Joshua Malbin

Four books this week, all of which I liked to varying degrees. None I have very deep feelings about. So I’ll run through all four real quick because I think they’re worth checking out, and anyway they kind of remind me of each other.

The Girl Who Owned a City is a graphic adaptation of the classic YA novel from the 1970s by O.T. Nelson, adapted here by Dan Jolley, Joelle Jones, and Jenn Manley Lee. It’s set in a near-future apocalypse following a worldwide pandemic that killed everyone over age 12. The kids left behind try to organize themselves to survive, and predictably they do a pretty bad job of it.

Our hero is a girl of around 11 who bands together all of the kids in her neighborhood to create a self-sufficient, defensible community in an abandoned school. Jones and Lee’s art is excellent and the story moves along snappily enough, but honestly a lot of the amusement comes from the fact that this is supposed to be Atlas Shrugged for kids, and therefore the heroine can’t just run her little community, she has to own it, and make moving speeches about moochers coming to steal what she built. There’s weird comedy in the fact that O.T. Nelson made a junior Jane Galt who’s going to run straight into a virus in about a year and die, and that doesn’t seem to bother him.

In fact, if everyone dies before they reach childbearing age, our junior Jane Galt owns the last city that will ever exist, since humanity will be extinct within a decade. Top that, Jamie Dimon.

Preview here.

Breathers, self-published by Justin Madson, takes place in a world living under the shadow of a pandemic considerably further along. Everyone knows that the air is poison, will kill you within minutes if you breathe it, so everyone has to wear a gas mask when he or she goes outside. Within that world Madson tells what the jacket copy calls “Short Cuts-style intersecting stories.”

I liked Breathers a lot—the most out of these four books—and there were moments of real intrigue as the various plot threads eventually came together. Only two things held it back from being truly great: 1) Madson’s drawing style is ethereal, stylized black and white that doesn’t convey facial expressions or body language well, especially with masks often covering most of his characters’ faces. The characters all look similar, which makes reading harder than it should be.

2) I would have liked his sci-fi world to have clearer real-world parallels. I thought Madson was going there with his description of a society ruled by fear of an invisible threat no individual can dare to confirm for himself. And he does begin to push in that direction with the Breathe Free movement, a forbidden ideology that claims the virus is a hoax. But I didn’t feel like he really paid that idea off as well as he might have. This might be a bit of a SPOILER, but the final message ends up being something like, “Trust scientists and the government,” which would be a sentiment I could actually get behind and a counterintuitive way to go. Unfortunately, the scientists in question were also conducting highly unethical experiments on children, which muddles the thematic message.

Preview here.

In Deadenders the end of the world came not through a virus but through an unexplained Cataclysm, almost as if Ed Brubaker didn’t care how the world ended, he just wanted to get it over with so he could play in the rubble. It’s funny, I thought that Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips had come up with something totally fresh last year with their noir reimagining of Archie comics The Last of the Innocent. I didn’t realize that Ed Brubaker already did a post-apocalyptic  Archie ten years ago. It’s a fun shaggy dog story, but I imagine if it were launched now they’d do it as a limited-run series and have much tighter plotting.

Picket Line concerns another kind of crisis: the destruction of a beloved ancient forest by a rapacious developer. Not an apocalypse, quite, but to the insular community near it, it does feel like the end of the world, and for much of the book volcanic annihilation also threatens. And it’s also self-published book by author Breena Wiederhoeft.

The story is told through the eyes of a young woman who drifts into town trying to find herself and gets hired by a landscaping company. But its central and most interesting character is her boss, Rex. He takes a contract with the developer to maintain the grounds of a hunting lodge in the forest, but he does so hoping to find a way to convince the man to change his plans. His wife cheats on him with the developer and meanwhile he’s trying to broker a reconciliation between his daughter and her estranged husband, both of whom work for his business.

The trouble is, I’m fairly sure Wiederhoeft doesn’t quite realize that Rex is her central character, the one with the most interesting conflict to explore. We drift around the action with our point-of-view character, whose own motivations are comparatively very weak.

Unsurprisingly, that character’s biography closely mirrors Wiederhoeft’s, and I wonder whether she fell into a trap I have fallen into too often myself: writing a character based on me and then assuming his motivations would be obvious to the reader because they were obvious to me. I knew why the character was acting that way.

Anyway, just as an interesting contrast, Wiederhoeft’s art is in many ways far cruder than Madson’s, generally close to the web comics she usually draws. But she handles those crude figures much more adroitly. Their simple faces are alive with expression, and she tags each character with recognizable features (sometimes something as simple as a hat) so that the reader knows who’s who before having to think about it.

PDF preview here.

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Something a little different this week: I could use advice from all of you. As we authors do, I am always sending out query letters to agents, and a recent one got me back the usual request to see the first 50 pages plus the request to send “an annotated list of the competition you see for your book and why you think yours is unique.” As far as competition goes, my guess is that Soap and Water is most like literary visions of a fallen America like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, J.G. Ballard’s The Drought, or Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, but really this is a hard question to answer for oneself, so I thought I would put it to you all. Any ideas for what my competition might be or how I might beat ‘em?

Also audio thru chapter 39 is now up on the Soap and Water page.

http://joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water/

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The last book of Guy Delisle’s I reviewed was about his time in Burma, and when I wrote about it I had mixed feelings about his customary form, which is to string together four- to eight-page travel vignettes almost exclusively focused on his day-to-day experiences, using what he sees or hears as an opening to discuss some broader phenomenon about the culture he’s visiting. His stance is always that of a sincerely interested, naive tourist rather than a journalist, and I felt that it simultaneously  showed too much humility (in that he declined to speak for Burma) and not enough (in that he also gave space to things like his problems with air conditioning).

On the whole, though, I liked Burma Chronicles. I just wanted even more about the country. It was a closed, mysterious society and I was curious.

I came to his new book Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City with exactly the opposite predisposition. Few countries on earth receive as much consistent media attention as Israel, and its history and conflicts have already been the subject of countless books, including graphic works by some of my favorite (Joe Sacco) and least favorite (Sarah Glidden) comic book authors. I had no curiosity left about it.

As it turns out, that makes it the perfect subject for Delisle’s interested tourist routine, in part because he is a keen observer of details it turned out I had never seen before. Rather than dramatize big injustices, like Sacco, or grapple with the whole arc of modern Israeli history, like Glidden, he focuses on small ironies and oddities.

When he visits Hebron, for example, he does discuss the ongoing conflict between settlers and Palestinian residents, but does so by remarking that there are certain streets Palestinians cannot use, and that the one they can use that runs next to settlers’ homes has been roofed with netting to catch the garbage settlers try to throw down from their windows. He visits a settlement near where he’s living in East Jerusalem and notes that many Arab Christians are living there, attracted by the cheap rent. “It’s like we’re resettling the settlements!” laughs his host.

Overall, then, he presents a picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of its effect on daily life, both in Israel and in the West Bank, which turns out to be fascinating and darkly funny. (He is never able to get permission to visit Gaza, and he guesses that the Israeli official who denies that permission does so because he thinks Delisle is Sacco.)

Three elements stuck out for me in particular.

First, his year in Israel overlapped with Operation Cast Lead, and he does an incredible job of describing the surreality of going about his daily routine while a war takes place just a short drive away. One striking sequence has him and a friend at the beach, watching fighter jets go past en route to Gaza.

Second, the wall encircling Palestinians in the West Bank. He talks about it only occasionally, but is always trying to sketch it, and it shows up constantly in his descriptions of other events. It hangs over everything else silently, just as he must have experienced it.

Third, Delisle is fair-minded, and makes a point to present what he sees as the best aspects of Israeli society. Specifically he points out that the Israelis can be more critical of their government or of Israeli extremists than any American media outlet would ever dare to be.

On December 4, settlers occupying a building in central Hebron were evacuated by the Israeli army. The settlers put up a fierce fight, and six soldiers were injured during the operation. Other settlers responded with violent attacks on Arab families, all under the eyes of journalists. The story made the front page of the papers. The vast majority of Israelis vigorously disapprove of the extreme behavior of the Hebron settlers. In a statement following these incidents, Ehud Olmert spoke of “pogroms” perpetrated by Jews against Arabs. Harsh words, deliberately used by the prime minister to make an impression.

…

Elsewhere you might think twice before accusing Jews of carrying out pogroms… In Israel, it’s not an issue.

Delisle is interested in Israel in all its diversity. He visits the Samaritans, the Armenian Church, a Bedouin village, the Dome of the Rock. He tours an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. He even goes on a propaganda bus tour organized by a pro-settler group. In the end it is clear where his sympathies lie, and above all who he sees as villains. But the personal travelogue format allows him to be fair about all he does experience without having to throw in a lot of caveats about all he doesn’t, and I felt like he showed me a great many new things about a subject I’d thought I was sick of.

PDF preview here.

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I know it’s cliche to think things like, “Can you believe people still love the Odyssey after 2700 years,” it’s a bit like becoming enraptured with your hand when you’re stoned. Nevertheless, it is marvelous to contemplate the structure and evolution of the human hand after smoking pot (I have heard), and it is remarkable that the Odyssey remains a great read in 2012.

That awe leads many writers to want to borrow prestige from timeless works—itself a time-honored tradition upheld by James Joyce and the Coen brothers, among many others. Gerry Duggan and Phil Noto join the tradition with The Infinite Horizon, a graphic Odyssey set in a near-future dystopia where undefined wars have left the world in anarchy. Our Odysseus (unnamed) starts his journey home from Syria, where the U.S. is pulling out of its final war; his Penelope, actually named Penelope, is home with their son “Terry” in upstate New York, trying to hold their farm against waves of refugees from the city. (Oddly they’re in the Catskills and not Ithaca. Maybe Ithaca would have been too on the nose.) Odysseus slowly makes his way home, fighting past a pirate attack, the Cyclops, the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens, and I think Scylla and Charybdis.

All of this is good adventure sci-fi, and the art is several notches above average. It’s also fun to play the game of identifying which episode of the Odyssey we’re on now.

But there’s a cost to borrowing prestige from a classic like the Odyssey: it raises the reader’s expectations. When you borrow perhaps the greatest adventure story in world literature, readers will expect a great adventure as a matter of course—plus something more. After all, I could always read the Odyssey; I need an additional reason to read this new version of it. What does this version tell me about my world that the original doesn’t? Or, another option: what does this version tell me about the Odyssey that I might otherwise miss?

In other words, why are you retelling the Odyssey?

Actually, that’s a question you could ask of any work that draws on or refers to sources it wants the reader or viewer to recognize. For example, O Brother, Where Art Thou? answers well and A Serious Man doesn’t, and that accounts for about 80 percent of why the former is a better movie.

As good as The Infinite Horizon is at spinning a yarn, its answer is essentially nonexistent. As a result it’s emptier at the end than I wanted as I was reading it. That’s too bad, because the idea of using the Odyssey as a template to write about a returning American soldier is a timely one, given the struggles of our real-life returning soldiers, and I would have liked to see something more meaningful done with it.

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I’ve got a new story linked on the story page, a form for you to fill out. Don’t skip any questions or your application will be discarded.

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It occurs to me that not everyone follows me on Facebook or Twitter, so I should mention this here too: a couple weeks back Richard Fulco asked me to write something for his blog about music in Soap and Water, so I did, and here it is. It was fun to write and is about how Merle Haggard is a big, awesome asshole.

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I know I regularly inveigh against the proliferation of memoirs, but I’m going to praise a memoir today. In fact, I’m even going to say I hope budding memoirists follow Derf Backderf’s example. If we must have all these memoirs, we might as well have ones that know their place.

In My Friend Dahmer Backderf keeps himself squarely in the background. He’s telling the story of his high-school years, yes, but he knows that the only reason readers might care about those years is that he went to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer. He keeps his focus on Dahmer, therefore, even following him into solo scenes, reconstructing his habits and home life from later interviews Dahmer gave. He himself—Backderf—only appears when his life intersects Dahmer’s.

This may seem like a simple thing, but imagine how easy it would have been for a memoirist to do it the other way around, to stick to his own perspective and only describe the moments of Dahmer’s life that touched on his. Not just easy, common. I’d wager that 90 percent of memoirists would have gone that way, and their decision might be defended as a form of journalistic integrity, but really it would come across as narcissism and a lack of imagination. What Backderf has done instead is much more respectful of the reader, and much more compelling.

Partly that’s because even in high school, Jeffrey Dahmer was fascinatingly fucked up. His parents were in the midst of a bitter divorce, his mother suffered from some kind of paranoid delusional thing and was heavily medicated, and he’d already started the serial killer pattern of hacking up roadkill to see what was inside. In school he mimicked the tics and slurred speech of a person with cerebral palsy, and his weird behavior made him a sort of mascot for Backderf and his friends. To keep a lid on his necrophiliac urges he kept himself permanently drunk, including at school, and Backderf asks how all the adults in his life could have ignored his obviously nutty behavior and failed to get him psychiatric attention.

I think that’s probably an unfair question. I’m perfectly willing to let Backderf and his friends off the hook when he points out that:

You never ‘narced’ on a classmate. It simply wasn’t done. Besides, my friends and I, we were just clueless small-town kids wrapped up in our own lives.

I think he should let the adults off the hook a bit too. They should have noticed and tried to do something about Dahmer’s alcoholism, sure, but I can’t believe that getting him attention for that would have been very likely to uncover his deeper problems. Maybe it would have. In any case, Backderf certainly makes it easy to understand how people can ignore and rationalize weird behavior—and frankly much of the time, the 90 percent of the time you’re not dealing with someone dangerous, that might be the right way to react.

But in asking “Where were the adults?” Backderf is at least following through on the best thing about My Friend Dahmer: he treats Jeffrey Dahmer as a human being. Which doesn’t mean he excuses him, of course. Treating him like a human being means treating him as a being at least theoretically capable of moral judgment. He writes in the preface:

This is a tragic tale… It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent. Once Dahmer kills however … my sympathy for him ends. He could have turned himself in after that first murder. He could have put a gun to his head. Instead he, and he alone, chose to become a serial killer and spread misery to countless people.

Up to that moment when Dahmer kills, Backderf tries to understand him. He shows Dahmer struggling with desires he doesn’t want to have, and slowly losing the struggle. I’m not sure there’s a deeper lesson to that. It’s probably just rubbernecking. But Backderf gives us a hell of a car crash to stare at.

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Hunter S. Thompson is sort of like Ernest Hemingway or Jack Kerouac: his voice is so strong and unmistakable that when you immerse yourself in his writing, you have to work hard to avoid becoming just another acolyte. Look what’s happened to Johnny Depp. He played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, became such a devotee that he got The Rum Diary made, and according to the foreword to Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson, he is now trying to get The Curse of Lono turned into a movie too.

That foreword is written by Alan Rinzler, one of Thompson’s many editors and collaborators over the years, and it’s an unforgiving, fascinating piece of writing. I have heard at least one other interview with an editor of Thompson’s (John A. Walsh), and the picture of him that emerges is pretty consistent: he was capable of brilliant writing, but he was also an alcoholic, an addict, and an incredibly difficult human being to deal with. His collaborators miss his talent but aren’t surprised he killed himself, and didn’t necessarily feel close to him personally.

So here’s a man who inserted himself into his journalism, and wrote about himself and his opinions extensively, in a way that bewitches readers into wanting to be like him, but in a way that also doesn’t square with the accounts of those who worked with him. Is the heroic drug use in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas less heroic if you know that his immoderation eventually killed him? Is his relentless pursuit of Nixon in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 less compeling when you know what a political crank he became in later years?

I give Gonzo credit for at least raising these questions. Writer Will Bingley wants to put Thompson’s life into context, and you can see him fighting to do it page by page, to convey Thompson’s irresistible appeal while at the same time making sure we understand that the binge of Las Vegas came after months and months of struggling and failing to report on the Chicano Pride movement in East L.A., and his partner in crime in Las Vegas, Oscar Acosta, was his main contact and friend there. Many times (as with this example) he succeeds.

He also happens to know how to write for the comic book page, and so keeps his text spare, giving Anthony Hope-Smith’s excellent art room to breathe. Hope-Smith never catches his figures straight on, preferring to draw them from slightly above or below, and he uses those changing angles to create dynamism and a sense of unbalance even in scenes where Thompson is sitting still.

But it was in examining these drawings that I first began to understand what was bugging me about Gonzo.

See, Hope-Smith’s drawing of Hunter S. Thompson is preceded by two massively famous, cartoon Thompson avatars: Uncle Duke and Spider Jerusalem. It’s impossible to look at Hope-Smith’s drawings of Hunter S. Thompson and not think of how Garry Trudeau and Darick Robertson drew him. Similarly, it’s impossible to read Bingley’s words and not think of the cartoon version of Hunter S. Thompson the man created for himself.

All those cartoon versions are simply way, way more fun than Gonzo‘s straight-ahead truth. The book would have been better served not trying to compete with them. I’m imagining a drawn version of an older Thompson, during his waning, struggling years, or even a younger Thompson, during the formative time in Puerto Rico that he novelized as The Rum Diary. Gonzo does give some pages to each, but it devotes the bulk of its attention to Thompson’s most creatively fertile years, his peak from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. That’s exactly the Thompson we already know intimately, and no matter how Bingley fights to give us a fresh perspective it can’t help but feel a little familiar.

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Brian K. Vaughan is an unusual case in the modern comic-book world. He’s one of a very small number of creators beloved by both mainstream readers and what I guess we could call “literary” comic book types, someone who’s had commercial success pursuing his own vision, using no one else’s superheroes. Roughly speaking the generation before his had five guys like that (the British big five: Moore, Ennis, Ellis, Morrison, and Gaiman), while this one has only three: Brian K. Vaughan, Bill Willingham, and Brian Wood. Willingham and Wood both have ongoing titles, but ever since Ex Machina ended, about 18 months ago, we’ve all been waiting for what Vaughan would do next.

The immodestly-named Saga is what, and I’m pretty excited about it. Where both of his previous big projects (Ex Machina and Y: The Last Man) were constrained at least a little by their ties to the real world, Saga is a leap into pure fabulism. There are warring clans on faraway planets, clashes between magicians and TV-headed robots, and a baby born to parents from enemy sides. In that broad sense it’s a bit stitched together using off-the-shelf sci-fi tropes, but the specifics, and the way Vaughan handles them, feel original and specific.

Part of that can be attributed to artist Fiona Staples, in particular her character design, and part of it to the controlled way Vaughan doles out information in this opening issue. He knows enough to highlight the elements that are original rather than the many borrowed from convention.

I was never as big a fan of Y: The Last Man as some, and as I wrote in my wrap-up review, I appreciated Ex Machina more as a reflection of New York than as a well-controlled complete story. Both titles started strong and then lost focus, so it’s hard not to be apprehensive that the same could happen to Saga. Nevertheless, it is starting quite strong, in many ways stronger than either of the last two. Again, I partly credit Fiona Staples, whose art is miles better than Pia Guerra’s (Y) and considerably better than Tony Harris’s (Ex Machina). Better art makes a richer world.

One little bonus: by the standards of the current market Saga #1 is cheap, $2.99 for 64 pages with no ads. Image is making it as easy as they can for you to check it out, and I recommend you take them up on it when the second printing hits stores tomorrow.

Short preview here.

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A whole bunch of comics have been piling up in my office, eying me, giving me guilt trips about not writing their reviews. So let me just plow through a few of them in capsule.

Goliath has a solid concept: Goliath doesn’t actually want to fight. He’s tricked into it by his captain, who has sold the Philistine king on the idea of ending the war with the Israelites by menacing them with a champion they dare not face. And it’s good for some solid laughs, especially in the beginning.

But author Tom Gauld doesn’t account enough for the fact that we all know how the story ends, so there’s no suspense, and in the absence of suspense he needs to work harder to keep things entertaining. Goliath sits around and does nothing waiting for the Israelites to respond to his challenge, and, um, that’s a little boring? The Goliath story offers so many juicy thematic possibilities, and as far as I can tell he doesn’t pick them up. The whole book never advances beyond its concept.

PDF preview here.

Belgian author/artist Hermann shows why he’s a comic-book legend in Europe with Afrika, first published in 2007 but newly translated into English for Dark Horse. It’s an impeccably told, beautifully painted tale about a park ranger and reporter in Africa who accidentally witness a government massacre and must go on the run.

Well-told, beautifully painted—and yet kind of anachronistic. Even for a Belgian born in 1938, 2007 seems too late to still be telling stories about white heroes against an African backdrop. That feels like something we were doing in 1967 and should have outgrown by now.

Preview here.

You’d think the story of a young girl’s perspective on the fall of Communism in 1980s Poland would be pretty gripping, right? It should have been, but about two-thirds of Marzi needed to be edited out. It seems like memoirist Marzena Sowa included every single last little detail she could remember about her childhood, and while some of these could have served to establish an atmosphere, all of them together crush her story under the weight of their triviality. I was angry at this book when I first got it, for having so little regard for its audience’s experience; now I just think of it as a wasted opportunity by a first-time author with a great personal story to tell and no editor to help her tell it well.

I’ve discussed why I don’t think comics translate to movies nearly as well as people expect them to; The Blue Dragon is an object lesson in how you can’t just translate any old dialogue to the comic book page either. Robert Lepage is apparently some kind of  theater deity in Canada, but his talky dialogue just sits there, completely static and clunky, when it’s packed into comic book panels and dialogue bubbles, even though Fred Jourdain’s watercolor art is breathtakingly gorgeous. Too gorgeous, in fact, to pay attention to characters’ facial expressions. Play dialogue is designed for audiences that can’t see faces, but it seems perverse to translate that limitation to comics.

So far, rather than trying to continue the meta-story of the original Bulletproof Coffin limited series, in The Bulletproof Coffin Disinterred David Hine and Shaky Kane seem happy to tell weird little tales patterned on forgotten genres from the 1950s. Since said tales are so far a blast, I’m going with it.

When Ted McKeever’s last series META4 launched, I had no idea where it was going and remained in the dark right up until the end, when it made a half turn and became one of my favorite comics of 2011. Mondo is starting more conventionally (which says something about McKeever, given that it’s about a radioactive superchicken/man), and now more than ever I’m willing to hang on and see what he has in mind.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, whose work I’ve loved in Criminal and liked okay in Incognito, take their signature noir style over to horror with Fatale. I haven’t figured it out yet, to be honest, and I think I’d recommend waiting for the trade to see if they can pull it all together in the end. There are multiple threads of story from different eras, and three issues in it’s still not at all clear how they relate to one another.

Another where I’d wait for the trade, fortunately due out in just a couple of weeks!—not because Terry Moore is unclear at all about what he’s doing but because he takes awhile to unfold his plot. But that plot is engrossing and hardly anyone does facial expression better. In fact, aspiring comic artists must check out his recent one-shots How to Draw Women and How to Draw Expressions (both available through his store, click on “Related Books”). Both give indispensable advice in areas where comics are too often lacking.

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