Recommendations #1

I need to read and respond to 2 graphic novels per week for my ART/DES 300 class, and it seems silly not to archive that information here for later reference. So, 7 weeks of comix:

1. 9/6 - 9/13

Truer Than True Romance
Jeanne Martinet, 2001

Martinet has taken ten of the silly romances that masquearaded as comics for girls from the late fifties through the late seventies and turned them into hilarious spoofs, leaving the artwork untouched and replacing the text with contemporary satire. Thus, the old story "In Favor of Love" becomes "My Heart Said Yes, But My Therapist Said No!" In between individual stories are parodies of advice columns and, in one case, a list of what all the ridiculous symbols that appear in romance comics (single tears, seagulls, blue faces) "really mean." Everything about this book is funny, even if you haven't read a lot of the original romance comics (which I hadn't when I was gifted the book long ago, but have now). Funnier with that background, though, and a pretty well-done critique of helpless heroines and people obsessed with relationships.

Clyde Fans, Book 1
Seth, 2004

I love this book and can't wait for the next installment. The narrative of two brothers, Abe and Simon--the first an aggressive, successful businessman and the second a sensitive intellectual who can't make a sale to save his life--is given in an extended flashback framed by the narration of a much older Abe. The story's a cliffhanger, and that's irritating since Book 2 doesn't yet exist, but Seth's blue, black, and off-white illustrations are perfect for the tale of the Clydes. Their hues recall old advertisements, as do the spare lines and stylized figures. Nice writing, too, very clear and an interesting tutorial on sales and salesmanship.

2. 9/13 - 9/20

One Hundred Demons
Lynda Barry, 2002

Very successful, in my opinion, semi-autobiographical tale (mostly) about Barry's childhood; by turns hilarious, sad, and unsettling. I really like the vibrant collages that precede each of the color-coded chapters, and I love the art. Barry uses brushes, bright color, distortion, and little-to-no shading to produce work that feels like a very artful childish scrawl. Appropriate to her flashback subject matter and a nice foil to the huge, very adult issues she occasionally raises (sexual molestation, suicide, domestic abuse, etc.) Barry has got a sense of humor and a very clear bullshit detector. Also, the back of the book is a photo tutorial on inking with big Asian brushes. Neato!

Danger Girl, the Ultimate Collection
J. Scott Campbell & Andy Hartnell, 2001

After Barry this book feels a little bit like slumming, but it shouldn't. J. Scott Campbell's crisp, expressive artwork is beautiful even if he is "mainstream." Danger Girl is a very cinematic secret-agent story/satire, and Campbell's spit-thin, booby women and chiseled-chin men are entirely appropriate. The mini-series follows five women who operate as secret agents under Deuce, their aging-but-virile supervisor. They stand opposed to a militant Neo-Nazi group that's trying to steal nice, museum-quality stuff so they can take over the world with nice stuff's magic power. Along the way the girls pick up the narcissistic Johnny, a free-agent who wants to get into the pants of Abbey, our heroine. Think Charlie's Angels meets Raiders of the Lost Ark meets James Bond. Lots of fun, this one, but not too deep.

3. 9/20 - 9/27

Maus, I & II
Art Spiegelman, 1973, 1986

My God. This is probably the most powerful graphic novel I've ever read. Spiegelman's choice to keep the whole collection black and white and liney is just right--reminds us that we are indeed dealing with history, and doesn't distract from or overwhelm the terrible, hard-line reality of the plight of the protagonists (Spiegelman's parents). At first I was thrown by the depiction of Jews as mice, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, French as frogs, and Germans as cats, but soon I hardly noticed the bestial roles and by the end of the second book I found the symbolism not only clever but necessary. The Holocaust is too viscerally horrible to view for 136 pages when "real" people are staring you in the face, first of all. I needed the distance mice and cats allowed. Also, that Spiegelman used animals meant I couldn't internalize the story as something that happened to "those two people" and leave it at that.

The framework narrative--Spiegelman's strained realtionship with his now-aged father over the course of many years--balances the books nicely. We see not only the ravages of the Holocaust, but its ripple-effects on the second generation of survivors. Sad, sad, sad book, but fabulously crafted (lots of complex, wonderful little panels) and incredibly gripping. I read all night and then chainsmoked four cigarettes. And I don't even smoke.

4. 9/27 - 10/4

Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, 1987

If you like superheroes or detectives or gritty street tales or complicated conspiracies or atomic accidents or unreliable narrators or good guys getting the girl or gosh-darn-it, just good ol' intelligent writing, Watchmen is the best of the best of the best. It's huge--at least 250 pages in standard comic book format, and each page crammed with uniformly small panels--but the story is so marvelously clever, the art so bright and the whole thing so rich with symbols and parallels and metaphor and the like that you could read it a hundred times and learn something new with each read. Gibbons clearly knows the superhero genre, but doesn't draw large-chested women and flat-stomached men--the closest thing Watchmen has to a hero is a plump guy in his late thirties or early forties who's terrified of both the violence around him and his budding affair with the almost-heroine. As to basic plot, the book presupposes a world in which superheroes (some with powers, some without) actually exist/existed, and the story's focal point is the murder of The Comedian, a troubling superhero (or anti-superhero, depending on how you look at him) and the creepy Rorschach's obsession with it. But there's a lot, lot more.

Squee's Wonderful Big, Giant Book of Unspeakable Horrors
Jhonen Vasquez, 1998

Scratchy, scribbly, nightmarish little gory drawings (there's brushwork, too) by the creator of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Invader Zim. I prefer Vasquez's Johnny comics to the Squee collection (Squee is Johnny's young neighbor, and the book bearing his name is a spin-off of that earlier 7 comic series) because I think the Johnny stories were stronger. But the art is still creepy and unpredictable, and I like the scenes of poor, good-hearted little Squee trying to maintain faith in his abusively negligent druggie parents. The "meanwhiles" are fun--short intermissions between the Squee stories, they're usually bizarre and always self-contained--but some of their lay-outs grow tedious quickly, and I don't like the computer shading at all. Johnen's pen-only panels are much more interesting, especially because of the authorial asides and teeny narrative boxes scrawled into the margins.

5. 10/4 - 10/11

Birth of a Nation
Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin & Kyle Baker, 2004

Strangely enough, most of this was written by the creator of the popular comic strip The Boondocks, but drawn by Baker, whom I've never heard of. I like the story a lot--East St. Louis, screwed by shady election day poll practices, secedes to create the country of Blackland--and the cartoony art, which I didn't like at first, grows on me. But there's no dialogue at all in any of the page panels; all text is at the bottom of the pictures, like in a television-inspired photo narrative. Odd. Odder still, the text sometimes comes straight from the characters themselves and is sometimes delivered by a third person narrator, and I find that practice very jarring. This book is sometimes funny, sometimes inspriing, and deserves at least one read. I'm not going to grab it, though, if the house is on fire and I can only take one graphic novel out with me--those "stage direction" moments really bug me.

6. 10/11 - 10/18

Blood Song
Eric Drooker, 2002

Last week I reviewed a book with no text in the panels; this novel has no text at all. The story of an Asian girl who flees with her dog to a strange city after her family is murdered by soldiers who invade their village is more than a little surreal at times. Vibrancy of color is carefully controlled; most of the book is drawn in charcoal blues and whites with black brushwork. Only the occasional "quick" image--a bird, butterfly, drop of blood or note of song--will appear in deep green or purple or red. If you're not careful, this book can blow by very fast, but it's worth slowing down to figure out why Drooker draws what and how he does. My only complaint is that the end of the novel is too predictable. Otherwise, it's a rather wise and entertaining work. I like the dog best. He looks exactly like my dog.

Amphigorey
Edward Gorey, 1972

Most of the work in this book was published elsewhere, and it's much more a gathering-together than any kind of cohesive single novel. I love Gorey's anemic hatching, though, and this book creates a nice opportunity to see some of his harder-to-find works in print. Before I read Amphigorey, I'd never seen, for example, "The Bug Book," which is the only story included that's in color. Neat. Even panels that seem innocuous have a quality, in Gorey, that leaves them teetering on the edge of really frightening. It's all the tiny black lines, that Victorian sense of ghosts and understatement and repression. Like Lewis Carroll, Gorey is a very effective manipulator of nonsense.

7. 10/18 - 10/25

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 13
ed. Chris Ware, 2004

Wow. Wow! This now-famous Chris Ware comic's issue of McSweeney's is a great sampler of lots of big names (and names that should be big) in contemporary cartooning. Lynda Barry, Jeffrey Brown, Joe Matt, Mark Newgarden, Ware himself...there were only a few artists I didn't like, only a few stories that didn't grab me. This is a really excellent book to start with if you're new to graphic novels or simply want to study a lot of different cartooning styles. Not to mention that the dust jacket is a big, beautiful poster/comic strip drawn by Ware, who is brilliant. There are even some articles, for the lit crit kids!

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid in the World
Chris Ware, 2000

A lot of Chris Ware's work feels as much like architecture as art--there's a uniform shaping, a careful squaring of the squares and rounding of the rounds--that looks like it was done with drafting equipment. I don't mean that as a criticism; it's an incredibly unique style and oddly compelling. Jimmy Corrigan is very, very depressing, though. Jimmy is a hopeless man in a hopeless world with hopeless social inequities. I loved how the story was told, the color and the structure, but I wasn't always sure exactly what was happening. Much of this confusion stemmed from the fact that though the book is full of flashbacks from as long ago as early childhood and as recently as yesterday, Jimmy wears the same clothes and looks roughly the same age in nearly every scene. And what exactly is his age? Again, unclear. He looks quite old but some of the dialogue contradicts that...weird. Weird, weird, weird. I like this book a lot. The little connect-the-tabs pages are particularly great. But it's all a big thick mindfuck sandwich.


More recommendations next week!