great artists such as Jaime Hernandez, David Mazzucchelli, Craig Thompson, and Emily Carroll to do the adaptations.  First:Second Comics editor Chris Duffy must have had the same thought because he did just that when he put together Fairy Tale Comics.

As a comics reader myself I realize that I have to do a lot of the work for the comics companies to help grow a new generation.  And obviously a book called Fairy Tale Comics isn’t written for someone in his late 30’s so I decided the only way to see how good it really was meant reading it to my 5 year old and over the space of a week we read one story after another.  Did he enjoy every story?  No, but he enjoyed many of them and by the time he was done he was asking me to reread some of them.  Basically what I witnessed was the beginning of a new comics reader and I can’t give a title a better endorsement than that.  If you have children find this book and buy it and share it, it really is that good.

Comic Reviews: Nowhere Man & Rebetiko

Nowhere Man: You Don’t Know Jack

Let me start by saying I love receiving books by small publishers.  Nothing makes me happier to get to see what kinds of titles are being produced outside of the mainstream.  And I really love it when someone takes an old idea and gives it a fresh spin.  Nowhere Man: You Don’t Know Jack by Jerome Walford is the story of an NYPD detective using super powers he got in a mysterious accident trying (perhaps just a little too hard) to live up to the long shadow that his father left In the police department.

What starts out as a routine case quickly spins out of control leaving Detective Jack Maguire in the middle of the biggest conspiracy of all time.  All that’s been done before in other books but what I like is that the lead character is black.  He’s not a walking stereotype but a real 3-D person with the kinds of problems that all men have and that works to the book’s favor.

The problem is how do I give an in depth review what is essentially only the first  chapter of 40 pages of a longer story?  What kind of accident gave Jack his powers?  How long has he had his powers?  What happened to his father to make him try to hard?  What is the conspiracy about that we start to learn of?

The book kind of starts with no back story and then just stops with no real ending.  I know that this is the first of at least 3 volumes and I wish that the author had waited until he had the 120 or so pages finished to release all at one time as I felt I came into a movie 5 minutes after it started and walked out after 30 and tried to write a review.  I would like to know what’s going to happen next but this is a tough book for me to recommend.

Rebetiko

First off, I want you to click on this link and listen as you read.  As I may have mentioned before, I am a student and lover of history.  Every continent in every time period has fascinating stories just waiting to be told.  Rebetiko by David Prudhomme has been referred to as his masterpiece and I wish I could agree.  I wanted to enjoy this book.  I really did but the experience felt like trying to run through a swamp.  I would slog and slog and then hit a patch where the author really nailed it and I was off and running for a little bit until I again had to wade through the next slow patch.

Rebetiko refers to a kind of bluesy, jazzy Greek folk music popular in the 1920’s and 30’s.  The book itself follow the lives of a group of musical rebels who fill their days with smoke, drink, women, settling debts, and of course the music itself and their story is told against a backdrop or a repressive military dictatorship.  A clear parallel can be made, I think between Rebetiko music being a cry from a repressed people and poor African Americans in the delta almost needing to create the blues as a way of giving voice to their hopelessness.  The irony, of course, is that repressed people are often the ones in a society with the most freedom to express themselves.

As many problems as I may have had with the story his art is never less than amazing.  Prudhomme has a painted style in this book that is very reminiscent of poster artwork of that time further grounding it in that time period.  I also was fascinated by his use of shadows.  Day or night, there are the shadows.  People are sitting in them, walking through them, or casting them on the walls behind them.  It is a subtle trick he uses that helps to convey not only the oppression that the Greek citizens lived under but also I think signifies the shadow of suspicion these artists and their music had cast on them by the ordinary citizens.

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All this comes down to if I can recommend it.  Let me say this, comics are a marriage of art and words.  If you removed the art you’d be left with a book.  Remove the words and you still have a comic.  And while the words might not be all I had hoped for the art is incredible and worth looking just for that if nothing else.