Hell Girl
Written and Illustrated by Miyuki Eto
Created by The Jigoku Shoujo Project
Del Rey Manga; $10.95

I gotta admit: I didn’t get all the way through Hell Girl. I don’t know if that means this isn’t a “real” review or whatever, but that’s for someone else to decide. I gave it a shot, read the first two chapters, then skimmed through to the end.

Hell Girl, Volume 1 is divided into five “chapters,” but they’re really more independent short stories than connected parts of a greater whole. The first one is about a girl named Mari who gets caught shoplifting and is blackmailed by one of the mean, popular girls from school. The blackmail gets out of control and Mari can’t handle it any more. When she hears about a website called Hell Correspondence where you can enter an enemies name and they’ll be immediately taken to Hell, she decides that’s her way out. The only catch is that you have to also give Hell your soul when you die, but like these stories always go, Mari doesn’t care about that in the face of relieving her immediate trouble.

There are lots of problems with this story. First, it’s never really clear whether or not Mari actually stole what she was accused of stealing. From the rest of the story, she doesn’t act like a thief and she certainly never admits to having done it. Apparently, her actual guilt or innocence is supposed to be secondary to her concern over the very accusation of having shoplifted. So, when the girls from school threaten to tell on her if she doesn’t do all their homework and buy them things, she caves easily.

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Midnight Sun
Written and Illustrated by Ben Towle
SLG Publishing
$14.95

Midnight Sun is two parts drama; one part adventure story. Ostensibly, it’s about the real-life disappearance of the airship Italia shortly after its successful arrival at the North Pole, but it goes deeper than that. Ben Towle has fictionalized most of the crew, condensed events, and freely speculated to fill in holes, but the gist of the incident is intact. In May 1928, the Italia sent a message home saying that it had reached its destination; then went abruptly silent. A massive, multi-national rescue operation ensued and eventually ended almost two months later. I’ll leave it for you to discover how successful it was.

Most survival dramas focus on the attempts of the survivors to stay alive. And most survival dramas are boring as hell. Ice, wind, freezing, frostbite, hunger, do we eat the dead or don’t we? Seen it all a billion times. Towle does something different though.

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Graphic Classics, Volume 14: Gothic Classics

Written by Jane Austen, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Rod Lott, Ann Radcliffe, Antonella Caputo, Edgar Allen Poe, Tom Pomplun, Trina Robbins, and Myla Jo Closser.

Illustrated by Molly Kiely, Lisa K. Weber, Carlo Vergara, Leong Wan Kok, Anne Timmons, Shary Flenniken, and Trina Robbins.

Eureka Productions; $11.95

I’m sort of a big fan of Gothic Romance. I say “sort of” because I discovered the genre by backing into it from Horror. After loving books like Frankenstein and Dracula, I wanted to learn more about the novels that inspired them, so I checked out The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Otranto is awesome with its giant helmets, decrepit castles, graveyard meetings, spooky forests, and hall-wandering ghosts. It’s also nice and short, so it really got me hungry for more like it. Unfortunately, Udolpho nearly turned me off the entire genre for good. It’s about half-mystery/horror; half-travelogue. For every page with a creepy room, secret passage, or black-veiled painting, there are endless descriptions of mountains and forests and views from carriages and people sitting in rooms waiting for things to happen. Also, the mystery/horror angle is considerably less satisfying than your average episode of Scooby Doo.

But still, I love the idea of gothic romances. The genre’s defining elements — innocent, young girls in peril; dark, foreign counts with evil intentions; dashing heroes with mysterious pasts; old castles and woodland graveyards — are all awesome, thrilling things that make any story better.

Gothic Classics is a great primer on the genre. I really wish that it included The Castle of Otranto, but c’est la vie. It starts with two of my favorite Graphic Classics regulars — Rod Lott and Lisa K. Weber — adapting J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Weber’s whimsical, gothy illustrations are a natural for this volume and Carmilla as adapted here is a great story. It’s the one with the most supernatural element to it and is exactly what I hope for when I think of gothic romance.

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Graphic Classics: Free Comic Book Day
(Eureka Publishing)

Written by Edgar Allan Poe, Rod Lott, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alex Burrows, Mary Shelley, Antonella Caputo, Lord Dunsay, and Milton Knight.

Illustrated by Gerry Alanguilan, Mark Dancey, Simon Gane, Anne Timmons, and Milton Knight

This Free Comic Book Day is shaping up to be pretty cool. First there’s news of an Atomic Robo offering, and then I got word that Graphic Classics is also getting into the fun. Better than that, I got a preview of the Graphic Classics FCBD issue and it’s worth getting excited about.

Unlike most Graphic Classics volumes, the 64-page FCBD issue doesn’t focus on a single author or even a single genre. Instead it presents a cross-section of the kind of stuff Graphic Classics puts out, which is what a FCBD offering should do. There’s a horror story by Poe, a one-page fable by Ambrose Bierce, a supernatural tale by Arthur Conan Doyle, a gothic love story by Mary Shelley, and a whimsical tale of world destruction by Lord Dunsay.

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Less Than Heroes
Written and Illustrated by David Yurkovich
Top Shelf
$14.95

In an essay in the back of Less Than Heroes, David Yurkovich claims that his book was inspired by the simpler, more fun- and adventure-filled comics of yesteryear. Comics that were made before Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen left their permanent influence on everything that came after. Which is kinda ironic since it was Watchmen that I kept replaying in my mind as I read this book.

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Andromeda Stories, Volume 1
Written by Ryu Mitsuse and Keiko Takemiya; Illustrated by Keiko Takemiya
Vertical
$11.95

When I was a kid, I would’ve loved to get my hands on a book called Andromeda Stories. Just knowing that there was a galaxy full of solar systems and planets next to ours nearly killed me with the story possibilities. What kind of people lived there? What fantastic worlds existed?

Unfortunately, I missed the boat or the boat missed me; the English translation of Andromeda Stories comes about fifteen years late and I’m not able to appreciate it as much as I might have as a kid.

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Astronaut Dad, Volume 1
Written by David Hopkins; Illustrated by Brent Schoonover
Silent Devil
$5.95

I wanna talk about Horrorwood for a second before I get into Astronaut Dad, if that’s okay. Brandon Terrell’s script for Horrorwood was an engaging homage to the horror movies of the thirties and forties, but another artist might have been tempted to focus on its darker elements and create a straightforward horror story out of it. What made Horrorwood really special was Brent Schoonover’s simple, expressive illustrations. Letting the script communicate the mystery of those old films, Schoonover’s cartoon-like drawings ran against expectations and captured their fun.

So, I was pretty excited to see what Schoonover was up to next. When I heard it was a book called Astronaut Dad, I immediately thought of shows like Lost in Space and My Favorite Martian. Something about family, but with a space-adventure hook. But, in what’s becoming a recurring theme in this column lately, I was surprised to read a book that was pleasantly different from my expectations for it.

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Continuing our 2008-oriented top ten lists, here are the top ten “middle-brow” comics we’re looking forward to this year. I can’t decide if I love or hate the term “middle-brow,” but it’s the closest thing I can think of to describe indie adventure comics right now.

1. RASL (Cartoon Books): Jeff Smith has already set the bar pretty high for himself with his epic Bone and the delightful Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil. But after seeing the preview of RASL from San Diego , I don’t think we have anything to worry about. My only dilemma now is deciding if I’m buying the regular-sized comic or waiting for the oversized collections. — JK Parkin

2. Tiempos Finales 2 (Sam Hiti): The first volume of Tiempos Finales was an amazing, luxurious bit of storytelling. It also left some unanswered questions that I’ve been dying to learn the answers to. Sam Hiti’s announcement that he was continuing the story this year was the best piece of news I heard in 2007. — Michael May

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Vampire Loves
Written and Illustrated by Joann Sfar
First Second
$16.95

Since I liked The Professor’s Daughter so much, I was in the mood for some more Sfar. Conceptually, Vampire Loves comes from the same place as The Professor’s Daughter, since they’re both more or less romance books featuring classic monsters. I say “more or less” though because The Professor’s Daughter is a traditional romance with a star-crossed couple we’d like to see get together, but Vampire Loves takes more of a Jeffrey Brown approach.

This is to say that it’s romantic in its own way, but that way is kind of sad and pitiful. It’s also more relatable since most people I know have had way more experience with sad and pathetic love lives than they have with successful, happily-ever-after ones. And that’s the essential difference between The Professor’s Daughter and Vampire Loves. The Professor’s Daughter puts our lovers through the ringer, but we never doubt they’ll end up together. Ferdinand, the nosferatu protagonist of Vampire Loves, doesn’t inspire that kind of confidence. In that way, he and his stories are much more real.

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The Professor’s Daughter
Written by Joann Sfar; Illustrated by Emmanuel Guibert
First Second
$16.95

Knowing that it’s about the romance between a mummy and the daughter of the man who discovered him, I expected The Professor’s Daughter to be whimsical. And it is.

What I wasn’t prepared for was for it to go beyond whimsy and into ridiculousness. That’s not a bad thing, but it caught me off guard when I thought I was reading one kind of book and it turned out I was reading another.

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Paul Jenkins’ Sidekick
Written by Paul Jenkins; Illustrated by Chris Moreno
Image
$16.99

I don’t usually like superhero parody a whole lot. It’s an overdone subgenre and most of the parodies I’ve read just repeat the same tired jokes endlessly. I’d list a couple of examples for you, but honestly it makes my head hurt to think about. I actually am pretty fond of superhero comics and dwelling on their worst qualities isn’t something I enjoy. If I find a particular aspect of superhero comics unappealing or ridiculous, I’ll just quit reading comics that have that trait. I certainly don’t want to read a parody comic that highlights it and makes it the center of focus.

Sidekick isn’t that kind of parody. I actually had to think about the word “parody” for a bit to decide if it even applies to Sidekick, but I think it does. Certainly there are some fun, silly superhero comics that get inappropriately labeled as parody, but they’re more celebrating the genre than making fun of it. It’s the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at him. Let me repeat that it’s certainly valid to laugh at superhero comics; I’d just prefer that comics that do that be, you know, actually funny. And that’s what separates Sidekick from the usual parody.

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MW
Written and Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka
Vertical
$24.95

There’s a line in Citizen Kane that’s haunted me ever since I heard it. The reporter researching Kane’s life observes to Kane’s general manager that Kane made an awful lot of money. The manager’s response is what gets me. “It’s no trick to make a lot of money,” he says, “If what you want to do is make a lot of money.”

That was the first time I’d ever come up against the idea that you really can do whatever you want as long as you’re willing to sacrifice everything else to get it. And it’s the American Dream, really. If you just work hard enough and sacrifice enough, you can achieve anything, right? Hold on to that thought for a second, ‘cause I’m coming back to it.

MW is the story of a guy with a single-minded goal. He’s willing to do whatever it takes to achieve it. The trouble is that his goal is the death of a lot of innocent people. Nearly seven billion of them, actually.

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Hawaiian Dick Volume 1: Byrd Of Paradise
Written by B. Clay Moore; Illustrated by Steven Griffin
Image
$14.95

I’d forgotten how much I liked Hawaiian Dick. Because both the inaugural mini-series and its follow up The Last Resort had problems coming out on time, it’s been tough to keep enthusiastic about Danny Byrd mysteries. In fact, after The Last Resort, I promised myself that I’d wait for the trades on any future installments of the series.

But my fondness for the concept must be deep-rooted because my resolve to wait for trades was severely tested by the arrival of the new Hawaiian Dick ongoing. And though I’m still skittish about buying it in individual issues, the new series got me thinking about revisiting the original. And doing that has me even more tempted to start picking up the singles again.

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The Fog
Written by Scott Allie; Illustrated by Todd Herman
Dark Horse
$6.95

Back in the day, before DVDs or even VHS, comics adaptations of movies were pretty cool because they let you relive the movie over and over again. These days, they’re a pretty lame substitute for the real thing and I ignore them as best I can. Prequels, sequels, and whatnot are a whole other story though. I’m all for comics that add to the worlds we see in the movies. That’s the approach Dark Horse’s The Fog takes.

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Flight: Volume One
Published by Image
$19.95

I’ve hit a sad patch in my review pile where nothing’s grabbing me enough to want to write about it, so here’s another look at an older book worth another look.

Written and Illustrated by Bengal, Bill Mudron, Catia Chien, Clio Chiang, Chris Appelhans, Derek Kirk Kim, Dylan Meconis, Enrico Casarosa, Erika Moen, Hope Larson, Jacob Magraw, Jake Parker, Jen Wang, Joel Carroll, Kazu Kibuishi, Kean Soo, Khang Le, Neil Babra, Phil Craven, Rad Sechrist and Vera Brosgol

It’s weird, but as afraid of heights as I am, I love to fly. Especially when the plane gets above the clouds and you can’t see the earth… just white fluffiness from horizon to horizon. It’s otherworldly and peaceful.

There’s a reason so many superheroes fly and it’s not just to make it easier for them to get around. It’s a common fantasy that we earthbound creatures have. How many times have you been stuck in rush hour traffic and wished that the year 2000 had yielded all those flying cars we thought we’d have by then when we were growing up? Up you’d go and off you’d go, without having to worry about lanes or lights or signs or other cars or even pesky geography like trees and rivers. We’ve all wished we could fly.

The creators of Flight set out to tell stories around that theme. Coming together from all corners of the internet, these online cartoonists banded together to give us a look – sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical – at what it means to fly.

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Cyclone Bill & the Tall Tales
Written and Illustrated by Dan Dougherty
Moonstone
$16.95

I’m skeptical when it comes to comics about music. Comics can do a lot of things well, but communicating music isn’t one of them. Usually, when a comic is about a performing musician or a band, we get some fancily lettered lyrics with maybe some musical notes scattered around and are asked to fill in the music ourselves. That never works for me and what I’m left with is usually mediocre (at best) poetry and a half-assed melody that I’ve created myself just so I can keep reading the book. It’s a frustrating experience, especially when the musicians are supposed to be good. 

Cyclone Bill & the Tall Tales wisely avoids all that by never trying to portray music on the page. Not melody; not lyrics. And that’s especially important for this book because it’s not just about “good” musicians. It’s about a band that’s supposed to be legendary. Not pop-flavor-of-the-year legendary, but Beatles/Rolling Stones/U2 legendary. And it never would’ve worked had Dan Dougherty tried to give us an actual taste of the music.

It’s the one instance where “tell, don’t show” is actually the preferable choice. Music is just too damn subjective. What I hear in my head when I think of legend-status music is going to be completely different from what you hear, so Dougherty lets us fill that in ourselves and just reminds us over and over again how universally popular – amongst critics and fans alike – Cyclone Bill and the Tall Tales are. Whether they sound like REM or Hootie and the Blowfish (God bless you) is up to you. And the story’s involving enough that we lose ourselves in it and come to completely accept this premise. (more…)

End Times: Bloody Demon Guts
Written and Illustrated by Sam Hiti
Published by La Luz Comics
$10.00

Continuing our perusal of older books that deserve another look… 

The first time I ever heard of Sam Hiti, he was this quiet guy on a convention panel I attended about indie creators and small-publishers. After the panel, I wandered by his table and looked over what he was selling: a one-shot comic called End Times. It was about a monster hunter, and I generally like monster hunters, but what got me to fork out the moolah for it was Hiti’s art. At the time, I thought of it as sort of a Latin version of Mike Mignola’s work with its abundance of black ink, simple, but intriguing designs, and uniquely creepy monsters.

Since then I’ve followed Hiti’s work pretty closely. The first interview I ever conducted was with Hiti right after he won the Xeric grant for a sequel to the End Times one-shot. Three years later, that sequel came out.

I tell you all that so that you can get a sense of the anticipation and expectation with which I finally read End Times: Bloody Demon Guts (the English translation of its actual, much-cooler-in-Spanish title: Tiempos Finales: Tripas Sangrientas de los Demonios). It was everything I’d hoped it would be, yet nothing like what I expected.

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Baraka and Black Magic in Morocco
Written and Illustrated by Rick Smith
Published by Alternative Comics
$14.95

When I first heard about the concept behind Rick Smith’s Baraka and Black Magic in Morocco, I was skeptical. I don’t like looking at friends’ vacation photos, so how interesting am I going to find a comic book version of a stranger’s slideshow of his trip to northern Africa? But, hey, I review comics. Part of the gig is keeping an open mind about concepts that you might not ordinarily be drawn towards. So, with open mind in head, I started reading.

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Little Lit: “It Was a Dark and Silly Night…” 

Written by Lemony Snicket, J. Otto Seibold, Vivian Walsh, Tony Millionaire, Neil Gaiman, William Joyce, Basil Wolverton, Joost Swarte, Carlos Nine, Kaz, Barbara McClintock, Patrick McDonnell and R. Sikoryak

Illustrated by Martin Handford, Richard Sala, J. Otto Seibold, Vivian Walsh, Tony Millionaire, Gahan Wilson, William Joyce, Basil Wolverton, Joost Swarte, Carlos Nine, Kaz, Barbara McClintock, Patrick McDonnell and R. Sikoryak

Cover by Art Spiegelman; Edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly

Published by RAW Junior/Harper Collins
$19.99

This and last week’s reviews aren’t exactly responses to Chris’ call for papers, but his article did get me thinking about some older comics that I loved. So while I get caught up on some current reading, here’s another edited version of a review I originally did for Comic World News. 

My almost-two-year-old son made it very difficult for me to finish reading “It Was a Dark and Silly Night…” He kept pulling it out of my hands so that he could look at the endpapers by Where’s Waldo creator Martin Handford. The fact that this irritated me a little because I was enjoying the book is a testament, I think. Although 34 years apart in age, we both were able to enjoy the same book…even if on slightly different levels.

“It Was a Dark and Silly Night…” is the brainchild of Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, and his wife Françoise Mouly, the art editor of The New Yorker magazine. It’s the third in their best-selling Little Lit series of anthologies that are supposedly for youngsters, but are really — if this volume is typical — for anyone who enjoys a good story.

The premise is that Spiegelman and Mouly asked well-known novelists like Lemony Snicket and Neil Gaiman, cartoonists like Tony Millionaire and Patrick McDonnell, and children’s book artists like J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh to tell a story beginning with the words, well… you know. The result is a whimsical, entertaining anthology of stories (and games) by an A-list group of the most creative people on the planet.

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Honour Among Punks
Written by Guy Davis and Gary Reed
Illustrated by Guy Davis, Vince Locke, and Alan Oldham
Published by iBooks
$19.95 

The following is an edited version of a review that I originally posted on Comic World News.

We’ve all got times in our lives that we look back fondly on and measure all our subsequent experiences against. For some of us, it’s high school. For others it’s college. Or our first apartments. Or whatever. For Guy Davis, it was his time in the punk scene during the eighties. Davis would later cut his tall, spiked red hair and create quite a name for himself in the comics industry illustrating titles like Sandman Mystery Theatre, Nevermen and The Marquis, but before that, he and his buddy Gary Reed put together a few comic books that combined Davis’ love of the punk scene with Reed’s love of Sherlock Holmes. The result of that amalgamation was two mini-series and a couple of short features that all fell under the title of Baker Street.

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