Joshua Malbin

I’ve wondered what Joe Sacco was doing with himself recently. He hasn’t published a major work since Safe Area Gorazde in 2000, and not even any new minor work since The Fixer in 2003. Well, now I know: for the last eight years he’s been working on Footnotes in Gaza, the most important comic of 2009 or 2010. (Depending on how you count it. It’s listed with a publication date of December 2009, but I’ve only seen it in stores beginning two weeks ago.)

Back in 2002, during the lead-up to the Iraq war and in its earliest days, Joe Sacco was in the southernmost part of Gaza, close to the Egyptian border, interviewing survivors of two events from the war between Israel and Egypt in 1956. One of these, as reported by survivors, was a simple massacre: many of the men in a town and adjoining refugee camp were lined up and shot. The second is more complicated. Israeli soldiers gathered all the men in a second town and refugee camp and selected those they thought were fighting for Egypt to be bussed to a prison. During the course of the day some men were shot for not following orders or beaten to death.

Interwoven with these accounts are Sacco’s observations of life in Gaza as he travels around those refugee camps conducting interviews with old survivors. It’s a sad, cramped place whose residents are not only angry at Israel, for shooting at them and bulldozing their homes, but also at the Palestinian Authority, for selling them out, and often at Hamas and other militants for attracting Israeli guns, tanks, and rockets to their neighborhoods. (2002, remember, was considerably before the Bush administration egged the Palestinian Authority into the armed conflict with Hamas that lost them all control over Gaza.) We see the same neighborhoods in their 1956 incarnations, as fairly new UN refugee camps, and in their much more built-up and crowded 2002 aspects, filled with teenagers who have never lived in a normal place and have nothing to do but follow Sacco around and make trouble.

There is nothing intrinsically important about the two events that have drawn Sacco’s attention. They are two small war crimes in a 50-year war full of crimes on both sides. But consciously or not, by reconstructing events from eyewitness testimony Sacco echoes every Holocaust documentary since and most especially including Shoah. It is jarring to see young Jews, some of them surely child Holocaust survivors or the children of survivors, conducting roundups and lining up men against walls barely ten years after World War II.

There is no way a book like this could avoid being an accusation against the state of Israel, though Sacco does include un-cartooned interviews and documents in appendices to provide Israeli perspectives on the past and current events he depicts. And there is perhaps no way to recommend it as strongly as I would like to without taking part in that accusation. But my own reaction, for what it’s worth, was closest to the perspective of John Sayles’ Men with Guns: it’s true that there are two sides to any conflict, but they aren’t the two sides fighting, they are the men with guns and the people without. All young men grouped and trained to kill are monsters.

Preview here.

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I didn’t think so much of the last Warren Ellis alternate sci-fi history I wrote about, Ministry of Space, so I’m happy to report that the new collected trade paperback of Ignition City is a whole lot better. Where Ministry of Space let its business be telling its alternate sci-fi history, Ignition City leaves that alternate history in the background to tell a character-based story.

This time it’s the mid-1950s, and the people of Earth have had regular flights into space and contact with aliens from Mars and Venus for years. That contact hasn’t gone so well, though, so all the governments of Earth have one by one suspended space flight, leaving only one spaceport operating, a government-free island called Ignition City. There live the inveterate spaceboys and spacegirls who went up in the early days and can’t get anyone to take them back—and there’s where Mary Raven, a young spacegirl herself, has to go to reclaim her just-deceased father’s things. It’s a straightforward, hoary tale of a new sheriff coming to spacetown, but well told.

No previews, but you can see samples of the artwork at the Flickr page.

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Via Unfogged, Axe Cop is “written by a 5-year-old and illustrated by his 29-year-old brother.”

And it is awesome.

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I believe when last I wrote about David Lapham, I was raving about the close of his underappreciated surrealistic series Young Liars. Now he’s back with something equally weird but more along the lines of mythic allegory than surrealism.

Sparta, USA is a town of just under 10,000. It has a dozen major league pro football teams and 30 minor league ones. In Sparta, explains the advertising blurb, “they believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through treachery, blackmail and murder – just like the Maestro taught them as he learned it from the U.S. President.”

Or as David Lapham himself described it:

An isolated town filled with young people and with the veneer of normalcy, but underneath they’re all being taught to kill each other.  Why?  Where are they?  Why are they all young?  And why is there a big red guy and a big blue guy walking around without everyone pointing and screaming?

Look, nobody said it was a subtle allegory. But there are yetis.

It’s a limited series, so they’ll wrap the whole story in six issues. The art’s nothing special but, you know, whacked-out political allegory and yetis. C’mon.

UPDATE: I don’t know why I was rattling on about yetis. They’re barely in the story and I don’t actually care about yetis.

Preview below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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The last issue of the first Kick-Ass story arc just came out, and since the movie release is only three months away, it’s worth looking back over the book’s first two years (yes, only eight issues in almost two years) to try to figure out why this story I loved so much at first went off the rails.

The premise was fantastic: a nerdy kid with no training or special abilities decides to put on a costume and go out and fight crime. In his first real altercation he foils a mugging, taking on three guys at once. He also gets beaten so badly he ends up in the hospital. But someone records the fight on a cell phone, uploads it to YouTube, and Kick-Ass the superhero becomes a national sensation. Of course in his secret-identity life, in which he still goes to high school with his costume on under his clothes, he’s busy pretending to be gay so that girls will deign to talk to him.

I thought this would be a story that took the desire to be special seriously, and let the kid be special in a real way, in a real world. (See, for example, the true story of Master Legend, a guy who lives in Orlando, dresses up in a superhero costume, and goes out to fight crime. He also rustles up donations of supplies for the homeless, launches a campaign to educate them about a staph epidemic, and helps force the state government to relocate endangered gopher tortoises out of the path of a freeway. He is simultaneously ludicrous and, in a deep sense, a hero.)

But instead Mark Millar ended up using his fake superhero as a backdoor into a plot involving real superheroes, a Punisher-type character and his ninja ten-year-old daughter. As soon as they made their entrance the tone shifted and we got several straight issues of slapstick violence, culminating in this issue 8 bloodbath. (There’s an onomatopoetic joke involving shooting a guy’s penis off and then splitting his head with a cleaver, for instance.) Maybe I should have known Millar’s intentions didn’t lie in the direction I wanted from the tag line on the cover of issue 2: “Sickening Violence…Just The Way You Like It!”

From the previews it looks like Kick-Ass the movie follows the comic’s storyline pretty closely. For once I wish the screenwriters who wrote the adaptation had decided to diverge more. I don’t think Mark Millar would have cared—Wanted the movie had only the vaguest of resemblances to Wanted the comic book.

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I’m in the comic-book store today, because Wednesday is new comic day, and this kid of about thirteen or fourteen comes in with his dad. I’ve seen him there a few times before. He has Asperger’s or something: can’t modulate the tone of his voice, is totally obsessed with a specific subject (in this case, comics), seems oblivious to other people’s reactions to him. He strides inside confidently and announces that Batman and Robin is the only good comic out this week, everything else is crap.

He’s carrying a pole about five feet long with some kind of yellow mechanism at the end he’s holding topmost. I see it, assume it’s a piece of merchandising for some movie or comic franchise I don’t know, and don’t remark on it much further than that. The store owner banters with him and his dad a little about comics and whatnot, and finally asks him, “So what’s that you’ve got there?”

“This?” the kid declares, holding his pole aloft. “You might call it a mop handle, but in fact it’s my staff of all cool things that are awesome!”

Top that, Barack.

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Several of the volumes of Rex Mundi now have been careful to point out, on their back covers, that the comic predates The Da Vinci Code. The latest and last, Rex Mundi: Gate of God is no exception. It is true, but they were both beaten hollow by Foucault’s Pendulum a good fifteen years earlier, which made merciless fun of the conspiricizing they both take so seriously.

For those who aren’t familiar with the story so far, it’s far more inventive than Dan Brown’s, which seems to be a pretty straightforward mystery based on other people’s conspiracy theories. (From what I know of it. I haven’t read Dan Brown and don’t plan to.) Rather than setting his conspiracy about the bloodline of Jesus in the modern Catholic Church, Arvid Nelson constructed an entire alternate world in which the Reformation and the French Revolution both failed. The setting is France in the 1930s, still ruled by the monarchy, in a Europe where the Catholic Church (and its Inquisition) are still major political forces. Also, magic works.

It started out highly promising, with political and mystical forces all at work together in a major mystery whose surface the main character, Dr. Julien Sauniere, is only beginning to scratch. I was puzzled by the fact that France devolves into Nazism around book 3 or 4, setting off a war more similar to World War I than II—does Nelson mean to imply that Nazism was historically inevitable, even under vastly different political circumstances? And as the curtain was drawn back further and further on the central mysteries, I found myself disappointed by them.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. It’s always easier to hint at mysteries than reveal them.

Anyway, this last volume is entirely given to a final cataclysmic confrontation between good guy and bad guy, with the help of some pretty silly magic wine and a collapsing castle. It’s satisfying in a formal way. Thematically, it’s supposed to have something to do with Baha’i prophecy, apparently, but I wasn’t really sure what to make of that.

Preview of book 1 here.

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At first I thought The Unwritten was okay, nothing special. A cute little metafictional story about Tommy Taylor, a guy who may or may not be the incarnation of the main character in his vanished father’s fantasy novels. This failed to grab me in part because those fantasy novels seemed to be a lamer version of Harry Potter crossed with the Hardy Boys, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to notice how dumb they were.

A few issues in, though, it becomes quite clear that Mike Carey and Peter Gross know exactly what they’re doing. A group of writers meets in the house where Frankenstein was conceived, and after a few pages to remind us of the power of Mary Shelley’s work, we meet her literary heirs:

I’m Sonia Taft, creator of vampire detective Medley Silver. Sexy undead chick solves crimes in the big city. It’s noir fusion.

I’m Simon Grove. I write cosmic metaphysical horror. Most of my work comes from the Lovecraft estate. I’m finishing off three novels that he left in note form.

My name is Lauren Sedgwick, but I write as Lauren Snow. I’m just finishing a big magic realist psycho-gothic epic. Umm–not yet commissioned.

‘The name’s Bond, James Bond.’ Nah, I’m Stanley Jardine. I do post-modern, self-referential slasher horror. Lots of blood, but–you know, played for laughs.

I’m James Mortenson, and since you’re thinking it, I’m happy to say it. I write torture porn, which is horror unencumbered by the demands of plot or character. The real deal.

Later, the group is hunted through the house by a scythe-wielding maniac. “It does no good to run,” he declares.

And it does no good to hide. But I know what it’s like, your brain shuts down, and you follow your instincts. Or at least you think you do. But you know what you’re really doing? When you flee through the night, or crawl into your little bolthole? You know what’s really guiding you? Controlling you? Pushing you on? Genre conventions.

That last line is delivered after he cuts in two a woman hiding behind a curtain, which is of course two references in one: horror movies and Hamlet.

And then Tommy Taylor isn’t even in the last issue. It’s all told from the point of view of Rudyard Kipling, who explains how the shadowy conspiracy that sent forth the scythe killer made him a literary success for their own reasons, and how he ultimately rebelled by writing the Just So Stories. For which they destroyed his family.

In other words, The Unwritten appears to be genuinely interested in the power of narratives to shape the real world as well as their fictional one. This could be one of the many cases where authors promise more depth than they can deliver. But at least Carey and Gross have the ambition to make the promise.

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I included some series that began in the late 1990s if most of their run occurred in the 2000s.

Honorary Mentions: La Perdida, Incognegro, Loveless, Persepolis, Dogs and Water.

10. Fables by Bill Willingham.

Fairy tale characters have been evicted from their Homelands by a relentless Adversary and must get by on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at least until they figure out how to fight back. Fun as hell.

9. Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming.

I’m including Oeming (the artist) here because Powers, the story of an ex-superhero cop and his partner trying to police supervillains, mainly makes my list on the strength of its page layouts. The scripts, included in many of the trade paperbacks, show that Bendis described those layouts in great detail, but Oeming realized them.

8. Berlin by Jason Lutes.

It’s the late 1920s, before the Nazis take over, with Brownshirts and Communists fighting in the streets. The book is beautifully drawn and written, if a little slow. I just wish he’d actually publish it more than occasionally.

7. The Goon by Eric Powell.

A comedic cross between zombie and crime fiction, early issues of The Goon feature such unforgettable concepts as a mule prostitute and “fish squeezin’s.” If Powell had kept up the insane energy of the first fifteen issues, I’d probably have this even higher, but the last dozen or so have been disappointingly serious.

6. DMZ by Brian Wood.

Another one that could be higher on the list if it hadn’t declined a little recently. The Iraq War has precipitated the United States into another civil war, and the two opposing armies face each other uneasily across New York Harbor, the rump United States in Brooklyn, the Free Staters in New Jersey. In the middle is the DMZ of Manhattan, and from there junior journalist Matty Roth files his reports.

5. Queen & Country by Greg Rucka.

In the late 1970s, the British network ITV ran a series called The Sandbaggers, a spy show that mostly took place in the headquarters office building and dealt with bureaucratic headaches but was nonetheless totally gripping. Greg Rucka revived the concept for Queen & Country, though he put in a bit more action and centered the story on one of the field agents rather than the Director of Operations. Still gripping.

4. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore.

It’s a concept so perfect and obvious you can’t believe no one ever thought of it before: assemble the greatest heroes of 19th-century popular fiction into a steampunk SuperFriends. The first two volumes were excellent, though Moore’s attempts to extend the idea into the 20th century have so far felt a tiny bit strained.

3. Rex Libris by James Turner.

From my review of Vol. 2: “Rex is a 2,000-year-old librarian at the Middleton Public Library, the greatest library since the the burning of the Library of Alexandria, where Rex started his career. He is a member of Ordo Biblioteca, the secret international order of librarians charged with guarding human civilization, and Rex Libris the comic is his autobiography, published by minor comic magnate B. Barry Horst of Hermeneutic Press.”

2. Palestine by Joe Sacco.

Palestine was originally published in a series in the 1990s, but no one read it until it was collected in a trade hardcover in 2001, so I’m counting it. An examination of daily life in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli occupation, Sacco’s comic does the invaluable work of humanizing Palestinians for an American audience.

1. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.

Unquestionably the best of the decade and in the top five ever, Fun Home is also probably the smartest graphic novel or comic book I’ve ever read. Not only is the writing erudite and richly layered—Bechdel uses Proust and Joyce to navigate her way through her own history, retelling the same episodes over and over in light of new understanding (something like the protagonist in The Good Soldier)—the art is incredibly careful and sophisticated.

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I’ve hesitated to review Pictures That Tick, a reissue from Dark Horse Books of Dave McKean’s short comic collection, originally published by Spiegel Fine Arts in 2001. The original became a collector’s item, selling for as much as $500 for a first edition.

McKean is best known for painting all those stunning Sandman covers that were inevitably better than the plodding emo stories inside, and Pictures That Tick shows him stretching his creative wings. The art is amazing, miles beyond what most comic book creators can dream of doing. He often works in collage, combining painting, photographs, drawing, and typography in ways that seem descended from Marcel Duchamp or Hannah Höch.

But, and this is embarrassing to admit, a lot of the time I feel like I’m just not getting it. I’ve mostly decided to think of these as comic poems rather than stories, because that way I don’t have to worry about puzzling out the full sense of the narratives in a literal sense. And that, I suppose, is how I would recommend taking them.

With the critical vocabulary I’ve learned for poetry I have ways to describe when work is ill-formed, sentimental crap or finely balanced, careful, and beautiful. Unfortunately, I don’t have a similar critical vocabulary for comic book poetry, so I can’t really do the same here. Various parts of it strike me each of those ways. I recommend picking up in a store and flipping through to see what you think yourself.

A few isolated pages below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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