“7 True Tales of Internet Horror” by Keith Knight

This apparently isn’t actually a story per se, but an introduction to the rest of the volume, although I did not discover that until I got to the final panel, in which Knight lists his seventh tale of Internet horror as “Finding out the intro you were asked to do for MySpace Dark Horse Presents was due last week!!”

So, poor job of introducing the introduction as an introduction, although it is a decent introduction of what follows in that it is a typical Keith Knight cartoon, and an anthology that contains a typical Keith Knight cartoon is one that’s probably going to include a great deal of variety, since no one has such a disciplined loose style as Knight, nor the ability to rely heavily on verbal wit without seeming to be trying to overcompensate at all (A word-less Knight strip would still be pretty hilarious, so adept is he at drawing funny faces, and moving from image to image).

Also, its inclusion demonstrates that whoever put the anthology together has pretty good taste, which is a good sign.

“Murderous Intent” by Mike Mignola and Ben Stenbeck

Your typical Mike Mignola story, which is either a good or bad thing, depending on the degree of affection you have for Mignola’s writing and the amount of patience you have with the endless variations of a government agent guy versus the supernatural (with the supernatural presented with enough historical detail that they feel genuine, or at least based on real historical facts, whether they actually are or not).

This one stars Edward Grey, star of Mignola’s Witchfinder series. Stenbeck is credited with art, but many of the panels look so Mignola-esque that I would not call you a liar if you told me he penciled or inked it himself.

That’s not necessarily a criticism of Stenbeck, by the way. Being able to do a very convincing Mignola impression is probably a virtue in drawing a Mignola-verse story.

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I usually try to review a comic or two here on the weekends, but my review stack has gotten pretty out of control, so I figured instead of shaving a little off the top, I’d try to make a more sizable dent in it. So below you’ll find reviews of five comics and graphic novels from the last few months.

Empowered Vol. 5 (Dark Horse Comics) Adam Warren’s one-man graphic novel series has reached the point where reviewing each new volume seems a little beside the point. You’re either reading or your not, and if you’re not, you should be. Or at least, you should be if you like, love or maybe even loathe superheroes.

Empowered remains not only the funniest superhero comic on the stands, but also the most mature and sophisticated, which itself seems like a joke given the series’ start in superhero parody, shameless cheesecakery and bondage gags that would make William Moulton Marston blush.

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The main conflict at the heart of Kimi Ni Todoke (Viz) has a problem that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen very many American teen movies. Fifteen-year-old Sawako Kuronuma is extremely unpopular at school, and said to look like the scary little girl in Ringu, thus frightening all her classmates.

Yet just as Rachael Leigh Cooke with long hair and glasses is just as beautiful as Rachael Leigh Cooke with short hair and contacts, Sawako’s obviously drawn as a very pretty girl and, in fact, her attractiveness is part of the plot—Kazehaya, the most popular boy in class, is apparently secretly in love with her.

Manga-ka Karuho Shiina, who obviously has a lot more leeway than a Hollywood director, gets around that dilemma by keeping Sawako’s physical features consistent, but often framing her the way the villain or monster in another manga might be framed.

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I think we can all agree that there are few things in this world as cool as comic books, and that one of those things is probably dinosaurs. This explains why comic books about dinosaurs tend to be fairly awesome, and Hitoshi Shioya’s Dinosaur Hour, a recent offering from the Viz Kids line, is no exception.

Yes, it’s a kids book (recommended for kids ages 9-12 on Amazon), and yes, it’s educational, but don’t hold any of that against it. It’s also a pretty funny sketch comedy starring various dinosaurs from various periods of prehistoric history. The comedy is all physical or character driven, to the extent that the dinosaurs are able to develop personalities in their few page appearances, and is otherwise pretty much realistic and naturalistic.

Basically, it’s a slice of life comedy starring a bunch of dinosaurs.

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Low Moon, the latest release of one-named  Norweigian  cartoonist Jason from Fantagraphics, is a hard book to review, as the previous sentence probably tells readers all they need to know about it.

Jason is one of the relatively few working artists that even a jaded, cynical, complain-first critic like me will happily declare a true master cartoonist, without reservation. Jason is—how to put this?—good. Really, really, really good. Good enough that even the very worst of his work that I’ve seen, a handful of the early pieces he’s done, collected in Pocket Full of Rain and Other Stories, are fascinating in light of what he would come to do after those works, and how they signal and reflect his future work.

So, Low Moon? It’s Jason. It’s new. It’s obviously really, really good, you know?

(Can I get away with a three-paragraph review? Or does that look too lazy? It does? Alright, alright; more after the jump then).

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Kevin Cannon is one half of Big Time Attic, the art studio that’s worked with writer Jim Ottaviani on some of his best science-fueled comics, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, Stuff of Life and, my personal favorite, Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards.

If the production of those books can be considered analogous to the work of a rock band, then Cannon’s Far Arden (Top Shelf) is his solo side project. Sure, he might have been a perfect drummer, keeping the beat while half obscured by his bass drum in the background, while Ottaviani and fellow artist Zander Cannon dominated the stage, but it turns out Kevin  Cannon can write, sing and play guitar just as well as his bandmates. And man, can he shred.

The story of Far Arden is a wild one, but there’s a structure to the wildness, so all of the seemingly random happenstances and coincidences, the betrayals, reversals and unlikely alliances, the big reveals and zany plot points ultimately make a sort of sense. Parts of Far Arden might seem completely, hilariously insane, but never just for insanity’s sake—Cannon’s gags all serve his story.

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Today is Wednesday, which means one thing to me—It’s my own personal weekly holiday, known around the Caleb household as Comic Book Day.

Today is a special Comic Book Day though, as not only is it Wednesday, not only is it Comic Book Day, but it’s Wednesday Comics Comic Book Day, the Wednesday on which the first issue of DC’s Wednesday Comics is published.

Like a lot of folks who like great comics, I’ve been kind of looking forward to this book. It’s got several artists contributing who are on my own personal Will Buy Anything From list, including Joe Kubert, Paul Pope, Mike Allred and Kyle Baker. And those are just four of the, let’s see, 28 creators contributing 16 ongoing features starring DC’s biggest, most popular heroes (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash), weirdest, oddball characters (Metamorpho, The Metal Men) and pretty much everything in between.

But beyond that, I’ve been looking forward to this issue because I was so intensely curious about it.

I knew the facts regarding the book (if “book” is even the right word for it), that it would be the size and shape of a regular-sized comic book, but unfold into 14-inch-by-20-inch pages that look and feel like newspaper, thus evoking the sort of comics section that hasn’t even existed since before my life time. But I honestly had no idea how that was going to look, read and feel. Not until I had it in my hands, anyway.

And hey, now it’s in my hands!

I wasn’t quite sure the best way to go about reviewing it, so I figured I would just pseudo-liveblog my reading of it. That is, I’ll review it as I read it. Or rather, I’ll read it, and then review it as I re-read it, so it’s as if I’m reviewing it as I’m reading it. So join me after the jump to read me writing while reading over my own shoulder. Or something like that.

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I understand that the term “graphic novel” has some difficulties, particularly in the second half. After all, the term is used to refer to pretty much anything that is comics and has a spine, whether they’re actually the comics-equivalent of nonfiction or short stories.

To call a bound anthology of short, nonfiction comics a “graphic novel” might not be technically correct, so I can understand why someone might not want to use it.

I don’t understand what’s so wrong about the word “comics” though, or why anyone might think the word “picto-essays” is somehow preferable, as Brendan Burford apparently does, as he’s titled his extremely strong collection of comics Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays (Villard).

What does the term “picto-essays” really accomplish that that “comics” couldn’t have? Well, it makes the book seem incredibly pretentious, and the editor and/or publishers seem somewhat unfamiliar with and ashamed of the medium.

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Quick, think “autobiographical graphic novel.”

What comes to mind?  A black and white trade paperback, containing the intentionally rough, scratchy, simplified artwork of a twenty- or thirtysomething revealing intimate details of their love life? Maybe a black and white trade paperback version of a memoir, in which the middle-aged author discusses a particularly interesting aspect of his or her life, like coming to grips with a new child or dealing with a terrible disease?

Well, C. Tyler’s You’ll Never Know Book One: A Good and Decent Man (Fantagraphics Books) isn’t like that, nor is it much like any other autobio comic I’ve encountered.

The form of the book distinguishes it immediately. It’s a big, huge rectangle, a foot across, and 10.75 inches high, although it’s only 100 pages long, and the story is expected to continue into two more books. The form (like the amount of color) sets it apart from many of the works in its genre, but that’s no necessarily why it’s in that form—it also serves the story.

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Neil Swaab’s comic strip Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles is pretty much the same as Jim Davis’ Garfield. The only differences are the details and the degree.

Garfield is, of course, about an overweight house cat and his often adversarial relationship with the loser human being he lives with. Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles is about a teddy bear and his often adversarial relationship with the loser human being he lives with.

Garfield’s human foil is a stay-at home cartoonist named Jon who never seems to be working, and is always complaining about his inability to achieve what he wants in life. Mr. Wiggles’ human foil is a stay-at home cartoonist named Neil who never seems to be working, and is always complaining about his inability to achieve what he wants in life.

Much of the humor in Garfield is derived from the lead character’s vices: His laziness, his gluttony, his selfishness and his readiness to hurt others in his life, emotionally or physically (usually by throwing something in Jon’s face, or kicking Odie off a table). Much of the humor in Mr. Wiggles is derived from its lead character’s vices: His drug problem, his many sexual deviances, his pedophilia and his readiness to hurt Neil (usually by hitting him in the genitals, or sexually violating him while he’s sleeping).

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As a boutique publisher, AdHouse Books doesn’t put out a ton of comics each year, but what they may lack in quantity they certainly make up for in quality—I just read two of their recent releases, and they were among the best comics I’ve read so far this year.

The first was Fred Chao’s Johnny Hiro Vol. 1, a trade paperback collecting the first three issues of the serially published comic, plus two more stories that would have been published serially as comic books, if that were still feasible in today’s comics market (Plus a bunch of one-page gag strips).

I spoke at length about the considerable virtues of Chao’s Johnny Hiro in this space before, specifically on how Diamond’s changing minimum standards might affect a great comic like this that was being created specifically as a serial comic book, so I’ll try not to repeat myself.

If you’ve yet to heed my recommendation, Johnny Hiro is about a young man by that name and his girlfriend Mayumi Murakami, and their struggle to make it in New York City, while plagued by unusual problems, like a Godzilla-like monster, 47 Ronin Businessmen, a knife-wielding cooking staff, and a $50,000 lawsuit seeking damages for the hole in their apartment caused by the kaiju attack. These are on top of their normal people problems, mostly dealing with bills, money, work and, in Mayumi’s case, some discrimination at her place of employment.

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I had every intention of reviewing Jeffrey Brown’s latest memoir, Funny Misshapen Body (Simon & Schuster), today. I was planning on reviewing it right up until I got to the very end of the book, and in a post-epilogue, F.A.Q. like sequence he addressed my main difficulty with the book:

Like Brown’s “Girlfriend Trilogy” books, Funny Misshapen Body is structured out of sequence with time, with different sections jumping over and over, so that he’s telling cumulative anecdotes rather than a story, and those anecdotes become the story by the time it’s finished.

In the girlfriend books, these sequences are all very short, giving the books episodic natures. Here though, the sequences are entire chapters, and rather than simply covering the course of a young person’s relationship, the cover a major chunk of Brown’s life—decades really.

It doesn’t hurt the integrity of the story, but I wonder if that story might have been served better with a structure. In the panels posted above, Brown explains why he writes his comics like that, and it certainly makes a great deal of sense, but almost all of his comics are structured the same way—even his lighthearted superhero parody Bighead or his awesome Transformers parody book—which made me wonder if Brown was choosing to tell stories that way, or if its become a default.

So I thought I might talk about that a bit in the course of criticizing his book, but then I got to the end there, and come on…

…how can you criticize a guy with a face like that? He’s so sincere in his apology! It’s okay Jeffrey, I forgive you. Maybe it’s not you anyway; maybe it’s just me.

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I understand that the word “mijeong” means “pure beauty” in Korean; at least, that’s what it says on the back of the NBM manhwa collection Mijeong. I’m not sure if the “pure” part necessarily applies to the work of Korean creator Byun Byung-Jun contained within, but I’m positive the “beauty” part does.

The seven stories of Byun’s that fill this book’s pages are each beautifully drawn, regardless of the subject matter, tone or even the style in which they’re drawn—all shift from story to story.

In fact, there’s such variety within these stories that it’s hard to see what it is that holds them together, beyond the creator, and perhaps the level of skill with which they’re illustrated. Most of them are set in the city, and share a certain romantic but bleak outlook, but then there’s a few near the end which are comedic pieces.

As a whole then, I’m not sure how successful a book Mijeong is, if one-person anthologies are to be judged on their cohesiveness, on the way that every part informs the entire work. But I certainly don’t want to sound dismissive of what Byun’s done here either, as there are some pretty great stories in here.

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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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One of the great things about reading comics today is that we’re well past the point in the medium ‘s history where they were all for kids, and finally getting past the point where so many of their adult readers felt compelled to reflexively, defensively declare that comics most definitely are not for kids anymore.

Melvin Monster, a ten-issue series Dell published in 1965, was most assuredly a kids comic. It wasn’t all-ages, or a comic for teenagers or young adults like Marvel’s comics of the period, but for children.

But Melvin Monster Vol. 1, the first collection in Drawn and Quarterly’s John Stanley Library line, is for both children and adults, addressing both audiences in different ways simultaneously. I think that, in itself, is pretty cool. As cool as it might have been to be nine-years-old in the mid-‘60s and buy an issue of the series off the spinner rack in the drugstore, it’s even cooler to have this gorgeous, hardcover objet d’art  in my hands as a grown man, and be able to appreciate it as a member of whichever audience I feel like reading it as, or to be able to hand it over to one of my nieces (provided her hands are clean) or a friend whose as interested in art and illustration  and know either one of them are really going to dig it.

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Reading and re-reading League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3: Century #1 (Top Shelf), I experienced the usual jumble of emotions—confusion, admiration, awe, frustration, bemusement, dread at the thought of writing about it—but the overwhelming one was relief.

I was relieved that Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s latest go at the LOEG fell closer to the model established in the first two volumes, rather than the Black Dossier hybrid graphic novel. Black Dossier certainly had its charms, and was clever as hell, but Moore made it difficult to appreciate it as anything other than an interesting exercise, the chance to watch an extremely talented writer demonstrate his ability to imitate a variety of styles.  I mean, I like Alan Moore’s writing, and I like Jack Kerouac’s writing, and the idea of Moore imitating Kerouac sounds intriguing, but actually reading pages and pages Moore’s prose echoing Kerouac’s is something I didn’t need to read, particularly in the middle of what was a comics narrative a few pages ago.

In Black Dossier, Moore seemed to take the “What if all fiction occurred in the same world, and the characters and narratives could interact and cross-pollinate” too far away from the original concept of a Justice League of Victorian literature adventure heroes, even abandoning the comics medium for too-long stretches of it.

Century isn’t like that. It’s all comics for one, is set closer to the original time period of the previous volumes, and focuses on better-known characters and works of fiction, although still some much more obscure characters than the ones appearing in the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

The format is similarly something between the two previous models; it’s not a six-issue comic book series, nor an original (hybrid) graphic novel, but a series of three original graphic novellas, each set in a distinct part of the 20th century.

This one is set in 1910, and one-time Dracula victim Mina Murray still leads the League, which now consists of the now-young Allan Quartermain, William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, E.W. Hornung’s gentleman thief A.J. Raffles and the legendary sometimes gentleman/sometimes lady immortal Orlando. Led by Carnacki’s prophetic dreams, this dysfunctional League tries to unravel half-understood clues to stop a massacre on the docks and a plot by Aleistir Crowley analogues with apocalyptic aspirations.

That storyline is intercut with two others. One involves the extremely old Captain Nemo’s daughter, who runs away from her legacy and calls herself “Jenny Diver,” and the other is, an, um, musical staring “Mack the Knife” and a prostitute named Suki who sing their scenes, using reworked songs from Threepenny Opera (Or so I’ve heard; these were among the allusions lost on me).

Not lost on me was Moore’s alternate Ripper theories, and the fact that not only does he revisit From Hell through re-examining the Ripper killings (Following Eddie Campbell’s 2008 Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard, now both of From Hell’s creators have revisited that work in amusing ways within the last year), but also by exploring that bigger, denser work’s concept of the 20th century being brought about by magical rituals, and the Whitechapel murders coloring the nature of that century.

It all works about as well as could be hoped—musicals, obviously, don’t translate too well into the silent medium of comics, although O’Neill draws some funny dancing scenes—and Moore provides plenty of action, city-destroying mayhem and colorful, humorous characterization to balance out some of the more obtuse references (I could read a Moore/O’Neill Orlando monthly comic forever, I think).

I was also relieved to see so much of O’Neill, as reducing his contributions to illustrations in certain sections of Black Dossier was another of the things that rankled me about it. O’Neill’s work is enormously rewarding, and the reason I can go back and read and re-read these stories so many times. Each panel is packed with so much visual information, layered behind the most significant actions of the panels, that one can take any given panel in as is, or read it layer by layer for additional sight gags, visual allusions and subtle details characterizing the protagonists and their settings.

And, while this has nothing to do with the work itself, I was sort of relieved on Moore’s behalf, since his new publisher must certainly offer him a less tense relationship than his previous one, and it seems both the creators and the publishers have found a way to continue LOEG in a way that is at once unequivocally Moore and O’Neill’s comics and a Top Shelf production.

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.

Given the media attention Wolverine has received this month, it’s probably safe to assume everyone’s heard some version of his real-world origin by this point. He was created by writer Len Wein, designed by John Romita Sr., first drawn in a story by Herb Trimpe and first used as an adversary in a 1974 issue of The Incredible Hulk. He was given new life, and his incredible popularity by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and John Byrne, during the seminal X-Men run that began in 1975′s Giant Size X-Men #1.

I imagine that a lot of readers have also encountered some theories as to what it was exactly that made Wolverine so popular, to the point where his popularity has only increased as the years have passed. Is it the fact that he has knives that pop out of his hands? Is it the haircut and sideburns? The mysterious origin? The fact that he says “bub” a lot? His Canadian-ness?

I don’t know, nor do I think anyone knows for sure, or else DC and Marvel would be pumping out a lot more new Wolveirnes (Actually, Marvel has tried just that, given variations of his origins, attitude and hand-knives to more and more characters, most notably in X-2, a teenage girl version of Wolverine, and Daken, the son of Wolverine soon to appear in a title called—no joke?—Dark Wolverine).

But of the theories I’ve encountered in my own cursory reading of whatever comic book and superhero news my Google News alerts deposit in my email each morning, I think a particularly convincing one is that Wolverine stood out—and continues to stand out—because of how sharply he contrasted with the other characters in the X-Men. The character may not have been a team player, but he was also on a team for a good decade before he started spinning-off more and more (Hang on, I’ll get to Wolverine: Prodigal Son eventually, I swear).

All heroes should stand out as different from the rest of the characters in a story in some way shape or form, but Wolverine stood out from the rest of heroes in the stories he was in, by virtue of being more troubled, more haunted, more violent and more willing to just totally kill someone if he has too. (This specialness has worn off completely in Marvel comics, now that Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic and Spider-Man are perfectly okay with exterminating alien invaders and one of the half-dozen team books Wolverine appears in is X-Force, the premise of which is a whole X-Men team made up of nothing but Wolverines. But the character’s appeal as The Least Boring One on the team is certainly on display throughout the first three films).

I wonder then if rather than appearing as an X-person, if Claremont and Cockrum or Byrne had introduced the character as a solo star in a 1975 Wolverine #1 if he would have ultimately been as popular as he turned out being. Like, if he didn’t spend a few years butting heads with Cyclops and calling Jeanie “darlin’”  and Nightcrawler “Elf” and being fastball-special-ed by Colossus and threatening to skewer his enemies allies in berserker rages and getting swept up in mutantkind’s melodrama, would he currently be in a movie, and starring in four ongoing comic books with the word “Wolverine” in the title, in addition to all his X-Men and Avengers titles?

I don’t have an answer of course, it’s just something I’m wondering about, having just finished reading the first volume of Wolverine: Prodigal Son, the first of the Del Rey books re-imagining Marvel’s X-Men characters as manga-style characters in original manga-style stories.

It’s not very good.

I don’t know that it has much to do with not doing the character justice or anything like that; I’ve read far more terrible Wolverine stories than good ones over the years, and in the very best ones tend to be where he’s part of a larger ensemble cast. As is the case with any (well, most) other character(s), there’s little that’s inherently good or bad about the character of Wolverine, and writer Antony Johnson and artist Wilson Tortosa keep many of the design and story elements that seem to be rather integral parts of the character.

He’s got the hair and sideburns (with Tortosa drawing it so so that he has an almost Inu-Yasha-like, canine ear shape to it from certain angles). He’s got the claws (although they’re bone instead of metal), as well as the heightened senses, the healing factor, and the propensity toward berserker rages. He has a mysterious past that’s so mysterious even he doesn’t know about it, and he hangs out in the snowy wilderness of Canada.

That seems to be more than enough to keep Wolverine Wolverine, doesn’t it? Especially considering that this is a continuity-free, do-over sort of take on the character, similar to what we’ve seen in Ultimate X-Men, or the X-Men movies and cartoons, or Marvel’s previous, in-house attempts at manga versions of the character.

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The eleven short stories that make up Cecil and Jordan In New York: Stories By Gabrielle Bell (Drawn and Quarterly) all flow so effortlessly into one another, and compliment one another so strongly that the experience of reading it was like that of listening to an album.

The songs might have been written over a period of years, come from a variety of inspirations and have been originally put down in different practice spaces and studios in different cities or different countries, but when you listen to them as an album for the first time, they’re part of a seamless, unified whole, and seem like that’s the way they were meant to be all along.

That’s what this book is like.

It collects Bell’s stories from a variety of anthologies—Kramer’s Ergot, Mome, her own Lucky—but there’s nothing fragmented about the collection. There’s a consistently honest, observational tone that overrides the stylistic difference and narrative choices in each of the stories, differences that may only be apparent on a second, closer reading and binds the stories together.

Here are a few words about every single one of them.

“Cecil and Jordan in New York”

The title story is a wonderful act of subversion, a short magical realist story that reads like any of Bell’s Lucky stories. The young, female narrator talks about her and Jordan’s moving to Brooklyn and trying to stay out of the way of those putting them up.

And then, halfway through, she turns into a chair.

This is the story which director Michael Gondry has adapted into Interior Design for his part of the trilogy film Tokyo.

Visually, it’s the least Gabrielle Bell-looking story in the collection, a brightly-colored story in which few of the lines are black, and even the narration boxes and dialogue bubbles are blue rather than white.

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The jungle adventure genre just isn’t what it used to be.

Popularized by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and the work of Edgar Rich Burroughs in the last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th century, and then given new life in pre-code Hollywood, tales of safaris into darkest Africa, noble wild people raised in the jungles and battles to the death with wild animals are very much a product of their times.

And, as such, the stories don’t lend themselves well to re-telling, at least not in a modern milieu. Africa—as well as most of the rest of the world—is no longer so dark. The acts of wrestling rhinos and slaying gorillas has lost its luster now that the great beasts are endangered. And let’s not even get into the casual racism of pop culture in the first few decades of the 20th century.

In short, popular imagination has transformed so much during the course of that century that we don’t regard the jungle in quite the same way we used to. It’s not longer a deadly, dangerous challenge awaiting to be explored, conquered and made use of; now it’s seen as a dwindling, fragile resource in need of respect and protection.

So if you’re going to do a jungle adventure story, you’re probably going to want to set it in the past, right?

Steven E. de Souza, the screenwriter who has been working with Devil’s Due Publishing to restore Golden Age heroine Sheena, Queen of the Jungle to comics shelves, didn’t go that route, which, frankly, surprised me.

I was even more surprised by the fact that it worked.
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