Famous Players
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This murder case, long an unsolved mystery, took place in 1922 Hollywood, where moving pictures were just settling into being an industry. William Desmond Taylor was a director for Famous Players, the most prestigious studio of the time, and actress Mabel Normand was the last person to see him alive.

When Taylor was found dead, suspicion fell on young star Mary Miles Minter, someone the producers wanted to become the next Mary Pickford. Three of her hairs were found on him, she had sent the much older man love letters, and her mother seemed to know things at suspicious times. But things get much more complicated, with revelations of a previous life, sexual secrets, hysterical threats, many other possible murderers, and plenty of outrageous rumors.

Following his usual illustrated maps, Geary sets the stage of the early days of Hollywood beautifully, including the features that made California such a desirable setting. It tickled me that, in addition to climate and landscape, he mentions the proximity to the border. Many early moviemakers were violating Edison’s moving picture patents, so if things got hot, they fled to Mexico. (How times have changed, since the movie companies are now some of the most rigid in trying to prosecute those who don’t respect their trademarks.)

In this case, a studio man was allowed to search the house to prevent anything “reflect[ing] poorly upon the deceased or the studio.” Various pieces of evidence disappeared, making it impossible to know what really happened, especially now. Geary lays out what’s known and touches briefly on what’s speculated. As always, he declines to pick a solution, suggesting possibilities instead of certainties.

Geary’s detailed pen-and-ink line provides a wonderful sense of nostalgia and time gone by. As is typical of the cases he chooses to profile, there are plenty of mistakes to feel superior about. “Today, the neighbors know not to move the body or traipse through the house before the cops arrive,” the modern reader thinks, but human nature is still the same. The ending roll call of stars who died young reinforces how little some things have changed.

A complimentary copy for this review was provided by the publisher. They have posted a preview at their website; compare to the pencilled pages.

Magic Trixie and the Dragon
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First off, there’s an awful lot going on. I’m okay with having a minimum of plot so long as there are plenty of amazing Jill Thompson pictures to look at, but that’s certainly not the case here. Trixie’s grandmother Mimi takes her to the circus/carnival, where she falls in love with the dragons and wants one. Of course, she can’t have one, even though her sister’s boyfriend works with them as part of the Cryptozoological Institute. Plus, she’s learning to take care of her baby sister Abby Cadabra, while her kittie cat Scratches gets jealous of how much Trixie wants a new pet. All the storylines keep intertwining with each other in unexpected ways.

Then there’s the art. Trixie’s magical world allows for all kinds of astounding props and costumes and settings. Whether it’s Mimi’s over-the-top outfits or the circus experience (a series of wordless panels, because the images tell it all) or the Weirdtastic Wagon shop … there are plenty of pages where you’ll want to stop to take it in, or come back and just drink in the detail.

Background reactions often caught my eye, like Trixie’s sister’s spit-take when Trixie accidentally insults grandma. And I got tears in my eyes with Scratches packed a handkerchief with little squeaky toys and headed off, feeling unwanted and unloved.

Like the other books in the series, the tale is ultimately about “be careful what you wish for” — Trixie learns that her parents and grandparents really do know what they’re talking about when they tell her dragons don’t make good pets. It’s the getting there that’s so darn entertaining, as well as beautifully made. Highly recommended for children of all ages!

Undertow
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Ellen Lindner’s Undertow is a fascinating portrait of 60s Brooklyn. Rhonda and Estelle are bored young women, dating and drinking because they don’t know what else to do. Chuck, a Harvard man training to be a social worker, is looking to Rhonda’s brother Johnny for his entree into the group to study them after a tragedy. There’s some great atmospheric work here, establishing the feel of the urban setting and the lives of bored, crazy kids.

Marguerite Dabaie had the second volume of her Hookah Girl and Other True Stories, short stories about the cross-cultural struggle of being American Christian Palestinian. Subjects range from the minor and mundane — how to eat sunflower seeds — to the disturbing — reading scary editorial cartoons. I liked the historical and cultural ones best, such as her guide to the Arab-American lifestyle or the drawings of embroidery.

Peter Quach’s Transit, a well-illustrated, affecting piece about life in the big city, can be read in full online. It’s got good, realistic conversation and strong figure work.

Johnny Hiro
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Johnny Hiro, by Fred Chao, collects the three previous comics with more new material. It’s imaginative and inventive, as in the first story Johnny tries to rescue girlfriend Mayumi from Gozadilla, a dinosaur attacking Brooklyn. What’s striking is that Chao captures all the adrenaline of an adventure story but paces it with the meaningful flashbacks of a modern novel and weaves in the everyday reality of living in New York. It’s an outstanding approach that’s unique and yet seems perfectly natural and well-chosen. It’s also well-drawn.

In other stories, Hiro is sent to steal a lobster; gets attacked by samurai at the opera; catches a giant tuna with his boss; and goes to Night Court. Plus, there are cameos by Alton Brown and Judge Judy. I really like this book and I hope there will be more.

Molly Lawless gave me two samples of her Infandum comics. (Whereupon I learned that “infandum” is Latin for “unspeakable”.) They’re large-format, the size of a sheet of paper (unfolded), the better to show off her detailed pages. I don’t get her fascination with old-timey baseball, but otherwise, I enjoyed these glimpses inside her mind and what she finds interesting, including childhood memories and training for a marathon.

My favorite minicomic acquisitions were Ken Wong’s origami comics, three-dimensional paper creations that still told a story. Ed’s already praised them, and they’re much deserving. Ken developed them as a rejoinder to the idea that webcomics were superior to print — he wanted to show that paper comics could do something comics on the web couldn’t. And so he built a box to tell Pandora’s tale. (My version is flat, with instructions on rebuilding it, because I thought it was easier to travel with.)

But it’s the fortune teller that really captivated me. The idea of picking living or dead under one of the folded tabs is funny enough, but when you unfold the device and look at the opposite side, it’s the drawings of the various cats famous in comics and animation that really tickled me. It’s so multi-leveled: honoring different styles and characters while evoking the multiverses of DC and Marvel through each label: clones, irradiation, robots, manga stylings, comic strips… it’s a tiny little encapsulation of so much comic history, all on one page. He’s got a listing of the various earths on his website, but the list of cat homages is up to you. I know I’m missing a couple.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(Manga Edition)
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Hyeondo Park, the artist on the webcomic Sam & Lilah, was kind enough to give me a copy of the manga adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, which he did the art for. It’s good storytelling, with plenty of adventure, but I look forward to seeing more individual work from him.

The last thing I’ll mention is the work of Sean Lynch. We had a great conversation about his sketchbook — he creates on the pages of an old programming book, the Borland C++ Programmer’s Guide to Graphics. It was bizarre to see art done with bits of sample code peeking through.

Whew! Some really neat work being done. Even with the issues with the show, I’m looking forward to going back next year.

edited by Ed Choy Moorman
Bare Bones Press, 176 black-and-white pages, $10 US

This benefit anthology (proceeds go to RS Eden, a substance abuse treatment facility in Minneapolis) is loosely themed, keeping with the title. The ghost approach was reinforced by the first piece, an odd wordless thing with small pen-and-ink drawings by someone called Hob featuring the ghost of a brontosaurus (or whatever they’re calling long-necked dinosaurs these days). It sets things off with a good tone. Other stories are less connected, being only about memories, or losing a loved one.

Pieces that stood out to me: Maris Wicks draws cute little formless ghosts in a short series of funny strips about living in a haunted house. (Turns out she’s illustrating Jim Ottaviani’s upcoming book from First Second about women who worked with monkeys, which means I’m now looking forward to it even more.) Lucy Knisley contributes a story about going to an outlet mall and passing by the boarding school she once attended, but I’d already read it in one of her books. Jessica McLeod’s story, featuring the ghosts of dead tomato plants, was adorable.

Some of the stories are little more than doodles, with the kind of scratchy naive art I’ve given up reading. Others appear intended for somewhere else (the Japanese folktale, the knight slaying a beast). The editor’s piece, about music-driven memories, also appears in Side B (see below).

A practical note: the table of contents lists only the artists’ names. The stories themselves may have a title or may have nothing at all. All entries in an anthology should have the story title and author’s name clearly listed in the same format whenever the stories change, and so should the table of contents. Since so many contributors to these kinds of projects may not be well-known to the readers, full identification should be used in all cases. Without it, I had to flip back and forth between story and table of contents to see who’d drawn what I was reading.

Secret Identities

Secret Identities
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edited by Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, and Jerry Ma
New Press, 200 black-and-white pages, $21.95 US

This Asian American Superhero Anthology has an admirable purpose — to address under-representation of Asians in comics and demonstrate the abilities of Asian American creators — but the results are too often uneven.

Some of the characters are utterly generic, heroes that have nothing to recommend them beyond their ethnicity. Other stories were barely a prologue, just establishing a premise or introducing cast members when they ended. (The best of this bunch is The Citizen, by Greg Pak and Bernard Chang, which features President Obama activating an Asian American hero to kill Nazis. It’s of a distinctly more professional level in both art and writing than some of the other pieces.) Instead of a showcase, sometimes this seemed like a pitch book, a try-out for getting more work.

The history-influenced section, “War and Remembrance”, is the longest in the book and the best. Some stories focused on downturns of oppression, especially during the section set during the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. I don’t dispute those feelings, but it’s a bit weird to see stories that demonstrate no hope, no view for a better future, especially those set in the past. I would think that the existence of this book serves as a small counter-argument for that view.

It seemed to me that some of the heavily shaded entries were designed for color reproduction, and the result when printed without was dark, muddy, and hard to read. There is a short color section, but it’s used for character profiles, a kind of who’s who of ideas for other comics.

I liked the revisionist take on the Green Hornet by Gene Yang and Sonny Liew called “The Blue Scorpion and Chung”. It’s got a drunken racist crimefighter and his hard-working chauffeur, and it’s really about the despair of sacrifice.

There’s one section dedicated to “Girl Power”, either female creators or characters or both. Lynn Chen and Paul Wei tell a folklorish story dealing with body image that was a pleasant change of pace while still keeping with the theme. “Sampler”, by Jimmy Aquino and Erwin Haya, is an odd piece about superpowered costumes with a distinct look that suits its fashion focus. The rest of the book is as typically male-dominated as other superhero comic projects and companies, with women showing up as girlfriends or scantily clad superheroines when they appear at all.

The strips I enjoyed most were those that directly addressed the problem of representation and spoke to individual experience. For instance, Tak Toyoshima’s one-pager where his character Secret Asian Man talks with Larry Hama. Or the page where Greg Pak talks about his goals, art by A.L. Baroza. (The writer is credited as Keith Chow; there are two more of these short interview pages in the book, talking with Gene Yang & Michael Kang and Greg Larocque.) I wish there had been a lot more of this kind of material, but that would have been a different book, one about the work of Asian American creators, without the superhero hook.

Side B: The Music Lover’s Comic Anthology

edited by Rachel Dukes
Poseur Ink, 232 black-and-white pages, $22.99 US

As with Ghost Stories, I would have liked to have seen a design element introducing each story with a title and author, but at least here, most of the stories do that themselves. The theme, comics about music, is a great one, as well as immensely challenging. You can’t convey sound through a silent paper medium, so the artists must instead cover the emotions raised.

I was generally impressed by the high quality of the work here. Even with the pieces where I didn’t care for their chosen style, I could see skill underneath (as opposed to the “I drew better than this in 4th grade” feeling I sometimes get in these cases).

Brian Butler had an interesting collage-like piece about life as an indie band. Dominique Ferland’s two-pager about meeting in a club says it all in a short space. Joshua Rosen starts out talking about having to come up with an idea for a comic music anthology (boo! to too much self-referentiality) but it turns into a piece about how music matters differently to us as we age. Elizabeth Gearhart’s accomplished lines and toning illustrate the story of an opera singer’s ghost and a cat told in verse! Impressive and cute!

Many of the pieces are semi-autobiographical, or seem that way. I liked the approach, since made the book feel like hanging out chatting with friends. Lucy Knisley ponders technology changing our musical memories (and this one I hadn’t read before). Katie Shanahan talks about having tastes outside of the usual, open-mindedness, and acceptance. Cindy Hui and Joe Laquinte share family memories in an imaginative piece that uses comic symbolism to capture emotion. Andy Jewett remembers home taping from the radio; it brought back strong memories for me, and the urge to find my old homemade cassettes. Jamie Campbell has two pages on music in soundtracks, combining with visuals. Megan Rose Gedris’ piece on muses helped me understand why some young comic makers are also into other arts.

Other contributors you might recognize are Jeffrey Brown, Todd Webb, Jim Mahfood, and Ryan Kelly. There’s music as proposal, music as elegy, music as lifesaver. Several of the pieces, as expected, are about favorite songs, bands, or albums. Only two mention downloading in any way, which surprised me. (One’s about the Rock Band video game, which was cool.) Then again, many of the stories are about memory, and online music is still relatively new. With stories about record shops, mixtapes, and listening to entire albums, the book is almost a time capsule of how things used to be. Lawrence Gullo’s “Summer 1968″ sums it up: music is about freedom.

So far, the best anthology I’ve read this year. Get a copy and see for yourself.

This is the second part of my MoCCA reviews. Previously I talked about floppies; this time I look at the books I bought.

Bite Me! A Vampire Farce

Bite Me! A Vampire Farce
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by Dylan Meconis, Elea Press, $15.00 US

Claire is a bar maid, but also part of the anti-monarchy French underground. Lucien is a vampire out running an errand for his master. While away, Lucien’s vampire coven is captured. Ginevra manages to escape and needs Lucien’s help to rescue the coven. Claire is inadvertently turned into a vampire and so joins Lucien and Ginevra. Meanwhile, the French revolution is in full swing.

Bite Me! is a farce in the best sense of the word. It’s an irreverent comedy that pokes fun at a variety of targets: Anne Rice, Hammer vampire films, radical leftist revolutionaries, the 18th century. It reminds me of Friends and Seinfeld in a good way. This is a conversation-heavy book where the plot is simply an excuse to bring together this wonderful cast of characters and get them talking. The conversations are funny and erudite. Meconis does a great job giving each character a distinct personality and speaking style.

This was Meconis’s first major work. The art is a little unpolished, but it does improve over the course of the series. She has an angular style, where the character faces look liked they are carved from wood. However, Meconis is gifted at facial expressions, and so her characters are full of emotions. The figures are static, but the writing is so good it actually breathes life into the art.

I enjoyed this book tremendously and recommend it as a refreshing change of pace. This was originally a webcomic and you can still read the entire series online. Meconis is currently working on another webcomic series, Family Man. You can learn more about Meconis herself at her website.

The Elsewhere Chronicles, Book One: The Shadow Door

The Elsewhere Chronicles Book One:
The Shadow Door
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story by Nykko, art by Bannister, Graphic Universe, $6.95 US

Rebecca’s grandfather, Old Man Gabe, just died. She and her family came from out of town to attend the funeral and to dispose of his house. Grandpa Gabe was a recluse, and some of the locals think his house is haunted. Rebecca meets Max, Noah, and Theo, and they go exploring her grandfather’s house. They find a strange device that looks like a television studio camera and a library filled with books. When their first visit is cut short, Rebecca and Max go back the next day to explore further. Noah and Theo go looking for their friends later in the day, only to discover them missing.

The Elsewhere Chronicles is a great fantasy series for kids. Nykko has created interesting characters and a story that draws you in from the first page. It’s quickly paced to keep young readers from getting bored. Adults will find the story just as engaging as well. I don’t want to discuss it too much in fear of spoiling some of the surprises.

Bannister’s art is excellent and done in a cartoon style. The art really captures the various moods of the story, be it a lazy afternoon in early summer or the creepy atmosphere of an empty house at dark. There is a lot of energy in the artwork; characters and the action jump off the page. This is a beautiful book to look at.

I enjoyed this book so much that I’m getting the other two books in the series. I can’t wait to pass these on to my nephew. I’m sure he’ll enjoy them as much as I. You can get more information on the series and see preview pages for all three volumes at The Elsewhere Chronicles website.

Twisted Journeys

Twisted Journeys #3: Terror in Ghost Mansion story by Paul D. Storrie, art by Sandy Carruthers, Graphic Universe, $7.95 US Buy this book

Twisted Journeys #7: The Time Travel Trap story by Dan Jolley, art by Matt Wendt, Graphic Universe, $7.95 US Buy this book

Twisted Journeys is a series of choose-your-own-adventure books. I picked these because I remember how much I loved them as a kid and figured my nephew would get a kick out of them.

Terror in the Ghost Mansion has you, your older brother, and two friends trying to escape a haunted mansion. The problem is the ghost family haunting the mansion doesn’t want you to leave, ever.

This was a difficult adventure to survive. I died several times. I finally sat down and counted how many possible endings there were, and in how many of them you survive. Of the 31 possible endings, only 5 end with you escaping the mansion. Of those 5, you’re the only survivor in 4. So that means there is only a 16% survival rate for you, and only a 3% survival rate for everyone else. Most readers, adult and kid, are going to find this book frustrating. I certainly did.

By contrast, The Time Travel Trap has you successfully complete the adventure most of the time. You are at the school science fair, and one of the participants has built a working time machine. You’re curious enough to see where it takes you, so you step through the time portal and begin your adventure. If you follow common sense, you can return back home easily enough.

The artwork in both books is excellent. About a quarter of the pages are comic pages. Another quarter of the pages have text with an illustration on them. The rest are just text pages. The art helps to make the adventure more tangible and the dangers more ominous. Once you’ve seen the ghosts in the mansion, you’ll know exactly why you want to get out of there, now. The time travel book takes you to so many different locales it’s good to have pictures for readers that aren’t familiar with all the different time periods and places.

I definitely recommend The Time Travel Trap. It’s a great trip down memory lane for adults, like me, who read these books as a child. It’s a fun book for kids to read and just play with. Ghost Mansion I would recommend to adults as a challenge to see if they can survive. A child with a lot of patience, who knows the odds ahead of time, might enjoy this book. I would suggest parents check out each of the other volumes in the Twisted Journeys series to make sure they offer more entertainment than frustration.

The Shiniest Jewel
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by Marian Henley
Springboard Press, 176 black-and-white pages, hardcover, $21.99 US

The art is simple: unvarying thin lines, no shading, plenty of white space, making for flat images. It’s the story that drew me to keep reading, and then I noticed just how expressive the characters are and how powerful the simple imagery can be.

This memoir tells how the author adopted a child from Russia when she was almost 50 years old. It opens with her telling her parents over Christmas, through the obstacles that arise, and the life changes she makes, until she journeys to Vladivostok to bring home her new son. There is a man in the picture, her boyfriend Rick, who has two unusual factors. He’s over a decade younger than she is, and he lives in Nashville, while she lives in Austin.

But there are striking images, especially while she’s coping with being patient in the face of a system much bigger than any individual person. At the same time she’s struggling to aquire a child, her father is stuck in the hospital, illustrating a generational cycle of life and demonstrating, with her mother, true marriage.

The Shiniest Jewel directly tackles the questions so many women deal with: home, marriage, kids, parental care. Even though Marian faces situations I’ve never encountered, it’s all very real.

Yellowstone’s Hot Legends and Cool Myths

Yellowstone’s Hot Legends and Cool Myths
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by Robert Rath
Farcountry Press, 64 color pages, $6.95 US

This slim, digest-sized book would make a lovely souvenir for a kid visiting Yellowstone National Park. Tall Tale Tom shares 10 myths and legends about the area in styles ranging from softly shaded colored pencils to dramatic bold ink lines. All are easy to read and suit their respective material, whether native legend or tall tale or ghost story. Narration is colloquial, replicating the experience of attending a particularly good theme park.

The book, while entertaining, also respects its material and the many groups who are connected to Yellowstone. It’s surprisingly good, especially for an educational project.

Science Fiction Classics

Science Fiction Classics
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edited by Tom Pomplun
Eureka Productions, 144 color pages, $17.95 US

With this, the 17th volume in the anthology series, Graphic Classics goes full-color. And it’s a good choice for the science fiction topic, which works better with a full palette of shades available.

The longest story in the book is an adaptation of H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds illustrated by Micah Farritor. I was praising the color, but this one is told with a faded palette, sepia-like, that reinforces the setting of more than a century ago. The emphasis on using as much of the original text as possible limits the image possibilities, so anyone familiar with the story has likely already seen a more impressive version, visually. The Martians here aren’t that menacing; the reader is kept remote from them. Instead, the focus is on the more personal emotions of the narrator. Although the ending is somewhat abrupt, it’s a good introduction to the story for a younger audience. And I think that’s the ideal reader for these books: those found in the school/library market.

A short story by Jules Verne, “In the Year 2889″, is illustrated by Johnny Ryan in a big-nose style that resembles The Jetsons. It’s a sketch of future history told from the past, which means it says more about Verne’s time than ours, making it funny. Roger Langridge draws Athur Conan Doyle’s “The Disintegration Machine”, a Professor Challenger story. That’s the standout of the book, since Langridge’s clear caricature style is hilarious.

Also included are “The Bureau d’Echange de Maux” (which I found horror more than SF), drawn in a well-chosen smudgy woodcut style by Brad Teare; Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey”, space adventure with art by George Sellas; and E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”, illustrated by Ellen L. Lindner. The last, although candy-colored, is the most disturbing in the book in its story of a civilization where everything is moderated by machine and touch is forbidden.

Band of Innocence

Band of Innocence
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written by Robert Agnello; illustrated by Lou Manna
On the Lamb Productions, 136 black-and-white pages, $24.97 US

A flip-through shows art reproduced from pencils, giving an unfinished look to the art, and lettering done in Comic Sans, which screams “unprofessional” to me. The writer is well-meaning, talking about spreading compassion and being inspired by the innocence of children, but the result shows that good intentions don’t automatically make for good comics.

There are these gods that represent things like fire and nature. They choose pure children to give their powers to in order to save the world. At this point, computers could have written this premise, it’s so generic and predictable. I couldn’t read any more, especially since some of it looks like it was reproduced on a photocopier with an inconsistent darkness setting.

All of the above books were reviewed based on preview copies provided by the publishers.

Chicken With Plums
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Set in 1958, the story explores the eight days he lasted, as he thinks about his family, his life choices, and what brought him to this point. In this, her fourth book, Satrapi’s simple style has become more accomplished. Her figures aren’t detailed, but their emotions are obvious and relatable, and the gridded pages are easy to follow. The approachability of the lumpy figures helps bridge cultural differences, emphasizing the humanity, even when the characters’ choices wouldn’t occur to traditional Americans.

At first, Nasser sets out to replace his tar, but he cannot find one with the right tone. A disastrous bus trip with his youngest child sheds light on problems in his family, ultimately leading to his resignation and withdrawal from life. Without his music, he has nothing left worth living for. He’s become disconnected from his wife and children long before, some due to his misconceptions about them.

During his decline, he thinks back to what drove the choice he made to marry as he did. His wife never understand the artistic personality, and he bowed to family pressure for the wrong reasons. In short, this deathbed reminiscence becomes a cautionary tale against settling. Marriage without love becomes toxic and hurtful.

Unfortunately, we see only hints of what turned his wife into the woman she became. She discovered that childish love may mean little when confronted with the practical hardships of everyday survival. She married for love; he didn’t; and both are miserable. He can’t let go of memories of his prior love, a woman whose father forbid their marriage because he was a musician.

Nasser is also visited by his children and his brother, thinks about the pleasures of the world — including his favorite dish, which gives the book its title — and reviews old hurts to his reputation and how others treated him. His suicide through neglect is a bit over-glamorized here, but it raises important questions of the nature of suffering in art.

Two different previews are available online.

Kabuki, formerly an assassin, has escaped from the institution where she was being kept in Metamorphosis and is seeking the mysterious friend who helped her, a woman she’s never seen. But as the character says to the reader early on, “All you need to know is that there is a scar on my face, I’m starting a new life, and I have a friend who is helping me.” She’s right. It begins as a story of transition, of a woman figuring out where she wants to go and what she wants to do, but it soon becomes much more. (The reader’s given plenty of background information as part of the story, too, enough to understand what happens here. After all, her previous life doesn’t matter; it’s what she’s leaving behind.)

Kabuki: The Alchemy
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Artistically, Mack has moved further into collage and graphic design, combining photographs and objects with his previous painted art. Many panel borders are made up of broken spines from a Japanese fan, and the letter keys of an old typewriter feature in the typography. Iconic symbols, like the woman who means “ladies’ room”, are manipulated, and stamps, coins, and buttons pasted into the art. Text is provided in captions overlaying the gorgeous pages. Mack has created a new way of doing comics, where the story is communicated through a blend of words and images, but the idea of panels is completely left behind. His work is stunning in its beauty and imagination, something to get completely lost in. (This review has a number of sample pages.)

That’s also part of why it’s so refreshing to find that his message reflects the user experience so thoroughly. Kabuki seeks Akemi, which sounds like Alchemy, and that magical transformation happens to all the characters. Kabuki moves from killer to creator, a writer like Mack himself. One can’t help but think that Kabuki’s thoughts — “I’m ready to change my style … to work in new mediums” — are shared by her artist, as Mack takes her story in new, more significant, metafictional directions. Both she and he have moved beyond stories of good and evil, of fighting and blood, in order to explore higher motivations and the world of ideas.

The characters were influenced by the books they read as children, literal examples of the transformative powers of reading. A new friend is a veterinarian and creator of both sculpture and prosthetic limbs, using similar methods to blur the line between art and science, objects on display and those that change people’s lives. She gives Kabuki a children’s book, The Shy Creatures, the text of which is included in full. It was later published separately, born in imagination yet taking on its own existence. Then Mack himself appears as a character, with a story called “Self-Portrait”.

Certain motifs are repeated, like the image of the unfolded die/cube, six boxes arranged in the shape of a cross. New beginnings are emphasized with maps, travel, symbols. Everything has multiple levels of interpretation, and the reader is encouraged to treat the book, and life itself, playfully but with purpose. Items rearranged take on new meaning. Reading and writing, whether letters or stories, become metaphor for journeys and life. There are plenty of big ideas here, culminating in the end sequence, where Kabuki writes her own story, credits it to a male author to protect her identity, and calls it Circle of Blood.

The first three series volumes can be read online. For another work about the transformative power of reading, see Finder: Talisman.

You Have Killed Me
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A woman from Tony’s past has just come back into his life. Her sister, his ex-fiancee, is missing, and she needs the detective’s help, in spite of whatever hard feelings he might still have. The sister disappeared, a few days before her wedding, from a bathroom with only one entrance and a witness watching the door in a locked-room mystery.

It’s very difficult to do this kind of project well. The genre, a film noir-style hard-boiled detective story, is so well-known that most people think of parodies before they think of classic originals. It’s easy to succumb to “nudge nudge” “this is just like that better story” smarmy wisecracking or too-faithful slavishness. The former, by making fun based in immaturity, makes you feel like an idiot for wanting something with honest inspiration; the latter makes you ask “what’s the point? I’ll get one of the originals.” This story avoids both those traps.

By contrasting Tony’s background — he came from the same privileged society world that his clients do — with his choice to strike out on his own, Rich gives him sympathy (who hasn’t dreamed of crossing over to how the other half live?) and mystery of his own. The woman who hires him says she wants the benefit of how well he knows the missing sister, but when he does give advice based on her character, she ignores it, offering more money to get what she wants.

Jones’ graceful-yet-strong lines are well-suited for the curvy femme fatale, but then I could say the same thing about the genre and her strong use of black and shadow. Her curling smoke drifts I can get lost in, and I adored the page of the detective smoking in the bathtub. She does impressively detailed work with settings and backgrounds, suitable to the period. The dialogue is snappy, conveying plenty of information in just the right tone.

The theme of roast almonds is spooky, giving me shivers from the beginning. It’s not spelled out, but the mystery fan will know from the start it’s the scent of poison, providing overtones of coming death. It’s also unusual for a comic to consider the sense of smell, which sets the story apart.

Note that because this is a noir, it’s about someone who’s never going to come out on top, even though you may wish otherwise for him. No one comes off well by the end, really. Tony wanders through a world of bars and seedy losers and the track and conflicts with the law and jazz musicians, all motivated by money, narrating as he goes. He’s the last honest man, asking questions and annoying people until the truth eventually comes out, several beatings later. It’s not that he has great observation or detective skills; he’s just more persistent, even in the face of his own pain (both physical and mental).

It’s The Thin Man without the liquor-fueled humor, The Big Sleep with an understandable plot. You Have Killed Me is due out July 15. Read a lengthy online preview. For the month of June, original art pages are on display at The Art Institute of Portland Gallery. (An online preview copy was provided by the publisher.)

Every Part of You Is Familiar to Me

Every Part of You Is Familiar to Me
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Collects the previously issued sketchbook-style comics Paper Women, Don’t Disappoint Me, and Everything/Nothing. (Encounter Her, also reprinted here, is a single story about how two women finally meet.) The pages are frequently gridded, divided into smaller fragments of experience, moments that contribute to the overall page puzzle of just what we’re seeing happen. With no gutters, the images blend together instead of being highlighted separately. Many of the wordless pages are about watching women or love-making of various kinds. (No surprise that this is tagged in Lulu’s lesbian section!) Moments of a particular relationship, the pleasure of touch, of eating, of nature’s seasons … these are captured here.

A particular favorite is “ce masque que je porte”, in which a woman goes through her day in a square wooden mask, until finally she returns home and her lover’s touch removes it. The individual panels are instantly relateable — a desk job, a cafe lunch — while the overall message is more optimistic than some of the other pieces.

The other page style consists of single-panel images with captions that provide some idea of what the artist was thinking about them. Often, they’re close-cropped images of part of a woman — just her face or torso, which makes her seem more symbolic than individual. The reader is asked to bring a lot to the work, combining her experience with what’s on the page to understand or interpret it. I found the images meditative, lovely, and thought-provoking.

Grace

Grace
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A longer work in horizontal format, Grace collects the online graphic novel about an art school student and her growing feelings for a life model. (Both this and the previous book have drawn nudity, FYI.)

I appreciate the print format over the online because it’s much easier to focus on the page as a whole, as well as flipping back to recall what we known or have seen about a particular character. Jordan, the student, is adorable in chapter 3, where she’s getting increasingly embarrassed trying to draw Grace in an attractive pose, a turning point in their encounters.

The book includes dialogue, but many scenes are still wordless. It’s structured such that the events of a silent chapter or two are followed by a chapter where they’re discussed or put into new context. I applaud Dresen’s confidence in her work and how skilled she is at telling the story through images. Aside from working beautifully with the theme of observing and creating art, it’s an important lesson (at least to me) to slow down and appreciate the visuals.

It’s a classic story, the question of how you get to meet someone you’re interested in. The missed cues, the timing that doesn’t quite match up, all these are things anyone who’s ever been in love can relate to. And the characters are so cute in their earnestness that I so hoped for their happy ending as I was reading.

The book has an additional eight pages of background material about the development of the story and characters and the settings.

She’s in the Trees

She’s in the Trees
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This is Dresen’s latest work, in color, a wordless story with potent imagery: a raven, fruit, wine. She was experimenting with using a color palette, instead of her usual black and white, and digital painting. It can be read online in full or purchased in print or digital formats.

Daisy Kutter: The Last Train
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Her ex-partner, Tom, is the town’s sheriff, and two strangers have just appeared to try and recruit Daisy to rob a train. This could be a traditional Western, until the robots show up. At that point, it has a lot of the flavor of Serenity, with its modern take on morality and living outside the law. What makes this particular setup unusual is that they claim that the train’s owner wants Daisy to plan the robbery in order to test his security systems.

Kibuishi’s best-known for editing Flight, but in this, his first long-form work, the pacing sets this story apart. The opening scene, which establishes Daisy’s skills, mood, and personality, is wordless until another character arrives, yet the reader is instantly swept into the environment through differently sized panels that focus on key elements. Together, moments make up the bigger picture. Kibuishi’s fondness for small panels make for a dense story with plenty of world-building, although he uses full-page images when the mood calls for it.

All the classic scenes are here: the poker game showdown. The barroom face-off. The memories around the old gun. And of course, the climactic showdown on the deserted, dusty main street. I particularly liked the rain scenes, with Daisy pondering her choices while the water pours down on her — it’s a powerful visual, well-executed. She’s a strong, tough lead, a pleasure to watch.

The clash between individuality and the rule of law is at the root of every Western, and here the conflict is foregrounded though Daisy’s history with Tom. She’s always made her own rules and lived true to her own beliefs, but Tom now represents the rules of society. She can’t accept that maybe he’s right, or maybe he’s grown up in ways she hasn’t. Her stubbornness puts them both in danger; relying on only her skill isn’t enough. She has to learn to share with those she trusts.

The book also contains background material, character sketches showing how Daisy’s look developed and early page layouts. Online previews are available. Amulet is Kibuishi’s new series.

Blazing Combat
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Blazing Combat ran for only four quarterly issues in 1965-1966, containing multiple stories in each installment. All are collected here. The stories aren’t all contemporary; some are set in the Civil War, some in WWII or WWI or Korea, some even in the Revolutionary War. No matter the setting, though, the message is how stupid war is, how destructive and numbing and violent and how terrible its effects on soldiers.

I already thought that, so the appeal for me was the gorgeous illustration style. The art is reproduced from “the original printer’s films”, so the work is clear and detailed, with the washes and shading providing depth and a feeling of realism. Those involving planes are the most beautiful to me, because they escape the grime of the grunt.

The stories are still timely. The first shows a kind of waterboarding used to torture a prisoner. The South Vietnamese ally performs the act while an American looks on and thinks, “I can’t order Captain Thanh not to do this — I can only advise!”

It’s obvious that the message is anti-war, so it’s not surprising that once they saw the first issue of the series, the military pulled it out of bases, so a key part of the audience couldn’t buy it. According to editorial matter by Michael Catron (the current copyright holder), wholesalers also destroyed issues instead of putting them on sale in order to censor the stories for being anti-American. That led to a severe drop in sales which caused the series to end quickly.

Also included in this book are interviews with Jim Warren, the original publisher, and Archie Goodwin about their time on the title.

French Milk
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The two women were each facing their own turning points. Her mother was turning 50, and Lucy was turning 22 and facing the questions of adulthood. Her preparations demonstrate her youthful view of what’s important: she barely learns the language, but she succeeds at taking up smoking, to better hang out in cafes. She’s struggling to figure out her future, planning for graduate school and wondering how she’ll support herself, but traveling with a parent makes it so easy to fall back into the patterns of childhood.

Knisley’s lines are beautiful, flowing and confident, avoiding the distraction of unnecessary noodling. The pages are single panels. Sometimes they’re photographs; more often they’re sketches, 2 or 3 or more, showing the details of everyday life, with Lucy’s recollections written in around them. Often they’re of her, her best character. She looks so young! And comparing the photos with the drawings give a better idea of how she processes events through her style.

The first 30 pages are set at her parents’ house, introducing the characters in “normal” life before their environment changes. It’s a good choice to let us get to know them before they set off. Much of her experience there is thinking back to old friends (an amusing concept for a young adult) she hasn’t seen in a while, foreshadowing life changes and moving in different directions.

The virtue of such a lengthy trip is that it stops being a vacation and starts being lived. Lucy’s especially attentive to food, a quality I adore, since it so well sums up their experience. Her days are captured through what she sees and what she eats. Not a book to read on an empty stomach! But she’s also willing to show herself at less than her best, grumpy or homesick or shallow.

The focus is on the moments she’s living, no matter her mood, instead of a reflective “and then that happened.” That’s the virtue of her capturing things as they’re happening. There are few lessons presented, just one text page of reflections, leaving the reader to share the experience and draw their own conclusions. I envision the author rereading this book in decades to come, remembering through her diary the experiences and especially the eating.

Lucy has been interviewed about this book. She’s also published Radiator Days. If you’re looking for other travel journals, try Carnet de Voyage.

Pyongyang
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As in Shenzhen, Delisle is working in North Korea for a couple of months as a supervising animation director. The opening scene, in which he’s taken to worship at a giant statue of President Kim Il-Sung (as every new visitor must), sets the stage for a portrayal of the country where everything is slightly ridiculous.

The incredibly restrictive society is handled lightly, for entertainment, with lists of rules undercut by Delisle bringing, as his only book, a copy of Orwell’s 1984. He notes early on how isolated and controlled the country is. It was only afterwards that I realized how much danger he could have been in for some of the silly things he does. That aspect is touched on, but only in relation to others, not himself. His main emotion is boredom, not fear.

Due to its repressive leadership, North Korea is one of the most mysterious countries on Earth. I found the descriptions of life there, as Delisle was able to observe it, fascinating and subtly creepy. For example, he notices, after a while, that he never sees anyone with a handicap. When asked, the guide says, “All North Koreans are born strong, intelligent, and healthy.” It’s not clear whether the guide actually believes this or knows he’d better say so because that’s what the leader expects.

The foreigners are always accompanied, everywhere, by guides, living representations of the rules. Everyone lives on only one floor of their hotel. No lights shine at night. There are few choices of restaurants or things to do, and even that little freedom stands out from what is allowed for citizens. Huge civic buildings are deserted, used only to impress visitors.

I appreciated seeing such a personal view of a country I’ll never visit. I love comics that can expand my boundaries this way. A preview is available at the publisher’s website.

Shenzhen
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For three months, he’s got to deal with inferior work, a lack of other foreigners, and the things that are common to all big cities: dirt, noise, smells. There aren’t many translators, and those that are aren’t very good. He’s very lonely. Trips to nearby Canton, a more welcoming city, come as a break and a high point.

Delisle’s European drawing style applies a humorous veneer to what might otherwise be a rather grim tale. But it’s so clearly hand-drawn — the lines of the buildings, for example, aren’t quite straight — that it takes on a cartoony feel, providing the reader some distance. Shading is done with different pencil greys, again reinforcing the hand-created feel that contrasts with and humanizes the mechanized urban setting. It’s a good choice for a smudgy, over-crowded city.

His claustrophobic panels, small and cramped, represent his mental state. They also do a wonderful job of capturing the right moments to give the feel of another country. His animation background allows for a sense of movement, so the art never feels static or too much like a travelogue. The bicycling sequence is especially effective. His skills are also helpful illustrating occurrences without text, for the many times when the language barrier gets in the way.

There’s no overwhelming story, just a series of moments captured as a way to pass the time until he could leave. One of the most harrowing, and thus memorable, incidents was his visit to a dentist, and the unsanitary, crowded way they practice. That’s balanced by amusing tips, such as when and how he figures out how to get by in a restaurant on his own. He mentions spending days without speaking to anyone, which leads to him silently talking to himself.

He also ponders bigger concepts: the nature of freedom, Chinese economic development, trust and paranoia. His vision can be so negative that if he wasn’t French-Canadian, he might be accused of being an ugly American. However, I can’t say that I’d feel any different in a country so different from my own where I didn’t speak the language and had nothing to do but work with those I didn’t respect. Neither he nor the Chinese people he knows are interested in understanding each other; what would be the point? Their lives and expectations are too different.

A preview is available at the publisher’s website. A different visitor had different experiences in Shenzhen. Delisle tells of his experiences on a similar job in North Korea in Pyongyang. If you’re looking for another travel journal, try Lewis Trondheim’s Little Nothings 2.

The Adventures of Blanche
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Geary’s traditional pen-and-ink style, with its thick lines and distinctive caricatures, does a wonderful job building a different world for the reader. As Blanche writes home to her parents, we see through her eyes these cities during the early 20th century. Instead of using her text to carry the brunt of the story, the visuals are essential.

In 1907, Blanche travels to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she stays with a European professor and his wife for concert piano training. The city is excavating for the subway system and building skyscrapers. When Blanche hears late-night noises in the walls, she finds she has stumbled across a secret society! After many exciting turns, including a furious chase in horse-drawn wagons, she becomes the toast of the Musical World.

That status takes her to Hollywood in 1915, brought to Los Angeles to head a new music department for a motion picture studio. It’s a town full of young people doing astounding creative work. This chapter has several cameos — Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith — as Blanche winds up mesmerized by the power of movies as both an art form and a way to communicate ideas. Meanwhile, a drive for union organization is riling the town with protests, demonstrations, sabotage, and violent incidents with outside agents.

Blanche survives her run-in with an attempt to stop the filming of Griffith’s Intolerance, but in 1921, she decamps to Paris. She was intending to embark on a concert tour of Europe, but her promoter has left her stranded, and she is questioned about the apparent suicide of a shipboard acquaintance investigating a new source of energy. She winds up working on a musical co-written by Gertrude Stein with sets designed by Picasso. The city is coping with the dispossessed veterans of the past World War, but Blanche runs into an old friend from Hollywood. Once again, the story concludes with a fantastic chase, this time up the Eiffel Tower!

This series shares Geary’s love of accurate, detail-based history with his murder tales, but its stories are lighter and more fun. There’s never any question that Blanche will be just fine. And for a proper Midwestern young lady, she sure winds up doing some amazing things!

The book reprints three previously published comics with a new introductory story. A preview is available at the publisher’s website.

Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom
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Frankie is a little Walter Mitty, someone who dreams himself into situations full of risk and excitement: an explorer fighting lava monsters, a superhero fighting a giant robot. These fantasies are drawn as comics, while the everyday pieces of the story are illustrated prose, making the book a combination chapter book and graphic novel. And the transitions are funny: A golden idol is the way Frankie sees the last breakfast waffle, while Dad’s a prison warden.

The plot is simple: Frankie has to clean up his room, but he likes it messy. So Mom lets him leave it that way in order to show him the consequences. It’s entertaining, but with purpose. And I love the character design! Frankie’s big head and eyes make him very expressive, and his dog, Argyle, is cute.

The book includes pages on how to draw the two as well as an extra comic story. There are already sequels in the works, with an eventual plan of two books a year. Artist Eric Wight previously wrote and drew My Dead Girlfriend (published by Tokyopop). Here’s a good interview with him about how the series came about and some of his goals for it. (This review is based on a PDF provided by the artist.)

Here is part of the press release:

“Our number one priority is to show our commitment to publishing by completing the great stories we have already begun to tell,” said Publisher Mark Smylie. In June, Archaia will release hardcovers of The Awakening and Some New Kind of Slaughter and has committed to put out at least two hardcover collected editions per month, thereafter, for the rest of the year. Making good on this promise, July will see the hardcover releases of The Engineer (which will be offered at an unprecedented $9.99 price point) and the second volume of the Eisner Award-winning Mouse Guard. Collections of the critically acclaimed Primordia and Gunnerkrigg Court Vol. 2 are set to debut in August.

“We’re also moving forward with series that are ongoing, such as The Killer, Okko, The Secret History, and Artesia: Besieged,” added Smylie. “These titles will pick up with individual issues and eventually be collected into hardcover editions.”

“In addition, books like Robotika, Killing Pickman, and Titanium Rain, which had just started toward the middle and end of last year, will be relaunched in double-sized formats, with 48 to 64 pages of art for only a $4.99 cover price,” exclaimed Smylie. “And as the year goes on, we’ll be slotting in new titles we’ve recently signed, like God Machine, Days Missing, and others we’ve yet to announce,” the publisher teased.

An interview at Comic Book Resources attributes many of the publisher’s previous problems to late-shipping and uncompleted titles, so now they’re vowing not to solicit until the art for a book is completed.

Not mentioned are the following titles, which will not be returning: Cursed Pirate Girl has moved to Olympian Publishing. The Devil’s Panties will be self-publishing, as will Runners after web serialization.

True Loves 2

by Jason Turner and Manien Bothma, $8.95 US

The first True Loves volume was released in mid-2006, collecting a webcomic, and I liked it. I was glad to check in again with these characters, although I was a little concerned about the subtitle “Trouble in Paradise”.

This volume deals more with reality than romance. True and Zander are moving in together after celebrating their one-year anniversary. But their enjoyment may be short-lived once he gets promoted to night supervisor and she’s still working days. As a result, they’re hanging out with different groups of people and facing temptation and jealousy.

The dialogue’s true-to-life and the behavior realistic. True and a friend get distracted sorting through clothes while packing, for example, meaning they aren’t packed when the guys show up with the rented truck. That’s the appeal for me, since the art is basic, although Turner does a good job establishing settings and backgrounds.

The creators know what they’re talking about, since they’ve been married for three years. Once a life together enters a new phase, it’s tough figuring out how to blend two sets of furnishings and finding time to spend with single friends and handling previous relationships.

It all comes together a little too easily and conveniently, but I enjoyed spending a little time with these hipsters and their friends. (Note: You should have tolerance for watching characters frequently indulging in pot.) You can see a preview or read the strip online. The book’s order code for comic shops is APR09 0957.

Jan’s Atomic Heart

by Simon Roy, $5.95 US

An engrossing science fiction story with a conspiracy angle. After being in a car wreck, Jan is half robot. He’s been given a loaner body that’s the same model as one recently used for terrorist attacks, and he’s concerned that someone intends to turn him into a bomb. As he investigates, the story swings between future concepts and paranoia.

The art is grey-toned pencils with a strong sense of place. That’s a great choice to provide familiarity and grounding for the more imaginative concepts. The details of daily life — meeting for coffee, calls from friends — merge with more outrageous events — a missing building — to effectively build suspense and curiosity on the reader’s part.

You can see a preview or read another review online. The book’s order code for comic shops is APR09 0958.

Classics Illustrated: The Raven
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Illustrated by Gahan Wilson
Papercutz, $9.95 US

Gahan Wilson’s tormented art seems like it would be an excellent choice for the emotionally haunting poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, but I was surprised to see how it was handled.

The shading shown on the cover is missing from the book’s interior. Instead, Wilson’s art is flatter, with less line weight variation. The most astounding element is the coloring, done in pastel yellow, pink, and blue. The result is Easter-eggy cute. I don’t associate cuddly with Poe, but that’s the feeling I’m left with here. It’s something like a child’s first melancholic reader. (There’s no credit given for the coloring.)

Normally, I like illustrated text for reading poetry, because the art, if well-chosen, adds an additional layer of meaning and interpretation. The pacing of the first poem, “The Raven”, is off, though, with the pictures showing a man reading and then a man opening a door. That’s two too-literal images for the first stanza, and then the next six are illustrated only by a picture of a raven. The next two, covering eight more stanzas, are the man staring at the raven, and then staring at a picture of a girl. And again, instead of black gloom, we get pastel pink chair and curtains. I guess it’s reassuring to the young, but for me, it was totally the wrong mood, almost funny.

With “Annabel Lee”, I was distracted by the silly seashell motif drawn decorating her tomb. “Lines on Ale” is a trifle, out of keeping with what one usually thinks of Poe. It’s shoved in with the others, when more spacing of presentation would aid in switching the mood. That’s true of many of the pages, where the text runs right into the image without enough white space to frame it.

Other poems included are “The City in the Sea”, “The Sleeper”, “The Conqueror Worm”, “The Haunted Palace”, “Alone”, and “Eldorado”, the lone dissenter from the color scheme I find so troubling. That one is done in bright red and gold, happy colors that had me reaching the end of the poem thinking “that’s it? What a letdown. Shouldn’t there be another 12 stanzas?” (There’s only four short ones.)

Graphic Classics: Oscar Wilde

Graphic Classics: Oscar Wilde
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Graphic Classics, $11.95 US

I know of Oscar Wilde, of course, but I know more about his life than I do his work. I think the only thing I’ve read of his is The Importance of Being Earnest (not included here). I was eager to see this volume because it includes work by Molly Kiely, a favorite of mine who usually draws porn. She illustrates Salome (adapted by series editor Tom Pomplun), which concludes the book. Before that, there’s

• The Picture of Dorian Gray, adapted by Alex Burrows, illustrated by Lisa K. Weber
• The Canterville Ghost, adapted by Antonella Caputo, illustrated by Nick Miller
• Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, adapted by Rich Rainey, illustrated by Stan Shaw

All those creators I was also unfamiliar with, although I greatly appreciated finding out about Lisa K. Weber, who mainly does work for young people (such as Cricket magazine). I like her soft pencil work and characters driven by expressive eyes. She handles Dorian Gray admirably. I knew about the device of the picture, but I had no idea of the many other relationships and actions that drive the story.

Although these black-and-white adaptations, by nature truncated to fit more than one in this space, can be abrupt in mood changes, Weber does an excellent job drawing the characters aging in various ways, either visually/physically, or in attitude as they harden (Gray). It’s an affecting, attractive portrayal of corruption.

The Canterville Ghost uses its fantasy elements to satirize rude, rich Americans of the period, their fondness for branded and bottled preparations, and their trampling of great British traditions, including the family haunt. Given the many cultural references, notes would have been a help, but it’s funny enough without them. The art is posed and caricatured; it reminded me of something you might see in Mad magazine. Overall, it’s an amusing story that ends up being quite touching, and I’m glad it’s being retold.

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime is even more exaggerated in its art style, to the extent that I found it hard to follow as a comic. The material is true to Wilde, making fun of how credulous aristocrats could be and following a silly premise to ludicrous conclusions.

Finally, Salome. The art was lovely, as I expected, but I found the text ponderous. I would have preferred more editing to lighten the content and reduce the amount of lines. It’s one thing to be true to the text, but a comic requires a different balance of words and art, so ultimately, I found this unsuccessful. Still, the volume overall has more enjoyment than not, and it’s an entertaining way to learn more about some of Oscar Wilde’s classics.

Jane Eyre: The Graphic Novel

Jane Eyre: The Graphic Novel
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By Charlotte Bronte
Adapted by Amy Corzine
Art by John M. Burns
Classical Comics, $16.95 US

Classical Comics takes an interesting approach to its versions of the classics — they release the same art with varying texts. This book, for example, is available in a Quick Text edition, with modern English edited down, or an unabridged Original Text edition. (In fact, there are four versions, since each set was originally done in British English and then redone, localized, for Americans.)

The books are handsome and substantial, with slick, heavy paper to show off the color art. The painted style suits the “classic” nature of the works. Comparing the two versions, it’s interesting to see how they handle the length differences, since the Quick Text is so much shorter than the Original. I expected the panels to look emptier without the longer captions and dialogue, but the transition is handled well. Most readers are going to buy only one or the other, anyway.

This is an attractive way to read what can be an intimidating novel. Background material covers the author’s life, tells a little bit about how this graphic novel was created, and points to teachers’ resources. That academic audience seems most likely for this work, as a way to interest reluctant students.

(Complimentary copies for this review were provided by the publishers.)