john and jana

Abandoned Cars by Tim Lane

From its cover image of a depressed guy driving his car in the night to the final page, mapping out Downtown St. Louis, Mo., circa 1895 (for the purpose of giving the logistics for the legendary murder story of Stagger Lee), Tim Lane’s “Abandoned Cars” hints that there’s something in the air in America — and it’s a bit of a downer.

Lane’s collection of short stories and cartoons all center around his idea of “the Great American Mythological Drama,” which he ruminates in his afterward. Lane spells it out far more eloquently than I will here, but this is essentially the title he gives to the tapestry of America characters and archetypes as they are weighed against American realities. This drama is the way a real individual comes up against the idea of America, how they interact with the American Dream, rather than actually being that dream itself. Thematically, this is territory covered in the songs of people like Tom Waits and Randy Newman, the literature of John Steinbeck and Charles Bukowski, the films of Elia Kazan and Martin Scorsese. Lane walks that territory like a young understudy — if his style and subject matter is a little affected by those who came before him, it’s not without its charm. Lane lays it on thick, a poetic goo that he spreads over his short pieces, but that’s his way of interacting with his characters, explaining their lives as if they were poetry to be dissected — and maybe they are.

Lane’s collection is split up into several one-offs and a few more continued pieces, all linking together through mood and backdrop — there are a lot of scummy old men’s bars in here, as well as cars at night, and everyone has a lost love and a haunting regret. Lane mixes up the tawdry, sometimes surreal, tales of the misfortune of others with autobiographical interludes that have him chasing the elusive gloom on a freight train, play-acting the lost soul in an attempt to grab onto and feel for himself just what affects the characters and archetypes he chronicles.

In between the stories are funny cut-out dolls of classic American types — Rockabillies, “Tai Chi Larry” and “Beatle Bob,” just to name a few. These playful bits speak to the idea that we all play roles in the drama, but our own personal spins give them an ugly, sad edge.

That’s at the root of Lane’s larger message as he moves through the ugly little realities of people’s lives, only to end up focusing on a seedy little murder that has lived on 150 years later as the romantic, dark epitome of the nation it took place in. Lane captures that line well — he’s immensely skilled art-wise and if his writing seems as if it is still forming, it is moving towards the possibility of something profound.

Pocket Full of Rain by Jason

“Pocket Full of Rain” collects Jason’s earlier efforts — he hadn’t quite settled on his world of cats as the center of his storytelling at this point, there are plenty of humans about.

The first story — after which the collection is named — centers around realistically-drawn humans and mixes up their pop culture obsessions and trite phrases into a surreal tale of love on the run. It holds much in common with Jason’s later work, but the human figures ground it in a different sort of reality — with the cartoonish quality to come missing from the equation, there is little chance a reader can divorce the story from anything in the “real world.” This speaks to the power of Jason’s early work — you can see the process by which he escaped the human reality, while still recognizing that the work was at a different starting place than most.

Other stories in the collection reveal more of this period, but the occasional invasion of an anthropomorphic creature shows the crossover began in small dribs early on.”Pocket Full of Rain” shows a creator who is figuring it all out, formulating the presentation that would soon define him.

Love and Rockets: The New Stories 1 and Amor Y Cohetes by The Hernandez Brothers

With the explosion of graphic novels into the popular consciousness, bringing acceptability to the form, there are plenty of pioneers in the field that shouldn’t be forgotten, especially when their work remains fresh. At the top of this list are the Hernandez Brothers, Jaime and Gilbert, whose series “Love and Rockets” has endured in one form or another for over 20 years, and has cemented the siblings as two of the most influential cartoonists of the last quarter century and easily the most important Latino cartoonists ever to appear.

When they first appeared in the 1980s, the brothers were telling stories about a population that wasn’t well represented in mainstream culture, let alone comics. Mixing tales of Latin Americans with slices of early punk and other alternative cultures — populated with real people rather than the stereotypes so often presented in other works — they built a literary world out a real one that mainstream America either ignored or derided. Continue Reading…

Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw

So rampant is the idea of dysfunctionality in our culture that almost any given person will describe their family as such. Each unit contains an air of mystery and each member flaunts an individuality that can make dysfunction seem real, as if being on your own track is the same as being on a separate one. More often the different tracks of family are parallel, more like lanes than entirely separate roads — but that, as with anything familial, is all a matter of perception.

What happens when a dysfunctional situation is deemed normal even expected? What if a family goes through the motions thereby creating a a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Dash Shaw investigates this matter and many more in the mature and surreal graphic novel “Bottomless Belly Button,” in which the Loony kids grapple with the unexpected divorce of their parents after four decades of marriage. The split seems strangely matter of fact as if this were the expected result of their years together, a passionless and lackluster nod to inevitability — it seems as though they are supposed to split up, so they do. The children exhibit their reactions through self-fulfilling personal prophesies that find their own plummeting expectations of life creating the very dysfunction that their parents are forcing along.

Called together for a final reunion at a beach house, gathered to witness the forced family decay together, the Loony offspring are largely too self-absorbed to really pour over the strangeness of the parents’ actions. Frog-faced son Peter continues to plunge into his own awkward, lonely misery until he meets a girl who provides a unique opportunity to blow off his parents altogether. His sister Claire has the exact opposite of her parents — an early divorce that offers her freedom in life that really only enslaves her and sends her wandering in confusion most of the time. Brother Dennis is torn apart by the announcement, obsessed with uncovering the reason behind the absurdity but really reacting to the crumbling of his own safety zone. Meanwhile, granddaughter Jill, an already awkward teen, has now been revealed the futility of the future thanks to her grandparents and the uncomfortability of her own skin seems to be an inevitable and permanent existence.

Shaw works with different kinds of symbolism, from the sand that sprinkles on their skin to the various types of water that can be applied to emotions and family history. It’s no accident that these are the two ingredients used by God to create the hapless, unintentionally wicked Adam, who was surely spiraling towards some kind of legendary self-fulfilling prophecies by eating the apple and being cast from paradise. Such behavior is in our heritage, but that doesn’t make us evil. It just makes us sad.

Shaw’s enormous graphic novel — it’s 720 pages and seems to weigh a few pounds — literally intrudes on the most private moments of the Loony family, a narrative that spirals through their misguided thoughts, as well as their showers, literally stripping them down for rough examination. It’s the level of space and pace that isn’t often directed at mundane family dynamics, but there’s something in there that each of us might recognize and certainly appreciate for the care with which it’s all been dissected.

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell

When it comes to legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko, there are two paths of interest in his story. One is obvious — as the co-creator of Spider-Man who wrote and drew the first few years of the character’s existence, his skill as an great innovator in the comic book for is of great importance.

There is another side to Ditko, less known to those who might know of him from his work with Marvel Comics decades ago — his unwavering devotion to the philosophies of Ayn Rand and his compulsion to inject those philosophies into his work. It starts out as a guiding principle, but soon Objectivism overtakes Ditko’s talents, commandeering both the stories he told and the career that never seemed to rise to the level it should have.

In “Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko,” author Blake Bell mixes up a career history and art critique of the legend with a more intricate study of the apparent psychological and social decline of the man. More importantly, Bell provides the link between Ditko’s often outrageous imagery and the mind that conceived of them.

Ditko’s career was as a rather mild-mannered, working cartoonist of obvious brilliance when he hit what, back in the day, was the big time. Ditko became a major player at Marvel Comics, partnering with Stan Lee (antagonistically) and bringing glory to the company through Spider-Man and his other tour de force, Doctor Strange.

A bad experience with the business end of Marvel Comics sent Ditko on his decades-long spiral that had him exhibit extreme paranoia towards associates and fans alike. Equally, his work began to focus more and more on his Randian beliefs so that characters were created and utilized for the sheer purpose of acting out Randian-fused fables. It was a bizarre descent, one that saw uncompromising principles see public form as erratic and self-destructive behavior and turned his work away from the fresh brilliance of Spider-Man and into screeds often resembling a Randian version of the Jack Chick Christian comics — so much wooden lecture that the words almost crowd the pictures out of the frame.

The real focus of the book, though, is the art and that his handsomely covered through reproduction and discussion. Ditko was a great innovator regardless of his eccentricities and his work deserves to be celebrated beyond the comics medium. No one could depict the psychological landscape in physical form better than Ditko — his visuals were quirky and unique.

Ditko’s demise — he is still with us, but hidden away — is sad and perhaps one of the best arguments against the validity of Objectivism as full-proof philosophy of life. His story, though, is fascinating and his art, as with so many others touched with creative greatness, will outlive his peccadilloes, even as they function as the physical form of his own psychological landscape.

Town of Mirrors by Robert Pollard

In his first ever book of collected artwork, Guided By Voices frontman Robert Pollard reveals his pursuits in collage art to be peppered with a cartoonish humor and a penchant for science fiction imagery. Combined with the sheer weirdness that is inherent in the best collage work — after all, collage is always about odd juxtapositions, whether in regard to subject matter or visuals that don’t quite match — Pollard’s work as presented in “Town of Mirrors” stands apart from his band’s work even as its history is bound to it.

Pollard’s collages are chunks of old-fashioned avant gardism that seems to leap excitedly out of the 1960s, with a trash sensibility melding with a good dose of psychedelics. So stark are the juxtapositions, so subtle the transitions, that the images in Pollard’s work conspire to get your attention with an apparent big message and then confuse you once you look closer. What could these things be trying to tell us? Only Pollard really knows.

But obscurity doesn’t make something bad and, in Pollard’s case, obscurity often makes an image delightful. In “A Tree Vanishes for Life,” why does the mysterious man cling to the tree, obscuring his own face? Why does the sepia-tinged staircase feature a vampire-like shadow for another creeping tree? It’s like an advertising for something you can’t put your finger on.

Other images are bold, in your face — an enraged bald man looks to the viewer as a train moves through his teeth; a fuzzy close-up of lips is juxtaposed over a distant landscape washed in pink; eyes in eyeglasses float in a macabre, green haze like an old horror movie poster; and a red skull lurks in the corner of the frame, turned away from a blurred background resembling a forest.

What these all point to are a guy comfortable with his own free-flow enthusiasm and confident others will be moved by the same. Often sharing space with song lyrics Pollard has written, “Town of Mirrors” functions well as an encrypted guide to one man’s pastimes, continually alluring in its mysteries.

Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco

The phrase “comic book journalism” isn’t one that is bandied around very often, but Joe Sacco has proven it can be done and in such a way that it puts a good bit of traditional journalism — as it exists today — to shame.

“Safe Area Gorazde” was duly lauded when it was first released — it was a New York Times Notable Book in 2001 and Time Magazine named it “Best Comic of 2000.” Sacco, who had previously won acclaim with his book “Palestine” has moved on to work for publications such as Harpers and The Guardian UK, in which he chronicles the War in Iraq.

This new edition of his timeless report on his experiences in the Bosnian War mixes cold facts and analysis with heartbreaking biographies, amusing slices of life and disturbing depictions of worst in human nature to present something of fearless compassion and scholarship. And as skilled as Sacco’s writing is, it’s his artistic prowess that draws you in, whether he’s rendering the friendly faces of the people he hangs out with or the intensity and destruction of the war that has hijacked their lives.

Sacco is generous with clear explanations of the situation in Bosnia, covering the history, the factions and the troop movements, as well as details of the kinds of atrocities so many thought had disappeared with Nazi Germany. He brings it all down to earth by chronicling his daily life in Gorazde and presenting his lighter moments with the denizens. As you get to know these people, he brings in their stories — it’s a jarring narrative construct as you witness these friendly people struggling for their lives as their own neighborhoods fall down around them. It’s a depiction of war as something that happens to real people — an example of what it would be like for you, the reader, or for the people out there trapped in wars now, whose lives are an abstraction of the wider implications of any conflict.

Sacco’s tale is also one of Twilight Zone absurdity at its most grim level — what if those you once called friends and neighbors suddenly want to wipe you and all your people out of existence, sadistically punishing you prior to your murder and waging the genocide in your own homes? What if your grandmother’s house was turned into the scene of a military battle in order to save the existence of your entire nationality? No zombie tale can compare for sheer terror.

This new edition is a timely revival, a reminder of the pre-Bush years and the gray world that existed before this one of absolutes, a work of elegant power that demands your attention.

The Complete Peanuts 1967 to 1968 by Charles Schulz

I went through that phase, the one I imagine many others do, where you begin to believe that Charles Schulz and his comic strip “Peanuts” are trite. The funny thing is that it’s not the comic strip that actually brings you to this conclusion — it’s the over exposure.

You trudge through life being mentally bludgeoned by greeting cards and notebooks and Dolly Madison snack cakes all using Charlie Brown and his friends to bring up sales and they begin to obscure your vision to the comic strip itself.

But then you hit a certain point in life where two things happen — you really get Sinatra and you really get Charles Schultz. You know what it is? Everyone walks under dark clouds and a few of those clouds manage to get just close to ground level and obscure your way.

When you’re young, you revel in the darkness, but when you’re older, it becomes so much fodder for other aspects. Sinatra becomes someone to love because he’s been there, too — he’s the poster boy for dark times, but he still comes out ring-a-ding-dinging. Schulz, however, offers something more important — the ability to look into the abyss and laugh at it.

Charles Schulz, as it happens, is deep. Very deep.

This becomes very apparent when you sit down and read many, many “Peanuts” strips in succession — it becomes the sum of very unassuming little parts and you begin to see the other reason you ever thought it was trite at all. At a rate of three or four panels, once a day (six on Sundays!), it becomes something you read and walk away from, you give a little chuckle, you move along. But it quietly builds up in your subconscious and a collection like Fantagraphics’ “The Complete Peanuts” — with its current edition covering 1967 and 1968 — provides a precise road map to what it sneaks inside of you.

A recent biography revealed that Schultz suffered from some level of depression, but I didn’t need a book to tell me that, other than a collection of his work. That fact is as plain as the zig-zag on Charlie Brown’s shirt. It’s not the depression that’s important about Schulz, though, it’s the fact that the guy expressed it artistically within a popular venue. He dealt with it and provided something many of us could latch onto, a little drip that amassed itself into a flood of reassurance that someone out there understood.

While Schulz crafts his strips with punch lines, he just as often draws them out with despair — some of them are little more than several panels of kids having panic attacks or plunging into depression. Schulz is just as likely to offer four panels of a kid being insulted and humiliated as he is to give you something to chuckle about. Cruelty is the staple in the “Peanuts” universe — and the twist in the knife is the total honesty about any given character’s failures.

Think about it — Charlie Brown frets about his baseball team, about his dog, about the little red-haired girl, about his pen pal, about his kite, about winter, stomach aches, about anything you can think of. He even worries about worrying. He is pushed around by his dog and his sister. He is constantly seeking the advice of an abusive girl who charges him for her insults. Even his so-called friends make sure that they remind him that he is a loser. It would be heart wrenching if it wasn’t so absurdly funny — and it wasn’t something you could identify with.

“My anxieties have anxieties,” explains Charlie Brown.

It doesn’t end with Charlie Brown. His best friend Linus puts his faith in a giant pumpkin that never shows up, his grandmother hides his security blanket, his sister bosses him around perpetually — he is constantly being pecked at until he blows up. His sister Lucy walks around with a grand ego, pushes other people around so much that she has no real friend, is obsessed with a piano player who will not return her affections and actually treats her with disdain and is fixated with anger on the antics of Snoopy to the point that it drives her to explosive fits of anger. It’s all very funny, and when piled up day after day, tragically funny.

In other words, “Peanuts” is a very special comic strip — and Fantagraphics gives it a presentation that such a special work deserves. The design of the book pulls out small bits of Schulz’s world to create a real eye-pleaser, from the manipulated image of Violet on the cover to the minimalist end papers with beautiful mono-color shading.

Even better, Fantagraphics offers an index to the book. This means that you can look up the really important things - a quick scan through reveals listings for “Aaugh,” “depression,” “Minnesota Fats,” “wishy washy” and “Zorba the Greek.” This is certainly the most indispensable index ever.

The packaging reflects the ultimate message of Schulz’s work — there is hope, in fact, there is joy despite everything. You have problems but if you can laugh in the face of despair, then you’re doing okay. It’s obviously what Schulz did in his life and through “Peanuts,” he invites us all to indulge along with him.

Hall of Best Knowledge by Ray Fenwick

Imagine the old classic scene in which a hero is tied up and placed underneath a giant pendulum that is going to swing down and bisect him through a slow and arduous process. The reason the process is poky has a lot to do with the villain who has rigged up the death machine. A quick death to the hero would solve his problem more immediately, but the villain needs more than merely to get rid of a problem — he needs to explain himself.

And so while the pendulum creeps ever forward to the hero, the villain takes this opportunity to talk — and talk, and talk, and talk and talk — and explain everything he thinks about everything, to point out to the hero what a superior intellect he is. The villain takes this opportunity to validate himself and state his argument for that validation loudly and clearly.

That’s really what reading “Hall of Best Knowledge” is like.

Written and designed by Ray Fenwick, “Hall of Best Knowledge” is a unique novel that unfolds in a series of brief but hysterical utterances laid out in a graphical style beset by decorations and typeface embellishments. The identity of the narrator is a mystery to the reader, but we are assured that he may well be the ultimate genius in the world and these little missives are his gift to humanity. He makes it plain that we should all be very thrilled that he is taking a moment to jot down his merest thoughts — always profound — for the rest of us to take in, filled with awe as we are of the masterful brain in our presence.

“I will walk boldly through the grim bone-yard of the fallen intellectual elite,” our narrator promises, “kicking aside their worm-eaten skulls to clear a path of a learning. Yes, the stench of previous failures will threaten to overwhelm, but I will push forward through this gruesome scene!”

When not imparting profound knowledge, the author displays displeasure in several directions, most notably his brother, babies (charging that they can “sense fear” and use this against others), people who hold parties without him and stupid people (that is, everyone else). What begins to build is not only the empty platform upon which the narrator hoists his accrued wisdom but also the little irritations that chip away at his disguise. By the end of the book, his over the top, sneering and highly dramatic platitudes are revealed for what they really are, but the journey to that point will have you snickering at the narrator’s words even as you consider what a massive prat he is.

Given that each missive is designed — the words fit in as part of a visual presentation rather than merely printed words on a page accompanying an illustration — the narrator’s persona is wrapped up in the typeface and other aspects of the page. This adds a lot and helps paint a clearer picture of not just the shield behind which the author hides but the heart of the person cowering back there.

In this day and age of MySpace pages and avatars representing ourselves to the world — facades through which our real selves threaten to break — Fenwick is directly on target with this book. Nowadays, almost everyone hides behind typeface, but few of us stand out from it in quite the same way as the narrator of “Hall of Best Knowledge” does.

The Living and the Dead by Jason

This sweet little pantomime about a low rent romance that was never meant to be is also a zombie story. In fact, it’s a pretty straightforward zombie story and, in that way, exciting, even though it’s acted out by Jason’s animal creature people.

“The Living and the Dead” follows the leaden trudging of a kitchen worker who has fallen for a neighborhood prostitute. He longs for her from afar, occasionally checking her price, and saves the best he can for that moment he can afford her.

And then the dead rise from the graves.

But Jason’s purpose is more than just horror movie satire. Dead in their own lives, Jason’s couple must come to life via the zombies, showing a side of each to the other that never would have risen from such a blase transaction. With the final moment of the book revealing what this has all been leading up to — a simple thing, really, but one that I won’t spell out — the idea seems to be that it all has to be torn down in order to create a system for these two people to be allowed to be together. And the real question is whether humanity will join them or they will join humanity.

Jessica Farm by Josh Simmons

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.

The Clouds Above by Jordan Crane

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 name 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.

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.