It’s somewhat astonishing how much there is in Julia Gfrörer’s Flesh and Bone, a 40-page, stapled six-by-eight-and-a-half-inch comic from Sparkplug.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the book is actually about witchcraft, that is definitely the subject matter, and Gfrörer works many bits and bobs of folklore about witches, their place in past society, superstitions and folklore.

Here’s a sabbat out in the woods, where a witch gives sexual favors to the devil. Here she is reading tea leaves, and offering magical help to a desperate local the church has refused. Here is an echo of Hansel and Gretel, of Baba Yaga’s hut in Wassilissa the Beautiful. There’s an animal familiar, a spell, a summoning…and magic that’s not really magic.

What’s remarkable is that while Gfrörer includes a survey of witch lore in so short a space, it’s all encountered naturally, in service to an engrossing, complete drama with a clean, succinct, satisfying structure and a simple, almost minimalist amount of detail.
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Eden is, in its Middle Eastern origins and the Western tradition that sprang from them, a literal paradise, a sort of heaven on earth, a place of absolute perfection, the way things could have been—should have been—if mistakes weren’t made.

I’m as sure as I can possibly be without actually asking artist Pablo Holmberg that he didn’t choose Eden as the name of his comic strips in order to comment on their quality. The most likely origin is Bob Dylan’s “Gates of Eden”, as one of Holmberg’s pieces quotes the lyric “There are no kings inside the gates of Eden,” which is written on a sign hanging from a gate and confronting one of the recurring characters, who wears a crown and a coat with ermine trim. (“Don’t let it intimidate you,” says another recurring character, from the other side of the gate.)

It’s an exceptionally fitting title though, and the metaphor works. The comics collected in Eden are perfect and, even more uniquely, pure comics—they are comics that can only be comics, they do things that can only be done in comics and as comics. Each individual, page-long piece makes a statement, asks a question or evokes a mood or feeling through a combination of words, pictures and the manipulation of time that is only possible through sequential images.

The majority of Holmberg’s strips are four-panels. In their original, online iteration those four panels ran horizontally, but in Drawn and Quarterly’s collection, a perfect little six-inch-by-six-inch square, 120-page paperback, they are reorganized to run in two-by-two square-shaped grids. A handful of one-panel, single-image cartoons make for rule-proving exceptions. (more…)

Publisher Quirk Books’ new DC Comics: The 75th Anniversary Poster Book offers two different reading experiences, to potentially two different audiences.

Firstly and foremost, it’s exactly what its title indicates, a “poster book.” It’s 14 inches high, 11 wide and, as the cover says in font nearly as bit as the title, it “includes 100 ready-to-frame covers,” the edges perforated to easily tear the over-sized reproductions of the covers out to sticky-tape to your dorm room or frame and hang in your library (or the room you keep all your long boxes in; whatever).

As a comics critic and blogger as well as a comics reader, I suppose I’m a little bit more engaged with DC Comics covers than some potential consumers of this book, but even still, I was somewhat surprised by how many images from the book I was already quite familiar with, either from reading the books, reading about the books, or just seeing a blogger posting a funny image of a gorilla cover or Batman doing something goofy in order to make fun of it.

It does speak to the original power of many of the images included, and the pervasiveness of their influence—either because of the overall quality of the image itself, and/or to the association with the contents of the story lurking under it. Think Superman lifting a car over his head while that guy in the lower left-hand corner freaks out, or Batman flexing like a body builder while jumping in front of a lightning bolt, or The Joker with a camera, instructing the reader to “smile,” or Superman crying and cradling the body of Supergirl while the rest of the DC Universe assembles in the background like wallpaper.
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Eternal teenagers Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys owe a great deal of their longevity to their adaptability. Not simply in how relatively easily they’ve been able to slide from prose mystery novels for the youngsters of the 1920s and ’30s into each new popular medium as it arose (comics included, obviously), but also in their ability to glom on to emerging trends, fashions and thinking.

It seems like it’s been quite a while since either Nancy or the Boys really had a hold of the zeitgeist, but they’re still around, you know?

Whether this Archie-like immortality is due to an essential blandness in the characters or an admirable blankness allowing for projection is something fans could argue with haters (provided either franchise possesses either); for the moment, let’s concern ourselves with current publishers of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys graphic novels’ ability to successfully translate the teen sleuths into library-friendly kids graphic novels, and in their savvy if transparent attempts to capitalize on the current pop literary interest in certain breeds of undead.

Nancy Drew, The New Case Files: Vampire Slayer, Part One promises an en vogue mash-up, it’s cover featuring a crossbow-toting young girl and a cute boy vampire standing upside down, bat-like in the background.

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Er, I mean comics.

The prolific cartoonist James Kochalka recently released two more of his little hardcover kids comics, which come across as a cross between a children’s picture book and a traditional comic book.

He continues his cheerfully silly series about “the best little ghost in the world” and his “pet ghost” in Johnny Boo and The Mean Little Boy, the fourth Johnny Boo book.

As with the previous installments of the series, The Mean Little Boy offers a pretty perfect distillation of Kochalka’s greatest attributes as an artist, and while it’s all-ages work with nothing adult or inappropriate in the content, it is a kids comics that adult can enjoy for its interpersonal character dynamics, goofy humor and the accomplished cuteness of Kochalka’s art.

In this volume, Johnny blows off his friend Squiggle, whom Kochalka draws to resemble an apostrophe-shaped marshmallow with emoticon-simple expressions, to play with his friend, Rocky the Rock (who is actually just a rock).

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What’s so stellar about the Stellar Six of Gingacho, the title characters of Yuuki Fujimoto’s manga of the same name? Not all that much really, from the outside looking in.

But Mike, who invents the name to refer to herself and her five best friends, sure thinks there’s something special about the half-dozen 13-year-olds and their bond with one another, and that belief—communicated forcefully and energetically by the cartoonist until it starts to infect the reader—is actually something pretty special.

Fujimoto has captured and bottled a very specific emotion common in adolescents—That elation of being a kid who’s leaving childhood and on the way to adulthood, of being convinced of your own special-ness, and absolutely in love with yourself and your friends. And Fujimoto dipped a pen in it that bottle and drew this comic.

“Gingacho” refers to the Gingacho Street Market, where the families each of the six come from all have shops and businesses there. Because of this, the six friends—three boys and three girls—all grew up playing together as a little pack, but now that they’ve grown up a bit and gone to school, they’re starting to drift in different directions.

The stories in this first volume are somewhat episodic, with the main thrust of the book being that the six aren’t as tight as they used to be, but are occasionally drawn back together in times of need, like when the owner of the bar they hang out in has a falling out with the best friend he drifted apart from, for example, or when an older lady in the market starts to ail and needs help. (more…)

Hidekaz Himaruya’s Hetalia: Axis Powers finds its inspiration in two rather unlikely sources of humor (Or at least unlikely source of humor for the modern, Western mass media): The events of World War II and ethnic/national stereotyping.

In fact, it’s not hard to imagine many readers stopping cold at the cover, which depicts a winking Italy and his ever-present white flag of surrender along with cute manga characters representing Japan and Germany.

Stopping there would probably be a mistake, since as provocative as the work might sometimes be, it is strongly rooted in the tradition of political cartooning, particularly in its anthropomorphizing entire nations into individual cartoon characters whose personalities and relationships are meant to represent those countries’ places in the world. Hetlaia is political cartoon as comic strip and, now, political cartoon as graphic novel (It began as an online comic strip and was later published as tankobon  in Japan; Tokyopop is releasing the volumes in the U.S.).

The title is itself something of an insult to Italy, as it’s a Japanese portmanteau pun blending hetare (weak, cowardly or incompetent) with Italia. Our title character is first encountered in this volume at a UN-like “Meeting of the World,” where, when given the floor, he shouts: “Pasta!!!” In the narrative, dour, business-like Germany finds Hetalia cowering in a tomato crate.
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After June’s $1 preview comic book, Papercutz begins their reprinting of the classic Peyo comics in earnest with The Smurfs and The Magic Flute and The Purple Smurfs. In some ways, reviewing artist Pierre “Peyo” Culliford’s and, in a few cases, co-writer Yvan Delporte’s comics seems a bit silly, as their place in history, their longevity and their cultural influence and significance all serve as pretty good clues as to the quality of the comics.

They are, or course, great comics.

Based on these 120 pages or so worth of Peyo’s Smurfs comics, they’re also remarkably timeless. Like most Americans my age, I spent a significant portion of my life watching Smurf cartoons, the theme song is permanently embedded in my head, and, when I would think of the Smurfs, I would think of a once irritatingly ubiquitous marketing presence. Even as a little kid I had grown sick of the Smurfs.

And yet these comics are strong enough that they erased all of my negative memories and associations. These comics are still fresh, and when I was reading them it was like I was meeting the characters and concepts for the first time.

Anyway, given the fact that we’re even reading Smurfs comics over 50 years after they first started appearing,  a regular review assessing the quality of those comics seems less relevant than assessing certain elements of their new presentation.

So let’s do that instead.

The presentation. I rather liked the overall look and design of the packaging. They’re slim trade paperbacks (although hardcovers are also available for a few extra bucks),  and both are between 50 and 60 pages (although the high number of panels per page help them “read” longer).

The main colors are, of course, blue and white, and Papercutz uses the former in inventive ways, like using blue ink instead of black or the page numbers. The title of each trade is presented nice and big, with a smaller “Smurfs…by Peyo” logo across the top. The Papercutz “Z” logo is itself tiny and unobtrusively placed, and there are little Smurf silhouettes indicating the numbers in each story.

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Many years ago, a 12-year-old Corey S. Lewis drew this:

It was a picture featuring a bunch of little grape warriors, each with a Smurf-like adjective name, distinguishing characteristic and weapons or powers.

He also drew mecha-battle suits for the characters, called “Robo-stomps,” and made up a bunch of video game-like special moves and special weapons for them.

If you look at that picture and think, “Wow, not bad for a 12-year-old,” then you and I think alike. If you think you see a little Japanese influence in the art, then I think you’re right—it does resemble modern pop Japanese art, as filtered through Nintendo video game design, doesn’t it? And if you find yourself remarkably impressed with this 12-year-old’s lettering ability, and wish the grown-up you could draw and letter like that then, well, I think you and I have been spending too much time together lately, because it’s almost like we’re reading eachother’s minds.

So, what ever became of this Corey S. Lewis character?  Well, he kept drawing, and grew up to create such comics as Sharknife and Peng! for Oni Press, and to contribute shorter stories to a variety of anthologies for a variety of publishers.

His comics-creating style grew into a fusion of myriad influences—video games, manga, anime, kung fu movies, cartoons, toys, graffiti and hip hop, rock and roll and advertising imagery—influences that weren’t available to artists from previous generations, at least not in the quantities they were available to Lewis. He was able to internalize these influences, giving him a potent, unique style that was personal rather than a pastiche, and is therefore poised to become one of a handful of artists who might ultimately prove emblematic of his generation of cartoonists, along with the likes of Brandon Graham and Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Oh, and he also went back to his 12-year-old’s designs for grape warriors to produce Seedless, first as a webcomic and now a trade paperback collection from Image Comics.

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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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All of the books discussed in this column have been out for a while, so long that my colleague Michael C. Lorah has reviewed some of them quite a while ago and you’ve hopefully already read some of these. They’ve been sitting in a small stack in my office even longer than that, waiting for me to review them.

In an attempt to shorten the height of my review pile—and silence the incessant whispers in my head from these particular volumes, saying “Review me, review me, review me”—I decided to just steam through them all as quickly as possible. Each of these works deserve a lot more time, space, thought and quality critical writing then I’m giving there here, but I had to silence the voices, which only grew louder the longer I put off writing about them.

So here are some of my thoughts about Dungeon Quest, The Legacy, Market Day, Temperance and Wilson.

Dungeon Quest Book One (Fantagraphics) I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with top ten lists and other such best of the year rankings, in part because of how arbitrary the unit of time a “year” is and in part because reading comics is such a subjective experience, and my appreciation of them may be influenced by other factors I myself am not aware of.

So I don’t really want to declare this book by Joe Daly, the cartoonist responsible for The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book (one of the best comics of last year…oops! Shouldn’t do that!), one of the best of the year or anything…particularly since it’s only August as I write this.

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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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Now this is a strange release.

Publisher Drawn and Quarterly and cartoonist/editor Adrian Tomine have been gradually introducing Western audiences to manga-ka Yoshihiro Tatsumi over the course of the last five years or so, through collections of his short, dark, adult work collected in Abandon the Old in Tokyo, The Pushman and Other Stories and Good-Bye.

Last year they printed his epic autobiography, A Drifting Life, and now comes Black Blizzard, which has so little in common with the work seen in D+Q’s earlier anthologies that you’d be forgiven for thinking it the work of an entirely different artist.

Black Blizzard is a much earlier work, created by a 21-year-old Tatsumi in 1956, and a fairly straight work of genre fiction compared to the literary work we’ve previously seen. It’s a fast-paced, crime melodrama with some extremely obvious twists and turns.

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The latest release in Drawn and Quarterly’s John Stanley Library line is closer to Melvin Monster than Nancy in that it collects a short-lived original series, rather than a popular series based on a preexisting character.

It’s unlike either in that it pulls back from the world of children a bit to focus on teenagers. Given the age of those teenagers—it’s right there in the title—that may not be a huge difference, but Stanley is tackling slightly more mature subject matter than in his better known Little Lulu and Nancy work: Romance, crushes, status awareness, fitting in and so forth.

It also means Stanley here has older, more adult characters to draw, and it’s a pleasure to see his quick, confident, concisely-placed strokes applied to the longer, lither forms of the teenagers. Thinking back on all the Little Lulu comics I’ve read, I’m having trouble thinking of any tall or skinny characters, as everyone in Lulu’s world—the older kids, the majority of the adults—have a soft roundness about him.

Here many of the characters are gangly and long-limbed, perfect figures for much of the running around and explosive histrionics they engage in.

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The many virtues of one-named Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s work are well documented, but one of the less talked-about pleasures of Fantagraphics’ publication of it is how nice the books themselves look as objects.

Individually, the slim, 10-by-7-inch-ish volumes are all well designed and attractive looking, but all lined up next to one another on a shelf? Oh boy, that makes for a fine looking half-a-foot or so on one’s book shelf! So uniform, so orderly, so…perfect!

And then Low Moon came along, and while it’s contents were rock solid, Grade A, tip-top, master-level cartooning, the format itself broke the streak—it was shorter, squatter and much thicker. It was still a beautifully designed book, radiating that pleasant sense of positive aesthetics that comforts a bibliophile’s heart just know it’s around, but it broke the harmony of the Jason section of my book shelf.

Thank God then for Almost Silent, a new collection repackaging some of Fanta’s older Jason books—some of which are no longer in print in their original format—as an anthology the same size, shape and design as Low Moon. Problem solved!

(And yes, I realize I’m using a pretty broad, silly definition of the word “problem” here, and that I’m lucky that something like how graphic novels look lined up on a bookshelf is one of my worse problems on any given day).

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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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Cory and Eric’s father must just be constantly looking for an opportunity to delve into a complicated geopolitical topic and/or an excuse to tell the life story of one of his ancestors.

How else to explain the fact that when he and his wife end up refereeing a conflict between their boys, involving Eric stopping Cory from buying a particular type of candy, because the older, wise brother knew it contained an ingredient the younger one didn’t really like, he boils it down thusly:

You know, you boys aren’t the first to argue over this principle…You’re arguing whether or not one entity—in your case, a person, but sometimes we’re talking about a country—can take away another’s capacity to act on its own choices.

After a little back and forth between the four members of the family, the patriarch launches into the story of Corporal Peter Crogan of the Foreign Legion, who naturally had to face the issues revolving around the ethics of imperialism as part of his job, occupying and defending swathes of North Africa for France, whether the native people wanted him to do so or not.

If I were Cory or Eric, I’d be afraid to open my big mouth around my dad…or maybe not, depending on how great a storyteller he is.

Writer/artist Chris Schweizer cuts away from the kitchen scene set-up in Crogan’s March (Oni Press) to present the story of Crogan as an unfiltered comics story, so we don’t hear exactly what the dad says or how he says it, but he must know how to tell a story, given the wide-eyed, slack-jawed looks of awe on the two boys’ faces when we return to the kitchen after hearing about Crogan’s story.

Schweizer, however,  sure knows how to tell one.

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Aw thanks, Boom Studios! I didn’t know you cared! The publisher, which currently holds the licenses on a bunch of Disney characters and concepts and has been making fine use of many of them, has put together a heck of a Valentine’s Day present for fans of classic comics featuring the core Disney mouse and duck characters.

The 130-page, six-story collection is similar in scope and format to the publisher’s 2009 Walt Dinsey’s Christmas Classics collection, with the stories selected comprising a sampling of work from various eras, creators and countries of origin (In fact, every decade between the ‘40s and the ‘80s is represented by a story in here).

The highlight is probably the lead story, 1941’s “Love Trouble” by Floyd Gottfredson, Merril de Maris and Bill Wright. At 36 pages, it’s the longest piece, and features the story of Minnie finding a new, much taller, more charming, more talented and more well-off boyfriend than Mickey, Montmorecny Rodent (although he pronounces it “Rodawn”). Humiliated over and over, and unable to compete, Mickey fights fire with fire by taking up with a beautiful, rich, blonde mouse new to town, and then proceeds to couple-stalk Minnie and Rodent, driving Minnie insane with envy.

Given the way they behave to one another, and use other people (er, “people” probably isn’t the right word…), I’m not sure what the two mice see in each other, but I suppose they’re better off together than inflicting their social dysfunctions on others. Just I suppose I have now thought way too much about the love lives of two cartoon mice from a fast-paced, lovingly and energetically drawn screwball comedy comic strip.

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The latest releases from AdHouse books I’ve read are both beautiful examples of books-as-art-objects. They look nice on a bookshelf, a night stand or a coffee table. You’ll look cooler and more attractive while reading them on the train or in a restaurant. Both suggest narratives beyond themselves, as if the books themselves are chronicling or representing something else bigger and more important, but outside the confines of their contents.

One of them is a lot of easily accessible fun, the other one is nigh impenetrable fun…which I suppose isn’t everyone’s idea of fun. In either case, they make for great conversation pieces. So let’s talk about ‘em, huh?

Let’s start with the character whose pretty, pretty face is to the right there.

Like the Quiet Bird-Man in Jamie Tanner’s The Aviary and the title character of Mike Dawson’s Ace-Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms, Afrodisiac’s first AdHouse-published adventure in 2005’s superheroes-by-artists-not-primarily-known-as-superhero-artists showcase, Project: Superior.

That adventure, in which the hero who possesses both an afro and aphrodisiac superpowers over all women to escape and electricity-themed villain’s master plan of employing lesbian hechwomen, is reprinted in AdHouse’s recent book Afrodisiac, along with a great deal of original material.

Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca’s book is rather curious in that it more or less functions as a greatest hits collection culled from a long-running superhero comic book that never actually existed. There are a whole bunch of short stories in a variety of styles, but they’re greatly outnumbered by the suggestions of stories—covers, posters, letters pages, concept art, advertisements and so on.

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