comics I read last week

Let's kick off a new column with a formal review.

Eamon Espey
Songs of the Abyss

Secret Acres, 2012

The second book of Eamon Espey was released four years after the first, Wormdye. These four years we have enjoyed a reality, resting from the nightmare that Wormdye was. In Songs of the Abyss we are again immersed in the dream and see the nightmare worse than the previous one. Songs from the title of the book are a lullaby to help us fall asleep; they are also prayers for the dead to help us fall asleep forever.



Retelling other people's dreams is a vain exercise. What could see stabbed to death by his brother Abel? Death, cradling a child? A severed head in his hands of an Egyptian god? What would be a nightmare for the devil? Manna from heaven throwing off by the aliens? Lynching Santa Claus? Each page in «Songs of the Abyss» is an excerpt of another's sleep, interrupted, staccato flowing from one nightmare to another.

The book is formally divided into several parts, but inside there is no logic of our world, only dream logic. The pages of the book are populated by the same monsters, otherworldly creatures, drawn as if Espey during the making of his book held regular spiritual seances and talked personally with the evil spirits of all kinds.
Espey continues to draw maps of hell, a "hell", which is known only to him. The book is entirely made with ink, which gives it the appearance of ancient manuscripts. In ancient myths Espey seep elements of modernity: On some pages you can find a moving line, flying saucers’ aliens, cars, guns. All this seems to be alien to the ancient objects, but who said that in the nightmares cars can not be combined with devils’ rig?

At the end of the book Espey succinctly describes each page of the book. It is superfluous: the author said and did everything with his art and without words. Therefore, these descriptions can be read as poetry, and they are written like poems:

«the children are of the snake
ghost and warrior go into the elevator
the door opens and enery pours out
a phoenix emerges
inside the flame is the ocean
the whale is no longer in a bowl
he swims without constraint
in his belly joan has lived and prayed for forty nights
she cuts through the blubber with her sword of truth
water earth
sky
space»

Cavemen in Space

Joey Weiser
Cavemen in Space

Self-published, distr. by Adhouse Books, 2010

A scientist from the future takes away some prehistoric cave men and places them in his spaceship «The Wheel». With the help of special techniques the scientist works on brains of people from the past, raising their level of intelligence. Chief of the cavemen - a tall man in an animal's skin with the name Washington - is the principal assistant of the scientist. Each of the cavemen do what they do once in the past, but this time more consciously. To the spacecraft with an unexpected tour comes an alien race with outwardly friendly intensions. But the aliens are more insidious than they appear, and the team of cavemen will beat off the alien hordes.



«Cavemen in Space» is a funny story in the spirit of science fiction of 40-50th with a mixture of "Flintstones." Subject of jokes here are the future technology and the past of the cavemen. Do not expect from a novel infinite action. The battle with the aliens begins only at the end of the book, and the battle scenes are drawn in cartoon style. Weiser carefully looks at the problem of adaptation of cave men in the world of the future. Washington and his friends feel the new features, feel the need in them, they like to help a scientist, like to develop, but their origin is not extinguish. For all the sophistication of the brain inside each cave man still Cro-Magnon sits, whose survival instincts trump everything else. And so the most important task for the cavemen is not to fight with the aggressive aliens but to choose his true purpose: to go back and be himself or to stay and feel his own inferiority to the end of days?
Weiser in his seemingly young adult book asks not children's questions.

Tumor

Joshua Hale Fialkov (writer), Noel Tuazon (artist)
Tumor

Archaia, 2010

Washed-up aging private detective Frank Armstrong unexpectedly receives a client in the face of the local drug lord. He asks to find his missing daughter. Armstrong wants to give up at first, but then sees in this business opportunity to earn money and somehow rehabilitate itself. The only thing that prevents the PI from doing his job decently is a brain tumor. Starting search for the girl with her boyfriend, Armstrong finds him in his own apartment - murdered. There appeares armed mobster hired by the father of the girl, and then suddenly appears disappeared girl, with a gun in her hand. Before Frank manages to do something, he loses consciousness from a brain attack. Thus, turning out between a hospital bed and in the street, leading the investigation, having lost the difference between past and present, Frank saves the gangster’s daughter and unravels the murder of his wife, committed several decades ago.



We have already seen a fair amount of amnesia noir, now we have a new, previously unknown kind – onko-noir. The tumor in Frank’s head gradually kills him, taking away the opportunity to think and live proper life. Detective loses his sense of space and time, not knowing where he is and what year. More frequent attacks lead to Frank coming again and again to the hospital, runs away from there thinking that next attack will definitely be the last for him. Events of past and present have become for detective a single entity. A reader can distinguish them only by art. Noel Tuazon blurs those panels, where the action takes place in the past, and conversely, uses dark lines, if it is present. Tuazon’s style makes this story very old-fashioned: it is a good illustrated pulp-novel, in which you never guess that the action takes place not in the 50s or 60s, but almost in our days. So suddenly you become surprised when there are mobile phones and internet in the book. It is not a believable story; it is a typical PI novel. Much more interesting is how the Fialkov weaves two plot lines in the end, allowing Frank defore the death to correct the mistakes of the past, not allowing history to repeat itself twice.



I should also mention the design of this hardcover (graphic novel was originally released in Kindle-version): between the chapters there are single page insertions, illustrating Frank’s headaches - pain, comparable to the shot in the head; in the end there are sketches, interviews with the creators and bonus story about Frank’s pat.

Fialkov and Tuazon in tandem have created an excellent novel.

Wormdye

Eamon Espey
Wormdye

Secret Acres, 2008

«Wormdye», a collection of interconnected stories of the same world, starts out as a family chronicle with a fair amount of violence: two brothers put their cat in a microwave oven, heated, and then throw the corpse into the toilet. In the next episode we see how these same brothers, their mother and sister standing at the grave of the father. The father, however, is not dead, but in the post-mortem travels gets all the pleasures of life that he has not had time to get in his time. In the next episode we see crime scene, when the scientist conducting the experiment on mutants (people-larvae), is killed by a group of masked robbers, who then kidnapped the mutant girl.



Such oddities can lasts and lasts, and they are not going to end. Among the other defendants in the events - the Pope, eating spaghetti with worms, wolf devoured the woman, puking children, the aliens. Eamon Espey has a great imagination. Imagine Bosch, who had read Philip K. Dick, the ancient legends and had seen enough of reality shows - this nuclear mix will be called «Wormdye». Plots of stories often are legends remakes - with Romulus and Remus, the Vatican, the ancient Greek voyages. But the classic stories change under the influence of modern culture. This is an ancient world, but with a TV and microwave, postcards and aliens. You won’t understand the nature of this world after reading the book, so I think, as the author himself. Espey certainly is the chronicler of strange times: between the novellas in the book often there are pages in the form of the ancient wall maps. It is not only a world map of Wormdye, it is maps of the entire universe. These huge paintings, which occupy page or two, dispense with the plot as such, but contain a bottomless pit of information. Emon Espy saturate the page with so many small details, from people to the quaint lines, that you can not look away a glance from a page for a few minutes - an abyss of information is mesmerizing.



Espey’s art is in harmony with the wild and crazy world of «Wormdye». The art is both primitive, simple, full of small details. When you look at the picture, you do not believe that it has drawn by a human, our contemporary. Likely to believe that this is done by someone from another civilization that lived long before us.



«Wormdye» is an artifact from another world and another time. This is a world that can be admired on paper, but you do not want to be there for a moment. And is this not the best compliment to the book.

The Broadcast

Eric Hobbs (writer), Noel Tuazon (artist)
The Broadcast
NBM, 2010

In 1938 Orson Welles’ radio show «War of the Worlds» stir among many Americans. In a small town in Indiana, this show led to the massacre. When at night a terrible storm begins, residents think that the Earth was indeed attacked by aliens. People can hide in a shelter in the house of a local rich man, but a place of refuge is limited: only 5 people can be saved. The serious struggle for a place begins. In this situation, all the discontent open, conflicts erupt. Gavin, a worker on a farm, propose a rich man's daughter Kim Shrader, but the father of the bride even does not want to hear that his only daughter will be married to a beggar. Shrader once raised the city, but after that has enslaved all his employees. And here is another conflict: workers do not mind to get rid of a tyrant. Later there is another character, a wounded negro Eli, and Gavin’s father helps him. Others begin to look suspisionly at Eli, and Shrader, guessing that the Negro is associated with gangsters, uses the man in his intrigues. All they want to survive, to save their loved ones and not lose the human face, but doing it will be extremely difficult.



«The Broadcast» gets you for the throat from the first page and do not let go until the very end. This is partly melodrama, part crime thriller, but because of the "War of the Worlds" even want to add – partlu science fiction, all ingridients are well mixed. The story reveals the major conflicts of prewar America, social, racial, class. Portrayal of the characters of the book turned out not quite impressive. For example, the daughter of wealthy Shrader is a writer, but we only at the very beginning see how she prints on a typewriter, but otherwise she remains the only daughter of her father. Eric Hobbs makes not the most original story a much more tense by adding a storyline with a black gangster Eli implicated in a double murder near the home of Shrader. Eli enjoys the hospitality and hides in a house together with everyone, but Eli is a hesitant gangster, incapable of meanness.



Art of Noel Tuazon is veryfitting to the raging weather. Blurry black-and-white sketches give the impression that the heroes of the book are always in the rain, even when they are indoors. Incompleteness of the picture does thr narrative more emotional, so that you can feel that all participants in this event are very nervious. Nuazon never gives close-ups, keeping the reader at a distance and not doing anyone special: it is not specific Shrader, Gavin, Eli, etc., they are a rich farmer, a rural worker and a gangster as such. Blur of the picture gives to the story surrealistic features.

Brilliant work.

Pug

Derek McCulloch (writer), Greg Espinoza (artist)
Pug

Image Comics, 2010

Writer Derek McCulloch and artist Greg Espinoza do not hide in their afterword that the creation of this graphic novel was influenced by their passion for old black and white noir films. The story of former boxer, who quit the sport and forced to make a living by helping the bad guys, actually originated in the 30's of last century, but what even until the plot is striking because is the art of the book.

«Pug», as a film noir, is drawn in an old-fashioned black and white style. By removing all unnecessary, the authors brought their work closer to reality. In the novel there are no beautiful scenes, no broken noses in public, no girls undress in front of a hero, it all remains outside the page.

Jake lost an important fight a few years ago. At the same time his wife with his son left him, and a former boxer now lives with a stripper named Kitten, surviving on a one time job, then another. Drinking in a bar, Jake meets with one guy who is offering Jake a permanent job almost for free. Already at the first working day Jake realizes that the work is not dusty, but not of his type: with a blad man in glasses they go from house to house, knock out debts from gamblers. The pug does not tell Kitty about it: he is ashamed that instead of the normal work he received a dubious job of a muscle at a loan shark. Desperate, but not lost his conscience, Jake comes into conflict with his weasel-employer.

«Pug» is a generally very chamber story, you can count the players here on fingers, and the main action takes place inside Jake: Does he break under the pressure of circumstances, or not? What looks flimsy here it's flashbacks, from which we learn how Jake lost the fight that put the cross on the pug and why he still suffers from the leaving of his wife and son. Past is shown too messy, it has more action, and it does not allow us to see what's going on in heart and mind of Jake.

The pug, if not to take the episodes from the past, until the very end does not even use force, main battle is in his head. And the entire novel, in fact, says one simple truth: if you can, avoid a fight to the last. But if the time has come, then fight to the last. Do not lose in second time, as has already happened once.

100 Months

John Hicklenton
100 Months

Cutting Edge, 2010

John Hiсklenton completed this book the day before his death. He suffered from multiple sclerosis and ended his life in hospital. His last book is devoted to nothing else like death.

«100 Months» is more an art album, rather than comics. Death is a stop and not a move, so here the action is reduced to the minimum limit. The book is structured so that one page has one panel. Most often, on a page there is just Mara, the protagonist of the book, she's death, Armageddon, and all the rest of the space, the so-called backs, left white. This allows to focus more on the main character, besides the white space is emptiness, that surrounds the death, and that emptiness, perhaps, is death itself.

In the book there is very limited number of persons: Mara herself, the Priest, and the Pig. Mara, going to the last battle with the Pig, on his way met the inhabitants of this world, created by Hicklenton, but they are only outlines, shadows, copulating animals, which you do not care about – and Mara does not feel sorry for them. Mara is alone in this world; she does not know anybody, and who wants to know death, who can know death?

The world of «100 Months» is a pagan world. Mara has a purpose that she must meet, the murder of the god in the guise of a giant pig, to save the world, you need to sacrifice an animal.

This seemingly unhurried book is not created for meditation. There is a dound that you will be able to meditate when you see a mountain of skulls, trails and bridges made from the bones, and piles of corpses of creatures. But you can admire art of Hicklenton indefinitely. His death has not a woman's face but the face of death, often invisible behind the hair. Its red color is mesmerizing. In the scenes of battles Hicklenton sprays tiny droplets of blood on the page so that you inevitably checks is it not your own blood on book pages, so much it's real.

And Hicklenton in «100 Months» almost quotes of Brodsky: Death happens.

Years of the elephant

Willy Linthout
Years of the elephant

Fanfare\Ponent Mon, 2009

Linthout wrote this book as self therapy when at the age of 21 years old, his son committed suicide. It can be considered autobiographical: in the book alter-ego of the author, Charles Germonprez, too, loses his son, springing from the roof, tries to cope with the loss, tries to soften the pain of loss, has insomnia, visits a psychoanalyst, wants to commit suicide, but the author to reality full of pain, loss, despair adds a solid amount of surrealism, and so «Years of the elephant» is only half non-fiction, the second half of the graphic novel is a strange prose.

Book would have been impossible to write, if the author did not have a fair amount of self-irony. Germonprez here is a funny man in glasses, all the while wearing a sweater and with a tuft on his head. He must have been modest and awkward before the death of his only son, was a good family man, but the tragedy distressed him. He became nervous, he couldn't the focus on something else, it throws him into tears, then into anger, but whatever he wished, his thoughts are inextricably linked with his son.

When you notice while reading this book, that you laughed once, twice, and then smiled, at first you stop laughing: whether it is good to laugh, when a person has sorrow? But soon you can't do anything about that: it's very funny. And the author did it on purpose: laughing at yourself, it is possible to overcome the sadness and suffering.

Surreal story amplifies with good art. The fact that the entire book is drawn in pencil, but Linthout left pencil sketches without erasing. Critic Paul Gravett in the preface to the book writes that in such a way Linthout wanted to show that these drawings with their incompleteness has human hand and heart. I see in such sketch style another method: unpolished pencil lines stratify each subject in the book and every person. So in addition to surreal moments when, for example, Germonprez tries to lay on the place circled in chalk outline of the body of the son or Germonprez communicates with his son, using Morse code, such layering adds a surrealistic tint. The alter ego of the author not only losing his mind because of the tragedy, but he also splits.

«Years of the elephant» is a brave book, in which the author was not afraid to put on the language of comics his personal tragic experience. And just for this we should applaud Linthout for hours.

Koko Be Good

Jen Wang
Koko Be Good

First Second Books, 2010

In the center of this graphic novel are the three heroes. Jon Wilgur graduated from university, learns Spanish and plans to leave to Peru to his much older girlfriend to help orphans there. Koko is a reckless girl, with a head full of confusion and vacillation. She lives here and there and could not find a place in her life. The third character, Faron, is a loser who works in the cafe. At a party Koko makes scandal, robs her rivals, and then runs away, taking Jon’s recorder: it has message his girlfriend dictated to him. Jon and Koko unexpectedly meet in a cafe and he asks to give him what belongs to him. They start friendship, and Koko decides to start a new life and be good.

The book is much more interesting in watching images rather than follow for the plot. All three characters are so doubtful people think that you may choose any of them, but you hardly succeed to empathize with him. Koko’s path from roguish and brutal girl to good girl, helping the needy, is too tortuous to believe that Koko really wants to be good. In general the whole story, with all three storylines, is rather undistinguished to make the paper in that condition.

What a truly «good» in this novel, is that's how Jen Wang draws. She knows how to perfectly play the scene, where to show the hero in close-up, and the pages where the characters do not say anything even seem to be fragments of almost perfect comic book. Selected by the author, brown and green colors are successfully combined with the general mood of the novel: the sadness and doubt.

The Little Prince (graphic novel)

Joann Sfar
The Little Prince
Adapted from the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

Full disclosure: I have not read «The Little Prince» by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

By and large it makes little sense to retell the plot of this book: those who wanted have read the book by Saint-Exupery long ago, and perfectly familiar with the plot, those who have not read, apparently, has never been interested in this book, and no longer interested. In short, the beginning of the story is about that: a military pilot whose plane breaks down makes the landing in the desert. The pilot smokes a cigarette, talking with the smoke from it in the form of a serpent, draws a hat, but insists that this is a snake swallowed an elephant. Then he repairs the plane, escapes from the sun in the shadow of an airplane wing, and at night sleeps there. In the middle of the night a boy with golden hair, huge blue eyes and long green scarf wakes up the pilot and asks the pilot who understands nothing to draw him a sheep.

Sfar in his adaptation uses the banned method: he often shows the little prince in close-up, so that in the page you see only huge blue eyes of the prince and stop paying attention to everything else. In them there are already gone childhood and childhood, which is always with you; thirst to know everything; understanding that there will be no better, but not worse, too; reflections of the non-existent worlds.
The Little Prince almost always looks at the sky, even if he looks at a drawing. When they with the pilot examine star map, the prince could not tell whence he came, he knows only that his planet is so small that it can not allow baobabs grow on it.
In space, there are flying ducks here, on planets there is enough space for only one person (of all episodic characters in this graphic novel the most memorable is the king with a long and strange-snag nose, he is very funny), the fox offers to be friends.

But we need to repair the plane and fly back to where there is not little prince, only soldiers, airplanes, adult life, but if today you are alone, it does not mean that tomorrow you will not meet the boy with the golden hair, who laughs and does not answer to questions. He just has not reached the Earth.

“Remember You’re a One-Ball!”

Quentin S Crisp
“Remember You’re a One-Ball!”

Chomu Press, 2010

This novel, before Chomu Press publishid it, was rejected by many publishers. This is quite understandable: the book is quite strange, moreover, it is not well written.
A story unfolding before the reader is notes of a young man named Ramsey Blake. He graduates from university, does not know where to go for as long as he is invited for an interview with director of the school where he studied. The director, while interviewing Ramsey, suggest to future teacher that he is very suitable for the vacant position: Ramsey himself a graduate of this school. So tired student begins to work in school, teaching junior classes. There he meets a girl Jacqueline. Ramsey clearly suffers from mental illness: he is afraid of people, barely controlled by his mind, besides what he says about himself: «I may have had sex, I had certainly never fucked anyone». Life with Jacqueline takes really stressful for him. In parallel, he wrote the note, where he tells the story of his classmate who was teased one-ball. This oath, one-ball, went from children's song:
«Rule Britannia!
Three monkeys up a stick.
One fell down and broke his dick.»

Of his classmate Harley Owen, of abusing him, of child abuse and worldwide conspiracy, Ramsey remembers (and read about that in the dossier passed to him by the director) because in that class, where he has learned, there is another one-ball, Norman. Both boys really have one testicle: a second one children hurt in accidents, so it should be deleted.

Soon Ramsey finds a link between the two cases and sees the mysterious behavior of the director and reading a book titled "Learning to say" yes ". He understands a lot, but could understand one thing: a place devoted to him in this story.
If the narrator can not until the last minute understand what is his role in the story of two one-ball boys, reader understands that after only three dozen pages. This however did not spoil the whole picture: the novel is already written in a very uneven way. The book is heavily skewed, as a face of the person that does not like anything. This, of course, is a multi-faceted novel: there are the memories, the memories within memories, records, excerpts of self-learning book - but it seems that the fragments are often not in own place. Some fragments (for example, Harley Owens’s dossier) would have looked good in the form of short stories, but among the clutter of other fragments the best places lose their luster. Convincingly described the history of child abuse was almost nullified by unconvincing explanation of the origin of one-balls.

The author has the ability, of course, but if you ask me, whether I liked the novel, I will just shrug my shoulders.

Wimbledon Green

Wimbledon Green by Seth
(Drawn and Qauterly)



Cartoonist Seth at the beginning of the book reveals itself: the book was written for fun, “the drawing is poor, the lettering shoddy, the page compositions and storytelling perfunctory”, and indeed the novel as a novel was not intended, and was only as set of sketchbooks. The author is cunning. In fact, the poor drawing and the shoddy lettering guess stylized 40-50s comics, and the abruptness plot resembles a good documentary movie - about the fact that madness is always possible, but to catch the madness and understand it is not so simple.

Wimbledon Green, as it is written on the cover, is the greatest comic book collector in the world. Reader will trace the way during which Green had become a collector, and at first watching for those Green years being funny young fat Green, then a daily routine of his life already in the status of the great collector. It's a mystery according to the laws of half a century ago pulp comics, in which one key element is disclosed on the first page: Green disappeared somewhere along with his huge collection, and no one knows what happened to him. Despite the seemingly partial loss of detective intrigue, you do follow the adventures of Fat Green, while still can enjoy reading.

Throughout the book, Green will be chasing the rare comic books, accompanied by his assistants, women in sunglasses and an enigmatic Hindu, and parallel to this not the last people in comics fandom will tell you what they have heard about the great collector, under any circumstances have met with him, and suppose he still lost. Such sketch inserts (one person - one page) perfectly play the role of fragments from the documentary, which could shoot about the disappearance of Green.
Special mention deserves one of the rare comic included in the collection of Wimbledon. "Fine and Dandy" is the story of two funny hoboes, thick and thin, whose sole mission in the life was to be free. And to be free for them means to be homeless. If you read the whole book with a smile on his face, then this sketch really make you laughing out loud.

It is not necessary, however, to think that the whole book is a story about the chase, written for fun and laughter (and laughter and fun are really there). "Wimbledon Green" is also about that everything changes (and need to change), everything goes, but something subtle is always with you. This subtle thing, perhaps, makes any person a little crazy. It is important to switch to the coin at the right time.