Hey, did you know that George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise is popular in other countries that aren’t even America, even some countries that are in Europe, a cradle of actual culture, and not just pop culture?

I suppose I sort of knew that, in the back of my head, but I was still surprised to see actual evidence of it, in the form of Space Warped #1, the first half of a Boom Studio’s published translation of Herve Bourhis and Rudy Spiessert’s Rustic Wars.

The new title alludes to the source material being parodied, but the original title better reflects the premise. It’s well known that Lucas sought inspiration from a variety of sources, including Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, Japanese cinema, Westerns and Joseph Cambell-digested world myth, and Bourhis and Spiessert essentially take the original Star Wars movie as Lucas created it, and then walked it back toward some of that inspiration.

In other words, it’s still an adventure story with elements of fantasy set long ago and far, far away, but the long ago is pre-Industrial Revolution, and the far, far away is Europe.
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Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden is by far the strangest comic of any kind I’ve ever read.

It’s a lovely looking object, as much of what publisher PictureBox releases tend to be. It’s an eight-by-six-inch square containing a fat, 330-page page count. It’s printed right to left, as it would have been in the original Japanese, and the white dust jacket is covered in generously spaced, slanted square reproductions of the panels from within, here printed in red ink. Within them are speed lines, large Japanese letters in a mechanical, sound-effect font, and strange characters engaged in mysterious, exciting-looking actions.

The very first panel is a close-up of one of those strange figures, telling a group of its fellow figures, “’Fraid the agarden ain’t open today.” After a few sentences of conversation—“What sort of garden is it?” “A very good garden”—they decide to walk around the fence and, when they find a break in the fence, enter the garden anyway.

The garden isn’t any sort of park and doesn’t seem to have any real vegetation—it’s a bizarre landscape filled with unusual and unlikely things, many of them seemingly falling somewhere between organic and mechanical, as if the entire system were an alien, inorganic organism.  There’s a river a waterfall of balls, a bride of swivel chairs, houses and mountains of every conceivable material and design, strange forms of conveyance, fake trees, towns where every single thing is put on wheels.

For the book’s 300-plus pages, this group of individuals—the size of which is never defined, but is evidently quite large—explores this space, splitting up and getting deeper and deeper into ever more complex, more imaginative and more dangerous territory.
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Like her 2010 Flesh and Bone, Julia Gfrörer’s latest comic features two passionate young lovers, some supernatural circumstances and a strange sex scene.  While the previous book was set in an undetermined past and mixed the lore of witchcraft with a Gothic melodrama, her new Too Dark To See has a modern milieu. That makes the setting more immediate, and the supernatural aspects a bit scarier.

The young couple is Lauren and Jamie, and we’re first introduced to them naked on their shared mattress on the floor of their apartment, in apparent post-coital bliss, the former telling the latter that “No one has ever loved anyone more than I love you.” As they sleep, a piece of shadow in the corner of their bedroom peels itself off the wall, takes the vague shape of a woman, and crawls into their bed, seducing Jamie.

The romantic sentiment Lauren expresses is soon undercut by scenes and dialogue suggesting problems in their relationship, ranging from minor annoyances (You never do the dishes, you always interrupt me) to more serious concerns (Are you cheating on me?), and essentially revealing a real world relationship fraught with real world pleasures and problems. That, or are the shadows that have their way with the lovers somehow impact their happiness, and is it just those two, or everyone?

Questions are raised, answers are to be provided by the reader.

Gfrörer’s artwork is a rare pleasure. Her round-cornered, ever-so-slightly wobbly panels repeat with a mechanical, filmic progression—despite varying in size and layout—and are full of white, white space. She has an extremely thin, delicate line, which probably artificially inflates the amount of white space that’s there, but her artwork is anything but minimalist or abstract. The figures are highly detailed, never more so then we see close-ups of their hands at work on extremely detailed objects, like Lauren before an espresso machine at work, or making a sandwich from lovingly cross-hatched strawberry jam.

The open space, filled in by the white of the paper the art’s drawn, sharply contrasts with the few scenes set outside of the couple’s apartment, which are darker and have more details, and the visits from the shadows, which are dark, slightly furious looking patches of less-precise lines, suggesting a sort of controlled scribble. They are also somewhat see-through, so they were apparently drawn with something other than the lines of the rest of the book.

The beautiful aesthetic of the art is mirrored in the production; this is a mini-comic Gfrörer made and is selling through Etsy, and looks and feels homemade, bound with string. In both the criteria of a comic as comic and a comic as object, it’s a beautiful thing.

If you’re interested in securing a copy, here’s Gfrörer Etsy listing for the book, and here’s her website.

If you merely heard about it, then you’d probably be forgiven for wondering if Matt Howarth’s The Downsized was in fact done by that Matt Howarth.

A middle-aged writer who left town to pursue his dreams in LA returns to Michigan, older, fatter, balder and still not the success he planned to be by this point, on the occasion of his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. There he meets up with his siblings, friends, cousins and former girlfriend. In the course of four long scenes spread across 80 pages and set almost entirely in hotel rooms, we get to know this cast of characters and their conflicts.

In other words, it’s real-world drama told almost exclusively through conversations, as if the reader were in the room and overhearing the action, almost like a stage-play. It’s about growing up, and, in a more vague way, how the current society and economy frustrates doing so, and how maturity is mostly relative anyway.

And yes, it’s by that Matt Howarth, the cartoonist best known for his 1980’s and early ‘90s Bugtown, Those Annoying Post Brothers and Savage Henry comics (the latter about a guitarist from an alternate reality), the cartoonist who did some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, a DC/Helix miniseries about a romance between a space alien and a sentient asteroid and high sci-fi comics featuring Keif Llama.

The Downsized might therefore not sound like something from Howarth, but there’s no mistaking the work of the creator by sight.
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The title of Daniel Clowes’ latest book refers to Marshall, a 38-year-old, balding divorce attempting to stave off his loneliness by going on a blind date his last remaining friend arranged for him.

It’s partly ironic, as Marshall himself notes he’s not exactly a great catch, although as the story progresses he gets the opportunity to act like—or at least attempt to act like—a knight in shining armor a few times

The title could just as easily refer to Clowes himself though. As should come as no surprise at this point in the cartoonist’s career, the book is wonderful.

Originally created for The New York Times Magazine, where it ran serially, the expanded and modified Mister Wonderful shares the horizontal, comic strip-novel appearance of the earlier Pantheon-published Ice Haven, although Mister Wonderful is much more straightforward and focused on a single character with a single story.

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Charles Schulz’s Peanuts has long been available in book-length collections, the slim, often topical paperbacks a staple of children’s departments at libraries and old book stores.

Such collections pre-dated the normalization of the term “graphic novel,” though—the technical definition of which could be argued at great length, but the current popular definition of which within the publishing industry is simply comics bound with a spine—which allows Boom Studios to proclaim Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown the first Peanuts graphic novel.

One could argue whether or not that is the case, I suppose, but not without first arguing about the semantics of the term, so let’s skip all that. This is definitely the first Peanuts-branded comics packaged and sold as a graphic novel, as opposed to a collection, its the first that reads like a graphic novel and, more noteworthy to fans of the characters and their creator, it’s also the first new Peanuts comics material produced since the death of Schulz.

“New” probably needs some qualification, though. The 85-page book is an adaptation of the recently-produced animated special of the same name, and that was based on Schulz’s strips. The result then is a pretty perfect balance between providing new Peanuts material without resorting to someone other than the late Schulz doing it—No, he didn’t draw these lines, but these are still his gags and his story. The book, like the special, is therefore more of a respectful cover song than a whole new band exploiting the name of another one.

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I like high concepts as much as the next guy, even if the next guy is a rabid otaku, and, let’s face it, when it comes to high-concept comics, Japan’s are higher and more numerous than anywhere else on earth.

But Yu Aikawa’s Butterfly features a really complicated one, which takes a majority of the first, 200-page volume to simply lay out.

High schooler Ginji Ishikawa hates the supernatural and angrily dismisses all aspects of it—from belief in ghosts and curses to horror scope reading. He also dismisses anyone who believes in it. This is kind of odd, since every single night Ginji is visited by the ghost of his dead brother, whom he shouts away with I can’t see yous and There’s no such thing as ghosts.

Ginji’s friend is constantly trying to set him up on dates with girls, although they usually end disastrously because of his ant-occult stance. On one double-date, they visit an amusement park, and when he’s reluctantly pulled into a haunted house, Ginji punches out an actor dressed as a ghost. He manages to avoid legal trouble, but only by committing to paying off the injured actor and park.

An opportunity to make the necessary money presents itself when a mysterious little girl approaches Ginji with a proposition: “Let’s go and kill all the ghosts in the world together!”
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If getting a Superman comic just right is a hard feat to accomplish in the 21st century, it’s nothing compared to getting one featuring his pal just right.

While the Silver Age stalwart Jimmy Olsen has never, ever gone away from his supporting character gig in the Superman comics, he hasn’t been a successful star in his own right for decades now, and the various attempts to make him work as a leading man in the post-relevance, post-Crisis, post-“Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!’ era never seemed to work out quite right.

In the last few years, for example, we’ve seen James Robinson put Olsen at the center of a dark, deadly serious sci-fi espionage thriller plot as part of the “New Krypton” direction of the Superman books, and Paul Dini and a battalion of writers and artists do…whatever they were trying to do in Countdown.

The problem with the character seems to be that while he is so fantastical that he’s extremely difficult to fit into the more realistic DC Universe line of the last few decades. There was always an almost magical realist quality to the character—a teenage reporter for a big city newspaper who had all sorts of fantastical adventures based solely on his proximity to Superman (and the scores of mad scientists that apparently populate the Metropolis suburbs), and who was always able to triumph, or at least survive, based on his wits. Powerless, he was kind of like Clark Kent, only without the deception, the milquetoast act and the need to change clothes in order to act.

Also, he was a kid, like his readers.

Of course, once kids stopped reading and more and more adult logic started being applied, well, it’s hard to even get past “teenage reporter”—Is he an intern? Did he go to J school? Why doesn’t he live with his parents?

Writer Nick Spencer, like relatively few others—Abhay Khosla in his Superman 80-Page Giant 2011 #1 short story, Grant Morrison in All-Star Superman #4—doesn’t seem to have had many problems making Silver Age Jimmy Olsen work in the 21st century. Or, if he did labor mightily to perfect his take and to find the best way to communicate it, one can’t see it in the final scripting. His Jimmy Olsen seems effortless.

He seems to have accomplished this by accepting the ground rules of the DC Universe and not tried rationalizing them or make too much real world sense out of them—this Jimmy Olsen is still a Silver Age, magical realist type of character and his world is still utterly fantastic. The writing—its characterization, its world-building, its dialogue, its storytelling—didn’t get more realistic, it simply got more sophisticated.

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Wow, whatever happened to sugar, spice and everything nice? That panel is from Peyo and Yvan Delporte’s story La Schtroumpfette , recently translated and published by Papercutz in their fourth Smurfs collection, The Smurfette.

Now, as a reader and as a critic, I think it’s always important to consider the context a work was originally created in, and, at least as a critic, not to judge by the standards of the days. The Smurfette comic was made in 1966,  in Belgium (a country whose mid-20th century culture I know exactly nothing about), so I’m reading it from 55 years in the future.

Additionally, the Smurfs comics aren’t terribly complex in their characterization. The majority of the characters introduced into the series so far all have exactly one character trait a piece, which they are named after—Grumpy is grumpy, Lazy is lazy, etc–and the most complex seem to be the ironically named Harmony and Brainy, who are named for traits they think they possess but are actually the opposite.

Even still, it’s hard to read The Smurfette and not wonder if Peyo and Delporte were coming out of terrible relationships when they made this comic or what. The above panel, in which the wicked sorcerer Gargamel follows a spell to create a female Smurf, is part of his plan to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Smurfs. Apparently, the existence of a female in their all-male world is all he thinks it will take to make them all completely miserable.

And he’s right!

The spell ends with a footnote, which appears along the bottom of the page as a disclaimer, “This text is the sole responsibility of the author of the spell-book ‘Magicae Formulae,’ Beelzebub Editions”, so readers won’t blame Papercutz for the portrayal of females.

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While there have been plenty of negative trends to emerge in mainstream serial super-comics over the last few years, one of the trends I’ve been quite happy to see the Big Two try out and stick with is weekly (and weekly-ish) comics series. You know, 52, Countdown, Trinity, Wednesday Comics, Amazing Spider-Man, Brightest Day, Justice League: Generation Lost, DC Universe Online Legends and so on.

They haven’t all been great comics, of course, and some of them have been downright lousy, but for someone with an every-Wednesday, weekly comics hobby/habit, there’s something quite refreshing about the dependability and regularity of the schedule—especially given that so many “monthly” comics have become “whenever-the-creators-get-‘em-done-ly.”

Outside of the thrice-monthly turned twice-monthly Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel’s weekly-ish comics have been trying out five-issue miniseries in five-week months, like last year’s weird, confused but still kind of fun Heralds series and, this month, 5 Ronin.

I like weekly-ish comics so much that the schedule was actually what sold me on trying it out this series…well that and the attachment of writer Peter Milligan, whose best comics are great and his worst comics are better than those of most writers.

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Brecht Evens’ late 2010 graphic novel The Wrong Place was a great one, but it was also a revelatory one. Evens used words and pictures to tell the story, but he also used color, page space and implied, invisible panels co-created by the reader’s act of reading to tell that story in a unusual, perhaps even unique way.

I haven’t read all the comics yet (although I’m working on it!), but I’ve read a lot of them, and I can honestly say I’ve never read anything quite like The Wrong Place.

This week Top Shelf released Evens’ Night Animals, and while it’s rather different than The Wrong Place, it is a new Evens comic and thus the most like Wrong Place of anything I’ve seen so far.

The title page of the slim, 48-page volume bears the sub-title, “A Diptych about What Rushes through the Bushes,” and the contents that follow are two short, wordless stories that indeed share a nighttime setting and a massive menagerie of beautifully, bizarre creature.

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“Realism,” quotation marks and all, can be a strange thing to demand from any form of fiction, and it can be a strange thing to decry the lack of.

This seems especially true when the fiction under discussion comes in the form of comics, probably because the form has been dominated by genre works for so long that straight comics literature divorced from easy genre classifications (horror, romance, superhero, crime, etc) are still (relatively) new.

Of course that fiction’s not real—it’s fiction. Someone is making it up. How realistic do you want it to be? The easy answer is that it should be realistic enough that you can forget that people are behind the scenes inventing it long enough to lose yourself in the story and the drama enough to enjoy it, or be affected by it.

I think comics struggles with this a bit more than other media like, say, prose or film, simply because it is easier for them to achieve different types of verisimilitude. A film looks like the real world, the written word is the way we communicate a lot of information—a novel might look or read the same way a letter or email or news article might.

But comics? Someone had to draw all those little lines making up those people, and the little bubbles surrounding all the words, whether they hand-lettered those words or had a computer program do it for them.
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The clever idea at the center of Dracula: The Company of Monsters is an obvious one, suggested by the “Bloodsucker vs. Bloodsuckers” tagline on the back of the first volume collecting the ongoing series.

Dracula may have been a ruthless prince who impaled his foes, literally did a deal with the literal devil and became an undead blood-drinking fiend, but at least he’s not a modern CEO.

The “You know who the real monsters are…?” statement is a staple of horror and monster entertainment, and its one this comic has the cognizance to apply to the major problems of the day. Certainly the commentary may at times be a little too pointed, as when Dracula makes a “That is the difference between a prince and a chief executive” speech, disgusted that the corporate CEO that engineered his resurrection and is keeping him chained in the company HQ’s basement has laid off hundreds of workers in order to improve the balance sheet.

But then, perhaps there is some poetry in a the sub-text of a story about the undead refusing to stay buried.
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On the surface, Rob Vollmar and M.P. Mann’s Inanna’s Tears (Archaia) is an engaging period drama, set almost as far back in recorded history as one can go, as the means by which history gets recorded are just being invented in the course of the story. More specifically? The city of Sumer within the Middle East’s fertile crescent, some 5,000 years ago.

The known world seems built around the city, while the city seems built around the temple, and the temple is built around the goddess Inanna. She is represented by her earthly consort, a sort of high priest, who names his own successor at the end of his life.

The last high priest chooses Entika, a young woman, to succeed him as Inanna’s consort and mouthpiece, which stresses her relationship with fellow temple servant Anarin and aspects of city government, while emboldening a wicked leader of the people who live outside the city’s gates.

On the surface, it works quite well.
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A mid-life crisis can strike at any time—in fact, for the semi-fictitous version of cartoonist Joe Ollmann in Mid-Life, it seems like he’s been having them fairly regularly since he was seventeen, and alludes to several of them throughout this book.

This book chronicles one of those crises. In his forties with two adult daughters from his previous marriage and a baby son with his new, much-young wife, the (hopefully very) fictitious John is having all sorts of existential problems regarding his life as a father, a husband, a cat-owner, a boss, and employee and a man, problems that eventually reach a crisis point when he becomes unhealthily focused on Sherri Smalls, a Raffi-like children’s entertainer he discovers while watching a video with his infant son.

Unlike many similar comics of the autobiographical or (seriously, hopefully quite) fictionalized autobiographical genre, the grumpy, bitter, aging protagonist shares the spotlight with the object of his misguided affection.

The Sheri character exists as a sort of co-protagonist, narrating chapters that chronicle her own mid-life crisis—which, for her, comes at age 33—and she finds the opportunity to sign with a network to do her own Saturday morning TV show a sort of crossroads in her life. Will she sell out and live comfortably, or will she chuck it all and follow her dream of being a singer/songwriter for grown-ups? And will she ever meet the older man of her dreams?
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Like most of the people who will probably end up reading cartoonist Adrian Tomine’s Scenes From an Impending Marriage, I wasn’t part of the work’s original intended audience.

The version I’m reading is the little, five-by-six-inch hardcover that Drawn and Quarterly published and is selling for about $10. The short, connected stories that make up the work were apparently originally produced as a wedding gift from the real Tomine and his real fiancée to the guests at their wedding.

The final story in the slim volume, before the epilogue, features the couple trying to decide what to give as a gift, and once Tomine pooh-poohs a few ideas, his fiancée suggests he make “a little comic book…you could do a bunch of short strips about us getting ready for the wedding!”

The story ends with the Tomine characters sighing, and saying he’ll think about it.

Personally, I’m glad he decided to do a bunch of short strips about them getting ready for the wedding, and gladder still that I was able to get a copy, even though I wasn’t a guest at the wedding (So, uh, thanks Tomine! And an extremely belated congratulations to you and your wife!).
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I kept looking over my shoulder while reading EmiTown, expecting cartoonist Emi Lenox to burst into the room and demand to know what exactly I thought I was doing—that’s how diary-like Image Comics’ print collection of her sketch diary-turned-webcomic actually is.

The work was apparently originally began without an audience of any kind in mind, which is quite evident from the personal, mysterious nature of a lot of the content, particularly at the beginning, where sticky notes of abbreviations and numbers often appear on the pages.

As the introductions explain, it gradually transformed into something for public consumption, yet throughout the 400 or so pages here, Lenox’s self-named town retains a great deal of mystery.

EmiTown isn’t memoir or biography, and doesn’t really resemble the sort of comics that likely come to mind when one thinks “diary comics,” even James Kochalka’s daily American Elf isn’t a good reference point, as Kochalka generally just chooses a single anecdote from the day to present. Lenox, by contrast, talks and draws about her days, the most personal matters semi-obscured by elaborate symbol-characters.

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Back in November, David Sedaris was a guest on The Daily Show and he was there to promote his then-new collection of animal fables, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.

During the interview, Sedaris told host Jon Stewart that his original title for the book was Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, but his editor responded, “Please don’t put the word diabetes in your book title,” and came up with final one instead.

I thought of  Sedaris’ editor when I opened an envelope to find a review copy of the fourth and final collection of Johnny Ryan’s Blecky Yuckarella strip, entitled Fuc_ __u, _ss__le.

Please note that I’m not trying to be demure and avoid saying “the F-word” and “the A-word” here on Newsarama; that’s the actual title of the actual book. Underscores are used to make the title look a bit like an unfinished game of hangman, an image emphasized by the cover, which features Ryan’s Blecky character hanging from a noose, her limbs shaking as sweat drops and  yellow-colored drops emanate from her figure (It’s the first of many appearances of piss in the book).

What if Ryan had Sedaris’ editor? If “diabetes” is a bad thing to have in a book title, how about the two words in Ryan’s title? And how would that initial conversation go? Perhaps “Hey Johnny, what do you want to call your new book?,” leading into an R-rated Abbot and Costello routine, with the editor all “Wow, what the hell Johnny? I’m just asking! There’s no need for that kind of language!”

Ryan obviously doesn’t have Sedaris’ editor, nor Sedaris’ publisher, and Fantagraphics Books is obviously quite in tune with Ryan’s sense of humor. This is, after all, the fourth of their Blecky books, and they’ve published two volumes of Prison Pit, starring a protagonist whose name I’m pretty sure I can’t post on Newsarama, as well as Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix.

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Tatsuya Tsugawa seems to be a particularly pathetic specimen of junior high student when we first meet him in the pages of Aion Vol. 1.  He’s being shaken down by some older students, and a girl in his class has to come to his rescue.

Tatsuya soon finds an even more pathetic victim of bullying than himself, however, a mysterious classmate who repeatedly tells him to butt out since she wants a particularly mean girl to throw her down and kick her when she fails to buy her the right sort of bread for lunch.

Trying to live up to his father’s dying wish that he be “a big man” someday, Tatsuya persists in interfering until he comes across the girl’s secret: She has a weird shadow dragon named Aion that flows out of her finger, swallows evil people whole, and then spits them out, having only digested the evil parasites from the ocean that are living in their brains.

After that, the pair’s lives become intertwined when Tatsuya finds the girl living in a cardboard box in the park and invites her home with him, where she discovers his scheming relatives are hosting evil parasites as well.

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When I had finished reading the very last page of Picture This, Lynda Barry’s book exploring the questions “Why do we stop drawing?” and “Why do we start drawing?,” I found myself desperately curious about another question entirely: “Where does publisher Drawn & Quarterly suggest this book be shelved?”

As you may have noticed, most books (and an awful lot of graphic novels) include among the fine print on their title pages or back covers suggestions for libraries and book stores regarding where the book belongs. These often include Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal system subject numbers, and/or a numbered list of subject headings.

For example, looking at a few books laying around my office, Brecht Evens’ The Wrong Place is suggested “Social Interaction—Comic books, strips, etc.” and “Identity (psychology)—Comic books, strips, etc.” I love looking these up, in part because it reveals what the publisher thinks of the book and how it should be classified and, to some extent, sold.

Most of the books I review here tend to fall under a catch all like “comic books, strips, etc.,” and libraries and book stores end up putting them either in their own, dedicated “graphic novels” section, or else somewhere under the “741″ number in Dewey. But sometimes they are so specific that I wonder if the publishers aren’t sometimes being sarcastic—Tim Sievert’s That Salty Air, for example, included “Oceanic Revenge” and “Seaside Heartbreak” which made me imagine a bookstore with sections that specific. What’s that? Oceanic Revenge? Yes, it’s over there on the left; right between Marine Justice and Sea-going Wickedness.

Where does Picture This belong? Certainly under a “Comic books” or “Art” subject, but more specifically? Memoir? Manifesto? How-to? Aesthetics? Art Therapy? Self-Help? Outsider art? Craft? Folk art? It belongs under them all, really. In the Dewey Decimal system, the argument could be made to put this in plenty of different places in the 700s (arts and recreation), though parts of the 800s (literature), 300s (social sciences), 400’s (language) and 900s (which includes biography) could claim it as well.

I can think of no better example of the potency of Barry’s Picture This than the fact that it defies, if not breaks, the Dewey Decimal system—we need a brand-new number to put on the spine of this book.
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