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The 2003 Year in Review: Honorable Mentions By Dirk Deppey (unless otherwise noted) All illustrations © their respective rights-holders.
Igor Tuveri, otherwise known as Igort, has produced what may well be the best crime comic of the past five years with 5 is the Perfect Number. Drawn in a loose, Expressionist style and beautifully paced, this book tells the story of an aging hitman who finds himself back in the racket from which he thought he'd retired, after his son (who'd followed in Dad's footsteps) is assassinated by a rival family.
The story is taut and suspenseful -- a fine example of the genre -- but what really makes 5 is the Perfect Number stand out is the visual experience. Every page is a joy in composition and staging, aided by the skillful use of a lush blue shading that adds immeasurably to Igort's artistic palette.
In a period when all too many practitioners of the crime-comics genre seem intent on aping cinema in general and Quentin Tarantino in particular, this book serves as a healthy reminder of how much dramatic sweep is possible in comics' own native idiom.
The second volume of Onstad's self-published collection of strips is a welcome corrective to this dilemma. Gathering every episode from the second half of 2002, Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar finds Achewood in full flower. While the first volume presents Onstad's initial struggle to find his voice, this one finds the cartoonist in full command of his storytelling arsenal, producing just as much humor from the interactions and foibles of his cast as from the often rude, over-the-top situations. For example, when Lie Bot convinces the five-year-old Philippe that he must now marry the flower he just impregnated by touching, it is the young otter's utter guilelessness and need to do right by those around him that makes the situation believable, giving the sheer absurdity of the premise more weight than a lesser storyteller would be capable of pulling off.
Three volumes are now available from the above URL, and while each is funnier than the last, all are worthy of your attention.
In Between the Sheets, the friendship between two twentysomething women, Minako and Saki, slowly begins to unravel after Minako realizes that she has in fact fallen in love with her longtime comrade in the dating wars, and clumsily tries to steer Saki towards the same realization -- going so far as to begin seducing her boyfriends in a desperate attempt to be as close to Saki as possible. If you think you know where this is leading, think again: what could have been a shoujo exercise in reactionary lesbophobia turns complex and human under the author's cool, knowing gaze. Saki, after all, is no Samaritan herself, casually cheating on her boyfriends yet rising to anger when they do the same to her. The events of Between the Sheets play out to an ambiguous resolution, with neither party getting quite what she wants, nor suffering some moralistic "just desserts."
One of a series of Erica Sakurazawa books translated and brought to the American market by Tokyopop, Between the Sheets may well be the most mature work they've published so far.
It's safe to describe Blankets as the year's most talked-about, most hyped, most divisive graphic novel. It's also safe to describe it as one of the year's best. The victim of an emperor's-new-clothes backlash (that in at least some cases had as much to do with the book's publisher or its author's previous work or the P.R. campaign surrounding it as with the book itself), Blankets is a marvelously drawn bildungsroman with a heart as big as the Midwestern plains in which it takes place. For that, it has been pilloried, and I wish I could understand why. Actually, scratch that -- no, I don't. If loving this rapturously illustrated and warmly told story of ecstatic pain is wrong, well, you know the rest.
Blankets is the more-or-less straight autobiography that author Craig Thompson's debut novel, Goodbye, Chunky Rice, hinted at. Indeed, elements of Chunky Rice put in cameo appearances throughout its successor's 592 pages, hinting at a rich underlying emotional universe in much the same way that The Lord of the Rings provided deeper and sadder echoes of material first found in The Hobbit. It's a book about long-distance relationships -- one with a girl, one with God; how they burn impossibly bright and yet can be extinguished with a phone call (in the former case) or a footnote (in the latter). Thompson's art both mines and mimes the riot of emotion such relationships engender, employing sweepingly expressive brushwork -- each page seems to swirl like a snowdrift -- and a vast (perhaps "dizzying" is a better word) array of formally experimental devices. And yet the art steers clear of the facile: Everyone notices the "blankets" of lush white snow, but a careful scan through the book reveals an almost obsessive use of powerful blacks, the unspoken yang to the wintry yin. Thompson's narration is unreliable, at times appearing to believe every word of its descriptions of sexual or spiritual perfection, at other times imbuing the delivery with that unmistakable "you can't go home again" regret, at all times trusting the reader to make the distinction. What we're left with is a book about rejecting Christianity that, miraculously, judges not; a book about adolescence that recognizes that term as one describing an age, not a level of complexity, or more specifically a lack thereof. In love and in loss, what happens to our teenaged hearts matters. So does Blankets.
A prodigious animator, winning an Oscar for adapting Jules Feiffer's equally brilliant Munro, Gene Deitch lived art. He later split for Prague, racking up the plaudits described in his son's excellent Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
Just before he animated Munro, Tom & Jerry, Mr. Magoo, and portions of Captain Kangaroo, though, Gene Deitch illustrated The Record Changer, the very first serious magazine dedicated to criticizing and collecting jazz. The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove collects Deitch's gorgeous, reverent, inspired covers and cartoons into one handsomely bound volume.
Deitch illustrated The Changer from 1945-1951. Deitch's popular character, The Cat -- a man obsessed with jazz sounds and collection to the exclusion of all else -- is depicted in a series of cartoons which paint an amusing portrait of this magazine's market individual boring and surprising women with inappropriate outbursts of jazz passion.
But Deitch threw a lot of political curveballs, especially on the issue of race. In one cartoon, the cat laments the purchase of a corny Harry James side -- a great white jazz trumpeter who borrowed heavily from Count Basie. September 1948's cover features a shoe shiner blowing what the blues-hued cover and positioning of the trumpeter outside of the spotlight can only be a poignant lament on his ironically inherited position.
I find myself occasionally flipping through this coffee table book... because that's what you're supposed to do with a book of this type... all of a sudden, I am involuntarily absorbing the whole damned thing -- the intros from managing editor/jazz potentate Orrin Keepnews and Gene Deitch, the New Yorker-style cartoons, and the unbelievable covers -- constructivist and cartoonish, but also expressionist, abstract, inspired and, as such, pure unadulterated JAZZ, man.
The word "Kafka-esque" is used on the back-cover ad copy for Mathieu's slim, marvelous little tale, and while there are indeed surface similarities, the label isn't wholly accurate; Kafka would never have stood for so hopeful an ending as found here, for one thing. Still, it's a useful adjective in other ways. Dead Memory is certainly an engaging, beautifully constructed work, from the careful layouts and well-spotted black spaces of the artwork, to the slow-but-steady pacing, to a carefully-written story that manages to ask questions often found in modern-day science fiction, yet concluding with answers that feel new. Marc-Antoine Mathieu may not quite share Franz Kafka's bleak pessimism, but his ability to examine the world around himself through fantastic, elegantly constructed parables would do the Czech master proud.
Everyday Matters begins as Gregory's wife Patti returns from the hospital, now confined to a wheelchair and learning to adjust. Ironically enough, she turns out to be better equipped to get on with her life than her husband, who begins drawing in an effort make some sense of the world. As the book unfolds, we watch Danny do just that.
Everyday Matters is interesting from a formalist perspective -- while never following the rules and conventions of conventional comics storytelling, words and pictures nonetheless interact seamlessly to produce a form of storytelling that would be much diminished if either were removed. Gregory studiously illustrates the world around him, beginning with household objects and nearby photographs before moving on to his neighborhood, the city at large and eventually the world beyond his purview, jotting down whimsically designed notes alongside the pictures as he progresses.
The story he tells is more fascinating still. Traditional diary entries and whimsical observations playfully weave in and out of the drawings they surround. Gregory's rambling, conversational tone draws you into his life like a visit from an old friend; watching his horizons expand to accept a world capable of both joyous moments and stupefying tragedy is all the more absorbing for the intimate tone of the authorial voice.
Don't let that stop you, though. While Annable's tales of amusing woe might be all of a piece in the philosophical sense, there's a wide enough variety in set-up and construction to make each story live and breathe in its own right. Whether depicting a crazy old uncle explaining to two little boys the true origin of farts, a patient plagued by his new doctor's weird-ass methods, or two pals hoping to survive an annoying acquaintance as he drives them to a party, Further Grickle delivers a dizzying array of odd set-ups for uncomfortable humor which sometimes skips the jokes entirely, all the better to make you cringe along with the hapless protagonists.
The standout piece in this installment is a sixty-page story entitled "By Necessity," in which a man's rambunctious dog sets in motion a series of events that ultimately wreck the lives of himself and everyone else in the immediate vicinity simply by going after the pet in the next yard over. Annable uses the extra page count to allow his scenario to build up slowly, setting things up in such a naturalistic and understated way that when the consequences do become clear, it seems like the obvious outcome yet catches the reader by complete surprise.
Annable's illustration style, more in tune with animation or gag-cartooning than with traditional comics art, has a pliability that allows the stories it carries to veer from wild exaggeration to understated pathos at the whim of the artist. There's a lot of range on display here, and, one suspects, plenty of room for more Grickle down the road. Here's hoping, anyway.
This all-too-slim softcover volume collects nine of his best stories, and while I'd love to have seen more comics included, there's no denying the quality and grace of the work that is presented here. The book opens with "Dance on a Razor's Edge," Russell's extrapolation of the final moments of Japanese author Yukio Mishima, who, having failed to lead a rebellion of disaffected soldiers against his government's post-WWII capitulation to America's demand that the Imperial family be reduced to figurehead status, committed ritual seppuku by disemboweling himself with a knife. It's a stunning sequence -- while a lesser cartoonist might have played up the gorier aspects of the act, Russell attempts to climb inside the suicidal author's head and present his reflections and experience as life leaves his body. It's a short but tantalizing tale, and sets up the rest of the volume with a virtuoso's touch.
Most of the other stories presented in Isolation and Illusion all deal with mythology in one form or another, and display the sure hand for which Russell is justly famous; my favorite here is an extended, whimsical adaptation of Cyrano De Bergerac's "A Voyage to the Moon," which is just as much fun to read as one suspects it was to draw. The presentation of these tales ranges from original pencilwork, to pen-and-ink chiaroscuro, to dazzling full-color illustration, each faithfully reproduced and given the justice it deserves. For fans of Russell's fine cartooning, this book is long overdue.
Given all that, thank goodness for Jack Staff. After Marvel rejected Paul Grist's proposal for a Union Jack mini-series, the artist changed a few surface details here and there and proceeded to self-publish twelve black-and-white issues of the series. Late last year, Image Comics republished the entire run in a 350-page trade paperback, making it available for those of us too busy to trawl through the back-issue bins.
Jack Staff is a delight, stuffed with more wonderful concepts than any reader has a right to expect -- Becky Burdock, Vampire Reporter! Tom Tom the Robot Man! Charlie Raven, the greatest escapologist of the Victorian Age! The stories are written with an inventive wit and zest for adventure, and Grist's evocative, clear-line art would do Alex Toth proud. Stories jump backward and forward in time, and from place to place, with an almost reckless abandon; yet Grist's skillful compositions and sure storytelling never leave the reader behind. Best of all, these are comics you could give to a child without feeling uneasy, yet clever and imaginative enough to entertain an adult.
Spain Rodriguez's graphic adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's sordid post-WWII novel, Nightmare Alley, originally initiated as part of a proposed series of reworked classic crime novels, is an evocative reconstruction of American pulp disillusionment.
The book depicts the rise-and-fall of Stanton Carlisle, an all-around heel who gets his start in a carny ten-in-one show, aiding then bedding a phony medium named Zeena. He uses her tutelage to set himself as a pseudo-religious spiritualist. But he overreaches when he attempts a swindle in collaboration with a duplicitous psychiatrist. It's a darkly gritty story, and Spain's just the right man for it. His heavily outlined black-and-white ink work matches Gresham's noir vision. Every character is unflinchingly lit as if by unflattering fluorescents, reflecting a Manichean universe of Sharks and Chumps. Unlike the creators of the '40s movie version, the former undergrounder doesn't stint depicting Carlisle's sexual exploits (Zeena, victim/goodgirl Molly and domineering femme fatale Lilith). All three women share the Spain body type -- slender, full-breasted and sporting a pair of muscular legs that could snap your neck in twain -- in keeping with our anti-hero's hard-boiled sexual predation.
Nightmare Alley is Spain's biggest work, but it arguably could benefit by being longer. Some sequences have more words per panel than necessary -- these are people who live by patter, so you want to see them using it to the fullest. But that's a small grouse; the meat of the book is Carlisle's trajectory. The book's denouement depicting his descent into alcoholism and carnival geekdom is conveyed with effective but deceptive casualness: not so satisfying for those who want to see this murdering slimewad's degradation protractedly portrayed, but true to Gresham. Grimly atmospheric, stamped by his distinctive storytelling, Alley shows the former Insect Fear artist thankfully hasn't strayed far from his underground pulp roots.
As for his storytelling skills, one need only look to the title piece. "Same Difference" tells the tale of two Korean-American pals, Simon and Nancy, who find themselves confronting questionable past actions and using them as a prism through which to contemplate the people they've grown up to become. Yes, we're talking about yet another meandering story of self-absorbed slackers learning valuable life lessons, a genre which at this point requires its practitioners to offer up something worthy of the reader's time, if only to escape the clichés of the past hundred cartoonists mining the same vein. Kim, however, passes the test admirably. His sure hand with pacing and imagery gets an admirable workout here, offering a smart, engaging yarn that rises handily above the also-rans cluttering the surrounding landscape.
This volume collects the stories of two, umm, people who live in a cartoon house and have odd little adventures. No, that's no good. Try this: Marc Bell's rubbery creations exist in a surreal universe where reality bends and twists depending upon... no, too vague.
Let's describe a sample story, then. In "Paul's Nipples," the tubular Paul wakes up one morning to discover that his nipples have disappeared, leaving two circular holes in his chest through which his soul escapes into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, we learn that the enigmatic, spherical Shrimpy has stolen Paul's nipples and glued them to his (her? its?) chest. Sue the Tooth materializes to warn Shrimpy of the incorrectness of the situation -- "Shrimpy, you're losing points!" -- but to no avail, and Shrimpy leaps out through the window. He (she? it?) takes a walk down the street to show off his (her? its?) new body ornaments, but trips and falls, losing the stolen nipples in the process. They are found by a frog-like thing, which takes them home and begins coating them with mayonnaise. Meanwhile, Paul's brother Saul is alerted to the situation, and...
I give up. All I can tell you is that this gorgeous, densely packed book comes complete with a color section, scrapbook pages, trading cards you can cut out, and a generous collection of some of the funniest, most bizarre comics available in book form. This is great stuff.
Each of Teratoid's subsections has its strengths: The wild wanderings of "Oaf" are notable for their emotional range and their visceral description of this fantasy world's geography; the simply-drawn creatures of "The Micro-Minis" are like cartoon automatons, their actions flowing naturally from their own design as a function of the very mechanics of drawing them; the wordplay of "Cridges," the book's only non-silent section, show Brinkman to be as able and witty a manipulator of language for its own sake as he is of art. The book's real tour-de-force, though, comes in the section called "Flapstack," which concerns the subterranean realm of little creatures that look a lot like pulled teeth. That section's story, "Sunk," is, I think, the single best comics sequence I read all year. Three of the teeth creatures, each bound to the other by a length of rope, fall into a winding labyrinth. As they try to navigate this complex maze, Brinkman intercuts between them as though multiple cameras are involved. The three creatures are indistinguishable but for the corresponding numeral that appears each time they come back "on screen." Before long we have a sense of exactly where in the maze each creature is, and it's the intense concentration required to keep up with Brinkman's byzantine constructions that attaches us to the creatures as surely as their frustratingly short lengths of rope attach them to each other. As they attempt to overcome the obstacles they encounter, the tension is, almost stunningly, an edge-of-your-seat affair. The powerful end to this thriller -- which, again, stars three silent and indistinguishable walking teeth -- is testament to the power of the medium when artists deploy it in new and sophisticated ways, and to Brinkman for having the vision to do so.
Thematically, Brown's sophomore effort is in many ways a continuation of his debut book Clumsy -- a tale of young love told in short bursts. As such it's difficult to herald the book as any real artistic advancement.
Unlikely is an engaging look at the games people play when looking for romance, as Brown details the rise and fall of his first mature relationship with a woman named Allisyn. In charting the couple's slow, sometimes awkward courtship, subsequent relationship and its eventual end, the episodic nature of the book is less a smooth, linear narrative than an accumulation of isolated incidents. Oddly enough, this works to Brown's advantage; the reader is encouraged to treat each individual scene almost as a story unto itself, which results in an uncommon sense of immediacy.
It's tempting to view Unlikely as the anti-Blankets. While Craig Thompson's acclaimed graphic novel presents a somewhat similar love story, its more traditional sense of pacing and editing feels contrived when compared to Brown's intimate, moment-by-moment storytelling. Likewise, Brown's work contains a rawness and sense of honesty that makes Thompson's seem glossy and manipulative by comparison. One cannot escape the feeling that while Blankets is the more crowd-pleasing work, Unlikely is the more fulfilling novel.
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Stating that Achewood is the single funniest comic strip available online, while certainly true enough, is also somewhat problematic. Working in the same skewed vein as Tony Millionaire's Maakies, Chris Onstad's strip is also a tad more subtle and character-based than Drinky Crow's anarchic adventures, requiring readers to plow through several months' worth of installments to really get the humor. Unless you're familiar with the strange world of Ray, Roast Beef, Philippe and the gang, many of the jokes are likely to fly straight over your head -- less "funny ha-ha" than "funny where the fuck did that come from?"
Erica Sakurazawa's tales of Japanese young adults falling in and out of love are unlike any romance comics I've read: far from the traditional protagonists and antagonists, far from the cause-and-effect pull of commonplace morality that usually governs such stories, Sakurazawa's work is noteworthy for the seeming randomness of the events it depicts, and the ambiguity of the characters who experience them. Men and women are led by their lusts and desires into new situations, alliances and betrayals that either work out or don't, depending on conflicting motivations and blind luck. Meanwhile the author looks on from a dispassionate distance, rendering it all in a clean, sparse penline.
Firmin Huff is a civil servant, charged with mapping a city so large, its inhabitants speculate whether or not its dimensions stretch into infinity. To control so vast and unwieldy a city, records and automated functions have been entrusted to a computer known as Rom, while the local governing council is so timid and fractured as to be of no use at all. Trouble arises when people begin taking it upon themselves to build massive walls throughout the city under cover of darkness -- night being the only time when one may build without a permit, according to the bylaws. As the walls grow in number, the city's inhabitants begin to suffer from memory-loss, and Rom becomes increasingly unhelpful.
"Two years before I started drawing, my wife was run over by a subway train. Sounds really terrible, I know. But, well, this book is about how art and New York City saved my life." With these words, Danny Gregory begins this charming and unique book, which sits somewhere between sketchbook diary and graphic novel.
In the matter of Graham Annable: How does one even begin to describe his comics? Annable's body of work consists largely of short, wistful stories which feature everyman-type characters dealing with brutal, tragic or just plain bewildering situations with a mixture of desperate abandon and pathetic cluelessness, with the expected results usually following in short order. By this standard, Further Grickle is essentially a continuation of the first volume -- if the stories from both books had been packaged under a single cover, they would have made just as much sense together as they do in separate installments.
For over twenty-five years, P. Craig Russell has been one of the premier fantasists of the comics medium. Armed with a lush, delicate drawing style and a nuanced storytelling sense, his short stories and adaptations, published in a wide variety of venues both prominent and obscure, have justifiably added to his reputation over time.
It's the Twenty-First century, and superhero comics are in a state of high decadence. I don't mean that as a value judgment... necessarily. Having pretty much exhausted every last angle of the genre for an aging audience that nonetheless cannot let go, having turned tropes to clichés and back again, the current fad in superhero comics is to meld superheroes to other genres. These days we have superhero spy thrillers, superhero romances, superhero police procedurals, superhero coming-of-age stories, superhero legal dramas -- you name it, they're publishing it. Supported by a market that practically won't accept any book not containing a cape and tights, the Direct Market's aging customer base has now effectively hijacked a genre that once appealed to young adults, and superhero comics for kids are now treated as an untested, almost alien concept for which the kinks still have to be worked out. High decadence.
If I had to pick my favorite debut work by a previously unpublished cartoonist in 2003, this slim, smart, self-published volume would be it. Same Difference and Other Stories proves Derek Kirk Kim to be a talent of considerable range, whose artistic chops are expressive and multifaceted, running the gamut from the realistic linework of "Pulling" to the rubbery, bigfoot cartooning of the Oliver Pikk shorts, the first comics I've ever seen starring an anthropomorphic olive on a toothpick. These comics are a joy just to look at.
Shrimpy and Paul and Friends may well be the strangest comics collection released in 2003 -- and in a year which also saw the release of Jim Woodring's collected Frank stories, that's saying something. Beyond that, I'm not sure what to tell you.
The cartoonist Mat Brinkman is the most compelling member of the Fort Thunder art collective, combining the whimsy and chops of a Brian Ralph with the weirdness and choppiness of a Brian Chippendale or a Jim Drain. And in this little book, he's created a minor sequential-art masterpiece. This nearly wordless, black-and-white collection of short adventure stories, in which a variety of monstrous, faceless creatures explore their respective environments with alternately hilarious and frightening results, recalls Jim Woodring's Frank stories in its deft use of scary-funny black humor and unexpected surprises. But it eschews Woodring's familiar funny-animal tropes for something new, eerie, and original. The art, which simultaneously possesses the starkness of woodcuts and the manic detail of the '60s undergrounds, quite simply looks like a transmission from Another Place.