Y: The Last Man Vol. 8: Kimono Dragons

Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Year: 2007
Genre: Action-adventure

In this installment, the party arrives in Japan and splits up, with Yorick and 355 following Ampersand's trail to a Canadian pop star, and Dr. Mann and her new girlfriend looking for Dr. Mann's mother.

The writing is still really creative. One memorable bit was basically porn for girls: a handsome android who says "Tell me about your day" and "Would you like to hold me?"

Quicksilver

Author: Neal Stephenson
Year: 2004
Genre: Historical fiction

Stephenson claims to be a science fiction writer, but I have to disagree. Like Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver is not science fiction so much as historical fiction about scientists. Maybe he calls it science fiction because his audience is the same; SF or no, Quicksilver can unquestionably be shelved under "zany fun for geeks."

What a tangle of subplots: there's the Puritan in Restoration England, the early history of the Royal Society, 17th-century financial intrigue a la A Conspiracy of Paper, Louis XIV court intrigue that's not too far removed from Mel Brooks, and two pirate stories. Half the fun is keeping all that in your head.

I'll see if I can still remember it when I get around to reading Book Two.

The Complete Concrete

Author: Paul Chadwick
Year: 1988
Genre: Science fiction

Most American comics fall into the superhero genre, and a lot of the most thoughtful ones use that genre to make an interesting statement. Concrete falls into that second category, along with Astro City, It's a Bird, and others of my personal favorites.

The concept is the normal guy who is mysteriously granted super powers, a Silver Age cliche that recalls Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk. This time, though, our hero is not a desperate teenager but a grown man, a politician's speechwriter, and recently divorced. Also, unlike his Marvel predecessors, Concrete does not live in a world of superheroes; he is the only one of his kind. This premise leads to a more realistic consideration of the superhero in society: there are government cover-ups, scientific research, celebrity appeal. Concrete becomes a licensed character, and goes on tour with a musician who resembles Prince. Wherever he goes, he is the center of attention.

In the end, it's a poignant story of a man who is granted new opportunities at the same time that the possibility of simple human existence is taken from him. He can (and does) attempt to swim the Atlantic Ocean and climb Mount Everest, but work, romance, and family are no longer part of his life. Throughout all of his trials, though, Concrete remains a believably human character. This volume's cover image says it all: it's a portrait of Concrete, whose two fragile eyes peer out from behind a face of stone.

King Solomon's Mines

Author: H. Rider Haggard
Year: 2002 (1885)
Genre: Adventure

This is it: the grand-daddy of adventure stories. It's the story that inspired the pulps that inspired Indiana Jones; its hero is a founding member of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; it's the original source of more cliches than Citizen Kane. There's a lot of expectation built up around such a classic, and Haggard's wild ride does not disappoint. The story features a deadly desert, a long-lost brother, an ancient map, treasure from Biblical times, an evil witch, a king in exile, and an all-out civil war. It's said that Haggard completed the novel on a bet in a whirlwind six weeks of writing, and the reader's experience is similarly breathless.

For modern readers, the "classic" European view of Africa and Africans is always likely to be politically troublesome, and you might worry that King Solomon's Mines would fall on the racist spectrum somewhere between Heart of Darkness and Little Black Sambo. The introduction by Alexandra Fuller deals with just this question, and comes to the surprising conclusion that Haggard (through Quatermain), in his 19th-century way, shows great respect both for Africans as individuals and for the diversity of African culture and geography. Haggard lived in Africa for many years, and his setting is based on a real place, not just a savagely exotic "other." (Lest we get too smug in our own political correctness, Fuller contrasts Haggard's Africa with the pastiche of stereotypes in the most recent film adaptation.)

Y: The Last Man Vol. 7: Paper Dolls

Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Year: 2007
Genre: Action/Adventure

I was an avid Y reader through the sixth collection, but I put off buying #7 because I had heard a lot of disappointed reviews. Specifically, I heard complaints that nothing happened in Paper Dolls, that the story had lost its way.

Now, it's true that the plot doesn't advance a great deal in this story arc. There's a lot of backstory and a few subplots are updated, but we're no closer to any answers to the Great Central Questions. Readers who were once burned by The X-Files may now be feeling a little shy.

That said, I don't count myself among them. I felt that Paper Dolls was putting the pieces in order for an upcoming Big Event (our heroes' arrival in Japan). I have faith in Vaughan, at least for the time being, that he does know where the story is going.

Most important, I'm still enjoying the story. Vaughan, much like my other favorite comics writer of the moment, Joss Whedon, writes characters who feel like individuals. The writer/artist John Byrne once wrote that characters need to look different from one another, targeting comics where you can only distinguish them by the color of their hair or the logo on their costume. Characters in Vaughan (and Whedon) not only look different -- they talk different. That sort of writing can keep my interest through a serial's inevitable lulls.

Batman: Year One

Author: Frank Miller
Year: 1986
Genre: Mystery

This is my favorite Batman story. Unlike the frenetic, postmodern future-Batman of The Dark Knight Returns, Year One is the story of a young Bruce Wayne as he learns to be Batman. More Death Wish than Watchmen, it's simple, solid, and as spooky as a good Batman story should be.

Batman is a perfect Frank Miller hero: like Daredevil, Marv, and Martha Washington, he is a victim turned vigilante, seeking both personal redemption and social change through violence. Gotham, like Sin City or the Kingpin's New York, is corrupt from top to bottom; but, Miller tells us, one man can try to change all that with little more than his fists, his friends, and his righteous anger. Of course, the struggle is never-ending, and our hero is doomed to failure, but he will win some battles along the way and leave his city somewhat less disgustingly rotten in the end.

I read the new edition, which includes some really cool David Mazzuchelli sketchbooks as a bonus feature.

Batman: The Long Halloween

Author: Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale
Year: 1999
Genre: Mystery

I read this book years ago, and we recently acquired it, so I read it again. It's a pretty compelling mystery story with enough plot twists to keep you interested.

The thing that strikes me about Batman as a mystery story (and they are mystery stories; the character first appeared in Detective Comics) is that it lives on the fine line between fantastic and ridiculous. Batman himself seems more or less like a hard-boiled Dashiell Hammett-type, and recent versions like Loeb & Sale tend to play up the grittiness of it (see also Frank Miller's Batman: Year One). If he's such a badass, though, why does he wear a cape and pajamas? I have no problem with Catwoman in her catsuit - she reminds me a little of Diabolik, which is comparatively (i.e., next to Batman) realistic - but The Joker? Come on! And despite The Long Halloween's close and sympathetic portrait of Harvey Dent, despite how bad you feel for him when he's burned by acid, you can't help but think that his half-gray flannel, half-gangster pinstripe Two-Face suit is just tacky.

The Long Halloween brings out this contrast in stark relief because it's Batman vs. the Mafia. It literally begins in The Godfather and ends in Arkham Asylum. You could view it as the story of Gotham City's transition from "normal" mobsters to criminal "freaks" like The Riddler and Poison Ivy, but it's hard to shake the feeling that fairy tales and film noir just don't mix.

Unless, of course, you're Jasper Fforde.

Lone Wolf and Cub #1: The Assassin's Road

Author: Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima
Year: 2000
Genre: Historical fiction

Reading Understanding Comics alerted me to some of the differences between Japanese and American styles of comic-book storytelling. This, in turn, inspired me (months later) to read a little manga. I've never been into it in the past; before Lone Wolf and Cub, all I'd read was Akira and a few issues of Crying Freeman. A serious gap in my comic book literacy, I decided.

I don't remember a lot of the peculiarities of manga that Scott McCloud identified, but as I was reading this book, I did have the feeling that something not quite "normal" was going on, as if I was watching a foreign movie. The structuring of the plot never seemed quite logical to me, and the conclusions were never fully satisfying. After seven or eight episodes, though, I started to get the feel of it.

The stories themselves are pretty formulaic, which helped. Itto the assassin and his son Daigoro show up somewhere, looking innocent; it turns out that someone is involved in illicit dealings involving land ownership or feudal succession; there's a big fight in which Itto's unbeatable samurai technique and/or the unexpected involvement of Daigoro carry the day; and we finally learn that Itto was hired by someone and on the job all along.

It's an enjoyable formula, though, and the strangeness helps to keep you engaged. The book is also interesting as a piece of historical fiction. It turns out (according to the last story in the book) that certain aspects of the decline of Japanese feudalism, particularly the disappearance of the shogun's assassin and executioner clans, remain unexplained; Lone Wolf and Cub, says Koike, "is one answer to this mystery."

Desolation Jones: Made in England

Author: Warren Ellis & J. H. Williams III
Year: 2006
Genre: Mystery

Film noir, in its golden age in the '30s and '40s, was a chance for audiences to shock themselves a little. The stories were filled with dirty people doing dirty things, but in the end, the hero would always prove himself to be a moral man in an immoral world, or else be punished for his transgressions.

In this comic-book/superspy updating of The Big Sleep, Warren Ellis goes to some extremes of dirtiness and immorality in order to shock his comparatively jaded 21st-century audience. Excessive violence abounds, and the MacGuffin is a missing porno film starring Adolf Hitler. While the hero does follow his own personal code of ethics to the end, he goes to great lengths to show that he's not above killing and maiming when he considers it necessary. This makes him difficult to relate to, and the story, on balance, seems callous and cold.

The art, on the other hand, is so good that it makes the whole experience worthwhile. Williams moves easily between washed-out L.A. scenes, trippy psychedelic hallucinations, first-person torture flashbacks, and slow-mo superspy fight scenes. In one memorable sequence, high-contrast black-and-white-and-red are paired with moment-to-moment transitions to show Jones fighting dirty to beat a 300-pound gimp in a Lucha Libre mask.

Night Watch

Author: Sergei Lukyanenko
Year: 1998
Genre: Fantasy

On the question of good versus evil, most science fiction takes the line of Spider-Man: with great power comes great responsibility ... and it's not hard to figure out where that responsibility lies. Night Watch presents a different point of view. In between fast-paced magical action scenes and suspenseful vampire-stalking, its hero frets over exactly what it means to be an agent of the Light.

This question is particularly difficult in a world where Good and Evil coexist under an uneasy truce. Their Treaty allows every good action by an agent of the Light to be countered by an evil action by the Dark, so there is no real gain. Besides, helping one person could cause unintended harm to others down the line. For that reason, the forces of Light attempt to maintain the status quo while their bosses quietly engineer social revolutions in the background. Only by such drastic means, they believe, can they gain a decisive advantage over Evil. The only problem is that it's never worked before ...

Something about this combination seems characteristically Russian to me. Of course, we associate Russia with fat novels full of implacable moral obscurity; I guess Lukyanenko is like a cross between Dostoyevsky and Joss Whedon.

I can't imagine how well that comes out in the movie, though (not to mention the video game). I've heard the movie compared to The Matrix, which, for all its supposed philosophical symbolism, looked to me like just another action flick.

Battle Royale

Author:Koushun Takami
Year:1999
Genre:Thriller

It's not often I read a book that's billed as a "high-octane thriller," but when I do, I guess I usually enjoy it. This was no exception - it's a gritty, ultraviolent story of 42 junior-high classmates who are forced by a totalitarian government to fight each other to the death. It could easily have turned into a one-dimensional hack-and-slashfest, but the author decided instead to give some little bit of personality to each character. It sort of felt like being in a big public school class - some people only appear briefly and you only know them as "track and field girl," "pop idol-crazy girl," or "baseball jock." The others - the ones you spend more time with - you get to know well, especially who they have a crush on. Yes, in between machine gun rounds, jungle tracking, and survivalist techniques, these 14-year-olds are realistically boy- and girl-crazy.

While I was along for the ride, I enjoyed Battle Royale, but it didn't quite live up to my expectations in the end. For one thing, it invited comparisons to Lord of the Flies, but I remember Golding's book as having much more to say about tribalism, mysticism, and brutality, while Takami falls short. The first few deaths did seem to symbolize the vicissitudes of life under a totalitarian regime - the student killed on a whim of a government agent, the couple whose love is so perfect that they commit suicide together rather than risk being murdered apart - but in the end, the story just hammers away on the idea that people will do anything if circumstances are extreme enough. I didn't really need "Sweet Valley Death Match" to tell me that.

My other complaint was that the ending was too easy to figure out. If you take it as a given that the end of the "game" can't go as the government intended, you're only left with so many possibilities. Really, most of the suspense comes from wondering which supporting character will die next, and how.

Most of the deaths are pretty gruesome and graphic. Seems like this guy hated junior high school even more than I did.