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.

Per Variety, Paul Pope’s Battling Boy graphic novel for First Second has been optioned by Paramount. Brad Pitt’s Plan B will produce the adaptation.

Here’s the description of the book that Variety provides:

Gritty tale centers on the son of a god or superhero who comes down from the top of a mountain at his father’s behest in order to rid a giant city of monsters.

I guess they’re kind of unsure about the plot. They also report that the graphic novel will finally be published … in 2010. Which is just way too far away.

The author of the acclaimed book Alan’s War shows you how he drew the blessed thing.

Related: Cory Doctrow reviews the book over at Boing Boing.

On his blog, Paul Pope teases us with art from a staggering 50-page fight scene from his much-anticipated First Second graphic novel Battling Boy.

“In Batman Year 100, I had room for a couple of long fight sequences,” Pope writes, “but I felt cramped even with 200 pages. This fight scene from Battling Boy alone is about 50 pages. It’s liberating to have no page restrictions. I wish Kirby could’ve had 50 pages for one fight scene, imagine what he would’ve done. … The extended cinematic sequence is one of the best gifts we’ve inherited from manga.”

Nick Bertozzi has a few sample pages up on his LiveJournal page from his next graphic novel that he’s working on with Colbert Show writer and producer Glenn Eichler. Titled Stuffed, the comic will see print next year from First Second and, according to Bertozzi, “it’s about racism.”

– Kai-Ming Cha looks at First Second’s plans for the upcoming Prince of Persia book.

– Wil Moss talks to Comics Foundry masterminds Tim Leong and Laura Hudson.

– RedOrbit talks with British cartoonist Posey Simmonds about her latest graphic novel, Tamara Drewe. I just read an advance copy by the way and it’s excellent. Keep an eye out for it come September.

– Paul Levitz discusses digital comics with Laura Hudson.

– John K. finds wrinkles hard to draw.

– Bob Levin on the problem of keeping yourself out of your story. Or not as the case may be.

– Ted May ponders the whole “death of the indie pamphlet” issue.

On his blog, Derek Kirk Kim says that he’s completed The Eternal Smile, a book he’s been working on with American Born Chinese creator Gene Yang:

As I mentioned before, this book is my collaboration with Gene Yang. Gene writing, me illustrating. This project has consumed my life for the past year, leaving little room for anything else. (As I’m sure you’ve noticed from this vacant website.) I worked my ass off on this book and I think I can safely say it’s the best artwork I’ve ever done in a comic. Okay, that’s not saying much, but still. (That’s a full page panel from the book above.) But even better, the three stories that make up this book are some of the best pieces of fiction Gene has ever written, in my opinion. It was an honor to be drawing for Gene. Being that this book is Gene’s follow-up to his towering masterpiece, “American Born Chinese,” I’ll be even more honored to ride his coattails.

Kim says the book will be published by First Second next spring.