Quote of the Week (Slight Return)

"'And I myself,' continued Ford in a voice so superior it would have caused single-cell life forms to accelerate their evolution so that they could use their fab new opposable thumbs to pick up a rock and beat him to death. 'I myself base most of my calculations on emotions.'"
-And Another Thing..., p.48, showing the strengths and weaknesses of Eoin Colfer's aping of Douglas Adams

Quote of the Week

"Since masturbation is what erotic writing so often leads to, that was reason enough to make [D.H.] Lawrence's novel [Lady Chatterly's Lover] controversial; but in addition, through the character of the gamekeeper, Lawrence probes the sensitivity and psychological attachment that man often feels towards his penis -- it does indeed seem to have a will of its own, an ego beyond its size, and is frequently embarrassing because of its needs, infatuations, and unpredictable nature. Men sometimes feel that their penis controls them, leads them astray, causes them to beg favors at night from women whose names they prefer to forget in the morning. Whether insatiable or insecure, it demands constant proof of its potency, introducing into a man's life unwanted complications and frequent rejection. Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is a man's most honest organ."
- Guy Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife, pp. 115-116

Six GNs That Won't Get a Full-Fledged Review

Because all I have to say about them can be said more succinctly:

Things Undone by Shane White (NBM/ComicsLit, November 2009, $12.95)

This is White's second graphic novel, after North Country, which I didn't see. His hero, Rick Watt, is a mopey twentysomething who moves jobs from Philadelphia to Seattle -- and, in flashbacks, moves from one girlfriend to a prettier model -- but is still mopey and depressed. White shows the mopiness and depression by having Watt slowly turn into a zombie, complete with body parts falling off -- and that's a great visual metaphor...except that it doesn't make up for the fact that Watt has no real reason to be mopey and annoying. His new job isn't going as well as he'd like it to, but he's also just being a jerk, particularly to his girlfriend, Natalie.

White is going for existential ennui, or maybe a quarterlife crisis, but, really, it's just that Rick is a passive-aggressive jerk who can't communicate effectively with either his girlfriend or his co-workers. He gets a happy ending of sorts by learning to have "backbone," which is precisely the wrong lesson -- Rick needed to be able to talk, not to fight and pretend to kill himself.

The zombie motif is artistically interesting, but the moments of greater zombification aren't consistently related to Rick being more beaten down and dehumanized; more often, they're a product of his own anger or lack of attention. There's nothing wrong with Rick that a but of slowing down and paying attention wouldn't cure; he's not a zombie, just a self-absorbed guy who thinks he deserves to get better than he gives.

Joe & Azat by Jesse Lonergan (NBM/ComicsLit, November 2009, $10.95)

Lonergan spent time in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan; the "Joe" of this graphic novel is a young man in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan. (And "Azat" is his driver/guide/best friend there, the usual super-energetic, vaguely entrepreneurial young man in backward or developing countries, always on the hunt for the next big thing, cheerfully forward-looking, and hugely outgoing.) But Joe and Azat is not autobiographical; it's only based loosely on Lonergan's own experiences.

That means, I suppose, that life didn't neatly turn itself into a story for Lonergan during his time in Turkmenistan, but, then, it never does. The story here is episodic and without much overall shape; the episodes are individually interesting, but they tend to turn into "look at these colorful people, so unlike bland American Joe! My, aren't people in the less-known parts of the world so much more ethnic than we are!" in the aggregate.

Lonergan does have a great eye for black; he has huge areas of inky black throughout Joe and Azat. His faces are also very expressive; his people really come to life on the page. (His body language is equally good; the cover is a good example of that.)

Joe and Azat is very enjoyable, but it's a pretty standard me-and-my-wacky-ethnic-friend comedy (crossed with here-I-am-in-this-weird-foreign-country). I have to think that Lonergan could have put together a stronger piece if he's kept closer to his own actual experiences; I doubt there was a "real" Azat -- and the people that he put together to make Azat would probably have been more interesting in their complexities.

Prison Pit: Book One by Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics, October 2009, $12.99)

I've only seen short Johnny Ryan strips before, so I wasn't adequately prepared for the apocalyptic, WWF-meets-a-disturbed-seventh-grader's-notebook quality of Prison Pit. There's no narration or scene-setting; a prisoner is about to be dumped on some hell-hole planet when the book begins, and it goes on from there, through ultra-violence and even less expected and palatable events.

It's a good thing for Ryan that comics don't have rating like movies do, that's all I can say -- the little box explaining the elements that went into the rating would be pages long ("decapitations, pervasive verbal obscenities, copious sadistic violence,..., disturbing imagery,....").

Prison Pit is un-reviewable; it is what it is, and most readers will loathe it. A few will actually enjoy it, and more will claim to like it, because they think they should like something as "transgressive" as this. Ryan is one crazy motherfucker, man -- and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 2 by The Hernandez Brothers (Fantagraphics, October 2009, $14.99)

Love and Rockets is difficult to review for the opposite reason that Prison Pit is: there so much here -- on the page, and in the backstory -- that just finding a place to begin is difficult. This particular yearly "issue" has a hundred pages of comics, evenly divided between Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez.

Jaime's half comes in two parts, but they're continuing the same story -- the story that began in last year's first issue in this new format, "Ti-Girls Adventures Number 34," as if all hundred pages of this story was a superhero comic from a more female-friendly (and multicultural) universe than any of the ones we know. It's also a sideways version of his main, generally realistic continuity, in which some minor characters from his Locas stories are superheroines and the ubiquitous Maggie makes a brief appearance. Jamie's view of superheroes owes more to wrestling (particularly the masked wrestling of Mexico) than is usual for American comics, and it's also a surprise to see his all-female casts beating up on each other as strongly (and with as few consequences) as the spandex-clad men of Marvel and DC. I didn't find this story as successful as Jaime's work usually is; it's too in-jokey and hermetic, as if the superhero comics of the world he's invoking are nearly as tedious and inbred as our own.

Gilbert also provides two stories, which fill up the middle of the book. But his are unrelated to each other, though "Sad Girl" seems to be set on the fringes of his Palomar continuity (in the more recent incarnation, with the current-generation characters relocated to southern California) and the main character of the literally nightmarish "Hypotwist" looks like, and may indeed be, Fritzi. The first is more of an episode than a complete story, and the latter is another one of Gilbert's periodic experiments with the comics form -- interesting and evocative, but difficult to describe, since it relies entirely on that dream-like atmosphere and imagery.

So this is a decent Hernandez Bros. book, but a horrible starting point for anyone who hasn't read them; thus, practically speaking, a unreviewable book.

Sky Doll by Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa (Marvel/Soleil, November 2008, $24.99)

This tale of a female android -- sexy but utterly innocent, sweet and loving and searching for love and her place -- in a galaxy-spanning medium-future civilization under mildly corrupt theocratic rule reads like as pure a distillation of the essence of Heavy Metal as is possible. And so it only makes sense that it would be published over here by marvel, which has been in the business of triple-distilling superhero comics, like some mad purveyor of punch-em-up Scotch, into ever more esoteric and self-involved forms.

There's not a single page in Sky Doll that's less than stunning, and not a single word or idea in it that any reader with the slightest knowledge of vaguely smutty commercial French comics (shall I just say "Heavy Metal" again?) will find the least bit surprising. In the alternate world that is France, this is Marvel Comics. And now it's so here as well.

Universal War One, Vol. 1 by Denis Bajram (Marvel/Soleil, January 2009, $24.99)

This book is pretty generic as well -- hard-bitten soldiers in space, in the midst of the usual inner system vs. outer system civil war, dealing with a suddenly-appearing black wall in space. Even more generically, they're a "purgatory squadron" -- made up of court-martialed officers (each for some very distinct failing that serves as each one's only personality trait), led by the un-respected daughter of a great (tough, hard-bitten, unbending...add your cliche here) military leader, who is also nearby.

There's the usual adventure-SF mix of tough-talking, vaguely enigmatic alien artifacts, punch-em-ups, and fighters banking in space as they dogfight. If you're the kind of person who can take any of that seriously, it could be a rousing story; it all looks very shiny and dramatic, and the dialogue only induces actual cringes a couple of times.

Abandoned Books: And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer

It would be unfair, and arguably wrong, to say that Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series went straight downhill from the beginning. Even the most crazed fan has to admit that the records were just as good as the original radio show, and that the Infocom game is possibly even better. But, if the conversation is restricted to the books, then there would be much less argument. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the funniest and best of the lot, both The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, the Universe, and Everything have real strengths, and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is only faintly embarrassing. (We don't talk about Mostly Harmless, the book reportedly finished on a flight into Los Angeles for a major book trade show, because it's not nice to speak ill of the dead.)

There is no sign at all that And Another Thing..., the unnecessary but inevitable continuation of Adams's series by Eoin Colfer, is anywhere near as bad as Mostly Harmless. In fact, it's probably, by all objective standards, a better book than So Long. But it's not by Douglas Adams, and that becomes apparent in a thousand small ways as the book goes on -- the characters speak in un-Adamsly ways, are overly emotional (and the wrong kind of emotional), and the plot shows suspicious signs of actually having been thought through and kept organized. Another Thing is at least a half-decent humorous SF novel featuring characters named "Arthur Dent" and "Ford Prefect," but it doesn't succeed at raising the ghost of Douglas Adams. It couldn't have done that, of course. But all those of us who try to read it are hoping for that. Another Thing also has the usual fault of a continuation by other hands: it relies too heavily on the reader's memory of the original Douglas Adams jokes (lots of bits supposedly from the Guide itself, the return of Vogons, the Heart of Gold, and so on -- I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that Marvin shows up before the end, too) instead of doing the same sort of thing in a new way.

So I gave up on Another Thing about ninety pages in, roughly a third of the way through. It's not Adams, and I'm no longer the ten-year-old who first read Hitchhiker. You can't go home again, death is final, but commerce is eternal.

But I just might try one of Colfer's own novels; he's funny pretty consistently here, though the Adams-isms are sometimes too florid and overworked. (Not to say that Adams didn't get that way himself, because he did. Again, this is better than about half of the writing Adams did in this milieu.) I wish this book didn't exist, but the world doesn't exist to please me. I can only hope that most readers of Another Thing are happier with the beating-So Long part of it than they are disappointed with the Colfer-isn't-Adams part. Don't let me stop you from reading Another Thing -- but go into it with reasonable expectations, please.

Chemistry for Beginners by Anthony Strong

What is science fiction? Chemistry for Beginners is not a novel most of us would fit under that umbrella, even though it's all about working scientists doing cutting-edge research on the frontiers of biological science in what may be the very near future. But that research is into female sexual response -- Female Sexual Dysfunction, to be even more clinical about it -- and Chemistry for Beginners turns out to be a romantic comedy in the end. (Though it's more Shakespearean in both its romance and comedy than the usual slapsticky modern style.)

So not even the fact that it's written in the form of a scientific paper -- with footnotes and references at the end and everything -- can save it from the taint of un-seriousness and girlyness. SF is about Big Men doing Big Things: shiny phallic rockets thrusting into the void and penetrating alien worlds, giant machines probing deeply into the inner recesses of the universe, wars and fighting and death. Getting an anorgasmic woman to achieve bliss is much too yonic for the True World of Skiffy.

Strong's hero is Dr. Steven J. Fisher, a brilliant young biochemist at Oxford working on a chemical treatment for FSD as head of a team comprising the usual hot-to-trot female sexologist and bevvy of young and eager post-docs. (Eager for each other in particular, as the reader learns bit by bit as Chemistry for Beginners goes on.) Strong has a weakness for the cliche in his characters; Fisher is implausibly innocent for a researcher into sex, and fits far too closely the typical media stereotype of the science nerd. He is our first person narrator, so we get inside his head, the better to learn how carefully organized, disciplined and regimented it really is. We're told that Steven is brilliant, but he never exhibits the quirky, random interests that the truly brilliant acquire; he's focused entirely on his work to an unlikely degree.

The other half of the sexual equation is provided by Ms. G. (Annie Gluck), a late addition to the study. She's goaded into it by her thesis advisor/boyfriend -- she's reading for a doctorate in English -- who gotten annoyed by her lack of response. She's attracted to Steven almost immediately, but denies it for a very long time; we read her locked blog entries interspersed throughout Chemistry for Beginners, so we can see that she's lying to herself as well. Strong isn't quite as clear about the results of the study -- since Annie is lying about it, and Steven is, of course, clueless -- but it seems as if she's quickly become orgasmic because of the sound of Steven's voice during the treatments, but lies about it for no reason ever specified.

Steven and his team are preparing a major paper on his treatment, KXC79, which will be a showpiece of a major conference presented by Trock Pharmaceuticals, the sponsor of his research. Steven is working hard, in the way that only monomaniacal fictional scientists can, to iron out the last few discrepancies -- which are nearly all relating to Annie's continued lying to him and the other researchers about the orgasms that their test equipment keeps recording her as having.

Chemistry doesn't turn into anything like a conventional romance until very near the end, since Annie is trying to deny her feelings for Steven and he's written to be as obtuse as a 179-degree angle. Strong does maneuver them into a position where it makes sense for them to have sense for the good of the experiment, but never plays up the comedy as much as he could.

And, in the end, Chemistry does rely heavily on the expected morals and endings -- there are betrayals, but True Love cannot be defeated, and that nasty reductionist science-y stuff is swept away by feeling. It's a pleasant novel that doesn't aim all that high: it wants to be an amusing novel with some romantic and comedic elements without ever committing to being either a comedy or a romance. Strong is witty, and makes up in novelty and cultural references what he leaves out in gripping plotting. (There is a flurry of plot near the end, to set up the required confrontations and reverses, but most of the book is an amble through a few months of these people's lives.) Chemistry finally is neither a SF novel nor a romance, and is closest to a chick-lit book, with its clueless protagonist documenting everything happening to him. If he'd been actually as smart as he's supposed to be, Chemistry for Beginners could have really been something. But, as it is, its a decent diversion, with characters that came too directly from Central Casting to be entirely believable.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/31

The actual list will begin after the ritual disclaimer: These are books that came in my mail last week, sent by various publicists in the hope that I'll review them. I get more books than I could ever review -- leaving aside the currently-large pile of books I read intending to review that I haven't managed to write about yet -- and so these will not all be covered in depth. So, to make sure I do mention everything, I run these posts every Monday morning.

Or, in bullet-point form:

• I haven't read these books.
• I might never read these books.
• This is not a "review."

But here's what I saw this week:

Nightchild is the third book in James Barclay's "Chronicles of the Raven" fantasy series, which has been confusing me for several months now. Pyr is publishing the books of this series -- originally published in the UK about a decade ago -- in quick succession, but have also been sending me both finished book and bound galleys...so I've been seeing each of these books at least twice, and not necessarily in order. But this one has a big "3" on the spine, which I am entirely in favor of. And this book will hit stores on November 10th. I haven't read these books, but they're the kind of fantasy that's not quite epic -- though definitely secondary-world -- that I always faintly assume has a gaming basis, somewhere far in the background. (Though I could easily be wrong.)

I don't actually have a copy of Fairies Art Studio by David Riche, since it won't be published (by Watson-Guptill) until March of 2010. But I do have a letter and color photocopies of sample pages, which reminds me of my days back in the book clubs. (This is exactly what I would see for art books in those days -- though I'd have wanted to see it much earlier than this; I bet the print run has already been set, for one thing.) It's a book about drawing fairies digitally -- as far as I can tell, there's nothing about drawing using the implements traditionally associated with that term -- and contains art by Myrean Pettit and Yishan Li. I'm not an artist, and I only have a small sample, but I'm not massively impressed so far. But, if you want to draw fairies with your computer, I doubt you have many choices in book tutorials -- and this one looks very professional and detailed.

Vatican Hustle is the first graphic novel from Greg Houston, a new cartoonist from Baltimore. (No word on whether there's a similar Young Turk from Houston called Greg Baltimore.) The art is highly stylized, drawing a bit from Munoz (perhaps via Giffen) as well as from Wolverton and the '80s RAW crowd. The story looks to be equally stylized; it's a '70s Blaxpoitation movie in comics form. That's an awful lot of style for one book.... This will be published by NBM in December.

And last for this week is the eighth collection of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack stories, coming November 17th from Vertical. (I reviewed the first and second volumes of the series for ComicMix, and I expect this book is broadly similar to those flamboyantly entertaining pieces of pulp craziness.)

Read in October

I do these monthly lists mostly for my own benefit, and to serve as an index of my reviews (either here or elsewhere). I do scatter a few new capsule reviews into each one, of books that I didn't write about at greater length elsewhere. Links are mostly to those reviews, with a few (the capsule reviews) jumping straight to a certain online bookseller for immediate gratification.

This time out, you'll find short reviews of Top Shelf Under the Big Top, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe, Sundome, Vol. 5, and Naruto, Vol. 37 within the trackless waste of links below.

• P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (10/1)
  
• Brett Warnock, editor, Top Shelf Under the Big Top (10/2)
  This was both older (from 1999) and more generically indy-comics (deliberately crude and often low-life short stories) than I expected, with a lot of stories that I respected rather than liked and even more that I couldn't bring myself to respect. It does have work by K. Thor Jensen, Dylan Horrocks, Matt Madden, Josh Simmons, and Craig Thompson, but there are no lost gems here -- just decent early comics from people who were still learning the ropes and would later do better work. It's a shame, since I was hoping to be led from this book to cartoonists I haven't read before, but that didn't happen.
  
• Leland Gregory, Idiots at Work (10/2)
  
• Joshua Glenn & Mark Kingwell, The Idler's Glossary (10/3)
  
• Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs The Universe (10/4)
  After five months of reading these incredibly entertaining twentysomething-life-as-a-videogame graphic novels, I'm finally caught up...and that means I'll have to wait for the sixth (and last?) book like everyone else. This one only came out in February, so I'd expect at least a six-month wait -- hmm, I probably should have spaced these out more. If you've been avoiding this series because you thought it looked too juvenile, I'd recommend taking another look: I'm about the worst person in the world when it comes to tolerance of dumb behavior by child-men protagonists, and Pilgrim didn't come across that way to me at all -- he's immature, yes, but he's a sweet, realistic kind of immature rather than the usual full-of-himself media-product immature guy. (If that makes any sense.)
  
• Guy Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife (10/6)
  
• Kazuto Okada, Sundome, Vol. 5 (10/7)
  I reviewed the first four volumes of this series for ComicMix -- here's a link to the most recent one, and you can track backwards from there -- but I didn't have anything new to say this time, so I bumped it down to a mention here. It's still a creepy, disconcerting look at obsessive teenage sexuality -- alternately horrifyingly broad in that stylized, templated manga way and cuttingly precise and true -- and just as compulsively readable as ever.
  
• Jack Vance, This Is Me, Jack Vance! (10/7)
  
• Susumu Katsumoto, Red Snow (bound galleys) (10/8)
  
• Shane White, Things Undone (10/9)
  
• Jesse Lonergan, Joe and Azat (10/12)
  
• Matthew Hughes, Template (10/12)
  
• Arvid Nelson, Will Conrad, & Jose Villarrubia, Kull: The Shadow Kingdom (10/13)
  Look for my review in the February issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• L. Frank Baum, adapted by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (10/14)
  Look for my review in the February issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• Anthony Strong, Chemistry for Beginners (10/15)
  
• David Small, Stitches (10/15)
  
• Lewis Trondheim & Fabrice Parme, Tiny Tyrant, Vol. One: The Ethelbertosaurus (10/16)
  
• James Strurm, Andrew Arnold, & Alexis Frederick-Frost, Adventures in Cartooning (10/19)
  
• Edgar Allan Poe & Gahan Wilson, The Raven and Other Poems (10/20)
  
• Jessica Mitford, Poison Penmanship (10/20)
  
• Shinobu Ohtaka, Sumomomo, Momomo, Vol. 2 (10/21)
  
• JinHo Ko, Jack Frost, Vol. 2 (10/22)
  
• Svetlana Chmakova, Nightschool: The Weirn Books (10/23)
  
• Richard Sala, Cat Burglar Black (10/26)
  
• Jeff VanderMeer, Finch (10/26)
  
• Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim & Christophe Blain, Dungeon: The Early Years, Vol. 2: Innocence Lost (10/27)
  
• Bill Willingham, et. al., Jack of Fables, Vol. 4: Americana (10/28)
  
• Peter Greenberg, Don't Go There! (10/28)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 37 (10/29)
  At this point in a series -- that would be roughly 7400 pages in to a complicated story with a cast of dozens and nearly as many factions, martial arts styles, and secret ninja villages to keep track of as well -- there's really no point in trying to give a synopsis or review; it would only be for the people who are at roughly the same point in reading the series. So I'll just say: after a long time, I finally found the next volume at the library, and I am still trying to keep up with this one. Make of that what you will.
  
• Bill Willimgham, et. al., Jack of Fables, Vol. 5: Turning Pages (10/30)
  

Getting the Hell Out of Dodge

About half an hour ago, I finished updating a spreadsheet for work and uploaded it back to the company portal, meaning that I've officially finished all of the work I needed to do and that I can now consider myself On Vacation.

And so I am.

Tomorrow morning, very early, all four members of the Hornswoggler clan will be boarding one of those newfangled aeroplanes and jetting off to balmy Orlando, Florida, where we will spend the next week and a bit firmly ensconced in the arms of The Mouse.

I've scheduled at least one post to pop up every day that I'm gone, including several reviews (and one it's-not-a-review) and some more frivolous stuff as well. But actual real-time blogging will not resume until the evening of the 9th at the very earliest.

Don't do anything too ridiculous while I'm off the grid, O Internet, and I'll see you in a week.

At Least It's Not Yellow...

My "Manga Friday" column for this week featured a review of a collection of gekiga stories -- in this case, historicals set about a hundred years ago in small Japanese villages -- Susumu Katsumata's Red Snow.

Next week I'm on vacation and pretty much incommunicado, but if I manage to write something later today and get it into the ComicMix system, there may be a post or two from me there. But I wouldn't bet on it.

My Deadly Sins

Another one of those Internet quizzes, which I suspect I may have done before...but it's a Saturday, so it's an easy post. I got this from James Nicoll.

Greed:	Medium
Gluttony:	High
Wrath:	Very Low
Sloth:	High
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	Low

Discover Your Sins - Click Here