A few months ago I read this awesome article on the civil rights struggle by Hamden Rice (h/t ABL):

It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea.  Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them.

And it is true that when the civil rights movement is taught and discussed today, the talk often focuses on legal markers of discrimination: housing, employment, the right to vote, school segregation. But Rice reminds us that civil rights leaders deliberately picked these fights not just because they were important in themselves but because they provoked racists into making visible the terrorist violence they were accustomed to carrying out in secret. It can seem borderline insane to risk serious beating over a seat on the bus or service at a lunch counter unless you remember that the violence was the point, not a byproduct.

They told us: — whatever you are most afraid of doing vis a vis white people, go do it.  Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.

Go ahead sit at that lunch counter.  Sue the local school board.  All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.

If we do it all together, we’ll be OK.

They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn’t that bad.  They taught black people how to take a beating — from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses.  They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating.

…

Please let this sink in.  It wasn’t marches or speeches.  It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free.

That threat of violence hangs over every interaction in The Silence of Our Friends, lending weight to its local story of a small civil rights skirmish. When author Mark Long was young, his father Jack covered the “race” beat for a TV station in Houston. On that beat he made friends with Larry Thomas, a professor at Texas Southern University (what today we would call a “historically black university,” and then was simply a black university), and an organizer in protests to get SNCC recognized as a campus group.

The book enters into each man’s family life, shows them beginning to approach each other in friendship. Then Thomas’s daughter is hit by a pickup—very likely deliberately—and SNCC calls a protest to close the avenue where it happened, a thoroughfare through a black neighborhood down which racists liked to ride at top speed, shouting racial insults. Cops move in on the protestors, and radical students in one of the dorms shoot at them. The cops open fire, one of them is killed by a ricochet from his own gun, and in the book’s climax, five students stand trial for his murder, with Thomas defending them and Long subpoenaed with his news footage as a key witness for the prosecution.

I don’t know how much of the actual dialogue Mark Long wrote as opposed to his coauthor Jim Demonakos. Understandably it tends to be better in the sequences showing Jack Long with his family than in those of Larry Thomas with his, and in most ways Jack Long is a richer, more nuanced character. He’s basically a good man but, for example, his functional alcoholism becomes a significant plot point.

Overall, though, it’s Nate Powell’s art that makes the book shine. In one scene, for example, Thomas takes his son down to Freeport to go crabbing. The first store where they stop refuses to sell him bait, insisting he go to the “colored store.” He starts to make a scene when another white man arrives with menace in his face, and Thomas retreats. Powell does a remarkable job of conveying that threat, and Thomas’s fear, with expressions and shading alone, and in the ensuing panels, when Thomas takes out his frustration on his kid, Powell shows his transition from anger to guilt without a word of dialogue.

Long and Demonakos put a great deal of trust in Powell’s ability to convey emotion and subtext in this way, without verbal description, and that trust is most richly deserved. Violence is rarely spoken of openly in The Silence of Our Friends; it is Powell’s art that does most of the work creating an ever-present feeling of threat and mistrust.

Check it out in a preview here.

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I wasn’t crazy about the previous volume of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ noir series Criminal. I noted in that review that for the first time they’d circled back to a main character; I didn’t say, but felt, that it sort of seemed like they were out of ideas in this vein and that was why they were going over old ground. But the latest volume, The Last of the Innocent, shows they had at least one more big idea: a noir reimagining of Archie.

Archie is grown now, and married to Veronica. That’s her on the cover, modeled after Sherilyn Fenn, according to Phillips. She’s cheating on him with Reggie. Jughead’s eating jags in high school were the product of his near-constant pot smoking, and now that he’s grown up he’s in a tenuous recovery. Moose is a well-meaning, slow-witted cop. Betty is still the girl next door, still the one Archie knows he should be with.

Of course, all these characters are copyrighted, so Brubaker has changed all their names, and Phillips only clues us in through flashback scenes drawn in that trademark Archie Comics style. It may please fans of the original to know Archie ends up with Betty in the end. Unfortunately for those fans, Brubaker quite deliberately sullies every scrap of Archie innocence to get there.

It’s a one-joke book, in other words. It just happens to be a really, really good joke, and Brubaker and Phillips fully commit to it. Good clean fun—with intrigue, addiction, loansharking, and murder, of course.

Small preview at Phillips’ site.

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#7 Amir, Zahra’s Paradise

Zahra’s Paradise begins on June 16, 2009, the day after one of the earliest and largest election protests in Freedom Square. Mehdi, a nineteen-year-old university student, was at that protest and hasn’t come home. His mother Zahra and his brother, the unnamed narrator, are worried about him and try to find out what’s happened. That’s it, but that basic motivation allows Amir and his artist collaborator Khalil to create a full portrait of the horror of daily life in Tehran during the repression that followed the protests.

#6 Fred Van Lente, Comic Book Comics

For a comic book buff it’s fascinating to read tidbits like the series of events that led from the Frankfurt School, to Fredric Wertham’s testimony before Congress, to the creation of the Comics Code Authority, to the death of EC Comics, to the birth of Mad magazine. Or how the increasing crackdown on drug paraphernalia in the early 1970s put head shops out of business and thereby killed the distribution network for underground comix artists like Robert Crumb. Issue #5 even manages to make interesting reading out of nothing but the many intellectual property ripoffs and lawsuits that have plagued the medium since its birth.

#5 Ted McKeever, Meta 4

I think (and this was never my strong-suit philosopher so I’m not sure, but I think) that Ted McKeever has written a Heideggerian allegory in comic-book form. Now available in a trade collection.

#4 Phil Hester, Golly vol. 1: Catching Hell

Golly feels as if someone took Garth Ennis’s Preacher and drained out all the meanspiritedness, sadistic jokes, and sexism. Golly Munhollen grabs the circus strongwoman’s ass one day, she knocks him out, and he’s visited by an angel who informs him that the Apocalypse has been postponed indefinitely due to lack of interest, and in the meanwhile he’s been appointed the clean-up squad for all those demons left running around the world. When Golly asks the logical question—why me and not someone smarter—the angel tells him that from a heavenly perspective the difference between him and a genius is negligible. “It would be like asking you to look into a puddle and select the smartest amoeba,” it says. “You will do.”

#3 Charles Soule, 27 (Twenty-Seven)

Will Garland has a repetitive stress injury in his playing hand, and in trying to cure himself accidentally makes a Faustian bargain that leaves him with a console implanted in his chest. Every time he activates it he gains a miraculous ability for three hours, but after the 27th time he does so, he will die. The ending is unexpected yet perfect. Now available in a trade paperback.

#2 Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, Daytripper

Every issue of Daytripper tells an episode in the life of the protagonist, Brás, at a different age. Brás starts his working life as an obituary writer, then becomes a novelist in his thirties; at the end of each issue he dies and we read the opening lines of his obituary. Though the episodes are told out of order, we realize very quickly that we are to read each one as if none of the preceding deaths happened, but everything else we’ve read about did. Brás has many loves in his life—a girlfriend, a wife, a best friend, a father, a mother, a son, a dog—and there are episodes touching on each of them. Brás is built up as the sum of these many loves and remembered in relation to them in each of his obituaries, in an extended meditation on loving in the face of death.

#1 Anders Nilsen, Big Questions

If Chris Ware is the comic book medium’s James Joyce, Anders Nilsen is its Samuel Beckett. Think Beckett meets Beatrix Potter, adorable little creatures on a bleak, featureless plain, staring into the abyss—but hopeful nonetheless, in its own way. “We can’t ever really know the outcome of our actions,” one of them concludes, “but if we act earnestly, and do our best, everything will turn out right in the end.” Of course the bird saying that happens to be responsible for the deaths of many others. And dead herself. Now available in collected form.

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I think I had tried and exhausted everything else. I had tried protests, I had tried petitions, I had tried academia, I had tried every possible language and way—and I was so frustrated. … Finding some way to express emotion, love and rage and contradiction and horror and anger and devotion in a medium that would be fast. … I have made documentary films, and with documentary films you have to lug a camera… The characters have to be present. You have to pay for the film and the light and the sound and everything has to be perfect… [W]ith the graphic novel … all you really need is your imagination and a pencil.

This is from a KPFA-Pacifica radio interview with Amir, the pseudonymous writer of Zahra’s Paradise, which lived as a comic serialized online for nearly two years until it was collected into a print form by First Second Books this month. (In its original, online incarnation readers helped with translation, making it available in thirteen languages so far.)

The book follows on the heels of Oil & Water as part of a new strain in comic books, graphic journalism, whatever you choose to call it. Political cartoons may be the oldest form of comics, but it’s only in the last decade that long-form graphic storytelling has looped back around and become overtly political once more.

Of course Zahra’s Paradise isn’t journalism. Amir is an exile, so direct documentary agitprop wasn’t possible for him. As he told KPFA:

We would get snippets of: oh, the grieving mothers are in the park. Oh, there are people outside Evin prison. Oh, the judiciary just lied about the rapes in the prison. So it was about putting the fragments together … and coming up with a composite character.

Nevertheless, his composite fictional story aims for as much concrete, verifiable truth as possible. The collected edition of Zahra’s Paradise concludes with nearly 30 pages of straight prose notes and documentation, followed by a complete printing of the Omid Memorial, an ongoing list of all the people killed by the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution—16,901 names in tiny print, page after page.

In that sense Zahra’s Paradise is like The Battle of Algiers, another explicitly political fictional work that ends with scenes from real history. But of course The Battle of Algiers ends with a victory, while Zahra’s Paradise ends with loss.

If I’ve held back on describing the narrative, it’s because it’s deceptively simple. It begins on June 16, 2009, the day after one of the earliest and largest election protests in Freedom Square. Mehdi, a nineteen-year-old university student, was at that protest and hasn’t come home. His mother Zahra and his brother, the unnamed narrator, are worried about him and try to find out what’s happened.

That’s it, but that basic motivation allows Amir and his artist collaborator Khalil (another pseudonym) to create a full portrait of the horror of daily life in Tehran during the repression that followed the protests. Zahra goes to the hospital, where she sees Revolutionary Guards dragging injured kids from their beds to be arrested. She goes to the notorious Evin prison, where they won’t tell her anything. She visits the morgue and sees the bodies of young people beaten to death, and drives home under the shadow of a pair of gay men hanged from cranes. She gets a bureaucratic runaround at the Hall of Justice. A copy-shop owner who does nothing more than print a “missing” flying for her is beaten by Basij thugs, his shop smashed. She meets a young man who says he shared a cell with Mehdi in Evin; he’s traumatized from being raped by the guards.

Finally, through an intrigue involving a prison official’s mistress, the brother manages to hack Evin’s records. He confirms that Mehdi is dead and buried in a secret grave in Zahra’s Paradise, the biggest cemetary in Tehran, along with dozens of others like him. The family manages to get his body released, and at his funeral Zahra pours forth a four-page poetic lament, during which Khalil’s art, typically restrained, becomes as florid as the prose, ending with a full-page vision of Iran on fire.

It’s a blistering, passionate conclusion, I think far beyond where a writer coming from an exclusively Western tradition would have felt comfortable going. But it represents a real movement of highly demonstrative, publicly mourning mothers from the weeks after the government’s violent backlash. See, for example, this widely circulated video of Neda’s mother at her funeral.

Alyssa Rosenberg recently argued that more politically aware art is often better art. Yet as a middlebrow art form comics/graphic novels have tended to stick to the personal. I’m glad to see more and more forays into the explicitly political—into more active engagement with the world—and Zahra’s Paradise is an inspiring place to start.

Read sample chapters here and here.

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In the decade and a half or so since Joe Sacco invented long-form “graphic journalism,” not many authors have tried to do anything like it. Guy Delisle, to a certain extent David Axe, Dan Archer. But more and more seem to be picking it up, and in Oil and Water journalist Steve Duin and artist Shannon Wheeler show why it has such great power when done right.

Like Sacco, Duin and Wheeler take us inside a tragedy that’s already been covered extensively by traditional news outlets: last year’s terrible BP oil spill. And like him they do it by focusing on individual stories, giving humanity and voice to people who we’ve otherwise met only in three-second soundbites at best, giving local color to the news’s dispassionate accounts.

Comics are an especially good medium for this, I think. Text alone doesn’t give the same effect of a person’s face speaking directly to you, and filmed documentaries must either hope their subjects are eloquent and charismatic or else edit their interviews extensively. Graphic journalists can clean up what people say and make them even more magnetic than they are in real life.

The frame for the reporting here is a trip to the Gulf taken by a group of about a dozen Oregonian environmentalists a few months after the spill. They are there to “bear witness,” they say, and it’s unclear what else they’re doing. There’s no attempt in the book to find a point-of-view character or to investigate very deeply what any of the visitors think about what they see; they are merely recording eyes who occasionally voice opinions. I don’t know if that will work for every future tragedy or even for every reader of this book, but it worked just fine for me. The book as a whole has a clear, angry point of view and it’s one I share. I’m a birdwatcher. The mass deaths of birds they describe upset me a lot. I don’t need that dressed up with characterization.

The only thing I wish were different is the art. Wheeler has opted for an almost impressionistic style in black and white, basic line figures shaded with ink brushwork. In a few panels this is quite effective, notably in some overhead landscape views of the Gulf or of towns. Much of the time, though, I found myself wishing for more detail. Since the event itself takes center stage, I wanted to experience it more fully, to see real individuality in the people who spoke and particularity in the lands around them. I wanted drawings that were more realist, in other words.

Even so, Oil and Water is a real achievement, both as a political statement and as a marker in the development of its subgenre.

PDF preview here.

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I’ve been struggling for weeks trying to find a good way to review Craig Thompson‘s latest book Habibi. Blankets, which came out in 2003, gave Thompson permanent cred in the indie comics world, and Habibi is his first major book since then. So I’ve felt like I owed it a serious review: it’s a major work by a major figure.

The problem has been that it’s got so many major thematic currents, it took me actually sitting down and trying to write this to understand how they all relate and what Thompson is trying to accomplish. And to articulate why, despite the immense ambition and skill on display here, I came away somewhat dissatisfied.

Let me start with a bare-bones story outline: when Dodola is still a child bride, desert nomads attack her village, kill her scribe husband, and capture her to be sold as a slave. She escapes from them with a young black slave she names Zam, and together they flee to a boat marooned in the desert, where they live for many years, as Dodola trades sex to passing caravans for food. Then she is once again captured and taken to a sultan’s harem, where she pines for Zam, her lost child. Zam meanwhile reaches puberty and, disgusted with what sex has done to Dodola, becomes a eunuch. The question hanging over the majority of the narrative is whether they’ll ever be reunited.

Alongside this major story, however, run a whole lot of thematic digressions. First of all, Dodola is a storyteller, so we get lots of her stories to Zam. Many are Quranic, but some are simply Arabic folklore, and many include discussions of the mystical properties of Arabic letters, which I think is derived from Sufism. (There are lots of references to Sufism in the book, including quotations from Rumi.)

Second, there’s the theme of environmental degradation, mostly played out through the use and abuse of water. Zam is named for Zamzam, the sacred well Ishmael found when Abraham exiled him and his mother Hagar to the desert. Zam finds the water that the government has dammed and sells it in the local village; by the end of the book all water is so polluted that he and Dodola fall deathly ill merely by swimming in it. There are stories about Adam and Eve using up the bounty of Eden, Solomon turning Lebanon sterile by cutting its cedars for the Holy Temple, and more. Overall we are given the sense that around this historically unrooted drama of Dodola and Zam humans are industrializing the world and consuming it to death. There are caravans and waterskins at the beginning of the book, high-rise construction projects and bottled water by the end.

This second theme sits comfortably beside the third: the way Dodola and Zam both exploit and trade their bodies to survive, at the same time depending on their flesh and hating it. There’s a familiar Marxian critique there, where everything is converted into commodities and used up, from the natural world around us to the bodies of the poor.

But those two things together sit very uncomfortably beside the Islamic mysticism, because asceticism isn’t really offered as a viable alternative. Rather, at the very end, it becomes clear that Thompson wants to offer mystical experience as a way to redeem the decadent, corrupting material world. Dodola and Zam, reunited, adopt a slave girl since they can’t have their own child, and the book closes on an examination of the letterology of the Arabic words for “love” (hubb) and “my beloved” (habibi). Here are the final lines:

The Sufi saint Rubi’a Al-Adawiyya was seen carrying a firebrand and a jug of water. The firebrand—to burn Paradise… The jug of water—to drown Hell… So that both veils disappear… and God’s followers worship… not out of hope for reward… nor fear of punishment… but out of [love].” [The word "love" is given in Arabic, ellipses in the original.]

I have three problems with this, two based on its execution in the book and one with the underlying concept.

Problem #1 with the execution: Thompson skips a step. He doesn’t really explain, at least not in a way that got through to me, how all the mystic letterology throughout Habibi connects to this ecstatic embrace of religious love. Doubtless the connection is there to be made, since both come from the same Sufi tradition. But it needed to be made evident earlier that there is more to the pages and pages about Arabic letters arranged in grids than we see, that it all springs from the same redemptive impulse.

Problem #2 with the execution: these characters are deeply in love with each other throughout the whole graphic novel, across monumental obstacles. Different kinds of love, too, as over time their relationship shifts from mother/son to husband/wife. Yet they both suffer tremendously, and all that changes to allow them redemptive love at the end is that they overcome the obstacles between them, establish a degree of material security, and form a family. The possibility of redemption isn’t open to them until external circumstances allow it.

Which brings me to my problem with the underlying concept. For a religious or mystical experience to offer redemption from a fallen world, it has to claim to be available to everyone. That’s the case in any religious tradition I can think of offhand: no matter who you are, what your current circumstances, you can improve yourself in this life or the next starting from the present moment. Well, I don’t think I believe that. It’s one of my beefs with religion. Anyone can be a good person at any time, but not everyone can have a transcendent experience. The world around you has to allow it. Which is exactly what Thompson’s plot has happen to Dodola and Zam, even if he lards on mystical quotes to claim otherwise.

One last thing, because this is getting very long. Thompson, so far as I know, is not a Muslim. Blankets was about his own growth away from the fundamentalist Christianity of his youth, and there was a sense of authenticity to it that Habibi lacks. It’s a truly risky thing to put on someone else’s religious tradition, and I’m not sure how right Habibi will feel to someone who grew up with Islam. To me, someone distinctly not of that tradition myself, its Sufism feels scholarly, well-researched, rather than lived in.

Let me be clear: Habibi is a fascinating book, well worth a read. The fact that I have problems with the execution and content of its major premise shouldn’t overshadow how great it is that it actually tackles major themes. It certainly gave me a lot to ponder.

It’s also gorgeous.

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A week ago I went to a panel discussion for the release of America’s Best Comics 2011, hosted by the year’s editor Alison Bechdel and featuring contributors Gabrielle Bell and Kevin Mutch.

Both Bell and Mutch primarily published their stuff online, in Mutch’s case later collecting it into a print volume, Fantastic Life. I got a chance to ask all three of them how they thought the changing distribution channels of comics (originally newspapers for Bechdel, experimental print books for Mutch, and always Web-first for Bell) had influenced the way they tell stories.

The answers were not at all what I expected. Bell said she started publishing online because newspapers are dying and it’s impossible to get a newspaper strip. But a newspaper strip is what she really wanted and for quite a while she conceived of her Web comics in a newspaper-strip-like vein, where there had to be a concluding beat for each page she published. Mutch said that he always imagined Fantastic Life as a printed work, with the aspect ratio of a traditional book, and serialized it a page at a time with that in mind, though he said that working directly in digital makes it much easier to achieve certain effects with color.

He pointed out that despite Scott McCloud’s prediction a decade ago of “the infinite canvas“—of online comic writer/artists making ever-greater use of the Web’s infinitely scrollable page, interactive graphics, simple animation—in fact the comics published online have remained for the most part faithful to traditional, print-derived formats. Probably (and this is my interpretation) that’s because there’s no money in online comics, so smart authors always have an eye toward the print collection. Mutch noted that the rise of tablet readers as a viable endpoint for publication might change that, though there, too, the aspect ratio is that of a traditional book. (Alison Bechdel mentioned Chris Ware’s new iPad-only comic Touch Sensitive for McSweeney’s as an example of an author exploring these new boundaries, but then Ware has always been about testing formal boundaries.)

Certainly, when I look at Bell and Mutch’s work in Best American Comics, there’s nothing about it to suggest a Web origin.

I had all this in mind when I picked up the sixth and final volume of Warren Ellis’s FreakAngels. FreakAngels was the first foray into Web-first publishing I know of by an author who’d built a major reputation for himself first in print. I assume he was the first because, alone of the famous comic book authors of his era, Ellis was a blogging pioneer. I’d bet that at one time at least as many people knew him through his regular collection of disturbing and disgusting stories and pictures at warrenellis.com as knew his comics.

Here’s the product description, because it’s easier than recreating it myself:

Twenty-three years ago, twelve strange children were born in England at exactly the same moment. Six years ago, they used their psychic powers in unison and accidentally flooded the world. Today, they live in and defend Whitechapel, perhaps the last real settlement in soggy London.

Now, FreakAngels does show that it was written with the plan of being collected into trade paperback–sized print books. There’s no crazy formal experimentation with layout or design, though it could be argued that the limitations of computer display led artist Paul Duffield to select bold colors and fairly simply compositions with lots of angles and attention to perspective, almost reminiscent of architectural drafting.

I have noticed a lack of act breaks. A lot of authors writing for issues nowadays have one eye on the trade paperback, where I think most of the money is made, and so structure their stories in four- to six-issue arcs. Every so many issues you come to a stopping place that resolves some conflicts and perhaps sets up ones to come, and as a result the trade paperbacks have a natural structure, with each volume telling a more or less self-contained piece of the story.

FreakAngels, which was serialized steadily in six-page episodes biweekly, doesn’t work like that. The story has dips and turns, but there’s no natural rest at the end of each volume, the new one just picks up at the same place it left off. That’s a style that works very well for a continuous story on the Web but doesn’t work so well in books. Every time I’ve bought a new volume of FreakAngels I’ve had to go back and review where we are.

On the other hand, I tried reading it on the Web, too, and a six-page episode every other week is no better way to maintain a continuous sense of story. A lot of that probably can be put down to Warren Ellis simply trying to service too many characters at once—a dozen is simply too many to give distinct voices and interesting development, especially in the serial format, and by never breaking into discrete chunks Ellis never gave himself the opportunity to focus on one or two for an extended time.

As a result, in the end we get a plot climax without much accompanying character resolution, and the whole exercise feels a bit unsatisfying. That’s too bad, because as usual for Ellis the books were packed full of ideas and inventiveness, and had a great setup. I just wish it had had a chance to deepen more before the end.

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Americus, written by MK Reed and drawn by Jonathan Hill, is a straightforward morality tale: a ninth-grade avid reader and his librarian pal stand up to the fundamentalist peanut-brains who want to ban Harry Potter for teaching kids witchcraft. (The part of the Harry Potter series is played by a fictional series called The Adventures of Apathea Ravenchilde.)

Now, on the one hand I’d like to be high-minded and remind Reed that he does himself no favors by making his main antagonist into a shrieking harpy cartoon who not only refuses to read the Ravenchilde books before she condemns them, but also packs her gay son off to a military school to turn him straight.

On the other hand, lots of people exactly that crazy do live in America, and do they really deserve a nuanced portrayal?

In any case, I like having reading be heroic, and I like how the excerpts from the adventure book are drawn with much more nuance and life than the bare-outlined figures of everyday life.

Preview here.

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Joe Ollmann’s Mid-Life feels like a throwback to the alternative comics of fifteen years ago, the ones whose loss I was mourning in my last review. Cramped, functional art designed to pack as much day-to-day detail of its story into each identically gridded page, based around an unlikeable everyman protagonist who feels like the author’s disgusted vision of himself, and a meandering plot.

Of course, back then the comic would have come out in single issues and told of its her’s miserable romantic life and dead-end job. In that sense Mid-Life is like checking in on one of those authors fifteen years on, so that now his miserable avatar is juggling two grown kids from a first failed marriage, an infant from a new second marriage, and a burgeoning crush on a children’s-music singer.

So far I probably sound rather negative. The truth is that Mid-Life does many things well. It devotes a fair amount of space to the children’s singer herself, and she’s an interesting character, trying to figure out whether she should abandon her dreams of being a serious musician once and for all to put on the golden handcuffs of a cable-network kids’ show. And Ollmann manages to infuse a lot of originality into the details of his protagonist’s mid-life crisis, even if the broad outlines are familiar.

PDF preview here.

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My favorite part of the new Optic Nerve comes at the very end, after the letters page, in what Adrian Tomine describes as  “a pointless, dashed-off autobio. strip.” It’s a two-page spread that describes the lengths he had to go to get a new issue of the comic into stores. See, nobody in the “serious” graphic novel business wants anything to do with the old monthly magazine trade anymore. The profit margins are too low, and none of the new generation of graphic novel buyers want them anyway. The existence of a “floppy” Optic Nerve is due entirely to Tomine’s nostalgia for the old format and all its ancillary special features. He mentions “the incidental drawings and gags in Eightball, the hand-drawn ‘plugs’ in Yummy Fur, the letters pages in Dirty Plotte” (and I’d add the fake ads in The Acme Novelty Library).

I identify deeply with that nostalgia, and with Tomine’s sense of shock at discovering all those things are gone. Until I read those two little pages I didn’t recognize they were never coming back, either, and now I’m in mourning. I’m sure the brave new internet-let world will develop its own stylistic signatures and quirks, but these were the ones I fell in love with and it’s sad to realize they’re almost gone. Will it still be comics when we lose the ritual of visiting the store every Wednesday to see what’s new?

Appropriately enough, the first of the two longer stories in the issue also revives a dying form, in this case the newspaper comic: six four-panel strips followed by a full-page color spread, with radically simplified figures and a punchline (or something given the weight of a punchline) in the end panel each “day.” Everything has to be conveyed through dialogue, nothing through drawn facial expressions or boxes of narration, which eliminates the reflective mood Tomine’s stuff usually has. It’s unfortunate because the story itself–about a suburban gardener who for years tries and fails to sell his new form of art combining sculpture and living plants–is very much his kind of plot. If he’d allowed himself his usual devices to create and nurture characters I think it would have been stronger.

The second of the two is much more in his usual style, and it works much better. It’s a ten-pager about a young woman who discovers she bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain porn actress, and all the problems that causes her with men throughout her young adulthood. It’s the kind of intimate, minor-key short work that Tomine has always done extremely well, going all the way back to his mini-comics, and seems almost calculated to remind readers of what he used to do in early issues of Optic Nerve, before he made a full issue of Summer Blonde, poured three issues into Homecoming, and tossed off Scenes from an Impending Marriage.

I guess that means all parts of Optic Nerve #12 trade in nostalgia, and I think we can only assume there’s a good chance we never see another magazine-format issue from Tomine again. That makes me even sadder.

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