Kai-Ming Cha caused quite a stir when she named Jeffrey Brown’s The Incredible Change-Bots one of the ten best manga of 2007, with bloggers questioning her decision to list it alongside more obvious choices such as Suppli, MW, and Tekkon Kinkreet. Regardless of whether Change-Bots qualifies as “manga,” her list spurred me to finally pick up a copy and read it—something I’d been meaning to do for months. And while I wouldn’t include it on any of my “best of 2007” lists, I did find it entertaining.

As the title suggests, The Incredible Change-Bots is an affectionate parody of The Transformers in all its incarnations: Saturday morning cartoon, plastic action figure, Hollywood blockbuster. On the distant planet of Electronocybercircuitron, two groups of sentient machines compete for control of the planet’s dwindling energy resources: the peaceful Awesomebots and the war-like Fantasticons. (As in the original Transformers series, both the Awesomebots and the Fantasticons can assume the form of vehicles and household appliances from big rigs and cement trucks to microwave ovens and calculators.) Electronocybercircuitron descends into civil war, forcing both groups of robots to flee the devastation. After fighting erupts on their escape vessel, the Awesomebots and Fantasticons crash land on Earth, where two groups go their separate ways to regroup for another battle.

Brown devotes most of his energy to sending up popcorn movie clichés, from hero catch-phrases (“Time to take out the trash!”) to speeches aimed at boosting the esteem of the least impressive Awesomebot. Sometimes the jokes feel stale or obvious, as is suggested by this exchange between Balls, a Change-Bot who transforms into a golf cart, and Jimmy, a human teenager who befriends him:

Jimmy: “I bet your friends will be really happy to see you, Balls.”
Balls: “I don’t know about that. I’m so small, they think I’m not very useful.”
Jimmy: “But what if there was, like, a tiny tunnel or something, and they needed you to race through it?”
Balls: “Gosh, Jimmy Junior, I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

Most of the cinema conventions that Brown mocks have been parodied ad nauseam in movies like Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Spaceballs, thus diluting their comedic impact. But just as the Naked Gun coasted through dopey moments on the strength of Leslie Nielsen’s deadpan delivery, Change-Bots squeaks by on the strength of Brown’s artwork and lettering, which has the same slightly crude, child-like quality I associate with Roz Chast’s New Yorker cartoons.

The Incredible Change-Bots is funnier when it takes aim at more topical targets. In the opening pages of the book, for example, there’s a sly poke at American politics as Brown explains what prompted the conflict back on the Change-Bots’ homeworld: the democratic “machinery” comes to a screeching halt when the Fantasticons rig an election. Brown also wrings laughs out of our current energy crisis, poking fun at tree-huggers and environmental pillagers alike. The Awesomebots, for example, embrace renewal resources, building “solar-turbine power converters” in the Amazon rainforest, while the Fantasticons buy nuclear reactors from the US military.

Considering how quickly you’ll finish this pocket-sized book, its $15.00 price tag seems a little steep, though the high quality paper stock and French flaps guarantee that The Incredible Change-Bots will make a more lasting addition to your library than most trade paperbacks. The Incredible Change-Bots is best appreciated as quick, portable way to get your political satire fix while The Daily Show is on hiatus. And if you can’t get enough of Brown’s goofy jokes, don’t worry: in true action-movie fashion, he leaves the door open for a sequel.

What can we say? Here at Indie Comics Roundup there is nothing we love as much as hate, but sometimes, no matter how hard you seek that which is hatable, all you find are good comics. We really tried, we even read an Image book. Perhaps later we can find something from Avatar to make our bile rise…

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…

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by 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. 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.

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 (it’s always very clear, in contrast, when Brown is being parodic). In “Jeremy Tinder is Secretly in Love with You,” an apparently autobiographical depiction of Tinder addresses the reader with an emotional and heartfelt confession of love. The evident earnestness of his words is artfully undercut by the fact that his confession is, by its very nature, an impersonal statement addressed to whoever happens to be reading the book (but don’t for one moment think he isn’t talking about you, he insists, because he is). The result is archly funny, and at his best Tinder manages to showcase the absurdity of presenting one’s emotions for the world to read in comic form. At his worst he comes across as cloying.

He also has a piece in which ghosts in clouds defecate apples, and that’s just weird.

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…

This set up could be criticized for being incoherent in and of itself: the identity-questioning implicit in a fox wearing a bunny suit and hopping about (his mother catches him in his room mid hop at one point), as well as the machismo implicit in the foxes’ murderous excursions into Bunnyburg, seems to indicate that we’re reading a metaphor for homosexuality or gender identity (cross fox and bunny and you’re “funny”—get it?); the pogroms on bunnies isolated in their own ghetto calls to mind a different class of oppression. I suppose this could be glossed over or explained away, but a more substantial problem obtains for any attempt at an allegorical reading: The young fox bears no responsibility, in the end, for his years of lepicide; he is offered redemption devoid of responsibility. This gives the comics’ ending, which would ordinarily have been satisfying, a hollow ring. The fox’s personal struggle becomes the only thing that matters, a topos that might have flown in the ’seventies but seems unforgivably selfish today.

But leaving the allegory aside, the comic has much to recommend it. It is completely wordless (which is why no one has a name) and wordless comics are hard to pull off, especially if it involves a strange world with its own rules, and rather arcane motivations. The amount of information Hartzell conveys wordlessly is impressive, and the story takes some pretty complicated twists without ever becoming confusing.

The art is pleasant and simple, and while it never takes on the iconic austerity of Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s work (clearly an influence here, and inevitably a comparison point), it does a better job of distinguishing characters, no small feat when you consider how similar all foxes tend to look. There are some nice formalistic touches as well. On the deadly joyride to Bunnyburg, the foxes’ bus enters a tunnel, and the panel goes black. On the following page, when they exit the tunnel, the page’s gutters turn black, and remains black throughout the pogrom, until, in the depths of a nightmare, the panels themselves begin to turn black.

Best of all are the small details scattered throughout the book. Foxes are ludicrously obsessed with being foxes, such that their cars and houses all have fox ears; and they’re also obsessed with killing bunnies, reflected in their movies and video games. Bunnies, in contrast, are obsessed with carrots. The multitude of tossed off fox/dead bunny/carrot gags are a delight, reaching a kind of frenzy in a double-page spread in the book’s closing chapter. Giving a friend the “bunny ears,” as school kids will, takes on a deeper meaning in this world, and it’s that kind of attention to detail that is the best part of Fox Bunny Funny.

Overall, Fox Bunny Funny is a well drawn and well done book, and certainly worth trying out. But it’s frustrating that it so thoroughly thwarts any attempts to read more into it.

The last two installments of Comics for Manga Lovers have focused on decidedly grown-up series, from Jacamon and Matz’s gritty assassin drama The Killer to Bill Willingham’s not-so-Grimm Fables. This month I focus on two series more appropriate for the Gon and Sgt. Frog fans in your household: Korgi and Essex County. Given the intended audience for these books, I have devoted attention to a few details that normally escape mention in my typical reviews—such as violent imagery and off-color language—in the hopes of helping parents make informed decisions about buying these books for younger readers.

Korgi, Volume 1: Sprouting Wings!

By Christian Slade
Top Shelf Productions, 80 pp.

Recommended age: All ages
Objectionable language or imagery: None

Christian Slade’s Korgi is visual stortytelling at its purest, told without dialogue or narration. Korgi focuses on a young girl, Ivy, and her devoted canine pal, Sprout. The two live in Korgi Hollow, a Shire-like community of elfin folk (otherwise known as Mollies) who inhabit thatched tree houses and work side by side with enormous herding dogs. When Sprout wanders away from the field where his mistress is picking fruit, Ivy sets out to find him. The two fall down a hole, initiating a series of adventures that will test their courage, resourcefulness, and loyalty to each other as they struggle to outwit hungry critters.

It’s a classic children’s plotline: child leaves home—by accident or by design—then struggles to find her way back, growing and changing in the process. What prevents Korgi from feeling like a retread of similar tales are Slade’s beautiful black and white illustrations. He has a marvelous eye for detail, as is evident in his characters’ facial expressions; Sprout and mistress alike register a nuanced range of emotions from astonishment, fear, and wonder to devotion and relief. Slade’s meticulous rendering of Sprout offers further proof of his consummate skill as an illustrator. Though Sprout hasn’t been anthropomorphosized into a talking sidekick or human surrogate, he is nonetheless a compelling character, albeit one who remains true to his corgi nature, solving problems according to the laws of canine physics and psychology.

Children will enjoy constructing their own story from Slade’s gorgeous, dynamic images, while adults will appreciate the artwork and sincerity of the story. (Read: no snarky pop-culture jokes sending up Cops or American Idol.) The imagery and storyline can truly accomodate a range of readers; any little one who can handle “The Three Billygoats” or “Beauty and the Beast” will navigate the few potentially scary scenes with flying colors. And it almost goes without saying that anyone who TiVo’ed the Herding Dog Group at this year’s Westminster Dog Show would also enjoy Korgi.

Korgi, Volume 1: Sprouting Wings is now available. A special Korgi story will be included in Top Shelf’s Free Comic Book Day giveaway, which will be distributed on May 5th. This review was based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

Essex County Volume 1: Tales from the Farm

By Jeff Lemire
Top Shelf Productions, 112 pp.

Recommended Age: 12 and up
Objectionable language or imagery: There are no violent or sexual images in this story. There are several scenes with swearing, but it’s nothing your tweenager hasn’t already heard (or probably used) on the playground.

Jeff Lemire’s Essex County, Volume 1: Tales from the Farm is a deceptively simple story about Lester, a ten-year-old orphan, who is struggling to adjust to life on his Uncle Ken’s farm in rural Ontario. Still reeling from his mother’s recent death from cancer, Lester has retreated into a fantasy world of superheroes: he dons a cape and mask, fantasizes about an impending alien invasion, and creates his very own comic book. Uncle Ken, a decent, hard-working man, is bewildered by Lester’s superhero affectation, while Lester finds his uncle a formidable and inaccessible figure, despite Ken’s repeated overtures of friendship.

In Jim LeBeuf, a slightly eccentric gas-station owner and one-time pro hockey player, Lester finds a surrogate father. Jim shares Lester’s affection for comics, and cheerfully indulges the boy by helping him build a fort and regaling Lester with tales of a one-day career with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Lester eventually musters the courage to show Jim his comic, “Heroes and Villains.” This scene—one of the best in the book—is both touching and hilarious. In Lester’s awkward body language and shy explanation of the premise, we can see how desperately he craves validation from the one adult likely to see merit in “Heroes and Villains.” The comic itself is a hoot. The simple, unshaded drawings, cartoonish dialogue, childish lettering, phonetic spellings, and cornpone character names are so convincing that I wonder if Lemire simply inserted an actual art project from his childhood.

I initially thought Lester was too old to be running around in a mask and cape–he’s ridiculed by classmates for wearing it to school and chided by Uncle Ken for wearing it while doing chores–but as his backstory unfolds, the device seemed more plausible. I also wasn’t 100% sold on Lemire’s portrayal of Jim LeBeuf, who sometimes felt a bit too much like Harper Lee’s more famous man-child Boo Radley. By and large, however, I found Tales from the Farm an emotionally honest book, free of mawkish sentiment or hokey homilies. Lemire has a great ear for dialogue, capturing his characters’s voices in language as vivid as his bold, rough-hewn images. The Bleach fan in your house may not warm to Lemire’s art, but I suspect he will recognize a bit of himself in Lester, especially if he’s ever been taunted by classmates for harboring a “babyish” interest in a childhood pastime.

Essex County Volume One: Tales from the Farm is now available. Volume Two: Ghost Stories arrives in stores in September. This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

COMICS FOR MANGA LOVERS INDEX
Comics for Manga Lovers: January 2007 (Mouse Guard, The Killer, Okko, Robotika)
Comics for Manga Lovers: November 2006 (Daughters of the Dragon, Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall)

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