Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, the upcoming graphic novel by Prudence Shen and the spectacularly talented Faith Erin Hicks, is now available for pre-order (It’s also been serialized online for the last few months, for those who have no idea what I’m talking about. Spoilers: It’s really good). To promote pre-orders, publisher First Second has decided to incentivize the process a little bit, and offer a prize draw for those who have pre-ordered, with the scale of the prize dependent on how many pre-orders are confessed in their comments section.

Some of the prizes are wonderful, whether it’s the original Faith Erin Hicks drawing on offer for 100-149 pre-orders or the all-original, one-off, not-to-be-published short story featuring the cast of the book by Prudence Shen for 250-499 orders, but the top prize, if the pre-orders top 500, is pretty damn great:

Pre-ordering us to death is the only acceptable method of breaking our website, for those of you considering it, in case you’ve been wondering. At this level, in addition to all the previously listed and frankly baller prizes, you’ll unlock a magical, awesome present for everybody who’s enjoyed Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong along with you.

With 500 pre-orders, we’ll post a special years-later epilogue about our crew from Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, complete with awesome cover art from Faith. As you can expect, it will involve poor decision making, a series of escalating disasters, and college (the locus of possibly the most terrible decisions ever).

People, (a) go check this book out, because it’s good, and then (b) pre-order it. I want to read this epilogue!

In 2004, then twenty-year-old artist Jen Wang made a short, 13-page webcomic in which an eccentric young woman named Koko meets a more straight-laced young man named Jonathan at a bus stop and the pair have a conversation about some fairly deep issues (The story is up on Wang’s website, if you’d like to read it).

By 2010, Koko and Jon stretched, swelled and changed shape, their coversation spread out all over San Francisco and included many more participants and their 13-page bus-stop story together grew into a 300-page graphic novel, Wang’s first, entitled Koko Be Good.

Koko is still an eccentric young woman, and on who seems to be trying very hard to prove that she knows exactly who she is while she’s actually stil trying to figure that out. A chance encounter with Jon, a young man about to move to Peru to join his long-distance girlfriend Emily in her work, helping Peruvian orphans, gives Koko a new direction to throw herself in. She’s tried to be many things, but now she’s going to try to be good, whatever that means, exactly.

Set in San Francisco over the course of some very dramatic, transitional times for two people, Koko Be Good features accomplished, confident, fluid renderings of expressively designed characters, flowing from panel to panel and emoting through big saucer eyes, subtly-shifting mouths, dynamic posture changes and really,really well-drawn hands.

If the artist herself hasn’t yet discovered exactly what it means to be good, her artwork certainly demonstrates that she is good—in the comics-making sense, if not the orphan-saving sense. We took the opportunity of her book’s recent release to talk to Wang about the characters, the work and goodness.

Blog@Newsarama: Koko Be Good began as a short story that unfolds in a single scene. How did that version of the story grow into a graphic novel?

Jen Wang: 2004 was a year of changes for me and the short comic came to me really quickly as an reflection of that time. Even before finishing the comic I felt I had more to say. Koko felt like the perfect character to channel my feelings, and I knew when I had enough time to process everything, I wanted to return to the character and do a more fleshed out version. It felt like the perfect thing to work on after graduation.

Blog@: Reading the original story on your website after reading the graphic novel version, I was struck by how the two Kokos are so similar, but the Jons look very different from each other. How did the characters evolve from between the two stories?

JW: The original Jon wasn’t much of a character. He was a bit of cipher, and for the book I wanted him to have his own story. Koko’s a pretty unreliable narrator so I needed someone more grounded and realistic to contrast. Once I figured out what Jon needed to be it wasn’t too hard to come up with a different design. (more…)

Walker Bean’s grandfather is an admiral in the navy, and his father is a captain in the navy, so it’s probably safe to assume there’s some sea water in the young, bespectacled boy’s blood, but his head and heart are full of inventions, not adventures.

Not that he’s adverse to a good bed-time story, of course, like the legend of the all-knowing, cursed Atlantean skulls jealously guarded by two titanic sea witches, that his grandfather tells him of one night.

The story becomes real for the Bean clan when the grandfather encounters such a skull at sea and comes down with a potentially fatal illness—in order to free himself of the curse, the skull must be returned to its rightful owner, something Walker is tasked with doing, despite the wishes of his own father, who would rather exploit it.

That’s the basic plot of The Unsinkable Walker Bean (First Second), cartoonist Aaron Renier’s new all-ages adventure story, primed to be the first in a very welcome series.

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Adventures in Cartooning
Written & Illustrated by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost
Published by First Second

James Sturm started the Center for Cartoon Studies several years ago, so it’s really not a surprise that he teamed up with two former students to create a book designed to teach children how to create their own comics.

Adventures in Cartooning begins with a knight seeking adventure, a dragon to slay, while standing against a blank white backdrop.  With the aid of the Magic Cartooning Elf, the knight quickly grasps the precepts of panels and word balloons, horizontal and vertical movement, and the most basic aspects of illustration.  The pair, with the knight’s sweet-toothed horse Edward, journey forth, overcoming giant walls, impassable oceans, and the depths of a whale’s stomach as part of their quest.  Sprinkled throughout the engaging adventure, the knight applies the principles of cartooning to overcome each setback and continue to the dragon’s island lair.

With an upbeat sense of humor, as well as obvious and subtle embedded lessons, Adventures in Cartooning manages to be entertaining and educational. The creators’ minimalist designs are easy for youngster to reproduce, and the large panels, bright colors and amusing banter entice you into the characters and their quest.

And better yet, the team reunites this fall for the Adventures in Cartooning Activity Book.  Time to put all those lessons to work, kids!

City of Spies
Written by Susan Kim & Laurence Klavan
Illustrated by Pascal Dizin
Colored by Hilary Sycamore
Published by First Second

This book is a pure delight.  In 1942, Evelyn and Tony are ten years old and full of imagination.  Evelyn doodles her own comic strips, Zirconium Man and Scooter (the sidekick bears an uncanny resemblance to Evelyn herself), and Tony’s always on the lookout for Nazi spies. Of course, the duo eventually uncovers a real Nazi plot and have to save the United States, over the skepticism of the adults.

Illustrator Pascal Dizin brings a Tintin-like line to the proceedings.  Clean, open illustrations, densely fitting an average of ten panels onto each page, carry the story with warmth and humor.  Dizin’s character designs are strong and unique, easily identifiable in different outfits or in shadow, and he’s able to create a cityscape that convincingly captures a clean ideal of 1940s New York.  The panel-to-panel progressions move confidently and easily.  Moreover, both Dizin’s line work and Hilary Sycamore’s color operate in an understated manner, finding a strong balance between the two.  Dizin’s strong designs and character acting carry all the wonder and wit of the script, and Sycamore’s flat, natural coloring complements the upbeat nature of the narrative. Also, the dot-style coloring used during Evelyn’s comic book sequences wonderfully suits the nostalgic nod to comics of childhood whimsy.

Susan Kim and Laurence Klavan’s script attains the warmth and imaginative quality of the best bits of childhood escapism.  Evelyn and Tony’s imaginative misadventures carry a large portion of the book, explaining why the adults do and do not believe their story of Nazi spies, and their antics manage to be sufficiently silly to entertain the youngest readers without being so juvenile as to bore older readers.  In short, they’ve crafted a true all-ages adventure, an imaginative delight.

City of Spies is aimed at your children, if my estimation of our primary readership’s age is even slightly accurate, but its creators, using sharp dialogue, engaging plot twists and strong artwork, have crafted a tale that all but the most cynical readers will delight in.  It comes with a full Blog@ endorsement.

Jordan Mechner’s main claim to fame is that he created the video game franchise Prince of Persia, which is primed to reach its likely apex of popularity later this month when the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring summer movie opens.

Showing fine timing, publisher First Second is releasing not only a new edition of Mechner’s 2008 graphic novel Prince of Persia, a remarkably literary collaboration with writer A.B. Sina and artists LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland, but also a brand-new work from Mechner, Solomon’s Thieves Book 1.

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Gene Luen Yang’s Prime Baby (First Second) has two unusual factors going for it, beyond the obvious fact that it’s a new-ish comics work from Gene Luen Yang.

First, its protagonist is an extremely unlikable (and thus, somewhat lovable) jerk whom one is more likely to root against instead of for. And second, the narrative takes an inventive twist or two, to avoid the predictable ending—it’s happy, and there’s closure, but it’s not the obvious, path-of-least-resistance conclusion.

Prime Baby began as Yang’s contribution to the funny pages section of the New York Times Magazine, and its collected format reflects its one time strip nature.

The thin volume is a horizontal rectangle, about six inches tall and eight inches wide, with a three-to-four-panel comic strip set in the center of each page, surrounded by white space. While it looks like a comic strip collection, it reads like a graphic novel. Rather than stopping and starting on each page, climaxing at the end of each strip and retreading what came before in the first panels of each new one, Prime Baby simply continues, the effect more like a long, continuous graphic novel scrolling sideways through the horizontal space, or, perhaps, a single comic strip with the length of a novella instead of a single joke.

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The commonality between the Greek heroes and gods of myth and the twentieth century comic book superheroes has been noticed, expressed and remarked upon so many times that it has long since become a cliché.

It therefore shouldn’t come as much of a surprise how at home the Olympians are in the native medium of the superheroes, and yet George O’Connor’s Zeus: King of the Gods (First Second), is an amazingly graceful story. It may technically be an adaptation, but it reads like an original work.

Part of that may simply be a matter of the Zeus and company being comic book superheroes before there were comic books or superheroes, but much of it has to do with O’Connor’s execution, the choices he made while making the book—many of them risky, most of them very smart.

This is the first of a planned twelve-graphic novel cycle, each covering a different Olympian, and O’Connor starts with Zeus, giving him an opening for the ancient Greek creation myth, and the chance to present Zeus in a far different light than the one he’s usually seen in.

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In his spare time, First Second’s editorial director Mark Siegel moonlights as a cartoonist.  If you haven’t seen his review of Scott Pilgrim 5, you really should.

Well, now he’s taken to using his mornings to write and illustrate a webcomic.  Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson is up and running at SailorTwain.com.  A tale of 19th century Manhattan, a sailor and the allure of the water, Sailor Twain is running new pages every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

It looks great and the story is shaping up nicely.  No mermaids yet, I like how he’s letting the story build itself slowly and organically.  And a deer swimming in the Hudson is bizarre enough to make me forget all about the promise of mermaids.

I have only two question: Mark Siegel has free time?  And does his staff know about this?

Since 1997, Lark Pien has built up a reputation within the small press comics community and has now made the jump to her first children’s book based on her most popular character, Long Tail Kitty. Having studied architecture and pursued work in the architectural industry, Pien gradually made the transition over to comics and becoming a full-time artist. With a number of projects in the works, this is a good time to check in on her.

Blog@Newsarama: Tell us about Long Tail Kitty, the character. How far back does it go and is it a guiding force in your comics?

Lark Pien: Long Tail Kitty – Heaven was a story for my rabbit who died while i was traveling abroad in 1999-2000. LTK was almost a side character but he was well-received, and I met many people in comics after this story.

I don’t think Long Tail Kitty is a guiding force, but he’s been fun to draw, and his easy way helps me not to be so serious all the time.

Blog@: You loved comics as a kid, you became an architectural designer and then you returned to comics. What was it like starting out in comics?

LP: It was very humble and private, but I met many cartoonists early on. They were supportive and gave advice freely. Sometimes I would get a postcard in the mail from a cartoonist. My little world became a little bit bigger that way.

There weren’t many girl cartoonists. I remember meeting Andrice Arp at an Alternative Press Expo. I bought her comic and she gave me a sticker of a giant angry duck and I got it in my head that I wanted us to be friends. This wasn’t grade school but it might as well have been! Somehow it happened, we became good friends.

Blog@: Please describe for us your working methods. How do you develop your work?

LP: I write and draw in my sketchbook. I’ll draw even when I don’t have ideas. Most times I know the beginning and the end of a story, but not the middle.

I have to really work to make the beginning and the ending meet. It’s good if i can build a structure to support my story, then let it take the shape that it wants to be.

A lot of people ask about creating characters, how I come up with them. Usually I’m thinking about what the character is doing or where it is in the world, and the story comes from that. The personality and how the character looks develops along the way, and usually reveals itself later on in the process for me.

Blog@: Can you share with us how you’ve managed to turn your comics and art into a career?

LP: This is a very hard question! I’m not sure i can answer it correctly. Do we talk about money? My view on money is general rather than specific. I tend to overlook trend type offers due to a muted interest in the short term.  I group projects by seasons (commissions for example, are winter/spring; conventions are summer/fall). I like to think ahead, but not plan a whole lot.

I think about political/cultural landscapes changing – and what will i be like when i’m seventy, ninety? Also there are all sorts of inventions I hope to see before I die. This is unprofessional to say, but I think my career is a semblance of self-certitude and the possibilities in the world surrounding.

Blog@: What would you like to tell us about your new children’s book, Long Tail Kitty?

LP: My publisher, Blue Apple Books, has been very generous! BAB has given me a lot of freedom in writing the stories I wanted to tell and drawing the art the way I wanted to do it. They made the book design very special (embossed die-cut cover, cloth binding, an activities foldout page, and a draw LTK bonus section!), and to see the artwork in full-color is a treat (my minis are usually in b/w). though catagorized for younger audiences the new stories in this book retain the qualities that are in my mini comics, so i hope older readers give it a chance too!

Blog@: Can you tell us something about your role as a colorist for Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese?

LP: Chinkee was a challenge to color – he was in a different style (more cartoony) than the rest of the characters, but still placed in a real setting. How yellow is too yellow? He’s supposed to be too yellow. It was hard to make those kinds of decisions. Sometimes I wanted Gene to say “Whoa! Change that color!” but he was very easy-going.

Blog@: Are there any comics that you follow? Or can you tell us about some of your favorite comics?

LP: I like Hicksville (Dylan Horrocks), Black and White (Matsumoto Taiyo) and Notes For A War Story (Gipi). They are my favorites.

Black and White I first read in the 90′s, when VIZ was in SoMA. I was given an oversized  two-volume set – which I foolishly lent out and never got back (see these glittering tears? Falling like rain.) It’s out of print now, that edition, but I’ve another reading set which I don’t mind lending out still.

I just read a ton of Vagabond (Takehiko Inoue) and cartoonists who I’ve recently stalked online are Lille Carré, Eleanor Davis, Laura Park and Anke Feuchtenberger. Girls win this round!

Blog@:  Any upcoming projects that you’d like to tell us about or any thoughts on what lies ahead for you?

LP: I just finished the artwork for Mr. Elephanter – a children’s book with Candlewick Press, based on my mini-comic, Brave Mr. Elephanter (2007). The graphic novel project, Stories from the Ward, is with First Second, but completion won’t be for a little while yet. FS has been very patient and supportive. There are two other comic projects with publishers, but we haven’t set a release date yet. Artwise, I’ve been developing a new series of abstracts. I’d like to squeeze in a collaborative project and/or installation project sometime this year. That’d be fun.

Keep up with Lark Pien at her blog and check out more of her work here. Long Tail Kitty is published by Blue Apple Books.

Ball Peen Hammer writer Adam Rapp must have one hell of a busy-looking business card at this point. He’s a playwright, filmmaker, young adult novelist and adult novelist, adding graphic novelist to his resume with this, his debut work in the medium. He’s working with artist George O’Connor, a picture book artist now on his second graphic novel (His first, Journey into Mohawk Country, was also published by First Second).

Their book, named for the tool used in a procedure best not spoiled here, betrays Rapp’s background in theater, as it’s an extremely talky one, mostly occurring in  two pretty claustrophobic settings. A cast of six or seven and minimal set design is all it would take to move this from the page to the stage, which points to a problem with the work: It’s a comic that doesn’t have to be a comic, and while that doesn’t make it a bad comic, I think it keeps it from ever being a truly great one.

I said it was talky, but it’s not at all poorly assembled. All that conversation is well-divided into different panels, so that the whole endeavor retains the form of a comic book and the experience remains one of reading a comic book—there are no walls of text, or panels overwhelmed by dialogue bubbles. It doesn’t read like a novel or screenplay or play being stuffed into a graphic novel for cynical reasons. Given how much of the story is told through the conversations—there’s no text prologue or narration to serve as shortcuts—it’s really quite remarkably assembled.

O’Connor’s lines are thin, and many when they’re needed—on brick walls, cross-hatched gloom, rotting diseased bodies, exterior long shots, a few rain storms—but his character designs are smooth, expressive, open and highly variant. The cast is a small one, but it looks great, and if you’re familiar with O’Connor’s children’s books, you may be surprised to see how he’s adapted his style to this form and this particular work.
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It looks like a Wanted lady has some very good things to say about First Second.

Angelina Jolie, who has starred in roles varying from the Fox in Wanted to mother Christine Collins in the J. Michael Straczynski-penned film Changling, has given a rousing endorsement of First Second’s book, the Photographer, which follows the crew from Doctors Without Borders in the heart of war-torn Afghanistan.

“An unflinching and gripping photographic memoir, The Photographer takes you on a breathtaking journey through the best and worst humanity has to offer in times of war,” she said. “Turning its pages, the reader begins to understand what it means to lose everything as a refugee of war, to cross mountains to help someone you never met, to feel the intense responsibility of being the only one able to capture the last moments of a child’s stolen life. Suddenly Afghanistan, a distant land, a foreign culture, a courageous and resilient people seem closer, more familiar—more human. I love this book.”

A pretty cool coup for First Second, considering it comes from Forbes’ #1 most powerful celebrity. You can learn more about the book here.

Ethelbert is the king of the tiny country Portocristo. He is also six-years-old.

That’s the premise of Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme’s Tiny Tyrant comics. It’s a premise that, viewed from one angle, seems high concept in a Hollywood pitch for a kids comedy kind of way, and, viewed from another, seems like a pretty incisive observation about the way adults cater to the demands of children, often to the point of foolishness…albeit an observation taken to its humorous extreme.

That extreme is where Trondheim, who writes the feature, keeps the narrative, as not only is Ethelbert a spoiled brat, but he’s a spoiled brat with absolute, unquestionable power over all of the adults in his world. They must all always bend to his whims, no matter how ridiculous those whims may be. Hilarity, therefore, often ensues.

The half-dozen stories collected in Tiny Tyrant Vol. 1: The Ethelbertosaurus were previously collected by First Second in a 2007; this collection is apparently a new, more album-like format that seems to serve the material very well.

The title story involves Ethelbert’s attempts to get a really cool dinosaur named after him, upon discovering that a new species a paleontoligist discovered in the kingdom was a tiny, bird-sized one. This involves forcing his scientists to genetically recreate a dinosaur and to time travel (I guess there is something to be said for iron-fisted dictatorship after all).

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Gene Luen Yang’s last book was 2007′s extremely well-received American Born Chinese, a book I feel quite comfortable calling “brilliant”  without worrying if I’m over-praising it. Derek Kirk Kim is responsible for 2004′s whip-smart  Same Difference and Other Stories, and for writing 2007′s Good As Lily, one of the better books from DC’s abandoned Minx line. The pair collaborated on The Eternal Smile (First Second), an extremely inventive and imaginative work that features a remarkable breadth of cartooning skills and styles, and I expect you’ll hear a great deal of well-deserved praise  for the book in reviews of it.

So I’ll seize the opportunity to be contrarian: The Eternal Smile is a disappointment. It’s an anthology with three different, standalone short stories, with nothing in common between them save the creators and the fact that in each case, there’s a twist that reveals that they’re not about what they at first seemed to be about. Comparing it to American Born Chinese might be unfair, but the three narratives, one book structure begs the comparison, and in doing so underlines the new book’s greatest weakness.

In American Born Chinese, Yang started with what seemed like three incredibly disparate story threads, and braided them all together by the end. In The Eternal Smile, there are impermeable walls around each story, which would be perfectly fine if they managed to add up to something greater, or play off of one another in some way, but that never occurs. And the book certainly head-fakes that it’s going somewhere, what with two back-to-back stories prominently involving frogs. The whole is exactly equivalent to the sum of its parts, so what’s the point of adding them all together in the first place?

That’s the downside of Eternal Smile, that it’ s not a truly great work of comics. It’s still a long, long way away from being a bad comic though, and if a comic can’t be be great, well being pretty great isn’t too shabby an accomplishment either.

The opening story, “Duncan’s Kingdom,” deals with a young knight who goes on a quest to avenge the death of his king and win the princesses hand in marriage. In the process of doing so, he stumbles across something strange, and learns that things aren’t what they seem at all. I’d rather not spoil the twist, and I feel I’ve already sucked some of the excitement out of your reading by even mentioning that there is a twist, but suffice it to say that what’s really going on is rather banal. There are highly dramatic events, but they ring false, like someone’s ideas of what would be highly dramatic events. The style of this piece is a slightly-cartoony, boys adventure style, which makes the turn seem all the more subversive.

I think the second story may be the strongest, and perhaps the creators themselves would agree, as it’s where the book gets its title from. “Gran’pa Greenbax and The Eternal Smile” is a one-for-one parody of Carl Barks‘ Scrooge comics, in which a greedy, miserly frog, his ill-treated and poorly paid nephew with a speech impediment and his nieces with rhyming names and color-coded costumes seek out a get-rich scheme, only to run afoul of Gran’pa’s rival greedy, miserly, rich rivall, who is more ethnic than our hero.

I enjoyed seeing how the pair systematically parodied elements of the duck comics, and their portrayal of the Scrooge character as a complete monster. After the twist—which will be quite familiar from other stories you’ve encountered in other media, but is used to great effect here—things get quite deep, and this is one story I had to read over again as soon as I finished, this time to see how the knowledge of the twist beforehand effects the pre-twist portions of the story. (A quibble: If the Disney analogies are meant to comment on Walt Disney, Carl Barks and the Disney corporation somehow, the meaning seems muddied by conflating the three, and likewise conflating animation and comics).

The final story  is “Urgent Request,” the sad story of a shy, put-upon office drone woman who gets an email from a Nigerian prince requesting funds from her, and not only does she comply, she does so repeatedly, building up a relationship with the prince, even if it only exists in her mind. The character designs in this story are all short, stocky and cute, the characters having Hummel figurines proportions and soft, squishy looking features. The bulk of the story occurs in small, single-color panels, each far away from one another on pages dominated with open space, but when our protagonist sees her prince, the panels open up, growing bigger and gaining color.

Despite my disappointment that it wasn’t as good as I assumed a Yang/Kim collaboration might be, and that the book amounted to a collection of three single comics stories with little relation to one another, it’s still well worth a read for comics fans, if only to see what two important creators have been up to and to taken their extremely impressive formal accomplishments.

Farel Dalrymple’s art is art you can love. It takes you to a good place where artist rankings and hipster factors don’t matter. This is just plain good stuff. I had a chance to chat with Farel at the Stumptown Comics Festival and this interview resulted. The man sure gets around and despite any modesty on his part, he is a drawing machine. Check out his LiveJournal. It says it all.

Farel Dalrymple is well known for his on-going comics series, Pop Gun War, published by Dark Horse Comics. He is the founder of the influential Meathaus collective and the winner of a Xeric Grant and Society of Illustrators Gold Medal. This year he is nominated for a couple of Eisner Awards for his collaboration with writer Johnathan Lethem on the Marvel Comics 10-issue series, Omega the Unknown. Currently, he is at work on The Wrenchies. This 250-page, full-color comic is a postapocalyptic fantasy that takes place 3,500 years in the future, featuring a group of street children called “The Bolts.” It is due out in 2010 by First Second. (more…)

First Second’s editorial director, Mark Siegel, has drawn a pretty witty graphic review of Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe for the webcomic Unshelved, which has been linked over on the company’s web site.

I’d show more on this post, but your head might explode because of how fun this review is, especially as it is in the style of Bryan Lee O’Malley himself. But click here to see what Siegel and the First Second crew had to say.

[Image and permission courtesy of Mark Siegel]

Should something this educational be so much fun to read?

Adventures In Cartooning (First Second) is a collaboration between James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost that grew out of a class assignment from Sturm’s Center for Cartoon Studies, and it’s part glossary of terms, part how-to book and part funny adventure story.

While all those parts might suggest something stitched together, there’s nothing patchwork about the results: This is lighthearted little graphic novel that just so happens to teach readers about cartooning on the fly, perhaps most elegantly and eloquently when simply being an excellent example of solid cartooning.

“Once upon a time…a princess tried to make a comic…” the book begins, and we see a princess made of super-simple shapes (round head atop a rectangle body with lines for arms and tiny oval hands) sitting at a table.

“I just can’t draw well enough to make a comic!!!” she cries, and in a poof of smoke a little, floating, even-more-simply-rendered elf appears to declare “That’s not true!!!”

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In First Second’s first six years, the publisher has had great success with original works and with importing and representing great European works. Now they’re looking a little further East, and publishing their first Asian work: Korean artist Kim Dong Hwa’s The Color of Earth.

And it seems like this new effort will be rewarded with just as much success, as Color of Earth is a remarkable book.

In a few sentences worth of introduction, the artist explains that this is the story of his own mother’s girlhood, “little gems from my mother’s life at sixteen.” He must have had a very close relationship with his mother, as the book is incredibly personal, as if she were the one writing and drawing her own story.
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Slow Storm

Written and Drawn by Danica Novgorodoff

First Second, 176 pages, $17.95 US

Slow Storm is the story of a modest young woman yearning for more from life. From this starting point, Danica Novgorodoff goes about fashioning a graphic novel that reads like an expression of a dream, complete with uneven pacing and leaps in dramatic storytelling, which is actually what gives it its vitality.

As the dark skies grow more menacing over the Kentucky hinterland during tornado season, Ursa Crain, a female firefighter, finds herself in a fire truck with a crew answering a call. Just prior to this scene, we’ve been introduced to the struggles of Rafi, a Mexican illegal immigrant. As if through telepathy, Ursa begins to muse and speak lyrically about what it would be like to have to leave behind your country and all that you knew. Completely out of left field, she goes on: “Do you think then – if you couldn’t ever see this countryside again – then would you remember driving through Oldham County like it was some kinda…like a…beautiful fantasy?” Pretty trippy stuff. Well, it works fine with me. Welcome to Danica Novgorodoff’s world and feel free to dream along.

I say read this more like you would poetry or something on the unconventional side. There are fantasies within fantasies to be found here. One of the most interesting is when it appears that Ursa has intentionally trapped her brother in a raging fire and assured his death. This is all played out in a very deadpan way leaving you to wonder what exactly happened.

Both Ursa and Rafi, from the first time they meet to their only moment of intimacy when their hands touch, remain totally deadpan cool. No one ever expresses anything in this book with just a facial expression. That’s not what you need in a book like Slow Storm.

– Alison Bechdel and Harvey Pekar, together at last.

– Steve Duin has some good news about underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson, who has been in ICU for the past several days.

– Ada Price talks to Dave Gibbons about his new book, Watching the Watchmen.

– Looks like it’s official: Naruto Nation 2009 is totally a go.

– Sam Thielman looks at the significance of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing in light of the new super-fancy collection coming out soon.

– Over at Stars and Stripes, Gary Trudeau answers some of his critics.

– Van Jensen talks to Mike Allred about the revamped Red Rocket collection.

– Here’s my idea of a fun time: Dan Nadel, Gary Panter and CF sitting around, talking about art and comics.

– Did you know About Comics is 10 years old this year? I didn’t. Chris Murphy has a recollection.

– Sandy Bilus is giving away a copy of Alan’s War over at his blog.

– Oscar Pedro Musibay looks at the Comics Galaxy event that was held at last weekend’s Miami Book Fair.

– Frank Santoro considers the new Popeye collection.