Top Shelf Sale

Top Shelf, one of the finest publishers of interesting comics on this or any other continent, is having one of their periodic amazing sales right now, and I urge you to go check it out and buy a few things.

They have comics for a buck, graphic novels for three -- lots of stuff half off or more, and everything I've read from Top Shelf has been...well, top shelf.

I've blogged about their sales before -- they do this in September a lot -- and here's last year's post about the stuff I bought then, as a taster. Look, it's a whole lot of great comics at ridiculously low prices -- if that's not appealing, I don't know how you find the energy to go on living.

Journalism by Joe Sacco

Sometimes a book's title just tells you exactly what it is: this is a book of journalism, and it's by Joe Sacco. There's something thrilling about that purity; it doesn't even have a subtitle to explain that Sacco does his journalism by way of comics -- the panels floating up from the background of the cover will have to do that.

So this is a collection of Journalism. Perhaps the fact that it's short journalism doesn't need to be said? But Sacco's other work -- most famously Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde -- is mostly book-length, the product of a long process of investigative trips into dangerous territory (into the middles of wars, occupations, and other tense, dangerous situations) and more time spent back in the US, turning those explorations into words and pictures.

Journalism collects some small pieces that popped up in between the larger book-length works -- a visit to the war-crimes trial in The Hague of some Serbian mass-murderers, several short pieces about Gaza and Hebron -- and a few longer works that are basically short books in themselves, on the refugee camps of Chechens, on the flood of African refugees troubling tiny Malta (where Sacco was born), and on the poorest and most untouchable of India's many castes in a poor northern state. There are also a few pieces about the Iraqi occupation, with Sacco embedded in a Marine unit, witnessing attempts to train local soldiers to something like competence, and investigating the claims of torture at US hands by two Iraqi men. Those last seem like they could grow into a new book, or be the offshoots of that book -- it's certainly a subject that could use a Sacco to look at it closely.

Throughout all of the stories, Sacco always is drawn to the poorest, the lowest, the most downtrodden and endangered -- the refugees, the tortured, the hapless bystanders caught in the crossfire. It's an excellent tropism for a journalist to have, and it's served Sacco well throughout his career -- he's not a journalist who will be tempted by access, or the prestige of wealth and power, or the lure of a puff piece in some cushy Western capital. Sacco is honest and uncompromising in the way a great journalist must be -- he goes to see what he has to see, and reports back as well as he can, showing us the sights as well as the words. Journalism would be an excellent introduction to his work, and is a vital, compelling read for anyone concerned with the way this world really is.

(I've previously reviewed the Sacco books But I Like It, The Fixer, and Footnotes in Gaza here.)

The Best American Comics 2012 edited by Francoise Mouly

Some books are harder to review than others, requiring more energy and effort up front to do a good job -- and anthologies, particularly "best of the year" anthologies, are among the worst. To really review The Best American Comics 2012, a reviewer should have a good sense of what she would have put into a similar book, to compare this actual book to the space of other potential books in order to judge what qualities the anthologist was looking for and what kinds of stories she gravitated to.

There are people who can do that -- I used to have a decent sense of the SF short-fiction field back in my book-club days, and there are probably a couple of dozen people who have that kind of standing to examine this book. But there aren't many of them, and they often are doing either competing anthologies or otherwise professionally connected to the field -- which often precludes an honest review, or one at all.

I've tried to review the books in this series in the past -- I started off comparing the initial 2006 volume with the almost simultaneous Ivan Brunetti-edited An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories and then had standalone reviews of 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, then finally sticking 2010 and 2011 into round-ups to hide the fact that I didn't have all that much to say about them -- but I don't think I ever did the job the way it really should be done. And I don't expect this will be much better -- so you're warned.

Francoise Mouly is the guest editor this year, and she bends the book slightly -- the same way each guest editor has bent the book only slightly, picking mostly the same acclaimed alt-cartoonists (literary cartoonists? what is the accepted term for that broad swath of comics creators who have solid careers and artistic interest and don't do men-in-tights books?) as anyone else would. Mouly's big change is a small section of comics for kids at the end, which I'm afraid comes across as special pleading -- most of it is cute and nice and inoffensive and pretty, which seems really minor placed at the end of a book of stronger, better stories.

But, of course, a lot of the stuff in here isn't "stories," but pieces of stories. The literary comics field is mostly one of book-length works these days, so an annual anthology has a bunch of more-or-less self-contained pieces of stories -- this year from Charles Burns, Adrian Tomine, Scott Chantler, Anders Nilsen, Sammy Harkham, Sarah Glidden, Chester Brown, Renee French, and Jaime Hernandez -- along with things that really do stand on their own.

So Best American Comics 2012 isn't really a coherent anthology -- if any best of the year could -- but a series of pointers to some of the best work from the oddly defined year of September 1, 2010 to August 31, 2011. Contrary to what I said up top, the reader who'll get the most enjoyment out of this book is someone with no expectations or knowledge of the field, who can find "The Love Bunglers" or the excerpt from Big Questions without any preconceptions, who can be surprised and illuminated.

I found this book in a library, which gives me hope that it can find those kind of readers -- that it will be stumbled over, on a shelf somewhere, over and over, by people who have no idea that comics can be more than a series of brightly-clothed characters who need to insist that the last part of their name is Man. (Overcompensate much?!) If you read comics, you might want to check this out. If you don't read comics, I'd urge you to find it -- because comics can do anything any other artform can, and this book will give you a glimpse of the ways that's true.

Two by Tim Kreider: We Learn Nothing & Twilight of the Assholes

I've got another blog, Editorial Explanations, which tends to devolve into my making fun of right-wing cartoonists. Sure, I there are some left-wingers in the mix, but those are fewer -- mostly because (I like to think), lefties do wordier, more convoluted cartoons that are harder to complain about rather than because I'm just a big stinky biased cretin. (Though, if you're on the Internet at all, you'll hear the latter opinion about yourself very often. It could even be true, some of the time.)

I have never featured a Tim Kreider cartoon on Editorial Explanations. There's a simple reason for this: he quit doing political cartoons -- his alt-weekly editorial cartoon, "The Pain -- When Will It End?" did end, back in 2009, and Editorial Explanations only got started two years later in 2011. So I hope no one imputes bias to the fact that he got out of the way before I started targeting his profession.

Twilight of the Assholes was the third and final collection of "The Pain," published by Fantagraphics in 2011. I've actually been reading it since then -- maybe even slightly earlier, since I got it as a PDF from the fabled Secret Fanta Online Repository for Comics Reviewers during the brief period when it looked like I would keep writing regularly and seriously about comics -- and only just finished it. Kreider is pretty much the archetype of the liberal cartoonist, with a massive need to overexplain everything, so nearly every cartoon here comes with a full-page essay (some essays are substantially longer than that) about how much Kreider really, really hated George Bush.

I kid Kreider -- he hated many other things, too. But Bush was #1 with a bullet, and the various functionaries and policies of his government made up most of the rest of the list.

So Assholes was a PDF, which meant that I forgot about it for months at a time -- I've mentioned here before that ebooks are certainly convenient, but they don't mesh all that well with my picking-books style, which revolves around staring at shelves -- and read it in bits and snippets on trains and elsewhere when I remembered it existed.

That's not a good way to read editorial cartoons, I think -- it might work a generation or two later on, when the particular politics are safely historical, but not when they're just receding into the recent past, and still resonant with the current news. Editorial cartoons, at their best, are created in a white heat, right at the deadline, to capture a particular feeling (usually anger; let's be honest) and moment in time. So you want to experience them as close to the time of creation as possible, for maximum gestalt. But I've never been good at doing things the right way.

Kreider has a smooth, flowing line -- he draws more like Aubrey Beardsley than any other editorial cartoonist I've ever seen, and vastly more than I'd ever expect any editorial cartoonist to do. He also -- I've said this repeatedly, and I'll keep saying it -- fits lots of words into a cartoon, in the liberal manner, either to throw in all of the ideas he has surrounding a news event or to head off several potential interpretations of his politics ahead of time. (Right-wingers are vastly more likely to make simple, stark cartoons with few words -- Obama is a Muslim, liberals are all America-hating wimps, that kind of thing.) So Kreider's cartoons can be physically hard to read -- his lettering gets flowery and expressive in dialogue, and there's often big blocks of hand-lettered text as well.

And, of course, this collection covers the second administration of the second, and lesser, Bush, which was not a high point in American civilization. There was a lot for Kreider to hate and complain about, from the bungling of Hurricane Katrina to the multifarious problems with our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he took full advantage of that -- this is not a book for anyone staunchly in favor of the Iraq War (surely there are still a few such idiots, right?) or for neocons in general. Kreider knows the point of an editorial cartoonist is to have strong opinions and to express them forcefully, and he's very good at that. It all feels like old news, now, but that's what happens to all editorial cartoons: first they're timely, then they're dated, then (if they're lucky) they're history. Kreider's stuff is currently in that big ditch called "dated," we'll all have to check back in fifty years to see if they turn out to be history. For now, though, they're vastly more palatable for those of us who thought invading Iraq was a really stupid idea ten years ago.

And then "The Pain" ended -- I'm not clear on all of the details, but the continuing death-spiral of alt-weeklies (just slightly ahead of the rest of the newsprint business) certainly had something to do with it. In a not-necessarily-related move, Kreider has been doing more essays and fewer cartoons over the past few years -- though, looking at Assholes, it does have more words than pictures, so he's been moving that way for a while.

To amplify that thought: We Learn Nothingis one step on from Assholes -- the latter was a collection of editorial cartoons with explanatory essays, while Nothing is a book of essays with illustrative cartoons. (Not completely different, no -- but subtly different enough that Nothing was published by the classy NYC house Free Press, not a comics company.)

Nothing is not a political book -- there's a flavoring of politics around the edges, but it's essentially a collection of personal essays (in the tradition of either Montaigne or Sedaris, depending on how cynical you are), telling stories from Kreider's life and his take on various aspects of modern society. If newspapers weren't clearly dying, he probably would have transitioned from a newspaper cartoonist to a newspaper columnist, but they are, so he didn't.

The essays here tend to be substantial -- ten pages or more, much longer than the newspaper gig I postulated above would have allowed -- which gives Kreider room to wander around all sides of his topics. They're not heavily structured essays, but they're not baggy monsters, either -- they have a purpose and a shape, and pretty much do what they set out to do, whether that's concerning unrequited love, Kreider's near-death experience, dealing with people with radically different political views, or, most often, telling stories of Kreider's misspent last decade or so, and the people he spent it with.

Kreider has a way with words -- I've marked a couple of passages from Nothing for "Quotes of the Week" here, and there are a number of other paragraphs that equally well crystallize an interesting thought or important distinction. And Kreider is very entertaining, whether he's fulminating against some stupidity by Republicans or telling stories of his friends -- and the stories about friends are guaranteed to have a larger potential audience. We might learn nothing, but we can have a lot of fun along the way.

Hereville: How Mirka Met a Meteorite by Barry Deutsch

How Mirka Met a Meteorite is the second Hereville book, about a spunky Orthodox Jewish girl who lives somewhere undefined: a small town or suburb nestled away in a forested area where, apparently, no goyim ever tread and what people do for a living is kept mysterious. (Perhaps it's the Orthodox utopia, since all we ever see the men doing is study.) I reviewed the first one as the middle book of a trio of completed unrelated graphic novels, and enjoyed the spunk but was left uneasy by the tension between Mirka's desires for her life and the clearly defined Orthodox culture that is devoted to turning her into something completely different.

(I'm still not sure how much of this Deutsch is doing consciously, but Mirka is exactly the kind of nail that gets hammered down hard in a society like this -- though people who believe in the values of that community would call it something like "sanding off rough edges.")

Meteorite is even starker about that tension; if the message of the first book was "a girl can have adventures and make her own way," this one comes down much more heavily on the old renormative standbys, "be careful what you wish for" and "know your place." Mirka herself does have a great moment of strength early in the story -- she saves her entire town -- but she's quickly outmatched by the meteorite, who is transformed into a simulacrum of Mirka by the witch from the first book.

So Mirka spends most of the book ineffectual, buffoonish, and useless -- doing badly both on her own terms (being a tough, self-reliant adventurer) and her society's (being a quiet, polite, hardworking, modest worker bee). She can't work out how to share her life with the meteorite, her anger and defiance do her no good, and a contest with the meteorite to decide "who is the best Mirka" becomes a series of painful failures. Mirka doesn't win out in the end so much as survive by luck and family -- again, not by the virtues that she's trying to live by, but by the things her society is trying to make her do: trust in God and do what her relatives tell her to.

I hope this series won't end with Mirka a quiet, respectable young woman, married to some man who doesn't seem to do anything but read, but it's difficult to see any other trajectory at this point. It's becoming clear that "Orthodox" is much more important to Hereville than "Mirka" is -- that's unusual for a series of stories in Western society, certainly, since we usually demand that our self-actuated heroes get everything they want because they want it, but, still, this particular twisting of that expectation is sad, for what Mirka could be and for what her society clearly is bent on turning her into.

Rough Justice by Alex Ross

Alex Ross has painted many covers for DC Comics. And they've been collected...almost ten years ago, in his book Mythology. Rough Justice, on the other hand, has sketches and preliminary art, and so will be of most interest to other artists.

Ross's pencil lines are as precisely and closely observed as his more-famous painted art is; he's an artist who really looks at models and objects and tries to draw them like real, solid things. His story ideas, in common with most of the popular comics creators of his generation, are almost entirely rehashed versions of the stuff he loved as a kid -- untold tales of Kandor, a '70s-style Shazam!, lots of Justice Society, and even a new story of the Super-Sons. Hardcore DC fans will love that, of course -- Ross is one of them, and deeply cares about this stuff. Those of us who just like to read stories will look at it, be impressed at the craft, and quietly move on to something with more substance of its own.

Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Creator Joe Shuster edited by Craig Yoe

Joe Shuster got half of the rawest deal of the 20th century -- a few bucks in return for Superman, a character that made hundreds of millions of dollars for other men (mostly not creators, mostly not scrupulous, mostly already rich). His story is perfectly crafted as an object lesson -- the artist who went blind, the creator thrown away from his own creation, the man who died just a step above poverty as his images were loved by millions worldwide -- and yet it's completely true.

Secret Identity wouldn't exist in a juster world: it collects the art that Shuster created in the early '50s for a trashy, badly-produced and frankly exploitative magazine called Nights of Horror, printed to be sold under the counter at a number of newsstands in New York. It has a lot of characters that look like Kent and Lane and Luthor and Olsen, because that's how Shuster drew, but these folks are whipping each other and engaged in other kinds of sadistic and sexual torments. This book exists because of prurient interest -- the art in the first place, and its republication in this form after it was rediscovered by Craig Yoe -- and I read it because of prurient interest, and, if you're at all intrigued by it, that'll be because of prurient interest as well. That's a kind of purity, I guess.

Secret Identity has interest primarily in the fact that it exists at all; there may be a few really devoted students of Shuster's line, but there are vastly more who will pretend to be while reading this book. It's a sad and tawdry symbol of the Original Sin of Comics, set to remind us that the house always wins and the little guy always gets screwed.

Daybreak by Brian Ralph

Daybreak is the world's only second-person zombie apocalypse graphic novel: the main character is "you," whose face or body Ralph never shows, whose viewpoint frames the entire story and whose voice is never heard. You begin the book by meeting a friendly one-armed man, and spend most of the rest of the book in his company -- dodging zombies (whose faces are almost never seen, as if You spend all of your time looking at the ground to keep your feet), scrounging for food, and having variously tense meetings with other still-human survivors.

Ralphs has a detailed, textured art style that works well for this story -- he's really good at drawing rocks and rubble, broken machinery and tangled junk, rain and darkness, grubby hide-outs and makeshift shelters. His dialogue is serviceable, but it gets choppy -- he's only showing one side of a conversation, but still wants the entire thing to be clear. Daybreak has a clever idea, but it never transcends the level of "clever idea" -- the story is just fine, entertaining on a picaresque zombie-story level -- but the reader has to assume that Ralphs was aiming at something more than that, and Daybreak doesn't deliver on that level. Still, it's a fun graphic novel with zombies and an interesting organizing idea, which is pretty good.

The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat by R. Crumb

I didn't start reading Crumb until I was old and grumpy and embittered -- which does match Crumb himself these days, so it's appropriate. But his biggest fans, I think, found his work when they were young and impressionable and enthusiastic, the way Crumb was as a young cartoonist in the '60s. So I've looked at a bunch of Crumb books over the past few years -- his interesting Book of Genesis, the mostly illustrative Sweeter Side, the aptly named Odds & Ends, and the very '60s Mr. Natural -- but not really clicked with any of it -- he's an interesting cartoonist of historical importance, but there's nothing that I really loved.

The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat is one of Crumb's central suites of stories, with the indomitably self-obsessed title character at their heart. Crumb's early work was all about screwing ever deeper into his own psyche -- which, luckily for him, both fit the mood of the age and featured a psyche very much in vogue -- and so each of the stories here sees some version of Fritz, a young man on the make in a world of anthropomorphics, haring off in a million directions at once (college student, rock star, CIA agent, revolutionary, etc.) to fit the fever dreams of a generation that didn't know what it wanted but was sure it wanted that right now.

The stories don't fit together in any coherent way; they're barely about the same character. Fritz is just one side of Crumb's desires, the semi-controlled id, always wanting to run off and do something more interesting than whatever's already in front of him. The stories also span nearly a decade, from the very scratchy, barely intelligible art of "R. Crumb's Comics and Stories" in 1964 to the mature full Crumb look of "Fritz the Cat 'Superstar'" from 1972 -- there's nothing at all consistent about this book.

I suspect that Crumb is highly regarded mostly for his work ethic -- he's produced vastly more work than his peers of the early underground scene, consistently for forty-plus years -- for the sensuousness of his mature art, and for the fact that he's been so willing to push boundaries his entire career. He wrote and drew stories about sex and drugs and angst and alienation, in immediate and obvious terms, and the Baby Boomers both knew just what he meant and felt he was talking right to them. That doesn't mean, unfortunately, that those stories work all that well for a different audience forty years later -- if you're my age or younger, I wouldn't expect you to ever love Crumb.

All the Awards in the World

Or at least it feels like that many. These are the recent award announcements that I've missed pointing out here -- many (most? all?) of you will have heard of some or all of them already, but I hope there's something new or surprising below:

2012 Shirley Jackson Awards

This is a new award -- so new, in fact, that it popped up after I lost my SF job, so it confuses me every year. It's an award for literary horror, more or less -- creepy/uneasy/weird stories written well, in the vein of the award's eponymous writer -- and there's a site for it here. This year's winners are:

• NOVEL: Edge, Koji Suzuki (Vertical, Inc.)
• NOVELLA: “Sky,” Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls, Twelfth Planet Press)
• NOVELETTE: “Reeling for the Empire,” Karen Russell (Tin House, Winter 2012)
• SHORT FICTION: “A Natural History of Autumn,” Jeffrey Ford (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/August 2012)
• SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION: Crackpot Palace, Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow)
• EDITED ANTHOLOGY: Exotic Gothic 4: Postscripts #28/29, edited by Danel Olson (PS Publishing)

Congratulations to all of the winners, and just one question to the organizers -- do you really have to specify an "edited" collection? I'm not aware of any spontaneously published anthologies out there....

(via Tor.com)

2013 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards

This is a long list -- I grumbled about the number of categories when I was a judge, a few years back, and the categories have only proliferated since -- so I'll just give a few of the biggies.

• BEST CONTINUING SERIES: Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image)
• BEST NEW SERIES: Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image)
• BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM -- NEW: Building Stories by Chris Ware (Pantheon)
• BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM -- REPRINT: King City by Brandon Graham (TokyoPop/Image)

(via Comics Reporter, though every other comics site has it somewhere as well)

2013 Prometheus Awards

These are given by the Libertarian Futurist Society each year to, as far as I can tell, the book that they really like that will most confuse the people who look at "Libertarian" in their name and go extremely literal. There are two awards: one for a new work, and one for an old one:

• BEST NOVEL: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow (Tor Books)
• HALL OF FAME: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

 These awards will actually be given at LoneStarCon 3 at the end of August, so, if you see Cory or Neal in the meantime, keep it quiet, OK?

(via Science Fiction Awards Watch)

Science Fiction Awards Watch also updated with several other awards -- I'd call them minor, but I'm trying to be tactful here -- like the Seiun (the Japanese Hugo, though the name means "Nebula"! Ha ha ha!), Scribe, and Sunburst. But my fingers are getting tired, so I'll just link 'em.

The Anti-Woody Allen

This is today's 9 Chickweed Lane, a well-drawn but molasses-slow and idiosyncratic at best comic strip; if its creator allowed commenting on the comic itself, I probably wouldn't bother to post this here:

(click to embiggen)

So, this young man -- I gather he's supposed to be in his twenties -- has an erotic fantasy harem entirely made up of women old enough to be his great-grandmother? The youngest of them is Kelly, who's also been dead the longest (since 1982).

Also, please note that all of these women are dead, and have been dead since at least 2000 -- sure, we'll assume that he knows them all through old movies, but does he live entirely in old movies? (In this strip, that is sadly a possibility.)

Please, creators, remember the old rule: just because you like something, or identify with it, doesn't mean your characters should.

A Pile of Manga I Should Have Reviewed Three Months Ago

I read all of these books in mid-February, expecting to dive back into regularly reviewing my review copies -- if any publicists are lurking out there, it annoys me nearly as much as it does you how little of that I've done recently -- but we all know where good intentions lead.

They're all manga; all interesting, to one degree or another; and all from Yen, save one book in the middle. And here's a quick look at them, in case anything turns out to be of interest to you:

Kaoru Mori: Anything and Something is the obligatory "odds and sods" collection from the popular manga-ka behind Emma, Shirley, and the current A Bride's Story, collecting just about every bit of her other art from the first decade of her career. There are a dozen short stories -- all about women, and several of them about maids, unsurprisingly -- and then a lot of more ephemeral stuff, like comics essays on aspects of Agatha Christie and corsets, signing sheets, concept drawings, and several "hey, here's the artist talking directly to the reader" pieces from the backs of collected volumes and other places. It's very, very miscellaneous, but Mori's art is precise and engaging, and several of the short stories  (especially the longest, last one, "Sumire's Flowers") are strong and striking. It's probably not the best introduction to Mori's work, but it does show a smart, hard-working creator trying different things and engaging directly with her audience.

BTOOOM!, Vol. 1 is from Junya Inoue, and it's a very shonen story: a young slacker, only good at an online multi-player combat game that uses only explosives, finds himself kidnapped to an isolated island where he has to play that game in real life! This volume is mostly set-up: we meet Ryouta Sakamoto and then see him danging from a parachute in a tree on the island, and then dive right into combat and the details of the different "BIMs." If you thought the big problem with Battle Royale was that all of the kids already knew each other, then you'll be crazy about Btooom! (And, yes, the exclamation point is part of the title, as it must be.)

Knights of Sidonia, Vol. 1 begins a melancholy giant-mecha series by Tsutomu Nihei. Mankind was nearly wiped out centuries ago by giant, hideous barely-sentient space monsters, and perhaps only one starship, Sidonia, escaped. Sidonia defends itself against those space monsters by sending out pilots in giant robots, but it's been a long time since the last battle -- so there are no veterans, only new recruits. One of those is Nagate Tanikaze, who grew up secretly in the bowels of the ship with his grandfather and knows nothing of the new post-human society, where everyone can photosynthesize, new genders are common, and the dorm matron has a bear head. But, even with all of the weirdness and culture shock, one thing must be as expected: Tanikaze turns out to be an awesome pilot. Knights is surprisingly understated and quiet for a manga -- or maybe it's just a kind of manga that doesn't make it across the Pacific all that often -- with the depth of a novel and a willingness to be obscure and indirect for as long as it takes.

Aron's Absurd Armada, Vol. 1 is something else again, a wacky 4-koma series about incompetent pirates by MiSun Kim. There's the distracted, dim captain -- from a rich family, and sent away by his scheming mother for inadequate reasons. And his minder, the devastatingly handsome and deadly family retainer, who cares only about money and has his own gaping holes where social graces should be. And there's the Royal crew chasing them, with their own tangled connections. And a young woman picked up from a shipwreck, who immediately falls in (silly, manga) love with the minder. It's all broader than the side of a barn, and written with very different cultural norms than Americans would expect, which makes parts of it funnier and parts of it just surreal. But the title says that it's Absurd, so we all should have expected that.

Blood Lad, Vol. 1 is a big, fat (360+ pages, around the length of two average manga volumes) series-beginner from Yuuki Kodama about Staz, a vampire and district boss in the demon world. Of course, Staz is also obsessed with all things from Japanese culture -- because this is a manga -- and so he does nuts when a real, live (well, at least briefly) Japanese schoolgirl appears mysteriously in his district. After a misadventure, the girl is left as a ghost, so Staz vows to return her to life (and then drink her blood) -- and that sets in motion what I expect the series will mostly be, a sequence of odd characters and events that might (or might not) add up to anything particular. So far, Blood Lad is the kind of shonen story that has more energy than sense, but it does have a lot of energy, plus amusing art and quirky characters.

And speaking of quirky, Thermae Romae, Vol. 1 takes the cake in that area; Mari Yamizaki's story follows Lucius, a Roman bath designer from Augustus's time who time-travels (through various kinds of plumbing) to modern-day Japan, to see and be amazed by their bath culture and technology. Lucius then returns to his own time -- not by his own control, but inevitably -- to incorporate what he's learned into his own designs and to become ever more popular and acclaimed. There's a whole lot of panels of Lucius making a stunned face and proclaiming (in a language the Japanese can't understand, of course) how wonderful every last detail of their lives is. Luckily, Yamizaki appears to be playing it all for laughs, because this would be difficult to take seriously. Thermae Romae is very silly, and somewhat weird for an audience that is neither ancient Romans nor modern Japanese, but it has enthusiasm in spades -- maybe too much enthusiasm on Lucius's part -- and it's definitely not a story you've ever read before.

Big Fantagraphics Sale for Memorial Day Weekend

How better to celebrate the long weekend that begins summer than by buying a bunch of great comics/graphic novels/juxtaposed words and pictures from Fantagraphics?

(That's a rhetorical question, smart fella. Though less so in these parts, where the weather is struggling to stay in the 50s and the rain might just let up tomorrow, if we're lucky.)

Fanta -- I call them Fanta, we're old buds like that -- has 250 pieces of swell comical art on sale at up to 75% off, so you'd be well advised to go check it out, and buy some things that appeal to you. I'd say to hurry, but it looks like they're committed to reprinting the things that go out of stock to complete orders, so just get your order in by the end of the sale on Monday night.

Even Cracked Is Noticing the Unexamined Assumptions of the Superhero Genre

One of many money quotes in David Wong's The 5 Ugly Lessons Hiding in Every Superhero Movie:

See, because without [Captain America] to tell them, these professional law enforcement officers would have had no concept of "evacuating civilians away from where violence is occurring." These people have had no training at all for what to do in the case of, say, a terrorist attack. Why would they? They're just cops working in post-9/11 New York, while Captain America is an unfrozen science experiment from 1942.

Remember: only the special people matter. Everyone else is cannon fodder to make the special people sad, or peons to be saved by the amazing powers of the special people.

All Too True

God help me, this is my life.

(comic source: Sheldon, which is always funny and smart but rarely anatomizes me so precisely)

W T F

It's WTF month over at DC Comics -- well, now it isn't, exactly, since everyone made fun of them when they announced it, but it was going to be, and it sort of is, so go with me -- and Bully, the greatest Little Stuffed Bull on these here Internets, has made a shocking discovery.

Well, a whole bunch of shocking discoveries, since every WTF cover has one. But this particular shocking discovery is that all of the shocking discoveries are interchangeable -- they work even better when slapped onto the "wrong" comic.

For example:

I trust this meta-shocking discovery, and its implications for all marketers everywhere, will be treated with just as much grace and nuance and good taste as DC has done with these covers.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley

We all eat, and we all get food, one way or another. But, like so many other things in life, many of us don't think about eating, the way we don't think about our work or homes or daily routine. Lucy Knisley, though, is not one for the unexamined life: her first book, French Milk (created and published when she was only 22) was the story of a month spent in Paris with her mother, focused on small moments, day-to-day rhythms, and, yes, the food.

For her second book, Knisley has gone even deeper: Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is a combination memoir and meditation on food -- with a few recipes thrown in along the way, as all good food books must. She comes by her food obsession the honest way: her mother was a chef and a caterer, and she worked in a cheese shop herself for a while.

Relish is not a book to read when you're far from your next meal; Knisley's art is open and welcoming, with cartoony food that all looks and sounds incredibly good, whether she's focusing on specific foods (cookies, mushrooms, cheese, croissants, pickles) or times in foreign countries (Italy, Mexico, Japan), you want to have some of whatever she's writing about right then. And her stories are equally enticing and immediate, specific stories from her own life related to food and growing up (let's be fair; she's still quite young, so her story mostly is about growing up at this point). Through it all, Knisley makes it clear she knows she's been incredibly lucky to have encountered a lot of great, interesting food in her life to date, and she has the true gourmand's missionary streak, the desire to want to tell everyone about this tasty new thing she's just discovered.

I haven't tried to cook from Relish's recipes yet, but they're detailed enough that I'm pretty sure I could -- more cookbooks could use pictures like Knisley's, to show us what something should look like between stage 2 and 3.

French Milk was a sweet little book about a moment in an interesting life; Relish is an examination of how she came to live that life -- and, more importantly, how to keep living a life open to experiences, in food and art, and to express what's important about that life to others. It's a big-hearted, savory, mouth-wateringly feast of a book, ready to be gulped down.

Incoming Books: March 22nd

I think I'm about to get serious about replacing at least some of the books I lost in the big flood, and, to start that, I had a big order from Midtown Comics this week. (They had a 30% off sale, with free shipping and no tax since they don't have nexus in my state, and I'll take that any day.)

So I got a couple of things that they boys can earn by telling me stories that they read, and. for myself, mostly books I used to have:

Famous Players by Rick Geary, his tenth graphic novel about a single historical murder, which I reviewed for ComicMix in 2009.

Speaking of Rick Geary, I also got the 2007 Gumby collection that he drew and Bob Burden wrote.

Good-Bye, the third collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's devastating and masterful gekiga stories from the early '70s, which I also reviewed for ComicMix.

The Grave Robber's Daughter, a short Richard Sala graphic novel from 2006.

Slow News Day and Dumped, two Andi Watson graphic novels.

Dork Vol. 2: Circling The Drain and Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Adventures, Vol. 1, two Evan Dorkin joints.

Scott Saavedra's Dr. Radium Battles Phill, King Of The Pill Bugs.

A bunch of Gilbert Hernandez, for my big planned Love and Rockets re-read and a couple of books that I actually don't think I ever read: Girl Crazy, The Adventures of Venus, and New Stories #1.

Almost Silent, a hardcover collection of four separate graphic novels by the Norwegian cartoonist Jason; I reviewed three of them here in separate posts and the fourth in a roundup.

The classic Violent Cases by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.


Steve Moncuse's mostly-forgotten Fish Police Volume 1, which got a reprinting from IDW in 2011 for no obvious reason. I think I had the old, old album-size reprints (and all of the issues packed up in longboxes), but I haven't read this in twenty years.

Legend Of GrimJack Vol. 7 by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake.

And, last, the first volume of James Kochalka's American Elf, since it's now done, so I'll have to dig into the archives for my fix.

(It might be clear from this list that I began my comics-reading in the '80s, and I'll cheerfully admit that.)