Superspy

Matt Kindt/Top Shelf

I don’t know how many people habitually peruse the copyright page before plunging into a book, but if you do you’ll find, right above the copyright information in Superspy, the explanation: “A Note on the Book: The chapters are arranged in a nonlinear format in the order that the author intended that they be read. However, it is possible to read the chapters in the order that events actually took place by using the dossier numbers as a guide.” This is incredibly cool, and, sure enough, each chapter comes with a seven-digit number paperclipped on…

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I Killed Adolf Hitler

Jason/Fantagraphics

Jason is that rarest of birds, an artist with bona fide indie “cred” (for God’s sake, he’s even European) who also has a mainstream-friendly esthetic. His stories revolve around gunfights and zombies and love, which is pretty much what I assume primetime TV looks like nowadays. I Killed Adolf Hitler is about a contract killer who goes back in time to kill the Fuhrer, and if that’s not a zillion-dollar movie idea, I don’t know what is…

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Robot Dreams

Sara Varon/First Second

Robot Dreams appears at first to be an example of Kochalkaesque whimsy, but, fortunately, it also possesses a deep undercurrent of cynicism that saves it from being cloying. It’s the story of an anthropomorphic dog who builds a robot and then abandons him at the first opportunity. The robot dreams of his lost dog friend…

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Where’s Dennis?

Hank Ketchum/Fantagraphics

There are plenty of gag panels that garner critical acclaim, and there are plenty of comic strips with recurring characters that are similarly respected, but the combination of the two–a gag panel with recurring characters–is generally the bottom of the barrel of the comics page. This is where Family Circus, Marmaduke, and Ziggy, the three horsemen of crap, reside; the mediocrity of Heathcliff looks like quality by contrast, but that’s really damning with faint praise. I suppose it’s a problem of dissonance between medium and content: strips lend themselves to character-driven humor, while panels lend themselves to the pure gags of Arno or Addams, and trying to shoehorn characters into one panel a day is comic poison. The prime exception is Hank Ketchum’s Dennis the Menace…

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Age of Bronze #26

Eric Shanower/Image Comics

Age of Bronze, which retells the story of the Trojan War from start to finish, is shaping up to be one of the two or three best comics of the decade, but it’s also a recurring warning of one of the weaknesses of the comic book “pamphlet” form. In this issue, the penultimate installment of the “Betrayal” story arc, the Achaean envoys to Troy seek a peaceful settlement, get rebuffed, and slip away from Troy with an angry mob at their heels, after a Trojan woman secretly seduces one of the envoys…

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Miriam #1

Rich Tommaso/Alternative Comics

Standing on its own, Miriam is a nicely designed, engaging comic. But Miriam does not stand on its own. It is a look-and-feel lawsuit waiting to happen. Miriam is what you would produce if you came from a culture that had the last few issues of Eightball and no other comics. It’s not a swipe, and it’s not plagiarism; but it’s probably the most blatant comics homage since Top Notch Comics appropriated Chris Ware’s esthetic in 1998…

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Lucky #1

Gabrielle Bell/Drawn & Quarterly

Lucky #1 is a neat little comic with a unique premise. The first half of the book is a straight autobiographical account of author Gabrielle Bell’s experiences giving slideshow readings of one of her dream comics. The second half is the dream comic. It’s a little like Chester Brown’s “Helder”/”Showing ‘Helder’” from Yummy Fur #19 and 20 in reverse…

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Shitty Art Book

Nicolas Mahler/La Pastèque

An art book is not really what you want from Nicolas Mahler. You don’t want it because you know it will be shitty…

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The Annotated Pilgrim

Brian Lee O’Malley/self-published (presumably)

This is not a comic, per se, but a series of notes about Scott Pilgrim, the widely revered but chronically late Oni Press series. References explained, “how I came up with this,” what’s based on reality, etc.: trivia, essentially. Whether you want to read this or not depends on how obsessed you are with Scott Pilgrim. You’ll either be delighted or bored, and you know who you are…

Read the complete review

Age of Bronze, which retells the story of the Trojan War from start to finish, is shaping up to be one of the two or three best comics of the decade, but it’s also a recurring warning of one of the weaknesses of the comic book “pamphlet” form. In this issue, the penultimate installment of the “Betrayal” story arc, the Achaean envoys to Troy seek a peaceful settlement, get rebuffed, and slip away from Troy with an angry mob at their heels, after a Trojan woman secretly seduces one of the envoys.

This slight story is beautifully told, illustrated in Shanower’s richly-textured clean line, with some variety in style used to indicate flashbacks or, in one surprisingly artful case, a sex scene. The backgrounds are lush, the characters expressive, and the story itself, detailing the conflicting motives of representatives of both sides of the struggle, fascinating. It also may be wholly incomprehensible to any first-time reader who chooses to start with the issue.

Like many comics nowadays, Age of Bronze has none of the trappings that differentiate one issue from another: there’s no splash page at the beginning, no title of the story, no wrap up with a caption reading “end” or “to be continued.” When the issues are collected into the inevitable trade, the story will flow seamlessly, and no one will be able to tell where one issue ended and the next began (a technique pioneered by Dave Sim in Cerebus). Nevertheless, Shanower has gone to some pains to give this issue a satisfying story arc, starting it with the Achaeans parading away from Priam’s council and ending it with their parallel but rather less dignified departure from Troy. In between, Menelaus’ story of his love for Helen is told in counterpoint to Laodike’s somewhat less ethereal love for Akamas. Presumably the collected Betrayal will have its own structure for this episode to fit into, but it’s good to read a comic that makes an effort to work as a unit.

What I question, though, is how effective this effort is. Age of Bronze #26 has its own structure, sure, but is that structure visible to anyone who has not read the previous twenty-five issues? Will a new reader even know who any of these characters are?

Eric Shanower has intimated that he may stop publishing the issues of Age of Bronze altogether, and focus on graphic novels. There are many things I’d miss if this happens–Shanower’s covers are consistently beautiful, his letters page is much more prone to content than the industry average, and, best of all, every issue is prefaced by an apposite quotation culled from what must be Shanower’s encyclopedic library of ancient texts. Quotation, I’ll miss you most of all. It will also be sad to go for two or three years (at least) between publication dates, as I can only assume Shanower’s careful pace isn’t going to speed up miraculously. But, really, I can’t see why anyone but me and a handful of comic fans would want to read this story in serialization. In fact, I don’t think anyone else does.

Jason is that rarest of birds, an artist with bona fide indie “cred” (for God’s sake, he’s even European) who also has a mainstream-friendly esthetic. His stories revolve around gunfights and zombies and love, which is pretty much what I assume primetime TV looks like nowadays. I Killed Adolf Hitler is about a contract killer who goes back in time to kill the Fuhrer, and if that’s not a zillion-dollar movie idea, I don’t know what is. Against all odds, the book is great, probably Jason’s best work since his American debut Hey Wait…

The book starts in what must be a deliberately off-putting way. In the first three pages four characters are introduced, three of whom look almost exactly alike; the fourth delivers a monologue about masturbation. It’s probably not how I would have chosen to start a story, but things get much better from that point on. The unnamed protagonist is an assassin, in a world where this is apparently legal and pretty normal, and an unnamed scientist hires him to target Hitler (the only character in the book, incidentally, with a name). The scientist has, of course, invented a time machine for this purpose, and he explains, “I completed this machine fifty years ago, but it’s taken me this long to get it fully charged. If you fail, we’ll have to wait fifty years to try again.” This probably makes no sense, but what do I know about time travel? and it sets up the rules of the narrative. Of course, things go wrong, and it’s a hunt for Adolf Hitler across time. The plot is ingenious, and it would be criminal to spoil its surprises. It’s also grandly melodramatic, in a way that fulfills the promise of the campy title as characters willingly sacrifice their entire lives for a strange obsession, vengeance against a mass-murder who hasn’t even done it yet.

As is often the case with Jason’s work, events can turn unexpectedly sweet, but without sacrificing a sense of irony. The book ends with two lovers reminiscing, “That was a long time ago,” but of course it wasn’t a long time ago. It was something like a week. All that time travel, you know.

I’ve seen copies of Mjau Mjau, Jason’s Norwegian comic book, that contain radically different art, with, you know, people, but all his work translated in America so far has been in a distinctive style: his characters are all heavily stylized and iconic anthropomorphic animals. This doesn’t leave much room for facial expressions, and part of Jason’s deadpan delivery stems from the fact that his characters are hard to read. What does a dog look like when he’s lonely, or scared, or happy? It’s also hard to judge character’s ages, and, as stated previously, the characters can look a lot alike. Most of the time the art is not a problem, as the cold, distant, generic look of the characters supports the tone of Jason’s stories; and if there are times it’s just plain confusing, this may be a tradeoff we just have to endure. Because, despite these mild complaints, Jason’s art is always charming, his compositions static but never boring, like John Stanley’s. Also Jason actually draws all his panels, even though it would be very easy for anyone with such an iconic style to photocopy the art, a commitment I, for one, appreciate.

And the similarity in appearance of the characters gives Jason the opportunity for some dry humor, as Hitler disguises himself by the simple expedient of shaving his mustache. “Is that him?” a woman asks as she walks the streets, searching for Hitler. “Is that him? Is that him?”

My one big complaint with the book is that it’s 48 pages long, the size of a $3.99 annual, and it costs $12.95. Sure the paper is nice, and the cardstock cover has cute little endflaps, but that’s still more expensive than going out and photocopying the entire book. I realize that Fantagraphics is mimicking the albums these comics are published as originally, but “that’s the way they do it in Europe” is never a good excuse in my book. I would very much like to see Fantagraphics collect five or six of these short comics and publish them as an omnibus, something with a page count that’s not just embarrassing.

This is not a comic, per se, but a series of notes about Scott Pilgrim, the widely revered but chronically late Oni Press series. References explained, “how I came up with this,” what’s based on reality, etc.: trivia, essentially. Whether you want to read this or not depends on how obsessed you are with Scott Pilgrim. You’ll either be delighted or bored, and you know who you are. Attempting to summarize the contents would be futile: suffice it to say that there are a lot more video game references hidden in Pilgrim‘s pages that I ever would have caught.

What I would like to single out for praise is the format: a deliberately difficult to obtain mini-comic released a generous duration after the book. There’s a lot of temptation to annotate one’s own work: it’s fun and easy, after all. Most web comic reprints seem to come with a little sidebar explaining the joke it’s next to, or just chatting amiably about it, and the vice is not restricted to web comics: Terry Moore’s Paradise, Too and Marvel’s moronically misnamed “director’s cut” editions are two other examples. These are comics that come with their own criticism.

I have nothing against criticism (I am, after all, a critic), but the blurring of text and criticism is, I think, misguided. After you read a text you should have some time to mull it over before having someone stride into the room cocksure and explain the thing to you. The fact that the critic is the author himself gives the criticism the appearance of added weight; is this explanation part of the piece itself, like Alan Moore’s notes to From Hell? or is it an afterthought, like a DVD director’s commentary?

Umberto Eco once wrote that a title should muddle a reader’s thinking, not regiment it, and this stricture should apply, I think, to all paratext. It’s no good starting a book with an introduction that tells you what the book will be about, and ending it with notes that tell you what the book was about. With that much bread in the sandwich, there’s no room for the meat.

Perhaps it’s best if an author does not comment on a book for ten or twenty years. If Alan Moore wanted to annotate Watchmen now (fat chance), I cannot begrudge him that, any more than I can begrudge Chester Brown his recent annotation to Ed the Happy Clown. But if the distancing effect of time is too much to ask for, at least give us the distancing effect of distance: separate the notes from the text, clearly label them as different animals. Criticism should be difficult to obtain, necessitating poring over the heavy volumes of the Contemporary Literary Criticism series, or better yet digging through musty bound journals in the forgotten rooms of the library; the time spent looking for it forces the reader to ruminate on the actual text, before having his reading compromised by another’s. Hats off to Brian Lee O’Malley for making The Annotated Pilgrim as distant from the text and hard to find as criticism ought to be.

Of course, in a couple of weeks it will be scanned and up on the internet, but that’s nobody’s fault but our own.

An art book is not really what you want from Nicolas Mahler. You don’t want it because you know it will be shitty.

Mahler is one of my favorite European cartoonists, but his deliberately artless, subdoodle drawing style is hardly something to seek esthetic value in. In most of his work, the art is purely functional, carrying a narrative but attempting nothing else except maybe to be unpretentious or possibly charming. What I’m trying to say is that Mahler doesn’t draw very well.

But Shitty Art Book is not really an art book, in the sense that it showcases art. It’s a strange little book, featuring disconnected pictures of an unnamed schlub character with dryly sardonic text, in English and French. The text is positioned like a caption in a gag comic, but there is no gag; rather the text is somewhere between straight narrative and a nonsequitor: “His only hobby was not knowing the difference between right and wrong,” reads one typical example. Other text may inform us that the protagonist shops, gets dizzy, or loses his shopping bag. The overall effect is as bleak and pathetic as a Chris Ware “Tales of Tomorrow” page, but without the contrast between the possibility and actuality. Mahler’s character is just statically pathetic.

For there is no story here. Most of the pages and text could be shuffled around in any order. And most of the pictures add nothing to the text. The caption “There were things bigger than him. A lot bigger. Those things were huge” is wry, and fairly amusing, but it is scarcely made more amusing by an accompanying picture of a poorly drawn man gazing at a distant, poorly drawn building.

The resulting book is a curiosity. It’s certainly interesting, but it’s also 100 words of text with bad drawings. You probably won’t regret reading it, but you may well regret buying it.

Shitty Art Book does have one real joke, in the ostensible paratext before the first page: the claim that the book is a signed and numbered limited edition of 1000, and this copy is number one. It also says there: “This shitty book is art.”

Lucky #1 is a neat little comic with a unique premise. The first half of the book is a straight autobiographical account of author Gabrielle Bell’s experiences giving slideshow readings of one of her dream comics. The second half is the dream comic. It’s a little like Chester Brown’s “Helder”/”Showing ‘Helder’” from Yummy Fur #19 and 20 in reverse.

Bell’s art is economical and, especially in the first half of the book (by necessity the more recently completed half) enhanced by the skillful use of spotted blacks. The fun of the autobiographical segment comes in part from Bell’s nagging insecurity and her despairing internal monologue. This is ground well-trod by dozens of autobio comics, but it’s well done here. And Bell has an added hook: she keeps giving tantalizing hints about the story she is performing; the comic is essentially a mystery, the mystery being just what it is she’s talking about. In any journal-type comic there are innumerable mysteries, as characters known to the narrator/artist appear and disappear without explanation, and this gives every impression of being just another one. But then the second half of the comic comes along, and there’s the solution. The solution turns out to be a strange narrative that does not make much more sense than its fragments did, but it’s a fun surreal ride.

Neither half of Lucky #1 represents Bell’s best work–her one-pagers in MOME may constitute that–but they manage to support each other pleasantly, and stand up better together than either would alone.

Standing on its own, Miriam is a nicely designed, engaging comic. But Miriam does not stand on its own. It is a look-and-feel lawsuit waiting to happen. Miriam is what you would produce if you came from a culture that had the last few issues of Eightball and no other comics. It’s not a swipe, and it’s not plagiarism; but it’s probably the most blatant comics homage since Top Notch Comics appropriated Chris Ware’s esthetic in 1998.

The comic features vignettes from the life of Miriam, who is kind of like Enid-light, focusing on her relationship with friend and occasional crush Peter. Peter is an aspiring filmmaker and Miriam is an aspiring cartoonist, which sounds terribly cliched (and also terribly Clowsian) but it never really intrudes. The main stories are from college, high school, and “age seven,” presented thus in reverse chronological order, and are light on plot and heavy on the observation of minutiae. Perhaps the best of the pieces is the inside front cover. The title panel proclaims, “Miriam and Her Pal, Peter in ‘Who’s the Bigger Dork?’” A small caption in the final panel reads, “Answer: Miriam.” This small callback to the title gives the page a unity that makes what is otherwise a very slight account of choosing Halloween costumes into an actual story.

Like a later Clowes piece, Miriam‘s individual stories gain by their interconnectedness. The characters’ relationships become clearer, sure, but the book also hints towards a thematic unity. In the first story (for example) Miriam and Peter watch Russ Meyer’s cat-fight classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!; in the second, two girls duke it out for a full page in a cafeteria.

These movies of Peter’s may be Tommaso’s veiled acknowledgment of his inspiration in Eightball. The screenplay of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is the source for the title of Clowes’s graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. And when Peter watches Polanski’s Knife in the Water, Tommaso redraws it to look like the cover of Eightball #15.

In one story, a Space 1999 Colorforms set is consistently and mysteriously obscured; it’s in many panels, but it is always drawn as a blank space. Since it is ostensibly these Colorforms that young Peter and Miriam are engrossed in, the effect is strange, and a little unsettling. Is it to draw attention away from the toys and back to the protagonists? Is it to enable the reader to fill in the blank space with a picture more salubrious to his own childhood experiences? Or did Tommaso just get bored or lazy and not draw it? (For that matter, what happened to the hardwood floor in this scene, it disappears too?) What Miriam‘s relationship with Eightball is, whether it’s some arcane act of critical commentary, whether Tommaso is just a rabid fan–this remains similarly mysterious.

There are plenty of gag panels that garner critical acclaim, and there are plenty of comic strips with recurring characters that are similarly respected, but the combination of the two–a gag panel with recurring characters–is generally the bottom of the barrel of the comics page. This is where Family Circus, Marmaduke, and Ziggy, the three horsemen of crap, reside; the mediocrity of Heathcliff looks like quality by contrast, but that’s really damning with faint praise. I suppose it’s a problem of dissonance between medium and content: strips lend themselves to character-driven humor, while panels lend themselves to the pure gags of Arno or Addams, and trying to shoehorn characters into one panel a day is comic poison.

The prime exception is Hank Ketchum’s Dennis the Menace, a thoroughly character-based gag panel that may stink nowadays (“Dennis has certainly left meancehood behind long ago,” the Comics Curmudgeon has observed) but was once a beautifully drawn and often very funny paean to or condemnation of the savage days of childhood, depending on how old you were when you read it. It should probably come as no surprise that Ketchum did not invent Dennis ab nihilo and start drawing perfect little panels from day one; he was a prolific gag cartoonist for magazines before Dennis ever appeared on paper, and Where’s Dennis? collects what I take to be a sampling of his output.

There are plenty of bratty kids here, but there’s also a thug in a pawn shop explaining to the dubious proprietor: “‘Honey,’ I says, ‘I know it’s gonna break yer heart fa’ me to hock yer opera glasses and mink coat, but I ain’t got no choice.’” it’s a good gag, and something that could never make it into Dennis; and there are plenty of good gags here. Ketchum’s art, always a high point of the Dennis panel, is showcased here with more variety that we’re used to seeing. Ketchum was a master of a particular ‘fifties style (Dennis’s father’s design is derived from it part), but he could also do ink-washed New Yorker-style cartoons as well as wonderful simple sketches with exaggerated facial expressions. The changes in art style could be due to the venue and could be due to the passage of time. I say could be, because there’s no way to know. The book gives no information where anything is from, or when. For someone trying to acquire a survey-level understanding of Ketchum’s career this is fatal, but even the casual reader will encounter trouble, as some cartoons don’t make much sense when removed from context. There’s a picture of Eisenhower getting ice cubes dropped down the back of his shirt, which I guess is kind of amusing, but leaves one wondering why this picture was ever produced. Some of the reproductions in this book are clearly just spot illustrations, but others are ambiguous enough that I found myself searching for a gag that may ever have been there. Maybe I just don’t get it, or maybe there’s nothing to get. This lack of context–we don’t even know what years the book spans–is frustrating.

But Where’s Dennis? does sport one ingenious conceit. It presents some of Ketchum’s magazine gags side by side with the Dennis panels in which he reuses them. Ketchum was pretty thrifty about recycling material, and the comparison between the original composition, and the Dennis the Menace copy, makes for an interesting study.

Although it would have been more interesting if they’d reprinted the publication dates, too.

It’s a simple story, told without words, and suitable for children. But I’m not sure if it can rightly be called a children’s book. The characters’ behavior is simply too callous, and the relationships in the book all read like veiled metaphors for romantic entanglements; considering that this is then the love story of a dog and a robot we’re probably lucky they remain metaphors, but it does make the book feel, finally, more mature than it appears on the surface.

In a silent comic the art’s main function is utilitarian, and it works well in that regard. The style is “cute” and “charming” without really being anything more, and perhaps the color palette is too muted for its own good. Really, Varon’s most “artistic” artistic choice is her excellent use of blank white pages with single panels as transition devices. But in general here the art serves the narrative, without calling attention to itself.

There are plenty of nice touches along the way, some of which play on the fact that the animals are not fully anthropomorphized: the birds migrate, the opossums eat insects, and when someone comes along to screw with the dog’s heart it is, of course, his old enemy the cat. There aren’t that many robot dreams here, despite the title, but two of them are the high points of the book, in terms of pathos: in one the robot fantasizes that things had gone differently, and he is still friends with the dog; in the other he imagines (incorrectly) that he is about to be rescued, and that everything is now going to be all right (it isn’t). This is Chris Ware territory, although it never reaches those depths of despair; perhaps a better analogy would be Charles Schulz. There’s not quite a happy ending, or even the hope of a happy ending, but the overall tone is one of forgiveness and acceptance. And who is cynical enough to begrudge a dog and a robot that?

“A Note on the Book: The chapters are arranged in a nonlinear format in the order that the author intended that they be read. However, it is possible to read the chapters in the order that events actually took place by using the dossier numbers as a guide.”

This is incredibly cool, and, sure enough, each chapter comes with a seven-digit number paperclipped on. The last four digits indicate the year, 1944; the first three reveal the chronological sequence of events. Much of this sequence could probably have been pieced together from the internal evidence, and I’m not even sure if the sequence as given is correct–my own chronology as I have it worked out places #0281944 much earlier than in twenty-eighth place–but the constant checking at the perhaps unreliable dossier numbers as each chapter opens is a nice mimesis of the actions of a spy, eyes always darting around, always looking for clues, always doubting what he sees.

This clever method of drawing the reader into the espionage world is typical of Superspy an ambitious book that usually, if not always, succeeds in its goals. It follows the adventures of a dozen or so espionage agents in the European theater of World War II, their stories and lives interweaving in a complicated tangle of shifting loyalties and conflicting motives. Some are professional, government-trained spies, some are ordinary people unwillingly drawn into the resistance, and one is an independent agent with her own mysterious agenda. How they kill each other and why is told in thirty-seven more-or-less self-contained stories ranging in length from five to fifty pages. At their best, each story is an economical little narrative with a satisfying twist or melodramatic turn at the end, like an old Spirit eight-pager, but, just as the issues of a mainstream comics title add up to a larger picture for anyone who wishes to collect them all, Superspy‘s stories taken together produce the grand (albeit fictionalized) narrative of how espionage won World War II. Keeping the independent stories satisfying while maintaining interest in the big picture is no mean feat–after all, mainstream comics fail to do it all the time–but Superspy‘s real coup is in the sheer variety of its stories. Much like Daniel Clowes’s Ice Haven, Superspy employs several art styles and narratives modes. Some stories (but not most) are as text heavy as an illustrated prose story, some (but not most) are told in a rigid grid, some are made to look like pages torn out of a larger book, some are rotated 90 degrees off the x axis, some are all large panels, some are color and some are black and white and some are both, etc. Everywhere there are interpolated maps, documents, notebooks, codes, comic strips, children’s book pages, cigarette cards. The overall effect is of a dossier compiled out of, presumably, several other graphic novels and miscellaneous sundries, jumbled together out of order in a manila folder somewhere in Allied HQ. There’s probably no better way to tell a spy story.

All is not sunshine and apples, however. Matt Kindt’s art is heavy on the artsy, which would be fine if it weren’t illustrating a potboiler of a story. Characters, especially the women, have a tendency to look the same, and even action sequences can be not so much ambiguous as murky. Did that briefcase explode? Did that man get stabbed? It’s like Bill Sienkewicz’s art on New Mutants: I might think it was beautiful if I knew what was going on.

He also starts photocopying, or perhaps I should say starts blatantly photocopying, in the book’s closing chapters. Although I can understand that Kindt’s drawing hand might have grown tired by that point, it’s frustrating reading through 300 pages of artistic integrity only to have the characters reduced to clip art. And sometimes the art just fails. When the camera pulls away from a Russian soldier and reveals that the landscape surrounding him is in the shape of a snowflake, it’s a lot like the final pages of Watchmen #9, but without Dave Gibbons’ draftsmanship to make it plausible. This is a tough trick to pull off, and Kindt is just not yet up to it.

Kindt’s real weakness is lettering. His hand lettering is just kind of bad, a little sloppy and rushed, but, what’s worse, he has a tendency of importing a vintage pulpy-looking font for background narration. Computer lettering doesn’t look good even when it’s in Comic Sans and trying to mimic hand-drawn letters; having a full-blown serif type face intruding on hand-drawn panels is just plain ugly.

But there’s a general rule of comics criticism that when you’re reduced to complaining about lettering, it’s probably a pretty minor complaint. There’s plenty of great comics in Superspy. When a dancer uses her movements to send a code, Kindt depicts her bending and contorting into the actual letters (H E L P M E…) that spell her message, an effective bit of surrealism. At one point, as an particularly thorough assassin destroys documents on her history, the book’s page becomes obscured by a huge burn mark, effacing the rest of the story, as though the assassin were attempting to wipe all traces of her passage from Superspy itself.

Superspy goes to some pains to indicate that its narrative deglamorizes the life of a spy, and certainly there is no room for James Bond in a two-grand tuxedo here. But this is a trick, and the spies in Superspy are indeed glamorized, even if it’s a glamour akin to nostalgie de la boue. Instead of Aston Martins and Emma Peel, here the rituals of torture and anal smuggling are fetishized. The world of Superspy, filled as it is with small melodramas, master assassins on vendettas, and last-breath confessions, cannot possibly bear much resemblance to actual espionage work, but in the end it doesn’t matter much. Superspy isn’t persuasive, but it is seductive, and that’s all we can really ask fiction to be.

There are many ways Big Plans is no better than the autobiographical mini comic your hipster roommate used to crank out. Parts of it are embarrassingly slight. Boo hoo, the author went to a comic store with no Fantagraphics books. If he couldn’t draw, he’d have to go home and blog about it.

But Big Plans has two advantages over most autobio minis. One is a thirty-page story in which some interesting things happen. The autobiographical stand-in and his girlfriend encounter suspicious types at an airport, and decide to leave the flight rather than risk a terrorist attack. This isn’t a thriller, of course, but what we get to see–escalating fear, the giddy feeling of triumph once a decision is made–strikes true, as does the amusing epilogue.

The other, and perhaps more important, advantage, is a design element that makes the comic fun to read even when the story flags. The design rests on a simple innovation: Steinke’s gutters are enormous, leaving each page’s six tiny panels floating in a patriarchal cross of negative space. Steinke didn’t invent the floating panels technique–Chester Brown may have, but I’ve hardly researched the topic–but he uses it well. The tiny panels leave room for only simple, pleasantly iconic drawings, more often than not just a head and a line of dialog. There’s rarely any room for a background, but Steinke makes careful use of blacks to keep the pages visually appealing.

A side note: I will bet a shiny new nickel that in the actual incident the story is based on the two suspicious characters were Arabs, and Steinke changed them to an indeterminate ethnicity to preserve his liberal credentials.

It’s probably impossible to review any single issue of Love and Rockets dispassionately or even fairly. The weight of twenty-five years’ worth of Love and Rockets comics lends every new issue a weight and depth it cannot produce on its own. The extended continuity is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes oppressive, but it makes for a unique reading experience. For a story running this long, in which every issue counts and there are no retcons or reboots, you can look to Cerebus or the first hundred issues of Fantastic Four, and there’s not a lot else.

Jaime’s lead story this issue was originally serialized in The New York Times Magazine in 2006 as “La Maggie La Loca,” and as such is clearly intended for a mass (read: uninitiated) audience, unfamiliar with Hoppers and unaware why Maggie might be a Loca at all. Maggie narrates her strange trip to Rena Titana’s island home, where the aging wrestling star has become a crazed recluse; there Maggie struggles with boredom, and occasionally with crime and the sea, but mostly with her feelings for a woman who is both a legend and a nutcase. The story works perfectly fine with no prior knowledge of the characters, but fans get the added bonus of the return of two long-gone characters: not only Rena, but also Tse Tse (when was her last appearance?). Serialized every Sunday, it must have been a blast, and presented all at once it’s a great, tight little story, utterly unlike anything else in comics, and also unlike anything we’ve seen in Love and Rockets before. It’s no mean feat to produce a story that feels just right for the series without repeating yourself at all.

A word must be put in about the art, because Jaime Hernandez–I’m sorry, Wally Wood, I’m sorry Gil Kane, but Jaime Hernandez is the best artist in the history of comics. His work clearly takes a lot of time–he’s not exactly a fast artist–but it sure looks effortless. Every stroke of his pen is the proverbial naked kiss; no line is ever out of place or superfluous. The panels are all carefully composed to be miniature works of art themselves, while also flowing smoothly from one to the next (a difficult balancing act, as Hal Foster and Mouse Guard proved by their failures). And, apropos of this issue, while black and white may show off Jaime’s clean line to better effect, this story was clearly created with color in mind, and its coloring, the contrasting night and day palettes, is beautifully done.

“La Maggie La Loca” was composed as a half page for the Times Magazine, so Jaime fills the rest of the page with a great Li’l Maggie story; this works wonderfully from a design standpoint, splitting each page between a color and a black and white story drawn in radically different styles. It’s also clever because it forces the reader to experience “La Maggie La Loca” as something approaching a the serial it was originally intended to be: instead of moving right on to the next page, the reader has to pause at each cliff hanger while absorbing the Li’l Maggie strip below before returning to the main feature.

Gilbert’s contribution to the issue, as has sadly been the case for a while now, I can recommend less wholeheartedly. Gilbert used to be regarded as the better writer of the brothers (creating a comfortable art/story division), but something that had been brewing for a while finally bubbled over during the second half of his New Love mini series (which had started out so beautifully): the focus became less on character or even weirdness (Gilbert’s strengths) and more on sexual adventurism. Perhaps this is just what happens naturally when you import characters from your pornographic comic (Birdland) into your “regular” comic; in any event, Gilbert’s L&R has, for a while now, begun to take on the decadence and the seedy feel of pornography. This is all well and good at first, but it does grow wearying. The characters look tired now, as though they want to stop acquiring ex-husbands and sexual partners and just settle down for a while. There are intimations that after this issue Gilbert is done with Luba’s sisters and their supporting cast, and for their sake, if nothing else, I hope it’s true.

(Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to see Venus, the little girl from Measles, get sodomized by two dwarves in bondage gear while giving a fellatio to a dog, which is pretty much guaranteed to happen if the series goes on much longer.)

This is not to say that Gilbert’s work in this issue is bad–it’s still head and shoulders above most other cartoonists. The fragmented storytelling technique he pushed to its furthest extent in “Love and Rockets X” is still in play here, and he’s still, formally, a master at it. Characters appear and disappear dropping impressionist hints at what goes on in their lives in a way that artfully lets his tell several stories at once. It’s just that I remember when Gilbert was so much better (of course, I also remember when he was worse, viz. Love and Rockets vol. 1 #1-2).

Incidentally anyone who doesn’t already own all the issues of Love and Rockets should go pick up the Maggie the Mechanic and Heartbreak Soup softcovers. They’re the best introductions to a series you’ll regret not being introduced to.

Everything bad that you’d care to say about Angry Youth Comics is true. It’s repellant, racist, juvenile, mindless, repetitive, and pornographic, and I can completely understand why someone might absolutely hate it. I love it. Angry Youth Comics is living proof that a bad joke repeated often enough becomes funny, and a bad joke pushed far enough is good. Neither enough nor too much is enough. You wouldn’t laugh at a retarded person, and you wouldn’t laugh at Hitler, but what about a character named Retarded Hitler? If Sam Henderson is a little too intellectual for you, if Tijuana bibles aren’t quite scatological enough, if Doofus is too well drawn for your taste, you’ve got a friend in Johnny Ryan.

One thing it’s easy to forget is how skilled a satirist Ryan is. When he has a character say, “This vagina growing on my back itches,” that’s as good a summary of Charles Burns’s oeuvre as any. Many of his jokes are, in addition to being a kind of parody of the act of joking itself , something approaching a social critique. When Loady McGee says, “Seeing a guy without a kid on his dick makes me want to vomit,” it’s not just funny because pederasty is funny and I’m a terrible person. It’s also funny because Loady’s self-righteousness and extreme disgust over someone’s failure to embrace the latest fad (which happens, in this comic, to be pederasty) makes him a recognizable “type,” and sodomizing children merely points to the ludicrousness of trendsters.

XXX Scumbag Party collects issues 6-10 of Angry Youth Comics, the period when Ryan comes into his own, and, perhaps not incidentally the period when he switched from short pieces to long form, free flowing, surreal stories. If the quote, “A UFO? Oh boy I’ll get the anal lube!” makes you laugh, maybe Johnny Ryan is for you. If it doesn’t, maybe (as Blecky Yuckarella says is issue ten) you’re just too stupid to realize that the baby boner was a symbol of America’s creative zeitgeist.

Issue #13, also released last month, is pretty much the same thing, but with more blasphemy and a photo cover (!).

Look, this is a comics review column, not a book review column, so I’m only going to mention in passing Douglas Wolk’s new book of comics criticism, Reading Comics. It’s divided into two sections: in the first (“Theory and History”) he says everything I’ve always wanted to say about comics but never quite managed to get out right. In the second (“Reviews and Commentary”) he praises comics I like. What a great idea for a book!

The only exception I would take is that he devotes an entire chapter to Grant Morrison, while I would have dismissed him as “the poor man’s Alan Moore” and moved on.

R. Fiore’s long-promised collection of columns has yet to appear and Daniel K. Raeburn goes bankrupt when he tries to publish something, so Wolk as far as I’m concerned is the reigning king of comics criticism. His book may not stake out any bold new theoretical ground or propose any sweeping new theoretical concepts, but he approaches comics intelligently and thoughtfully, and, in this the Wizard age of comics, that just may be radical enough.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the only thing worse than hearing one of your friends brag about his acid trips is hearing two of your friends brag about their adorable baby. Similarly, the only kind of autobiographical comic I dread reading more than the teenage drug fiend story is the “let’s have a baby” story. The hipster and the bourgeoisie are the twin horns of lame, and these two emblematic narratives are like their spoor, left behind when they pass.

So Peter Kuper’s Stop Forgetting to Remember focuses on drug use and babies, which is on the face of it a big problem. It also contains a “how I lost my virginity story” and a “I’ll teach that bitch who didn’t love me a lesson” story, all tied together by a chatty narrator (“Okay, okay! We get the picture! Jesus, don’t you ever shut up??” one character complains. “Can’t you see I’m trying to sleep?”); if you’re starting to get worried, you’re not the only one.

(Of course Stop Forgetting to Remember isn’t technically autobiographical; the protagonist is named Walter Kurtz (a nod to both Howard Kurtzman and Jacob “Jack Kirby” Kurtzberg as well as Walk Kelly), and Seth Tobocman is named Saul, etc. There may be other minor differences that those familiar with the minutiae of Kuper’s life can seek out, but, really, Kurtz is an authorial stand-in if there ever was one.)

Adding to the problem is the fact that Kuper has incorporated a couple of older pieces into the text. When Pynchon did this in V. , he rewrote the interpolated story so its style would match the main narrative, but revising comics is really hard and time-consuming, and so the old material tends to stick out like a sore thumb, especially since it’s not always well-integrated. The Richie Bush parody from World War Three Illustrated seems particularly shoehorned in, but then even a lot of the new material is awkwardly shoehorned in.

If all of this makes Stop Forgetting to Remember sound terrible–well, it’s better than it sounds. Kuper’s storytelling is strong, he’s just telling the wrong stories. And his art, although uneven, is at its best very striking; his distinctive woodcut style is abstracted enough that it lets Kuper slip in surreal or cartoony moments when it suits his purpose. When running like a scared rabbit, a character turns into a rabbit. When dizzy and confused, a character turns into a dreidel. This sounds rather simplistic and overly literal, but its execution is charming.

In the end, the real problem with Stop Forgetting to Remember (in addition to all the ones enumerated above) is, I think, one of distance. Kuper’s neither removed enough from his experiences that he can look back dispassionately and analyze it (as, say, Chester Brown does) nor close enough to them to make us feel that the emotions are happening now and the trauma is our own (as, say, Lynda Barry does). The in between stage just feels kind of…awkward. The best part of the collection is probably the account of Kurtz’s experiment with bisexuality, if only because straight men having gay sex is still taboo enough to require some courage to write about, which creates an interesting dynamic the rest of the book lacks. The fact that this portion of the book ends with a horrible girlfriend crawling like a worm, even turning into a little cartoon worm as she grovels over the phone–well, this is typical of the maturity level of the book.

So apparently girls can read comics. If this sentence absolutely blows your mind, or if it fills you with such delight that you are now doubled over with mirth, you will probably want to read this anthology. Anyone else can skim.

Because comic after comic here, feature tedious gender stereotypes trotted out to be either celebrated (boys like x) or “subverted” (girls can like x, too!). The didacticism involved is tedious, but much worse is the way that some of these cartoonists are so amazed at their own fandom. “That’s right, gang. I’m the comic geek, not my boyfriend.” This is a direct quote. They sound like Harlan Ellison, shaking his head at the craziness that even someone with his refined taste could like (gasp! choke!) comic books.

This is not to say the entire anthology can be dismissed. Any book with Debbie Huey and Raina Telgemeier in it is going to be at least worth a look (even if Telgemeier just provides the frontispiece), and with something like fifty different comics stories you’re bound to find some favorites (mine are Julia Wertz’s and Anneke van Steijn’s contributions). Just be prepared to be annoyed on the way to finding them.

Friends of Lulu, the publisher of this anthology, is an organization that has its heart in the right place, but has perhaps been misguided from the start. In the end, grass-roots activism didn’t get girls to read comics, manga did. All over America, at this very moment, female would-be comics artists are doodling in their sketchbooks and dreaming about being the next Rumiko Takahashi or Masami Tsuda; and they’re not thinking about how strange and special it is that they read comics.

(Confidential to Burton & Cummins: R5-D4 is a Star Wars droid; R4-D4 is some kind of youtube video.)

Unlike some of the other children’s comics that are currently being reprinted–notably Carl Barks’s Duck stories and John Staley and Irving Trip’s Little Lulu–the Casper comics are not good in any traditional sense. They are perfectly serviceable children’s stories, but there’s no reason for a grown-up to read them. Comparing Lulu to Casper is like comparing Edward Lear to Stan and Jan Berenstain.

This is not to denigrate Casper’s quality as a children’s comic. The stories are fast-moving and fun, and further–what makes the series stand out–Casper consistently presents kindness as a subversive act. With authority figures and indeed all of ghost society pressuring Casper to be “bad” (a concept pretty much limited to scaring people and kind of being a general jerk), Casper stands alone like an existentialist hero and rebelliously does what he thinks is right. What he thinks is right is behaving in a saccharine and cloying fashion, singing, at one point, this paean to insipidness:

How sweet the violets smell,
How nice the birdies sing,
How good to be under nature’s spell,
How nice is everything.

Isn’t it pretty to think so? So Casper’s rebellion is somewhat sickening, but small matter. For his infernal niceness he is made an outcast from ghost society, which nevertheless keeps him around to abuse and exploit. This is heady stuff for a child! Some years later Archie’s Sabrina would mine the same territory, but here it was a fairly explicit attempt by publishers to redirect teen rebellion towards bourgeois norms. Casper’s kindness remains (to preserve the existential reading) absurd, and is always tinged with sadness, especially in the earlier stories, before word got around to the forest creatures that Casper was a friendly ghost, when Casper is literally friendless and often weeping.

But none of this actually makes the Casper stories good. Yet there is one reason why an intelligent adult might want to pick up this collection. Simply put, Casper featured some of the best art ever to grace a comics page.

Howie Post has a loopy, enegetic style he deserves to be celebrated for, but the true hero here is Warren Kremer. At a certain point in the 1950s, Kremer brought the cartoony style to a kind of apotheosis, where every line is both in and of itself an esthetic object and also a building block of an exquisitely composed and rendered drawing. The three-part story from The Friendly Ghost Casper #11 (reprinted in the Dark Horse volume) is one of the best-drawn stories I’ve ever seen. The plot is essentially a watered-down rehash of “Duck Amuck,” as a mischievous penciller messes with Casper’s world, but the cartoonist’s complex facial expressions, the expressive poses of Casper in flight, and the varied line weight between the cartoonist’s “real” world and the world of the comics page he is drawing make this a story worth savoring regardless. Usually the claim that black and white reproductions of color comics serve to showcase the artwork looks like a feeble excuse to justify a cheap printing decision, but for once the claim is true; I would hate to see the linework in this story obscured by color. Kremer is here at the height of his powers.

Or at least I assume it’s Kremer. One of the weaknesses of Dark Horse’s collection is that it fails to give any credits on any stories. While I understand that Harvey’s archives probably lack credits, surely someone could have been found to identify the artists at least. Does Harvey’s most famous artist, Ernie Colon, appear in this volume? I didn’t spot his style, but I’m no expert, and can only say maybe.

This is one of the few defects in the book (the other main one being that twice it has pages reversed), which is otherwise pretty much all any Harvey reader can want. It features an informative if workmanlike introductory essay, a generous color section, over 400 pages of stories culled from twenty-five years, and a beautifully-designed cover to boot–and it’s a rare day that I single out for praise book design not by Seth or Chris Ware. Fans of the familiar art style of “heroic realism” won’t find much to their liking, here, but anyone whose art tastes are more catholic may make one of the great esthetic discoveries of his life, and on these grounds alone I cannot recommend the book too highly.

Also, if you’re six years old and reading this column, get someone to buy you a copy.

Love and Capes is either the driest parody in the world of comics, or it totally sucks. For the life of me, I can’t tell which.

It’s billed as “the heroically super situation comedy comic book, and this is no lie: Love and Capes perfectly mimics the banality and triteness of your standard situation comedy, with superheroes thrown in. The invariable basic plot follows Crusader/Mark’s struggles to get some time away from saving the earth to spend with steady girlfriend Abby. It’s not easy: when Mark is running late, Abby asks him, on the phone, “You don’t think you’ll be able to get free in time?” “Believe me, I’m trying,” Mark replies, and only then do we see that he speaking on a cell phone while caught in the grip of an enormous Creatures on the Loose-style stone monster. The joke is pretty bland, but it is also brilliant in the way it so perfectly recreates the kind of joke a sitcom might employ. Can’t you just picture Tony Danza (say) quipping into the telephone, “I’m a little tied up right now,” and then the camera pans back to reveal that the child he is babysitting has, in fact, bound him hand and foot with a clothesline?

In issue #5, Abby has to spend time with Mark’s parents. Yipes! Mark had to brave a Christmas with Abby’s folks in issue two–is this repetition a wink at sitcom’s endless recycling of the same tired plots, or is it just a lack of imagination? This is the basic conundrum the comic presents. Is it possible to love sitcoms so much that one strives to recreate them in comic form? Is it possible to hate sitcoms so much that one devotes issue after issue to savaging them? Are jokes about the IRS, playing bridge, and how old the magazines are in the doctor’s waiting room a dry send-up of lame sitcom humor–or are they actual bad jokes?

Mark: Look, Abby, I’m sorry I was five minutes late–
Abby: Mark, look, you do important work, I understand that, Don’t you worry about it.
Mark: Thank–
Abby: –and you were ten minutes late.

This dialog is pitch perfect, but it’s not pitch perfect to reality. You can practically hear the laugh track; the captions (“Later”) replace stock footage of the Tanner house and two bars of the theme as a bridge between scenes.

If this is an ironist’s savaging of sitcoms, it couldn’t be done better. If it’s just a sitcom, well, then, it’s just a sitcom. Heat up your TV dinner and get ready to laugh etc.

We would also like to request of you that if you wish to post a comment, please make sure the comment has some content. Not that we don’t appreciate your wellwishes, mom, but it’s starting to get embarrassing.

Love and Capes #5

Thomas F. Zahler / Maerkle Press
Shock Value: Either B+ or D

Love and Capes is either the driest parody in the world of comics, or it totally sucks. For the life of me, I can’t tell which. It’s billed as “the heroically super situation comedy comic book, and this is no lie: Love and Capes perfectly mimics the banality and triteness of your standard situation comedy, with superheroes thrown in…

Read the complete review

Casper the Friendly Ghost (Harvey Comics Classics Volume One)

Leslie Cabarga, ed. / Dark Horse
Shock Value: A

Unlike some of the other children’s comics that are currently being reprinted–notably Carl Barks’s Duck stories and John Staley and Irving Trip’s Little Lulu–the Casper comics are not good in any traditional sense. They are perfectly serviceable children’s stories, but there’s no reason for a grown-up to read them. Comparing Lulu to Casper is like comparing Edward Lear to Stan and Jan Berenstain…

Read the complete review

XXX Scumbag Party / Angry Youth Comics #13

Johnny Ryan / Fantagraphics
Shock Value: A-

Everything bad that you’d care to say about Angry Youth Comics is true. It’s repellant, racist, juvenile, mindless, repetitive, and pornographic, and I can completely understand why someone might absolutely hate it. I love it. Angry Youth Comics is living proof that a bad joke repeated often enough becomes funny, and a bad joke pushed far enough is good. Neither enough nor too much is enough. You wouldn’t laugh at a retarded person, and you wouldn’t laugh at Hitler, but what about a character named Retarded Hitler? If Sam Henderson is a little too intellectual for you, if Tijuana bibles aren’t quite scatological enough, if Doofus is too well drawn for your taste, you’ve got a friend in Johnny Ryan…

Read the complete review

The Girls’ Guide to Guys’ Stuff

various / Friends of Lulu
Shock Value: C-

So apparently girls can read comics. If this sentence absolutely blows your mind, or if it fills you with such delight that you are now doubled over with mirth, you will probably want to read this anthology. Anyone else can skim…

Read the complete review

Stop Forgetting to Remember: The Autobiography of Walter Kurtz

Peter Kuper / Crown
Shock Value: C+

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the only thing worse than hearing one of your friends brag about his acid trips is hearing two of your friends brag about their adorable baby. Similarly, the only kind of autobiographical comic I dread reading more than the teenage drug fiend story is the “let’s have a baby” story. The hipster and the bourgeoisie are the twin horns of lame, and these two emblematic narratives are like their spoor, left behind when they pass.

So Peter Kuper’s Stop Forgetting to Remember focuses on drug use and babies, which is on the face of it a big problem. It also contains a “how I lost my virginity story” and a “I’ll teach that bitch who didn’t love me a lesson” story, all tied together by a chatty narrator (“Okay, okay! We get the picture! Jesus, don’t you ever shut up??” one character complains. “Can’t you see I’m trying to sleep?”); if you’re starting to get worried, you’re not the only one…

Read the complete review

Love and Rockets vol. 2 #20

Jaime & Gilbert Hernandez / Fantagraphics
Shock Value: A-

It’s probably impossible to review any single issue of Love and Rockets dispassionately or even fairly. The weight of twenty-five years’ worth of Love and Rockets comics lends every new issue a weight and depth it cannot produce on its own. The extended continuity is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes oppressive, but it makes for a unique reading experience. For a story running this long, in which every issue counts and there are no retcons or reboots, you can look to Cerebus or the first hundred issues of Fantastic Four, and there’s not a lot else…

Read the complete review

Big Plans #1

Aron Nels Steinke / Self-Published
Shock Value: B

There are many ways Big Plans is no better than the autobiographical mini comic your hipster roommate used to crank out. Parts of it are embarrassingly slight. Boo hoo, the author went to a comic store with no Fantagraphics books. If he couldn’t draw, he’d have to go home and blog about it. But Big Plans has two advantages over most autobio minis. One is a thirty-page story in which some interesting things happen…

Read the complete review

Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean

Douglas Wolk / Da Capo Press
Shock Value: A-

Look, this is a comics review column, not a book review column, so I’m only going to mention in passing Douglas Wolk’s new book of comics criticism, Reading Comics. It’s divided into two sections: in the first (“Theory and History”) he says everything I’ve always wanted to say about comics but never quite managed to get out right. In the second (“Reviews and Commentary”) he praises comics I like. What a great idea for a book…

Read the complete review

Fox Bunny Funny

Andy Hartzell, Top Shelf

Fox Bunny Funny is the sort of book that demands to be read as allegory, although its unclear to me what the allegory might be for.

Its unnamed protagonist is a young anthropomorphic fox who wishes he were an anthropomorphic bunny. Since foxes, naturally, kill and eat bunnies this wish is problematic, and the young protagonist is bullied into being not only a bunny-killer but eventually a champion bunny killer. But the specter of his suppressed and forbidden desires still haunts him…

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Teen Boat #7

Josh Green and Dave Roman, Cryptic Press

I intentionally hate most things so that my love, when it does come, will be pure. In more concrete terms, I hate most mincomics so I can love Teen Boat.

“The ANGST of being a teen—the THRILL of being a boat!” the cover of every issue proclaims, and that just about sums it up. Young Teen Boat lives a high school melodrama somewhere between Archie and 90210, except he is also a were-boat for some reason. Teen Boat maintains a very precise and difficult tone, always playing it straight enough that it could be a real teen farce, but always going a half step too far. And then he turns into a boat.

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Stuck in the Middle

Ariel Schrag, ed., Viking Penguin

About as far from the world of Teen Boat as you can get are the teenage comics contained in Ariel Schrag’s Stuck in the Middle anthology. Schrag is already well known as the autobiographical comics wunderkind who had read too much James Joyce for her own good. She still hasn’t finished her own teen comic Likewise, long overdue, but it’s nice to see her return to comics with this enjoyable collection.

Nobody likes reviewing anthologies, which is why I’m not talking about Mome this month, so I’ll just run through this one briefly. The bad news is that the stories by Joe Matt and Daniel Clowes, both standouts, are also both reprints (from Fair Weather and Caricature, the copyright page says: they’re really from Peepshow #8 and Eightball #16, but I guess we’ll have to get used to people assuming graphic novels are comics’ default format). The good news is that the rest of the book is far stronger than is usual in the problematic world of comics anthologies.

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Black Ghost Apple Factory

Jeremy Tinder, Top Shelf

Black Ghost Apple Factory is a short collection of even shorter minicomics. With seven stories packed into 48 pages, it’s fast moving and surprisingly dense.

Tinder’s work is in some ways reminiscent of Jeffrey Brown’s “emo” stories, but he sometimes elegantly and sometimes uncomfortably straddles the line between parodying the genre and indulging it.

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The Aviary

Jamie Tanner, Adhouse

The Aviary is a comic of the absurd that gains its power by constantly appearing as though it’s about to cohere into sense, but never doing so. A man with a ape’s head walks into a burlesque house and tells one of the girls, “I am a patron of the pornographic arts. I would like to commission a masterpiece. I will pay you with love.” The woman, her knees freshly tattooed with the images of crows, is photographed with a fetish-masked pilot, the results displayed in a private art gallery. “Pay me, Heinrich,” the woman says; “I love you,” says the ape-headed man.

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Forever Nuts: Classic Screwball Strips: The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff

Bud Fisher, NBM

We are living in the golden age of comic strip reprints, which is good because the golden age of comic strips ended so long ago that there are few echoes of it still audible in our dull and shrinking funny papers. With complete serializations of Peanuts, Thimble Theatre, Krazy Kat, Dennis the Menace, Gasoline Alley, Dick Tracy, and, coming in September, Terry and the Pirates all in print, it’s easy to forget that not all comics of yesteryear are such gems that they deserve this archival treatment.

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Tales from Palomar #2

Gilbert Hernandez, Fantagraphics

Delphine #2

Richard Sala, Fantagraphics

Sammy the Mouse #1

Zak Sally, Fantagraphics

“The pamphlet market is dead,” Gary Groth decreed last year, and with some exceptions Fantagraphics has of late been trying other formats for its comics. This usually means hardcovers, but recently Fantagraphics, as part of some international conglomerate whose workings I cannot unravel, has been publishing the Ignatz Library, a series of magazine-sized comics on heavy-stock paper. Trying new formats to appeal to non-comics readers is nothing new: Love and Rockets and Raw are the obvious examples, but manga certainly owes its American success in part to its format. For this gambit to work, Fantagraphics has to persuade readers that there’s a substantial difference in the Ignatz Library, which, sadly there isn’t. The books are oversized, with sturdy covers, oversized dustjackets, and heavy-stock cream paper–they’re certainly high-end comic–but they’re also 32 pages for $7.95. This isn’t very different, but it sure is more expensive.

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