May 15th, 2008 John
I will freely admit that many Minx books are sooooooo not meant for a 42-year-old guy and they do present moments where I feel like I’m peering into a MySpace blog that I had no business looking at. This is less a criticism than a qualification — I understand I am not the target audience of any of the Minx line. This is also said with the understanding that teen-agers aren’t writing these things, but playing to that audience. That brings up a strange line to walk — as adults writing for kids, I imagine you want to speak to the kids of their own lives, though it can get kind of icky when you pander. There is a degree to which — at least I think — adults do owe it to their teen audience to set some sort of example of decorum — not the stiff kind, but just, you know, set an example in some way and maybe even offer some seasoned advice in the entertainment. Maybe it’s because I’m a parent that I think this.
The first new release by Minx this year, “Burnout” by Rebecca Donner and drawn by Inaki Miranda, grabs your attention fairly well without being anything special character-wise. Danni is a teenage girl who moves with her mother from the city to the middle of nowhere — bummer, nothing to do, as well all know — after her father bolts on them. Mom ends up in the arms of an abusive lout while Danni ends up starry-eyed for her future step-brother. Meanwhile, her outrageous rock and roll best friend — is there any other type in these books? — feels their friendship is slipping.
Oh, add in there some intrigue involving eco-terrorism.
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May 14th, 2008 John
Joann Sfar returns to the world of Algierian Rabbi Sfar and his cat in “The Rabbi’s Cat 2,” an incredible follow-up to 2005’s complex and charming collection of short stories.
In the first book, over three short stories, Sfar told how the cat won and lost its power to speak, how the rabbi’s daughter met the man she would marry and what happened when the rabbi visited Paris. In this new volume, Sfar adds two more stories to the cycle — in “Heaven on Earth,” we learn more about the rabbi’s cousin, Malka of the Lions, a legendary, desert-wandering lady heart throb who travels with his own pet lion, and in “Africa’s Jerusalem,” the rabbi makes a new Russian friend and begins an adventure across Africa.
As seen through the eyes of the family cat, everyone’s motives are known – after all, no one hides much from an animal — but the interpretations of this openness is saddled to the cat’s limited experience with the breadth of human emotion, as well as the cat’s own desires in life. In perfect feline form, the cat can be haughty and act on extreme displeasure, and yet the proper attention, vigorous stroking and a warm body to curl up with at night is enough — its a sensual creature and its reality is defined by those standards. At the same time, the cat drops all sorts of insight to the rabbi, his daughter and all the other characters that swirl through the stories.
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May 13th, 2008 John
For some people, being a glib smart ass is the key to untold riches and fame, but you have to wonder why that plan worked so well for the likes of Howard Stern, Christopher Hitchens and others, and not Harlan Ellison. Not that Ellison isn’t a success, certainly, but there is always a “never got his due” quality to the man. The reason, it has always seemed to me, is that behind the public persona of glib smart ass, people like Stern and Hitchens are actually team players on some level — smart ass kissers on another. There’s always a chance that I’m wrong with that impression, but I really don’t think so. Ellison, on the other hand, is the real thing. He plays his role so well that he’s not playing a role — he is an equal opportunity glib smart ass, he does not save it for an audience.
There is another side to Ellison that is not evident in so many people who do make their name in the glib smart ass strata — he is a perfectionist on his creative side, a superior craftsman with the written word, a man who walks on the literary side as well as the critical one. He takes storytelling very seriously.
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May 12th, 2008 John
In the last 10 years — if you’ve been paying close attention — it’s become very apparent that the ephemera of 50 years ago is more influential to our modern visual style than any fine or gallery art. In many cases, a visual idea may start with the boys in the berets, but it’s the commercial artists who take these and run, apply them to outlets in our daily lives and bring them to popular recognition, make them easy on our eyes and our brains, help us accept new ideas. As a result, brilliance crops up in the strangest places.
Like very old children’s books.
Two decades ago, Little Golden Books still had a reputation for the same level of ironic cheese that was reserved for Gumby and “Leave It to Beaver,” but that ended quickly once many of my generation started taking a second look at the line and realizing the artistic power behind the illustrators who created them. The stories run the gamut from charming to educational to odd dispatches from another era — with some timeless exceptions — but the artwork that graced these tales were often of such a high standard that they influenced generations of graphic designers, cartoonists, commercial illustrators and, yeah, children’s book illustrators.
In “Golden Legacy,” author Leonard S. Marcus offers decades-long company history of Golden Books, embellishing the behind-the-scenes revelations of business and editorial decision making with a lush and much deserved document of the company’s output — the work of legends like Richard Scarry, Garth Williams, Tibor Gergely, Leonard Weisgard, Alice and Martin Provensen and ground-breaking author Margaret Wise Brown. It’s part biography, part business history and — most importantly — part gorgeous art book.
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May 5th, 2008 John
Charles Burns’ “Black Hole,” recently re-released in paperback, is a horror novel of a different kind — one where the monsters are ourselves, but where the horror will be temporary if only we can survive it.
The best horror stories all riff from something real and honest and take it to a nightmarish extreme — works like “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Frankenstein,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” all examine common human themes — alienation, rage, responsibility, conformity and the price of knowledge — and extricate them from their everyday trappings with supernatural and/or science fiction circumstances.
In “Black Hole,” Burns presents a mysterious conundrum — teens all over Seattle in the 1970s are falling prey to a bizarre disease that mutates their appearances, turns them into monsters and outcasts. Unlike your typical zombie movie, though, the beasts don’t maraud — they hide out in shame. How do they become monsters? Through sex — and not necessarily careless sex. Each teen is faced with temptation and the call to explore that side of life — resigned to the disease and what follows, each teen sees it as the price they pay for something that is just part of animal growth.
The novel follows two stories that often intertwine — Keith, an amiable doofus, and the object of his crush, Chris, whose clever and popular veneer mask a dissatisfaction with everyday life. Chris’ escape, as with so many teenagers, is to dive into the danger of an intense relationship with Rob Facincanni, who she describes as “dark and sexy.” Certainly different from Keith, a boy she barely notices, but who keeps popping up at various points to save the day in some kindhearted way.
Keith spends his time scoring pot with his friends, biding their time hoping that confidence will someday fill their chests as easily the smoke from the joints they roll. An awkward afternoon at a dealer’s house leads Keith to meet Eliza, bohemian and flirty, with her own hint of danger and — as Keith notices — a tail. In Eliza, the mutation has not become grotesque, but cute, and Eliza’s comfort with it accentuates the idea that the disease sweeping the teenagers may not be entirely bad and, in fact, manifests itself in different ways in different people. This reveals what is different about Burns’ take on coming of age as opposed to so many others — adulthood is presented as a challenge, as the result of what you make of it mixed with the luck of the draw. Some people end up with melty faces, others with cute little waggy tales. Just like real life.
Burns’ portrayal of these mutations are all the more affecting thanks to his investigation of the teen years. He captures that age perfectly and unapologetically, allowing his characters to act as if there were no adult in view. This honesty creates some cringe-worthy moments as well sweet ones from the perspective of an adult reading the book, long past even the point of embracing or rejecting the particular circumstances of his own mutation. The scenes are so deft in their portrayal of a world three decades ago that they may seem like etchings from your own personal memory. Equally, Burns’ high contrast black and white style, at times seeming more like fluid wood carvings than illustrations, gives the story an atmosphere of displacement that matches the inner workings of the characters he follows.
With “Black Hole,” Burns has achieved something monumental, crafting a complicated tale of horror that draws not only draws from the real world, but transposes itself on top it in such a way that his horrors might overtake your own memories. In many ways, that’s what “Black Hole” is about — as the characters descend into moments of nightmarish surrealism in which their unconsciousness collides with unspoken societal fear of growing up, it becomes clear that the mutated bodies they suffer from are really something imposed upon them. The sickening transformation of their bodies is something their former naivete never considered would be unleashed, as they did nothing more radical than live their lives.
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May 3rd, 2008 John
In titling his book “A Short History of the American Stomach,” Frederick Kaufman is certainly cutting to the chase. Though it seems prior to cracking the book open that this will be another in the spate of books and documentaries examining the food we eat and what it means, Kaufman’s goals are more abstract, more psychological. Instead of revealing an ethical or healthy way to eat, Kaufman’s goal is to trace why we eat the way we do and his success at doing so is a wild ride through American absurdity born from one singular trait in the history and present day of our country: repression.
As documented through Kaufman’s work, America is the the ultimate binge and purge society and the whole of the book suggests that anorexia and bulemia are diseases ingrained in the psychology of Americans that only need an appropriate zeitgeist through which to ignite them. With a society birthed of Puritan mores, national days of fasting were common in our country up through the 19th Century, often declared by our presidents as a way of reflection on national issues of the day. Add to this the common medical misconception that all ills — physical or psychological — were centered around your diet and the only way to cure anything from a cough to a coma was to vomit, and you’ve created a dysfunctional relationship with eating that goes across a society.
Kaufman opens the book comparing food shows to pornography and he is right on the mark, going as far as sitting down with a porn filmmaker to dissect the camera techniques. In a binge and purge society, the excess of cooking shows is directly comparable to the idea that something so physical can be experience indirectly, that the visual suggestion can elicit savory excitement within the soul. You can’t eat it, but you sure can watch it.
Such is America’s self-flagellating relationship with sex and food — indeed, pleasure is something we overload on, even as we condemn others doing so. We like to blame the victim of the same temptations any of us have — we aren’t a kind lot. The diseases of being overweight are viewed with the same disdain as sexually transmitted diseases — it’s all their fault. Still, most of us are overweight, few of us have total self-control and the national obsession with dieting is an organized form of psychologically troubling binge and purge that is not only directly from the medicinal scrawls of crazy Puritan Cotton Mather, but a loud mixed message beamed out to every person suffering from an eating disorder in present day society. And it’s no accident that so much of the craziest dietary advice throughout our history have come from people who mix religious thought with food, suggesting that religion should be considered the third sensual pleasure we overload on and abuse.
As American history moves on, so does Kaufman’s sight, taking readers through the early American urge to eat anything that walks and in great abundance — something that culminated in insane, gluttonous meat parade through the streets of New York — through to the American obsession with dieting. His efforts reveal that the same conversations and outrages we have today are ones we’ve been having for a century or two.
Unlike other works that share the same territory, there is little finger pointing in Kaufman’s work, more a commiseration, an understanding. It’s like a clandestine meeting with your siblings where instead of complaining about your lives or your parents, you just look at the way you were raised and they way they were raised and just nod your heads during the analysis — it’s past blame and we’ve moved onto the acceptance and understanding phase of the discussion.
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May 2nd, 2008 John
In Kazu Kibuisi’s “Amulet: The Stonekeeper,” a science fantasy epic graphic novel for kids is kicked off with echoes of Japanese animation master Hiyao Miyazake and a bit of steam punk, as well as some Tolkien thrown in.
Emily and her brother Navin — along with their mother — work to move past a family tragedy in a new home, a creepy old mansion that is held in the family. It’s former resident, Silas Charnon, is the kids’ great grandfather, who went missing some years before after locking himself inside the house. Silas was noted as a puzzlemaker, but his puzzles resembled machines more than the traditional fare.
While cleaning the house, Emily stumbles upon a necklace, from which the titular amulet hangs — or perhaps I should call it the titular talking amulet, as it immediately begins warning Emily of some kind of impending doom for her family.
What follows is an exciting romp through a secret world in the bowels of the mansion, in which Emily and Navin are pitted against all kinds of oogly monsters and allied with a number of unusual robots — as well as faced with family secrets and a universal pressure to save everything and everybody.
It all culminates in a frantic but fun cliffhanger that leads directly into the second book of the series.
Kibuisi’s realization of his story flows beautifully thanks to his artwork — he’s wonderful at matching his character’s simple, wide-eyed, Manga-style appearances with painterly, gorgeous backdrops. Furthermore, his mastery moves between well-constructed dialogue and subtle silent scenes, whether capturing character moments or all-out action.
Further, Kibuishi’s meshing of genre styles is well-utilized for a tender tale of coming of age in a literary era where coming of age fantasies are a dime a dozen — unlike so many where kids wake up on the edge of puberty to find that they’re actually special, Emily and Navin wake up to find the challenges of the wider world are demanding that they prove they are special — or perhaps just capable. It’s a classic situation that any of us run up against — family mysteries rearing their ugly head — and it’s that challenge that makes the truths of Kibuishi’s story more universal. Many of Kibuishi’s readers will be facing similar, though smaller, issues and Kibuishi gives them reason to find light in the darkness without an in-your-face presentation of issues that diverts from a well-told story.
It’s a must for anyone who loves well-crafted fantasy or robots.
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April 25th, 2008 John
In Josh Simmons’ “Jessica Farm” a girl named Jessica Farm who lives on a farm wanders around a house filled with surreal creatures and psychological fury in an attempt to escape the wrath of her father on Christmas morning.
That’s a gross simplification of the story, which piles on the weird for weird’s sake incidents — a talking monkey figurine, a troll-like closet guardian, a tiny jazz band, and others — and mixes things up with a kind of juvenile sexuality, which includes an extended shower scene and a weird creature who sticks his testicles in people’s food to spice it up.
Unfortunately, these bits of surrealism don’t add up to much and part of the reason is the format. It’s Simmons’ plan to create a page a month of the story and then release a book each time he reaches 96 pages. This means that this current book was created from 2000 through 2007 and that the next book will not see the light of day until 2016?
The first problem there is that you’d think that seven years and 96 pages would be enough to give the reader something, anything, that resemble a plot or a progression — unfortunately, the book just seems like a series of weird events strung together. In that way, it’s all set-up, but with so little established that there’s no sense that the reader should expect anything further than what’s gone on before. In other words, there’s nothing resembling a story that grabs you and Simmons’ storytelling skills as demonstrated here aren’t so dynamic or depthful that you’ll forgive the lack of story just to see the mind at work.
The other problem is that it’s an awful large leap of faith to believe that most books would keep people hanging for eight years to read what happens next — it’s a gargantuan one when the story being stretched out is one that nothing really seems to happen of any logical consequence.
I appreciate what Simmons is attempting to do here, but in meeting the challenge, I don’t think the work rises above what it needs to be. Of course, further volumes on through the last in 2050 might indeed change my attitude about the whole venture and I could be taught a very valuable lesson about judging a story midstream. I just wish I felt Simmons had any more of an idea of where he is going than I do — taking seven years to essentially whistle dixie for 96 pages doesn’t give me hope. And I’m not so sure I’m going to be interested in enough in 2016 to try and change my mind.
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April 25th, 2008 John
Kaput and Zosky are aliens of the worst kind, with only three things on their minds — killing, killing and killing. Aside from that fixation, their only real goal is to dominate a world — any world — and their only real preference is to do so in the most violent, painful, awful way possible. If this doesn’t sound like it’s necessarily cheery fodder for a kid’s comic, in the hands of French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim, it’s entirely the domain of children. In fact, Kaput and Zosky might speak most vividly to kids, who will perhaps find humor in the pair’s sub-childish behavior. Really, these two could make a reader of any young age definitely feel like the mature one in the relationship.
Their lot in life is to wander around the universe, happen upon a planet that they are certain they can conquer and then be foiled in some way, usually having to do with the fact that they’re nowhere near as vicious as they pass themselves off as. In fact, they aren’t very bright and, as Trondheim illustrates again and again, brains are preferable to brawn in the game of war. It’s a lesson that countries have learned and forgotten over and over again — it’s no wonder two dim-witted aliens with itchy fingers on their laser guns are behind in that area of study.
If all this bloodlust seems a bit much for a kid’s comic, it’s a good idea to look at the philosophy behind it. It’s very well-stated in this comment from Kaput in one of the last stories in the book: “For me, there’s no paradise without misery.” That’s a profound statement for a slapstick comic about two aliens. You could line up artists and scientists and philosophers and many would agree that pain is the great universal constant. Everything in the universe is born of some sort of violence and survival is condition result from conflict and blood. All Kaput is stating is the truth — there is no other life but the one where dog eats dog. Rather than rising above it, he and Zosky have given into it.
This idea is accentuated in “The Cosmonaut,” a series of silent one-pagers that follows the adventures of an earthling in outer space. The gag is always the same — it always revolves around the quaint idea that the man is on a voyage of discovery in the universe but with each wonder he encounters, he kills it. This is almost always countered with the punchline that he is going to be killed by an alien on the same journey.
This makes Trondheim’s work both exalted and wacky. As with all good comedy, he takes something dark and uses it for laughs — in doing so, he creates a common ground between kid and adult. Either could read and crack up at this stuff, because it’s just too funny. For a kid, Trondheim’s universal view will be a peak at the horrible realizations of being a grown-up and the call to not let it overwhelm you — for a parent, the same outlook will cause a chuckle, thanks to the understanding that amidst all the horribleness, you’ve got to laugh.
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April 24th, 2008 John
In “Jack and the Beanstalk,” a boy reached the sky via a giant vegetable plant and a world of human-centric wonder was revealed. “The Clouds Above” skews all that , with a mysterious junky staircase leading a cat named Jack and a boy named Simon (who’s hardly simple) to another world of wonder, but this time filled with actual denizens of the sky, clouds and birds.
Simon is late for school and rather than face the wrath of his wretched teacher Mrs. Poe, he heads for the roof of the school, where he finds — amongst a load of junk — his entrance to the world of the clouds. Together they encounter the sorts of cloud-centric adventures you would expect — thunder storms and a great difficulty seeing where they’re going because all the clouds are blocking their view — as well as some more fantastic ones, including a talking cloud invigorated by a newfound freedom and a group of very rude birds.
What Simon and Jack end up discovering is that there a multiple implications to being in charge of your own life — there’s good and bad — but also learn a great deal about not only teamwork, but the power of mobs against oppressive bodies. In fact, the most potent lesson is brought about by the mean birds and that in itself is a triumph of wisdom — I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything in a book aimed to kids that even hints at the idea that even your enemies might offer useful tips worth noting. If the original problem is Mrs. Poe and the prime intent is to overcome her glee for tyranny, there is something in that struggle that becomes applicable to the dangers at hand. Conflict teaches and that is a valuable lesson for a kid.
Writer/artist Jordan Crane allows his tale to unfold a page at a time. Rather than lay it out as a traditional comic book with several panels on a page, there is one per, a format that insists the book be called a page-turner — you have no choice. As the excitement of the adventure builds, you find yourself flipping pages faster and faster, trying your best to keep up with the action while still attempting to take a moment to appreciate Crane’s animated and colorful panels. If at times it feels like you are indulging in one of the most gorgeous flip books imaginable, that only adds to the immediacy of the tale. This is a fantastic graphic novel for kids and adults alike.
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April 23rd, 2008 John
Here’s an idea that never occurred to me before: Easy reader comics. Toon Books has arrived to plant that idea in everybody’s head, however, and wash away any opportunity to use that sort of stunned opening sentence in a review ever again. As evidenced through their inaugural title, “Benny and Penny in Just Pretend” by Geoffrey Hayes, they’re well on their way to doing just that, with the mantra from editorial director Francoise Mouly: “Comics, they are not just for adults anymore,” as she said in a recent interview with the Horn Book.
If you have never heard of Mouly, now is the time to learn. As art editor of the New Yorker, she has defined the feel of the magazine for 15 years, taking the traditional look of the covers and adding an updated, distinct style to them. Part of the unique quality of her stewardship has been her connection to the comic book world, through her years publishing and editing the RAW imprint with her husband, Art Spiegelman. In 2000, she and Spiegelman started the RAW Jr. line, with the Little Lit series, a triumphant anthology of comic book tales for kids featuring work by top line writers and artists like Paul Auster, Dan Clowes, William Joyce and others.
Mouly’s formula has been simple, yet revolutionary. Whereas comics are often an afterthought to many publishers — and creators in the comic book world not necessarily well-regarded — Mouly saw a hot bed of originality in the comic pool and, with a discriminating editorial eye, sought to use these basic materials to give attention to the comic book form, to nurture the output for quality.
The result of this forward movement is the Toon Books line, which Mouly and Speigelman have also fashioned in collaboration with educators and educational advisors, stemming from the idea that comics are ideal for young readers, drawing them into the story, helping them “crack the code that allows literacy to flourish” — a comic book page acts as a road map to the mechanics of story telling that have proven difficult to some children and are valuable to any child.
With all that context for a book like “Benny and Penny,” it’s with relief that I report the book to be charming and simple, as it should be. Benny is a little mouse pretending to be a pirate — a wooden crate is his make-believe pirate ship. His little sister, Penny, wants to play with him, but a rejection and a scuffle sends the two into a conflict throughout the day where they will, inevitably, learn the value of each other.
This is no simple, sentimental aside, however — while familial affection is an obvious central component to the story, it doesn’t get in the way of creating a good bit of depth to the mice. Benny is a bit obstinate and reactionary are sudden, Penny is sly and patient — both characters are terribly honest, probably due to Hayes’ memories of his own dynamic with his younger brother and the idea that a kid might have to learn a lesson several times before it sticks. So it is with brother-sister relationships as it is with reading.
Hayes’ work hits the right between children’s books and comics. His mice and their world have that nice, warm texture of a personable picture book, but the panels flow with sequential ease, with energetic animation to his characters — there’s great body language going on here and Hayes gets a lot of facial emotion out of little mice.
Aimed at readers K-2, “Benny and Penny” will give any kid that age something delightful that will also challenge them — and any parent reading alongside will find plenty to be amused by. Toon Books is off to a great start and I look forward to them changing the way we look at comics.
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April 18th, 2008 John
Creepy and mythic, Cyril Pedrosa’s “Three Shadows” follows a family to the end of its greatest fear, examining what a parent will do for a child, while managing to steer the story away from a foreboding gloom that could overtake it and transforming it into a fable.
The appearance of three dark horsemen on a hillside upsets the idylls of life for a mother, father and son. Both parents deal with these manifestations in their own ways, seeking both frightening counsel and unsure flight from the problem. The father’s solution sends he and the son on a treacherous journey from home on a boat that is filled with passengers who pack the decks and nooks and crannies like scared insects, overseen by a corrupt captain and his associate, an amoral slave trader who attempts to befriend the father.
The incidents on the sea journey are merely a portion of the odyssey that has engulfed the father and son as they try to outrun the mysterious trio, but for Pedrosa, this is not the story of a chase, but of a transformation. Filled with mysteries to be solved, Pedrosa stays with you far past the logical end, guiding the reader through a range of emotions as each layer is peeled away.
The most amazing aspect of Pedrosa’s storytelling is his rich understanding that the family are just three people in an entire world — with each page, hundreds of stories are hinted at, little snippets of every person’s journey is eavesdropped upon and, by the end of the book, a ledger of happiness and grief has been compiled through the interactions of the father and son with everything that happens around them.
By doing this, Pedrosa is able to reveal the personal fears inherent in the family’s situation while giving it a context, one that ultimately leads to the conclusion. Once the three shadows are revealed and the nature of the universe is accepted, it is left to the family to be a part of the world that has unfolded around them, rather than apart from it. Life itself is an entity made of many parts and they, as a segment of this creature, must play their part in its continuance.
Pedrosa’s tale is reminiscent of certain films of Ingmar Bergman, like “The Seventh Seal” or “The Virgin Spring,” as well as Italo Calvino’s rich fairy tale reimagings like “The Baron in the Trees” and “The Cloven Viscount,” and every bit as lovely and profound as any of those. Pedrosa is able to mix the dark allegory of his writing with an astounding visual skill that is able to utilize various strengths depending on the scene. Pedrosa’s work is at times light and cartoonish, with springy black lines giving motion to his figures and his backgrounds — other moments, it is stark and black, sometimes sketchy, sometimes muddy, often vague and always pounding you down with heavy emotion. It’s a visual tour de force by a former Disney animator and certainly a sign of further great things to come from Pedrosa.
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