DMZ Vol. 1: On the Ground

Author: Brian Wood
Year: 2006
Genre: Graphic novel

There's a civil war going on in North America. Long Island belongs to one side, New Jersey belongs to the other, and Manhattan is the DMZ. A young reporter gets stranded there and has to find a way to survive, and hopefully send back some exclusive news.

The comic's first impact is a visceral reminder that war is real, and that modern war happens to everyday people in the place where they live. Amid the horrific vision of a bombed-out lower Manhattan, you're forced to remember that the realities of bombed-out Baghdad (and countless other places as well, but especially Baghdad) are just as close to home.

Premise aside, the book's plot and characters are interesting enough to carry you through the first few issues. Future installments will tell whether they're meant to function as your guide through the nightmare landscape of urban war, or will exist as independent entities in their own right.

Girls vol. 1: Conception

Author: Luna Brothers
Year: 2007
Genre: SF

One dark night in Pennystown (pop. 65), Ethan picks up a beautiful, naked, silent "mystery girl" on the side of the road. He takes her home, where she forces herself on him (not meeting much resistance). In the morning, she lays eggs that give birth to identical mystery girls, who then begin assaulting the women of Pennystown.

This first volume features the madness and uncertainty of the beginning of a monster movie. There are freak occurrences, violent deaths, interpersonal conflicts, and a wide supporting cast who may or may not turn out to be simple stereotypes. The series may go on to say something interesting about gender roles and relationships, or it may turn out to be a pulp story with sexy zombies.

The art is unusual, featuring digitally enhanced color separation, lighting, and depth-of-field effects. More important, the characters' visual representation supports their individual personalities, which is essential to keeping track of the dozen or so townspeople.

Town Boy

Author: Lat
Year: 1980
Genre: Memoir

In his native Malaysia, Lat is a phenomenon. A cartoonist since age 9, he's been enormously popular for the last thirty years, and was even commissioned to draw the artwork for AirAsia jets. Of course, he's practically unknown here in the United States, but First Second Press (publishers of American Born Chinese) are introducing him to American audiences by publishing two autobiographical volumes, Kampung Boy and Town Boy.

I haven't read the first volume, but that was no handicap at all. This book starts off when Lat's family moves from a village (or kampung) to the town of Ipoh, and follows the exploits of Lat and his friends through their first (age 10) and last (age 17) years of school together. They discover rock 'n' roll, cheat on the cross country race, perform in the marching band, and dream about pretty girls.

The striking thing about this kind of story is the mix of similarities and differences from what I would find familiar. While all the subplots could (and probably would) be found in an American memoir from the same generation, the setting shows some tremendous cultural differences. Malaysia is a very diverse country, and the English edition of the book includes some aspects of Malaysian English (notably the multi-purpose particle lah) as well as bits of dialogue in Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese, and what I believe is Tamil. Also, the schools are boys only, and the British-derived educational system makes some of the school scenes difficult to understand completely.

Despite the foreignness of the Malaysian setting, though, the overall feeling is of the warmth of friends and family. Lat has fond memories of childhood fun and mischief, an engaging storyteller's style, and a wicked caricaturist's sense of humor. I look forward to reading Volume 1.

Black Hole

Author: Charles Burns
Year: 2005
Genre: SF/Fantasy

In 1970s Seattle, a mysterious sexually transmitted plague turns teenagers into hideous monsters. Amid typical teenage dramas of love and independence, kids try to continue their normal lives despite the threat -- or fact -- of having caught "the bug."

This is obviously symbolic of something, but what? Does it represent the 1970s herpes outbreak and the AIDS epidemic to come? Does it mean that these former children have a hard time forming and recognizing their new adult identities? Is a loss of innocence signified by acquiring a tail or webbed fingers or a second mouth in your throat that talks when you're sleeping? Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's just another impossible situation that young people can find themselves in when they've acquired access to the adult world but don't fully understand adult responsibility.

Burns's detailed, high-contrast black-and-white art provides a feeling of surreality to the whole story.

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?"

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.

Blankets

Author: Craig Thompson
Year: 2004
Genre: Autobiographical

Everything seems bigger and more important to a teenager. A bad grade feels like a personal insult, and one bad day can make them think their life is over. As for the things that by any measure carry serious weight - consider romance, or family, or religious faith - adolescents often experience them with an intensity that makes adult life seem a pale imitation. In Blankets, Craig Thompson's art and storytelling somehow transport you back to that phase of life. He reminds us of the 17-year-old's persistent emotional rawness caused by the mere fact of living, the immediacy of the world seen through adolescent eyes.

The story focuses primarily on young Craig's first serious romance, during his senior year of high school. His relationship with Raina begins as a bible-camp flirtation, but when he stays for two weeks at her house, the time they spend together develops an almost religious importance. They offer each other an escape from the constant frustrations of teenage life: school responsibilities, lack of privacy, his family's rigid fundamentalism, her parents' impending divorce. The two are the "blankets" of the title (represented by a quilt that Raina makes for Craig, as well as the constant snowfall of the Midwestern winter); they shelter each other from the harshness of life that teenagers are often so ill-equipped to face alone.

During their two-week idyll, Raina leans on Craig and Craig literally idolizes Raina, as his love for her forces him to question his Christian faith. At first, he worries over literal-minded questions of lust and temptation, but eventually he finds a more profound spirituality, recognizing immanence in her earthly beauty. This brush with the divine is symbolized in the artwork, where a motif of radiance takes on the forms of a snowflake, a pattern in the quilt's fabric, and a halo for the deified Raina.

Their love is a small and fragile thing. After Craig returns home, their connection is quickly broken by long distance and everyday responsibilities. The next ten years of his life are told in a space of some five pages, showing that he has gotten over Raina without allowing the reader to move on as well. On the contrary, we look back with a deep nostalgia for his adolescent romance, and forward to her influence on the adult he will become: an artist, a thinking Christian with more questions than fundamentalism, a man who forms a fully adult relationship with his younger brother.

Perhaps comics, as a combination of images and words, is uniquely able to convey the unmediated emotion of adolescence, the sense of unbearable significance. Thompson makes a strong case: the experience of reading Blankets is like being surrounded by ghosts of your own teenage years. I certainly wouldn't want to return there, but I feel I have a different appreciation of it now.

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.

Borrowed Time vol. 1 & 2

Author: Neal Shaffer
Year: 2007
Genre: Mystery / Adventure

I wasn't sure whether I should post about this, because it's basically a monthly comic book published in graphic-novel format. In the end, I decided that anything with an ISBN belongs in my LibraryThing catalog, and can merit a review here.

Borrowed Time is the story of a journalist who goes to investigate the Bermuda Triangle and gets sucked into the world of lost things. I feel like this fantasy idea has been used and overused, but the only example I can recall offhand is an episode of Ren & Stimpy that otherwise bears no resemblance to Shaffer's world of bleak desperation. Through the first two issues, our hero has tried to find his place in his new world without giving up hope of returning to the old one; time will tell what happens to him.

The "regular guy walking the line between coping and denial when the world he knew is gone" storyline bears some resemblance to Y: The Last Man, but Vaughan's man-killing science-fiction plague is replaced by a wall of stubbornly unexplained mystery and obfuscation. Like any good serial writer, Shaffer will have to make monthly revelations around the edges of the mystery; the test of the series will come from whether we believe we're getting closer to its center.

Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall

Author: Bill Willingham
Year: 2006
Genre: Fantasy

I was always skeptical of Bill Willingham because I first heard of him as someone who took over Sandman characters when Neil Gaiman was done with them (for example, Thessaly and Merv Pumpkinhead). In fact, his adaptation of folktales to tell his own stories is very similar to Gaiman, and his multiple stories - multiple artists format is familiar from Sandman collections like World's End, but the stories themselves are imaginative and draw on different influences (mostly from fairy tales, while Gaiman prefers mythology).

Although I had never read Fables before, I found this book to be mostly accessible. It tells a lot of backstory of what I assume are familiar characters; when prior knowledge of the series was not required, the stories were quite enjoyable, and when it was required, I just said "Huh."

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.

Palomar: The Complete Heartbreak Soup Stories

Author:Gilbert Hernandez
Year:1996
Genre:Graphic Novel

First, I'll point out that this is the largest comic book I've ever read. It's nearly six hundred pages, about 9x12 inches, hard cover, and weighs a ton.

At first it's a confusing read. The book follows about thirty important characters in this rural Mexican town, and you have to have some idea of the relationships among all of them to make any sense out of it.

Then, in a way, things get worse. When I'm reading a comic, I expect it to be picaresque; every new story starts off in more or less the same place. After all, I don't believe Archie and Jughead ever graduated from high school. This is different, though - it takes place over about twenty years of the life of the town. So, as you progress, you have to remember who has a crush on whom, who once slept with whom, who went to the big city, who went to jail, who moved to the United States, and why.

On top of this, there are some flat-out surreal episodes, especially the one where the town is infested with monkeys and some workers from a nearby archeological dig have to help kill them, and one of the workers turns out to be a serial killer, and one local kid is an artist who witnesses the killing but doesn't tell anyone. You have a feeling sometimes that these episodes are somehow symbolic, but they're also real in the lives of the characters, and they look back on them in future episodes.

Initially, it took me a while to get into the soap-opera (telenovela?) storyline, but eventually the characters' lives go through so many twists and turns that you get caught up in it. It's like one of the "big novels" of classic literature, where you really need to see the entire life of the family before it makes any sense at all. In fact, one of the blurbs on the jacket compared Hernandez to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton talks about recognizing people you know in the characters in great literature. Hernandez is one of those kind of writers; as you follow the characters over their whole lives, they become less like soap-opera types (the femme fatale, the snob musician, the strong earth mother) and more like real people.

Runaways 1: Pride & Joy

Author:Brian K. Vaughan
Year:2003
Genre:Graphic novel

Six kids find out their parents are supervillains. Then they learn about their own super powers that their parents had kept hidden from them. In the end (to nobody's surprise) they decide to team up and fight crime.

The metaphor is obvious, but superhero comics have always dealt in obvious metaphors. (See The Incredible Hulk.) Vaughan's dialogue is snappy, if not Whedonesque, and the more or less believable teenage characters should keep future installments from becoming a typical X-Men soap opera. All in all, it was a pretty interesting spin on the supergroup team-up story. Plus, Chapter 5 includes a kiss between the two kids with the coolest hair in all of comics.