Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography
Written by Sid Jacobson
Illustrated by Ernie Colón
Published by Hill & Wang

After collaborating on a comic book adaptation of the 9-11 Commission’s report, and then issuing a book of journalism that followed up on the report’s findings and follow-through, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón have turned their attention to creating comic book biographies.  After targeting Che Guevara initially, the tandem digs into the life of a much less controversial figure, famed journal-keeper and Holocaust victim Annelies Marie Frank.

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The Bloom County Library v.1
Written & Illustrated by Berkeley Breathed
Published by The Library of American Comics/IDW

An admission: Prior to six or seven years ago, I’d never even heard of Bloom County.  I mention is because reading this volume got me thinking about how sometimes, for whatever reason (in my case, the strip’s ending when I was still fairly young and, in any event, its lack of inclusion in my local newspaper probably had quite a bit to do with my ignorance) sometimes we all overlook things that really deserve our attention.  Now obviously every reader out there can’t read every comic that might possibly appeal to them, but this book served as a notice to me to keep an open mind – just because you or I haven’t heard of a particular comic (or musician or film, etc.) doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly influential and/or very, very good.

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Incredible Hulk Visionaries: Peter David v. 7
Written by Peter David with Tom Field
Penciled by Dale Keown, John Romita Sr., Ron Wagner & Gary Barker
Inked by Mark Farmer, Fred Fredericks, Mike Witherby, Al Milgrom & Joe Rubinstein
Colored by Glynis Oliver & Mike Thomas
Lettered by Joe Rosen, Brad K. Joyce & Mike Heisler
Published by Marvel Comics

Now I’m not the biggest superhero fan on the block, but writer Peter David’s twelve-year turn as writer of The Incredible Hulk stands out as one of the standards I look for when I do venture into superhero territory.  Visionaries v.7 collects eight issues from 1991-92 (one of those issues written by Tom Field, though Marvel might as well have skipped it since it’s not Peter David-written and doesn’t tie into David’s storyline at all – it’s pure inventory).

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Usagi Yojimbo v.24: Return of the Black Soul
Written & Illustrated by Stan Sakai
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Whenever I buy a new comic, that book is automatically added to the bottom of my towering to-read pile and must wait its turn until it finally reaches the light of day and finds itself exposed to my withering glare.  (This method does not apply to review copies sent to me, as I try to finish those in something somewhat resembling a timely manner.)  Thus, the recurrence of stupendously late reviews by me: you’re witnessing the book that I bought six months after it dropped and didn’t read for another eight months after that finally digging its way to the surface.  One comic book series, however, is always excepted to this arduous months-long waiting process, because honestly, I just can’t wait to read it.  And that series is Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo.

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Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story
Written by Mat Johnson
Illustrated by Simon Gane
Gray tones and color by Lee Loughridge
Lettered by Pat Brosseau
Published by DC/Vertigo

Vertigo’s made a move recently toward publishing more graphic novels, and I approve in general of the move.  For whatever reason, I’ve never been a big fan of going to the comic shop every single week and prefer to pick up a meatier volume when something specifically strikes my fancy.  Much of their recent graphic novel output has come from the Vertigo Crime sub-line, which, for me anyway, has been a bit of a disappointment.  However, the graphic novels that aren’t part of the crime line have been quite impressive overall.

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Pang: the Wandering Shaolin Monk v.1: Refuge of the Heart
Written & Illustrated by Ben Costa
Published by Iron Crotch University Press

The long-running webcomic now comes to print thanks to the generosity of Peter Laird and the Xeric Grant (which provides self-publishing grants to independent comic book creators).  Pang: the Wandering Shaolin Monk tells of Pang, the titular monk, a survivor of a conflict during political upheaval in China during the latter part of the 17^th century on a quest to find his lost brethren.

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The Newsboy Legion by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby v.1
Written & Illustrated by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, with Arturo Cazaneuve, Steve Brodie, John Daly, Gil Kane and Harry Tschida
Published by DC Comics

As they’ve done with previous Jack Kirby hardcover editions, DC Comics puts together a nice package here – 300+ pages, hardcover (though personally, I’d pay a couple extra bucks for a stitched spine rather than a glued one), newsprint paper (preserving the pulpy origins of the material, though many readers may prefer a sturdier stock to ensure that their $40 books last a few years) – in the first collection of the Newsboy Legion stories created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Star-Spangled Comics #7 through 32, originally published from April 1942 to May 1944, are compiled here, introducing Tommy, Gabby, Scrapper and Big Words, four doggedly determined newspaper hawkers from the worst part of town.  Together, they battle mobsters and Nazi spies with last-minute assistance from their guardian, policeman Jim Harper and his alter ego, The Guardian (clever, that).

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Penny Century
Written & Illustrated by Jamie Hernandez
Published by Fantagraphics

At this point, I don’t know what else there is to say about Jamie Hernandez or Love & Rockets.  I suspect that one day he’s going to make a truly terrible comic, if only because he must feel at least a little bit bad about showing nearly every other creator up so often.

In 1996, when Jamie and his brother Gilbert felt that they’d said as much as they wanted to say under the Love & Rockets title, they folded their long-running, acclaimed comic magazine, and each moved on to separate comic projects.  For Jamie, this meant creating a three-issue Whoa, Nellie! serial and a new series titled Penny Century.  Both series took place alongside his previous Locas stories in Love & Rockets; Maggie’s female wrestling champion aunt and two colleagues took the lead in Whoa, Nellie!, while Penny Century continued Maggie and Hopey’s life tales, with more focus on their blond bombshell, billionaire’s wife pal Beatríz “Penny Century” García.

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High Soft Lisp
Written & Illustrated by Gilbert Hernandez
Published by Fantagraphics

Perhaps Gilbert Hernandez’s most graphic work since Birdland, High Soft Lisp tells dual narratives of longtime Hernandez protagonist Rosabla “Fritz” Martinez and her ex-husband, washed-up motivational speaker Mark Herrera.  Essentially paralleling their incredible vanity with their own descent into self-deluded excess, the book stands out for its depiction of extreme sexual proclivities of each lead character.

Fritz, as longtime Hernandez readers know, threads low self-esteem and extreme sexual adventures together with incredible rapidity, but High Soft Lisp stands out for the sheer bleakness of the narrative.  Wallowing in sexual degradation and alcoholic abuse, Fritz wanders through her life, disconnected from the family that gave flexibility to her life in the pages of Luba.  Mark Herrera, unwilling to climb out of the orbit surrounding his ex-wives, continues his own routine of casting judgments and proclamations without any tempering self-assessments.  This isn’t to say that the book is without its joys – Hernandez maintains a careful, but certainly very dark, thread of humor throughout the entire book, portraying his cast with a knowing irony.

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Stitches
Written & Illustrated by David Small
Published by W.W. Norton

Y’know, I hope that one of these days some cartoonist comics along with a really hilarious memoir that we can put up alongside the Allison Bechdels, Art Spiegelmans and David Smalls of the world.  I like to laugh. But until then, I’ll continue to marvel at how moving the comic book form can be, even in the case of heartbreaking works like David Small’s Stitches.

Small, raised by an emotionally unavailable and harsh mother, suffers far more than the slings and arrows of a typical childhood.  After a growth on his neck is left untreated for three years, he winds up physically voiceless and scarred (the book’s title coming from the first time he sees the surgical wound), emotionally sullen and withdrawn from the world.  During several segments, stretched across his entire childhood, Small discovers tragic segments of his family history, turns to therapy to understand his familial relationships, and finds a voice through his art, but everything happens in reaction to the loveless, abusive upbringing endured during his childhood.

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Fogtown
Written by Andersen Gabrych
Illustrated by Brad Rader
Lettered by Sean Konot
Published by DC/Vertigo

Another Vertigo crime thriller, and another faux-noir protagonist being carried along by a series of credulity-stretching plot twists.  In Fogtown, Frank Grissel is, his closeted homosexuality aside, yet another in a long line of Chandler-lite detectives.  Grissel’s hired to find a missing daughter, but as is the way in these stories, he’s set up to be a patsy and refuses to be anybody’s patsy.  You’ve seen it before.

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Almost Silent
Written & Illustrated by Jason
Translated by Kim Thompson
Published by Fantagraphics

Four of Jason’s past comics – Meow, Baby!; Tell Me Something; You Can’t Get There From Here; and The Living and the Dead – get compiled into one 300-page hardcover in Almost Silent.  True to the title, most of the comics within operate in pantomime, though text appears more often than you might expect.

First of all, I have to say how much I enjoy the format.  Fantagraphics has done a fine job with this book, with a striking cover, sturdy spine, and essentially giving me everything I want in my comic books in terms of collected treatment.  Lots and lots of pages in a portable size – Almost Silent looks and feels like a book, slips into a murse easily, and can easily be read on mass transit, in a waiting room or surreptitiously at your desk during work (not that I did, but one could).

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Rip Kirby v.2
Written and Illustrated by Alex Raymond
Written and Edited by Ward Greene
Published by IDW

Alex Raymond, abetted by editor and co-writer Ward Greene, continued to refine Rip Kirby during the years 1948-1951.  Raymond, the co-creator of Flash Gordon, created a new daily strip in the mid-1940s, following his return from military service, and the resultant Rip Kirby was as far from Flash’s romantic swashbuckling adventure as imaginable.  A procedural detective drama, set in a world specifically as real as that outside contemporary readers’ windows, Rip Kirby follows a dapper, upper-crust private detective as he untangles a variety of mysteries.

Firstly, credit to IDW and The Library of American Comics for their impeccable reproduction of these sixty-plus year-old newspaper strips, as well as for their elegantly designed, hardbound collection of the material.  A true classic strip created by on the field’s most acclaimed legends, Rip Kirby deserves a grand treatment, and IDW/The Library of American Comics have created a package that suits the bill.

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Wednesday Comics
Edited by Mark Chiarello with Chris Conroy
Published by DC Comics

One of DC Comics’ most interesting publishing projects in recent memory remains Wednesday Comics.  The concept was part throwback, part attempt to find alternative publishing models.  Each week, they published a broadsheet, folded in half and in half again.  When readers sprawled the sheets out to their fullest dimensions, 14” x 20”, they were treated to a humongous canvas, allowing the selected artists to showcase their ability on a larger scale than anything since the heyday of the Sunday newspaper strips (a format Wednesday Comics consciously emulated, with its newsprint production).  Now available in a collected hardcover edition, on much sturdier and shinier paper, Wednesday Comics remains an interesting project, though not nearly as interesting as in its original format.

Simply put, as it ran only twelve weeks, each story has only twelve pages of real estate to make its point.  Comics writers have been crafting some very engaging and witty short stories for decades upon decades, but there are still certain limitations on what you can do in twelve pages and many of the scripts here run up against those boundaries.  Few are outright poor, but even fewer are actually memorable in any way.  Much of the art is, fortunately, quite good, and the large size and quality paper does provide an effective showcase for the illustrators, making Wednesday Comics, ultimately, a project more suited to art-admirers than story-readers.

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MW
Written & Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka
Translated by Camellia Nieh
Published by Vertical

Osamu Tezuka, the godfather of manga, is one of my favorite comics creators, largely because his work simply can’t be pinned down.  After rising to prominence with the adventurous pop fun of Astro Boy, Tezuka’s work included a lifelong (literally) quest for immortality in Phoenix, medical thrillers such as Black Jack or Ode to Kirohito, fantastical historical fiction like Adolf, and several of the bleakest portraits of man’s cold inhumanity, including Apollo’s Song and MW.

MW tells of a young man, Yuki, who was exposed to minute traces of a chemical weapon – the titular MW – as a young boy.  Doomed to a slow death, Yuki resorts to kidnapping, murder, extortion and worse, perhaps losing all sense of morality from the gas, or perhaps simply filled with hatred over his fate.  Along the way, he is both helped and hindered by a priest named Father Garai.  Garai’s lustful attraction to Yuki prevents him from turning Yuki over to the authorities, though he offers several other rationalizations as to why he shelters a killer.  (A flashback involving Garai and Yuki’s encounter in a cave before exposure to the MW gas offers another possible motive for Yuki’s amorality.)

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The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans
Written & Illustrated by Rick Geary
Published by NBM

Rick Geary’s latest true-crime account – he’s been authoring these heavily researched re-creations of history’s startling, scandalous or unsolved crimes for nearly three decades now – takes readers to New Orleans in the years 1918 and 1919, when six people were murdered and another six grievously wounded by an unknown assailant.

In The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans, Geary’s careful eye for detail and rigorously researched backgrounds pay off in spades.  Opening the book with an overview of New Orlean’s history, dating back to its founding by French settlers, the transfer of power to the British, back to the French, the Louisiana Purchase, the arrival of the Cajuns and the birth of Fat Tuesday (otherwise known as Mardi Gras), Axe-Man establishes the flavor and culture of its setting quickly and clearly.

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Werewolves of Montpellier
Written & Illustrated by Jason
Translated by Kim Thompson
Published by Fantagraphics

Ostensibly about a jewel thief who dresses as a werewolf running afoul of real werewolves, Jason’s Werewolves of Montpellier stands out as yet another genre-mashing, hilarious send-up from the superb one-named cartoonist.  In truth, while the werewolves’ presence is noteworthy, most of the book is given over to the wry and awkward social interactions of Jason’s protagonist.

Fueled by Jason’s staccato panels (eight panel-grids on every page, without variation) and dry, humdrum-of-life pacing, Werewolves of Montpellier revels in examining the routines of Sven, the book’s erstwhile hero.  Whether it’s debating with a friend what parts of women to stare at or engaging in awkward dates with girls who realize he’s in love with another woman, Sven’s interactions are clumsy and forced, but intentionally and entertainingly so.

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Revolver
Written & Illustrated by Matt Kindt
Lettered by Steve Wands
Published by DC/Vertigo

With Sweet Tooth’s Jeff Lemire and now Matt Kindt in house, Vertigo’s done a fine job enlisting two of the best talents from Top Shelf Comics’ roster.  Lemire’s Essex County trilogy and Kindt’s books, Pistolwhip, Pistolwhip: The Yellow Menace, 2 Sisters and Superspy, rank among the most promising graphic novels of the past decade.

Kindt’s latest book, Revolver, verges on science-fiction, though in the oblique manner Kindt’s previous books touched on genre elements.  The book’s protagonist, Sam, finds himself shackled by dead ends: his job, his relationship and his self-righteous boss.  He wakes up one day to find himself in a terrifying world of avian flu outbreaks and dirty bombs, an apocalyptic landscape with danger in every minute.  And then he reawakens and finds himself again in his dull old world.  Flipping back and forth between two worlds, one dynamic but life-threatening, another safe but lifeless, Sam explores the limits of his relationships and searches for an answer to which world is ultimately his.

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Boneyard v.7
Written & Illustrated by Richard Moore
Published by NBM

The publishing world of comics won’t be quite as fun any more, as Richard Moore’s Boneyard concludes with its seventh collected edition.  Yeah, he could one day return, but for now, this supernatural comedic adventure serial is closing up shop, leaving its creator more time to pursue other projects that percolate in his mind.

Here’s Boneyard’s big picture: Michael Paris inherits a graveyard from his grandfather, and in this graveyard he discovers a classic sitcom-worthy collection of spooks and ghouls, including a lewd demon, a wolfman mechanic, a fishy temptress and one very cute, very deadly and very caring vampire named Abbey.  Over the previous six books, Michael and Abbey have grown toward one another, but always find themselves interrupted by … perhaps the devil himself trying to take over the graveyard.

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Blackest Night: Black Lantern Corp v.1 & 2
Written by Peter J. Tomasi, James Robinson, J.T. Krul, Geoff Johns, Tony Bedard & Greg Rucka
Penciled by Ardian Syaf, Eddy Barrows, Allan Goldman, Ed Benes, Scott Kolins, Marcos Marz, Eduardo Pansica & Nicola Scott
Inked by Vicente Cifuentes, John Dell, Ruy José, Julio Ferreira, Eber Ferreira, Rob Hunter, Jon Sibal, JP Mayer, Scott Williams, Ed Benes, Kolins, Luciana Del Negro, Barrows, Wayne Faucher, Sandro Ribeiro, Prentis Rollins, Jonathan Glapion, Walden Wong & Drew Geraci
Colored by Nei Ruffino, Rod Reis, Hi-Fi Design & Mike Atiyeh
Lettered by John J. Hill, Steve Wands, Rob Clark, Jr., Travis Lanham & Rob Leigh
Published by DC Comics

Okay, yes, the art is choppy.  Those credits include a metric ton of pencilers and even more inkers.  Most of the art is credible, but the sheer number of artistic voices does add a sense of inconsistency within each series.  One penciler handles most of each miniseries, so it’s not completely jarring, but you’ll notice some art discrepancies.

Black Lantern Corps v. 1 and 2 compile six different three-issue miniseries that tie into the Blackest Night miniseries.  Vol. 1 collects Batman, Superman and Titans, while v.2 brings together Flash, Justice Society of America and Wonder Woman.  The overall effect of reading all six series is an impression that the heroes’ victory over Blackest Night is largely pyrrhic. The sheer number of people killed in these two books makes a reader wonder if the heroes really are accomplishing anything.  Tomasi has Batman and Red Robin repeatedly state that their primary objective is to protect the innocent, yet dozens of Gotham police officers are killed on their watch.

Which isn’t to say that, taken on its own, any individual series isn’t without its redeeming points.  Superman, in particular, manages high octane action, a fair amount of creepy terror, and the most effective use of the over-used emotional spectrum view of the characters.  Wonder Woman, by comparison, feels jumpy and uneven, despite a strong opening narration wherein Greg Rucka examines Wonder Woman’s character quite nicely.

In the big picture, some entertainment lurks between these pages, but reading three straight Black Lantern Corps series (one volume), or all six (both volumes), probably isn’t necessary.  The repetition of themes (heroes’ regret over losses, rage over desecration of loved ones) and humorless struggles against zombie heroes add up to less than the sum of each individual serial.  Once you’ve read one of these Blackest Night tie-ins, you’ve read them all.  Stick to your favorite hero and enjoy one ride; six won’t add much to the experience.