Marathon

by Boaz Yakin
illustrated by Joe Infurnari
2012

Some Greek guy runs from one place to another. And for this a race is named after him.

Have you ever seen a movie storyboard? At its most basic, it's a collection of images with key dialog or actions described beneath the sketches to help communicate what the final film sequence should look like. It is a way for the director to communicate to the cinematographer how to frame a shot, for an editor to get a feel for the tempo of a scene, for a producer to understand what exactly they're paying for. If it were good enough to stand on its own it wouldn't need to cost millions of dollars and countless resources to make, you could simply publish the results and call it a day.

Marathon, written by filmmaker Boaz Yakin (The Punisher, The Rookie, Remember the Titans) and illustrated by Joe Infurnari, reads like a storyboard, one with only the barest of dialog attached and very little story development. You get the jist of scenes, or emotions, of impulses and motivations, and some very direct and unsubtle dialog to help you along, but a large portion of this book is action scenes. Sketchy, difficult-to-make-out action scenes, scenes so hard to follow sometimes you wish they had decided to give every character a different neon color so you could follow what was going on. Because at the center of this book what is going on is a story not often told.

The Olympic sport of marathon was the result of a the Greek legend of Pheidippidies, the messenger sent from the battle at Marathon (a place) to Athens to announce the Persians had been defeated. He made this run after having fought in the Battle of Marathon itself and was so exhausted that after giving his message he died. Buried in the myth is the idea that the god Pan aided the Athenians, and some misguided military decisions based on the favorable placement of the moon. Toss in a little backstory about Pheidippidy-do's being a slave whose family was first spared then killed when he was a boy, and his wife making an offering to the god Pan, and now we've got ourselves a movie.

But not a readable graphic novel.

I get how this could make a compelling action film, and there are hints of that buried in Marathon, but the owing to Infurnari's loose, sketchy nature of the art and Yakin's seemingly tacked on human interest elements, the book simply falls flat.

This was a finalist for the Cybils Award and, quite frankly, I'm curious to know how this got past the first round of judging. 

13 Days of Halloween: Sailor Twain

by Mark Siegel
First Second Press 2012

A riverboat captain on the 19th century Hudson River nurses an injured mermaid back to health, hidden from his employer who is determined to find and kill her, but is he another of her victims caught in her wrath and fury?

Captain Twain, no relation to Samuel Clemens' alter ego, is a riverboat pilot who runs a tight ship and  prefers not to meddle in his passengers affairs. His current employer is the brother of his previous employer who mysteriously became melancholy, disappeared, and was later discovered to have committed suicide. One day Captain Twain discovers a wounded mermaid floating near death in the river. Taking her back to his room he nurses her back to health in secret, bringing her food and telling her stories to entertain her, imploring her not to sing to him so that her song doesn't bind him to her underwater limbo; the Captain's sickly love waits for him and he has no desire to be unfaithful. She agrees, but can she be trusted?

The Captain observes his employer take on many lovers simultaneously, almost methodically, while maintaining a postal correspondence with an author of stories about the supernatural, including mermaids. He also mysteriously throws messages in a bottle into the river and refuses to leave the boat for any reason. It becomes clear over time that his employer doesn't believe his brother committed suicide but has fallen under the spell of the mermaid the Captain is harboring and is, in all his unusual efforts, attempting to undo her power over the souls she has taken.

Throughout there is the story of the mysterious author who seems to know something about the mermaid of the Hudson, known simply as South, and about the ways she can be defeated. Being a mysterious recluse the author agrees to appear in public and give a lecture on the boat at his employer's invitation. When it turns out the author is a woman the press suggests she's a fraud and even her publishers admit they wouldn't have given her the time of day if they knew or believed their beloved author was a woman. She takes the moment of her heightened publicity to speak out against slavery and women's suffrage and, for a moment, looks to become the last of his employer's lovers which would break the spell the mermaid has over his brother.

Healed, South returns home, inviting Twain to join her below as she believes he is the one she has been waiting for, the one who can release her from the spell that keeps her forever bound to the Hudson river. Torn between wanting to free her and fearing she might take him as she has taken other souls, Twain devises a plan to return his former employer to the world of the living but in the end suffers a fate very similar many who crossed the mermaid of the Hudson.

Initially daunting at 400 pages, Siegel has crafted a haunting tale that tweaks Greek mythology, gothic horror, and the strange romance of life on a river. While Twain's motives aren't always clear, his thoughts not always articulated, he is strangely compelling in the way that he observes and studies those around him in order to piece together what is going on. Granted, much of Twain's movements are for the benefit of the reader, but its only under close critical scrutiny after the fact that a reader might find the otherwise hidden seams holding the narrative together. In truth, the tale was so compelling I was more interested in getting to the end to find out what happened (and giving up precious sleep in the process) that the only time I felt pulled away from the story was in the very active climax where I found things to get a bit muddled.

Indeed, this muddle was further confirmed in the comments section of a review at Guys Lit Wire. Why did the wheelman of the ship sabotage it? Was everyone on board the boat under the thrall of the Mermaid's song? Did Twain himself, like Ishmael, survive to tell the tale only long enough to be reunited with his spiritual self?

By the end, with the story framed by a his employer's wife who holds the key to Twain's resolution, all I wanted to do was go back to beginning and start all over. I did not want to spend more time with these characters in further tales – or prequels, or backstory – I wanted them to relive their lives in the hope they would make different decisions. It's been a long time I've read a story that made me feel that.

This graphic novel is clearly for the older YA set due to mature sexual themes – almost unavoidable, really, if you want to tell a believable story concerning mermaids. Haunting, brooding, and inevitably people are going to call it the love child of Twain and Poe with, perhaps, a bit of Washington Irving thrown in for good measure.

I'd shortlist this for a Cybil award as well, though with its messy resolution I'd be surprised to see it pass the first round.

Legends of Zita the Spacegirl

by Ben Hatke 
First Second 2012 

Out titular (and accidental) heroine returns for continuing adventures as her fame sucks her further and further from ever returning to Earth. Bad for her is good for readers... 

A robot crawls out of its recalled packaging and imprints on the first being it sees: a poster of Zita advertising her tour of various planets as savior of Scriptorious. Finding a mop and fashioning a costume the robot not only begins to look like Zita but starts to adopt aspects of her personality, as witnessed while she is dragged out to sign autographs. Escaping her fans Zita crosses paths with her robot doppelganger and concocts one of the oldest bad ideas in the history of bad ideas: trading places with the robot in exchange for some freedom.

Naturally, this goes terribly wrong.

As Robot Zita learns and adapts and adopts more of Zita's personality it comes to believe it really is Zita, heroic spacegirl. While Zita is away a pair of Lumponian Ambassadors arrive looking for Zita to save their planet from a deadly attack by star hearts. While Zita's minder ponders the situation Robot Zita agrees to save Lumponia and away they leave... without Zita the Spacegirl! Zita and her sidekick Pizzicato the Mouse now must catch up with their friends and save the day, oh, and also do something about that pesky identity-stealing Robot Zita. And after a battle with the Queen of Star Hearts...

...To Be Continued.

The incredibly fast-paced adventure that began with the first Zita the Spacegirl continues here, with so much detail unexplained beyond the illustrations. What I mean is, it is up to the reader to fill in details that can be gleaned from the illustrations, as well they should. Seriously, nothing bogs down world-building faster than explaining why otherwordly creatures look and act the way they do, better to simply let them be (as Hatke does here) and let the reader back-fill whatever they need to know.

Though not as deep in mythology as Jeff Smith's Bone series, the Zita books have an accomplished sense of knowing where they are headed and a deft humor that makes them a joy to read and reread. Rereading will be crucial as details about characters and situations from the first book are left for the reader to recall on their own, just as they will need to consult this volume when the third Zita book comes out. Again, this is not a bad thing, as the books are simply good fun.

Or are they? I think their simplicity and the fast pacing is a sort of slight-of-hand for a non-Aristotlean (or Homeric if you prefer) narrative form.

While it's true that Zita has an overarching goal/desire – she wants to get home – everything that comes her way just piles on as one-damn-thing-after-another. Some narrative purists hate this sort of thing, but it allows for a more organic possibility in storytelling as real life rarely conforms to a Freitag Pyramid. Things do simply happen to Zita while she's in the middle of dealing with something else that's been thrown her way, but Odysseus had the same problems, and with no less freaky creatures to confront. 

So while I welcome (sort of) the continuing adventures of Zita the way I might if reading the Odyssey in serial form, trusting that she'll eventually make her way home, my one quibble is the "To Be Continued" that ends the book. The cliffhanger ending has never really worked for me in any narrative medium, and while I recognize the ending her comes at a good point I hate the feeling like I only got half the story. We could argue this point about sequels and series – you and I fair reader – but sometimes the story ends at a natural point and feels complete and sometimes the cliffhanger aggravates. It's a quibble and doesn't really ruin the fun of Legends of Zita the Spacegirl in the slightest.

Nursery Rhyme Comics

edited by Chris Duffy
introduction by Leonard S. Marcus
First Second  2011


Fifty timeless rhymes! From fifty celebrated cartoonists! At least forty-nine excellent classic nursery rhymes in a cartoon format!

There are a number of ways to approach nursery rhymes. You can either take them at their most surface story level. You can interpret them literally or figuratively or historically. You could also enjoy them strictly for their sound, for the way they roll with linguistic cadences. And with subjects like animals behaving oddly or inanimate objects coming to life or simply reveling in the absurdity of fairy tale-like imagery it is easy to see why nursery rhymes endure: they are wide open to interpretation and imagination.

Mother Goose and other nursery rhyme collections tend toward the cute, or the sweet, or at the very least, non-threatening. Most collections settle for a single image or two that illustrates some element of the story and leaves the rest out. For the truly young the story and the image become linked, forever lodged without explanation or the desire to even understand. It's a marvelous and sometimes bizarre thing to plant in a young mind the image of a Jack and a Jill tumbling head-first down a hill simply for doing their chores.

Enter sequential storytelling.

Sequential visual narratives strive to tell a story not only in the pictures but between the panels. Like picture books, they extend the characters and the narrative from one to the next, each panel like a page unto itself, each transition like a page turn. Structurally, comics and graphic novels make for great transitional narrative for readers as they are dialog driven and tend to build scene upon scene. Add nonsensical nursery rhymes and the interpretation of cartoonists and you've got quite a wild ride.

How many times have you heard or read Humpty Dumpty? How does it end? It ends in tragedy, like Shakespeare, inevitable and unchangeable. Ah, but cartoons have a long history of the punchline, the change-up at the end, a twist that turns everything on its ear. What if the Egg Man fell, cracked open, and out sprang a half dozen smaller versions of himself? This is precisely what Gilbert Hernandez does in his retelling, and in doing so transforms the familiar into the new.

In other rhymes the narrative is subverted for a parallel story not even hinted at in the original. Little Boy Blue remains a farm boy shirking his duties, but here the barnyard animals are the ones who are featured. Bob Flynn has the sheep in meadow throwing Frisbees, and the reason no one is willing to wake him is because the animals have a pretty good poker game going on.

On the historical front, leave it David Macaulay to turn London Bridge into a lesson about all the different architectural forms the bridge has taken in its time. From rickety wood to stone and steel, Macaulay manages to erase the notion that the rhyme is only suited for playground games where some unlucky sod gets caught in the gated arms of classmates (usually some boy trapped between two girls).

The collection of cartoonists involved is fantastic. Personal faves include Jules Feiffer, Eleanor Davis, Craig Thompson, Sara Varon, Marc Rosenthal, Kate Beaton, Tony Millionaire... a collection too numerous to mention. Most I have encountered somewhere along the way, either in alternative comics or picture books or graphic novels, and with the exception of a single artist whose style I just don't care for I find them all to be equally suited to the task.

For most families with children I would say this shouldn't be the first or only collection of nursery rhymes. But for those who might want a second book this might make a great addition for the family with a new reader looking to read nursery rhymes to younger siblings. It'll make them the hip and cool kid who introduces their kid brothers and sisters into the joys of reading, storytelling, and the slightly subversive world of comics.

Resistance: Book 1

written by Carla Jablonski
art by Leland Purvis
First Second 2010

This graphic novel set during the Occupation of France by the Nazis in World War II shows the work of the Resistance movement through the eyes of children who find themselves in the thick of things.

Teen Paul finds himself the man of the house when his father is taken away by the German Occupying forces. When they Germans come and take away his Jewish friend Henri's parents Paul and his younger sister concoct a plan first to hide Henri for his own safety, then find themselves recruited to help the Resistance get information into the hands of those behind the lines in Occupied Paris.


The overall treatment of the story is fairly workmanlike. A reader with any knowledge of the Nazi occupation of France won't be surprised to read about characters who defied the Germans and worked hard to defeat them underground. That teens and young children were involved doesn't feel revelatory as children have played important roles in the history (and fictions) of all revolts. The pluck of nerve of these kids is a given; anything less wouldn't provide us with the story. But it's a story that drags, a story that is either overly simplistic or overly illustrated, depending on the spread of the moment. Scenes either don't have much impact despite their importance – like the taking of Henri's parents which takes place off stage – or their impact is drawn out over several panels where they could have been better handed with a single image.

I think there's room for a graphic novel about the Resistance movement in France, and that it would make a valuable alternative for readers interested in going deeper into World War II abroad, deeper than they can in most history classes. I only wish this book, and perhaps this series (a trilogy) could be condensed into a single volume of manageable length. We'll see when its finished whether the series drags or if its merely my impatience with this first book's mise en scene for the subsequent stories.

Bake Sale

by Sara Varon  
First Second 2011  


The long-awaited (by me at least) new graphic novel by the author of Robot Dreams, proprietor of unusual parallel worlds. Recipes included.   

Cupcake is a cupcake who is the owner of a bakery that makes, among other things, cupcakes. It may take a moment of adjustment, but if you can get past that – and vegetables that eat carrot cake, and eggs that drink coffee, etc. – you'll be fine.  

Cupcake has his routine down. He gets up, bakes some fresh pastries, makes fresh coffee, sells his goods to his regulars, then in the evenings plays drums with his band. It's a god life, but it is a routine, and Cupcake actively tries to learn new things to prevent the routine from becoming mundane. When it comes out that his friend Eggplant has an aunt is friends with Turkish Delight, the greatest pastry chef in the world, Cupcake's dormant crush takes over his thoughts. Determined to meet Turkish Delight where he knows they will instantly become close friends, Cupcake quits the band and spends his extra time selling baked goods outside of his store in order to earn enough extra money for the trip to Turkey with Eggplant.

But just as Cupcake has earned enough money Eggplant loses his job and Cupcake is not willing to take the trip without his friend. In a gesture of friendship Cupcake gives his travel money to Eggplant so that he can visit his aunt, but this puts Cupcake in a funk. Without a band, without his best friend, and with no chance of meeting Turkish Delight, Cupcake loses interest in baking and attempts to sell day-old coffee and stale pastries. Eggplant returns and inspires Cupcake to enter a baking contest using fresh spices he brought back from Turkey with talk about what they will do with the prize: a pair of round-trip tickets to anyplace in the world. While Eggplant suggest they can return to Turkey and meet Turkish Delight, but Cupcake notes that it doesn't have to be Turkey, suggesting he has gotten over the folly of his crush and recognizes the value of the friendships he has at hand.  In the back of the book there are eight recipes from "Cupcake's Repertoire," items featured in the story. 

While I freely admit that it's stupid to have any expectation about any author's work, I was not expecting this story at all. Defying expectations, that's a good thing, but I think what I first had to get over was the imposition of logic my brain kept trying to force onto the story. Why I was so easily willing to accept a robot-building dog without issue but had to struggle with a cupcake-baking cupcake might say something about how easily we accept anthropomorphism with things traditionally given brains as opposed to inanimate objects like produce and bake goods. But then, what to make of the Gingerbread Man?

It wasn't an insurmountable obstacle, and soon enough I was firmly in Varonland and wondering, truly, where the story was headed. Would Cupcake find the love of his dreams in Turkish Delight, or would he find her personality at odds with his imagined version of his idol? Would the band take him back after he sends his friend to Turkey alone, or would they keep that Potato as his permanent replacement? Will Cupcake happily return to his routines and make fresh coffee ever again? There's a lot of visual and sight gags (I want to know who Mr. Peanut was buying a valentine for!) in addition to the occasional dissonance of wondering about an enormous turkey leg walking a dog and wonder where the rest of the turkey was. The New York of Varonland is indeed an unusual place but perfectly fine if you're willing to roll with it.

And while I was happily going along with where Varon was taking me, in the end I was a little surprised that the story didn't have a more pronounced conclusion. It stopped more than it ended, totally underselling the idea that Cupcake is happier to have a friend like Eggplant than to harbor hopes of a new friendship with a stranger. I'm not saying the conclusion needs to be more obvious or spelled out, but with a younger audience (the book is geared for ages 8+) the point could be easily lost. 

Comparing Bake Sale to Robot Dreams is like comparing dogs to eggplants, though there are similarities. Between the books I mean. Both stories deal with the idea of friendship with main characters that deal with the shifting emotions surrounding those friendships. While guilt is less of a factor in Bake Sale than in Robot Dreams there is still a dream sequence where Cupcake finally meets Turkish Delight only to see her literally sit on and crush Eggplant. This becomes the incident that causes Cupcake to give his friend his money, and while not exactly done out of guilt it does seem as if Cupcake recognizes the selfishness of wanting to go on a trip with his friend. So while Robot Dreams looked at moving beyond old friendships Bake Sale finds its strength in maintaining and valuing those friendships at hand.

The Unsinkable Walker Bean

by Aaron Renier 
First Second 2010 

Pirates! Glowing skulls! Crustacean-y looking giant sea-witches! A man with eight legs (he keeps running away!)! Homing messages-in-a-bottle! Wait! What's this all about anyway! 

I think the only real contentious moment I had while in grad school came from a faculty member who hated, more than anything in the world, when a story seemed to be as he put it "just one damn thing after another."  He believed very strongly in the structure and craft of storytelling in ways so deep and rich, its like an ocean of pudding I can't quite tread.  Not yet at least.  But of all the things he taught about story I disagreed with him because I felt there was an alternative to the three-act Aristotlean model of storytelling, I felt it in my bones, and I thought it was a more organic story structure that grew from an accumulation of events.  Eventually I calmed down. Until either I could define an alternative narrative structure or find a "one damn thing after another" story this was simply one of those areas of my education waiting to be discovered.


Eureka! 

Reading The Unsinkable Walker Bean I initially had one of those dissociative moments where I wasn't quite sure what was happening in my head.  Did I not get what was going on in the story?  Had I missed a crucial piece of information?  Or did this simply not make any sense to my internal story logic brainthink? When I am this confused I usually stop and pick the book up again a few days later, because that happens, sometimes you need a fresh approach. 

The time off helped.  I started in and this time I realized it wasn't me, it's the story. What kept me unable to gain any purchase on the story was the fact that there were characters, and action, and a story, and nothing for me, the reader, to hold onto.  The Greeks understood that you could send Jason and the Argonauts on a journey of one damn thing happening after another but you have to root that story in something human, something emotional.  Love.  A longing for home.  Truth.  Beauty.  Something.  You can have giant statues come to life and fantastical creatures screeching and flying and rising from the deep, but you have to be vested in the human elements within the story.  There has to be a character you would be willing to follow into battle, into the rocky straits, into the underworld and back.  If you're willing, you'll take on any unstructured strand of an adventure because you believe the character will deliver you safely home. 

So I guess by extraction you can guess my problems with The Incredible Walker Bean.  

We open with a fable, a folk tale, a legend about how Atlantis was destroyed by a pair of mare-witch sisters, how they masticated their human enemies skulls into a wall that could help them see past, present, and future. With one bone from this wall a human would have the collective knowledge of the world and be able to find buried treasure and even Atlantis itself!  

We pull back to find this tale being told to Walker Bean by his mutton-chopped grandfather who appears to be a Colonial Admiral.  Jump ahead to the Admiral sick in bed, a ghastly green, with his son (Walker's father) berating the old man to sell off the possession that's created his condition: a bag containing a glowing green skull belonging to the mare-witch sister's wall! Walker waits until he can steal a moment alone where his grandfather implores Walker to return the skull to its home, where it belongs, and only then will he be healed. And so an adventure ensues.

There are pirates, and magical devices made from animated metals, and maps and secrets... and none of it means anything because we're not behind Walker.  It may be his journey but he's doing it for his grandfather.  Returning the skull may be the right thing to do, but it shouldn't have been taken in the first place, and the person who should set things to rights isn't our main character.  What Walker is searching for he only pieces together as he goes, and while it seems certain he will learn much along the way there is a pervading sense that the story itself is formless and drifting.  Changes in events and scenery pile up, one after another, without delivering a satisfactory conclusion to the episode.  As the story drifts from one improbable fight, to rescue, to chase, to adventure, there's never a sense of resolution, never a moment where the reader wishes they were with Walker, or behind Walker, or cringing that Walker is about to make a huge mistake because we have nothing emotionally invested in him or his journey. 

Which is too bad, because I think Renier has an interesting collection of story elements and twists at work here – even the improbable ones, like creating a canvas canopy with fake constellations to drape over the boat and misguide the sailors at night, or the elaborate alternate steering mechanisms built in the ship's hold – but they are in the service of themselves and not the story.  Nothing deepens the emotional development of either Walker or the reader.  And just as the book ought to start tying things together and building toward some sort of resolution it piles on more and more stuff. 

Because this is only Book One? 

No.  No, no, no. I was so unsatisfied with the shear number of story threads unresolved and heaps of all-too-convenient coincidences of people, time, and place that I'm not going to care enough to reread this book in the future just to figure out what is happening in the next book.  This is rule one of serial storytelling: each piece must stand on its own as a narrative and also fit within the whole.

And this is a HUGE problem I see among graphic novels these days.  I think far too often there are stories that are serialized that don't justify their length and would do well to be contained within a single book.  This has been true almost without exception of every serialized graphic novel I've encountered. There are, of course, exceptions.  The eight-volume life of the Buddha as done my Osamu Tezuka works because each book can stand on its own while the whole provides a larger picture.  Jeff Smith's Bone series treats each volume as an episode that picks up where the last book left off but delivers a cohesive narrative arc that builds and escalates the story on step toward its resolution. But Walker Bean charges off like a bee-stung dog in a crowded open market, careening from one thing to the next, disrupting business and up-turning fruit carts, before disappearing down the road with no one chasing after it.

And now I know what one-damn-thing-after-another storytelling looks – and feels – like. 


The Unsinkable Walker Bean was a Cybils finalist this year, and I would have rather seen Calamity Jack or even The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future in its place.

Booth

Written by C. C. Colbert
Illustrated by Tanitoe
First Second  2010

A graphic novel exploration of the other half of the Lincoln assassination story, of its key player John Wilkes Booth, that lacks a very crucial element: motivation.

For as much as people refer to the United States as The Great Experiment in Democracy the simple truth is that it's history is marred by a pair of gaping wounds that will never heal out of willful neglect: racism and the Civil War.  Until we can have a frank and open discussion about these rifts, and can come to a place of peace with them, the Great Experiment can never be considered a success. 

Historian Colbert presents a pastiche of the life of John Wilkes Booth in an attempt, perhaps, to show us the other side of the story surrounding Lincoln's assassination.  We first learn of the Booth acting dynasty and the rift between brothers John and Edwin standing in the shadow of their master Shakespearean father.  Edwin, the prodigal, has the talent, but John has the looks, and the brothers are equally divided in their political loyalties once the War Between the States emerges.  While Edwin is content to gain accolades for his acting, John's attentions are split between the stage and his political activities helping the South. At it's simplest, Booth presents John as a racist, separatist villain with no respect for democracy, and his particular brand of theatrical arrogance finds favor among those who would use his access to political figures via his fame for their own ends.

But why does he do it?  How do a pair of brothers raised in the same house come to be divided over their politics during one of the most contentious periods of American history? Is it that Booth identifies with the South on an emotional level – be it an inferiority complex, a sense of entitlement, or simply an adolescent break from the parental confines – or is he nothing more than a pawn in a political game of chess?  What drives the disgruntled beyond grousing and into the realm of sedition?  These are the questions Booth doesn't answer, and given the ability to use the graphic novel medium to present a fairly large canvas it doesn't seem wrong to expect something more than backroom meetings and casual philandering for a shot at starring in the role of a lifetime.  We see a surly, angry Booth but we never know why or what has pushed him to this point.  Indeed, we aren't really shown anyone's motivations beyond the most one-dimensional of explanations.

Which brings me back to the point I started with, this idea that we are a nation scarred by the things we refuse to address.  History is as full of conspiracies and plots and schemes as it is honest efforts and high-minded ideals, but these things all come about by the will of people, and people have their reasons for doing the things they do.  If we cannot discuss their reasons, and do not engage in dialog through the ages over why people were motivated to do the things they did, we risk furthering old grievances and hatreds and misunderstandings.  With a change of scenery and dialog, Booth could easily be refashioned into the story of Lee Harvey Oswald.  I'm not saying the stories are identical, but that their backgrounds are equally murky and their motivations oversimplified.  And we risk the possibility of allowing history to repeat itself with every successive generation so long as we continue to not discuss these divisive issues. 

While I applaud Booth for wanting to address the idea that history has more than one side I find it lacks the necessary depth required for comprehending a difficult time in history.

City of Spies

by Susan Kim & Laurence Klavan 
artwork by Pascal Dizin 
First Second Press 2010 

This World War II espionage graphic novel set in New York is nothing short of an American cousin to Tintin, right down to the ligne claire style of artwork and youngsters in peril and adventure. 

It's 1942 and young Evelyn is getting dumped onto her NYC Aunt Lia so her dad can get married again.  Used to being left to her own, she creates the continuing comic adventures of Zirconium Man and his sidekick Scooter, who resembles Evelyn.  After a rocky start, she teams up with Tony, the super's boy, and they spend the summer searching the streets of New York for Nazi spies.  When Evelyn discovers a code template and works out its meaning, she and Tony attempt to route out the spies themselves, but they get in way over their head and find themselves hoping they've left enough of a trail that they can be saved in the nick of time. 

This doesn't even scratch the surface of what is going on in City of Spies, which is part of what makes it a rollicking adventure story.  The fact that Evelyn's family is Jewish, that they live in an ethnic neighborhood where everyone is desperately trying to cover their ethnic roots behind red, white, and blue patriotism, not only gives some great background to what wartime America was like but serves as a subtle echo to modern times where post-9/11 businesses were forced to place American flags in their windows for the same reasons.  As Evelyn and Tony discover, it's easy to see foreign agents wherever you look, and far too often it's the people who have assimilated themselves all too well who avoid suspicion.

At times I found Evelyn's comic book interludes to be a bit contrived.  They exist to give insight into how Evelyn is feeling – about being abandoned by her father, about losing her mother, about the nightmare of creeping Nazi fascism – and they rarely added enough to be worthwhile.  I was grateful at the end when her comics shifted toward an Evelyn-and-Tony team of Indiana Jones-type of adventurers, her fantasy realm now based on a cooperative friendship instead of paternalistic heroism.

The writing in brisk and well paced, with enough story for the secondary characters to move around in as well.  Dizin's art and color palate does Herge one better in presenting New York as a city with more that six colors; I don't fault Herge's limitations, he was one of the best at the time, but color processing was different 70 years ago. Would it be too much to hope for more Evelyn stories, adventures of a spunky girl in peril set in the mid-century that entertain against a historical background?  It might take a bit of jiggering (dad moves to New York so Tony could continue to be involved?) but I suspect this would hit the Tintin audience – boys and girls alike – and do very well.

The Eternal Smile

by Gene Luen Yang & Derek Kirk Kim
First Second 2009

This graphic omnibus collects three shorter illustrated stories that are bound by the common thread of illusions that people tell themselves to survive.

The first story, "Duncan's Kingdom," at first seems to be a fairy tale fantasy, a dark Grimm-like tale where two men are to battle the Frog King to win the princess. The twist comes when Duncan comes to realize that the sage who has been guiding him is also protecting him from a secret that reveals his true self. The choice forces Duncan to decide whether to remain trapped in his fantasy or to face the cold, hard reality he has been avoiding.

"Gran'pa Greenback and the Eternal Smile" begins as a parody of the old Disney Scrooge McDuck comics where greed is good and celebrated until a mysterious smile appears in the sky. Greenback decides to take advantage of the apparition and establish a cynical religion designed to fleece believers until a competitor sets up camp offering something a little closer to faith. The twist here is that the world of Gran'pa Greenback is actually a television program that built a Disney-like empire by employing animals with digital implants designed to make them perform. Another opportunity for choice, this time for the frog forced to perform: can he escape his fate and return to a normal life in the pond?

In "Urgent Request" we find Janet, a lonely computer programmer who is so desperate for contact that she responds to an email request from an unknown Nigerian prince to send him funds to help him preserve the fortune he is about to lose - the Nigerian scam that frequents many an email inbox. Mousy shy but otherwise intelligent, Janet gets sucked in deeper and deeper until her bank account is drained. When she insists on a face-to-face meeting with the "prince," and then hunts him down, she finds a college student using the scam to fund a questionable online venture he's dreamed up. Janet's choice is what she will do from here out, and the impression is that she'll start standing up for herself.

The theme that everyone has a choice to make between fantasy worlds and facing reality might be novel for less experienced readers and could provide some "teachable moments" with compare-and-contrast discussions. As I have read in other reviews, I found none of the plot twists surprising, nor where their outcomes difficult to guess. Taken together this collection would make for a good starting point for middle grade and YA readers who might suspect that all comics are superhero and that graphic novels have nothing to offer them. Nowhere near as engaging as Yang's American Born Chinese or Kim's Good As Lily, but still entertaining.

The Photographer

Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders
by Didier Lefèvre
illustrated by Emannuel Guibert
First Second Books 2009

I don't know how to explain this. There are books you read that pry open a whole world you never knew existed. I mean, you've heard of places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, you've heard of small villages living in remote regions, you know organizations like Doctors Without Borders exist and you know what they do, and you might even know (or remember) some recent history about the Soviet invasion and war with Afghanistan in the 1980s... but somehow it doesn't all add up to a single picture of that time, or place, or experience until a book comes along and drops you into the deep end and your fully immersed.

In 1989, a young French photographer named Didier Lefèvre is asked by the organization Médecins Sans Frontières to help them document their efforts to provide medical care to Afghans living near the war front who are without doctors or resources. It's a grueling journey requiring the group to sneak across the border of Pakistan illegally, to get to the farthest outposts where medical offices can be set up and, for Lefèvre, to make his way home safely on his own. Years later he recounts his stories to his friend, the illustrator Emannuel Guibert, and together the create a trilogy of books that document the experience. Those books, bound as one, are The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders.

As explained in the afterword, the concept was for Guibert to illustrate the story surrounding Lefèvre's photos, turning the enterprise in an unusual, and richly rewarding, hybrid of a photo travelogue and a graphic novel. The mix of graphic elements at times can feel like an artists scrapbook - along the lines of photojournalists Peter Beard and Dan Eldon - or sometimes require several pages of illustration that calls to mind (literally at one point) Tintin comics both in landscape and style. It's like a documentary with the narrative flow of fiction.

And it's about war. And people trying to do good against all odds. People and animals die with regularity. The absurdities of human experience abound. There are moments of terror and moments of humor and moments of great beauty. It is as much about the person behind the camera as much as the people being documented in front of it and shows that, if anything, a photojournalist's life isn't as glamorous as some might believe.

I felt this way when I read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis some years back. It wasn't that I didn't know something about Iran, it was all that I knew was through Western eyes and media. It had never occurred to me – nor could I imagine – what it would be like to grow up during the Iranian revolution of the late 70s and the overthrow of the Shaw. I had met many who had escaped Iran during that time, people uneasy with the coming reforms, and I knew their stories but not those of the ones who stayed. In The Photographer. Lefèvre and Guibert fill in some gaps about the Soviet conflict with Afghanistan in the same way, showing us what the Western (let's be fair, mainly American) world did not report. The borders were full of peasant villages, with Afghan troops on foot or with pack mule, facing Soviet helicopters and the last days of the big Soviet Cold War arsenal.

I seem to recall the American response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Olympics.

While The Photographer. doesn't necessarily add a great deal of information about the full nature of the conflict it does manage to put human faces on a small moment in the history of a part of the world still very much in our headlines. It's the sort of book that has to potential to open young minds and make them want to learn more about Afghanistan, about photojournalism, about Doctors Without Borders, and maybe why this part of the world continues to capture our attention.

Mentioned in this review

The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders
by Didier Lefèvre
illustrated by Emannuel Guibert
First Second Books 2009

Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi
Pantheon Books 2002

The Journey Is The Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon
edited by Kathy Eldon
Chronicle Books 1997

Zara's Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa
by Peter H. Beard
Alfred Knopf 2004

The Adventures of Tintin books
by Herge


This review is being cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire today.

Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia
Created by Jordan Mechner
Written by A.B. Sina
Artwork by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland
First Second 2008

I'm cross-posting today. This is my review from Guys Lit Wire.

Based on the video game, soon to be a major motion picture... eh, forget all that. Prince of Persia purports to be the legend behind the game, but any knowledge of this graphic novel's origins are completely unnecessary. What we have here is a great, multi-layered tale of power and and palace intrigue over the course of centuries, a story rich in Eastern myths and torn allegiances.

In the 9th century city of Marv, the warrior Saman has not only conquered but rebuilt the city in great splendor. Among his children, the twin brother and sister Guiv and Guilan, he has adopted Layth, the orphaned son of his enemy, and raised them as equals. Growing up together they vow strength in unity and insist on ruling as one when their time comes. The problem is that Guilan and Layth have fallen in love and that Guiv becomes an outcast when he tries to kill Layth in his sleep...

The 9th century blends with a 13th century where Shirin, daughter of the current ruler of Marv, leaves a palace that has become the home of decadence and lies to discover the truths that have been hidden from her. After nearly drowning in a well Shirin is rescued and taken to a citadel that is the secret home to Ferdos, who relates the stories of the past to her. The tales of two centuries echo each other as we learn of the rise of two princes, and how the power of the desert city is in the hands of those who control the waterways that have been built from ancient springs.

The thing about Prince of Persia, the element I long for in graphic novels, is the sense of the novel. It isn't merely a question of length, but when a story is rich in character and story threads, that's what pulls me in. I want to get lost in a story, in a time and place, and to know that the storyteller is weaving an elaborate tapestry. For me, it's part of what separates a comic from a graphic novel, this feeling of story heft, and Prince of Persia has it in spades.

I can't ignore how location resonates between the story and our own lives. How different are the days when an elite group of people controlled the means of survival for a larger community? Does it matter that it was water in the 9th and 12th centuries and oil in the 20th and 21st? Is the ancient Persian empire, no matter what it is called today or in the future, destined to be where all of our international battles for power will be set?

I read somewhere (advance word from Publisher's Weekly perhaps?) that the graphic novel wouldn't be as successful for its intended gamer audience because it lacked the interactive element of the game. Excuse me? Are gamers so limited in their abilities that unless a book based on a game is interactive like a game they couldn't appreciate it? That makes no sense, it sells gamers short, and totally ignores what a separate experience the book is from the game.

What we have here is reminiscent of great Eastern myths and storytelling. It may play off familiar images from what most people know of Arabian Nights stories, it has some magic and mythical qualities (no genies, however, but earth- and animal-based magic), but also has some grounding in the real world. In the 12th century the city of Merv was briefly the largest in the world, built on an oasis along the Silk Road, and no doubt a place where stories and myths were built around the tales of travelers in the region. It does not seem out of place that the stories included in Prince of Persia could have sprung from the ancient city of Merv.

My simple wish to those who can grant it: More like this, please.

Laika

by Nick Abadzis
First Second 2007

When I heard about this project the first question that crossed my mind was "How do you make the story of the first dog in space interesting?" My second question was "And would young readers even care?"

I'll elaborate on the first in a moment, but the answer to the second question is a firm and resounding "probably not" but that has more to do with a general lack of interest in the space program and nothing to do with this book.

What Abadzis does is completely round out the story leading up to the launch of Laika the canine cosmonaut including the lives of those around her. Laika gives us the backstory on Sergi Pavlovich, the "chief designer" behind the Russian space program responsible for Sputnik. The story begins with Pavlovich leaving the gulag where he was once one of Stalin's political prisoners mumbling "I am a man of destiny." Saying this enough time in double-digit-below-zero temperatures becomes the mantra that saves him until a sound -- and the moon -- appear to guide him towards his salvation.

Flash ahead years later where we're given a brief insight into triumphant launch of Sputnik, the little satellite that launch a superpower race toward space. Premiere Kruschev is impressed with success of the satellite and requests that the Chief Designer push forward to another historic launch in time for the national holiday a month down the road. An impossible task, but our man of destiny will not fail and he calls his team back from vacation to make it happen.

Drop back a few years to a scene in a Russian household where among a little of puppies is a "special" runt with a curly tail. This runt is, of course, the future Laika and she moves about as if she has a destiny of her own. Taken in as a young boys punishment (she is meant to teach him responsibility) she spends much of her time alone in a hall closet, patiently waiting to be understood and loved. When the boy attempts to ditch the dog in the river she falls in with a street dog that shows her how to survive the lean streets. Eventually she is caught and sent to a special research facility that is raising dogs for a special government program.

Here in the dog kennels we meet his handler, a young female apparatchik who is finding it hard to separate her scientific background with her love of her charges. She has come to recognize all the dogs in her care by their character, their strengths and weaknesses, and it's clear that she recognizes in Laika those same special qualities that all with eyes eventually see. Her patience, her loyalty, her trust in those worth trusting, make her the ideal candidate for her vigorous training program. As it becomes clear what Laika will be used for the scientists begin to have misgivings. Even Pavlovich is uneasy about the fact that in order to guarantee a successful launch for Kruschev he must send Laika up with no plan for retrieval. She is a dog of destiny.

What Abadzis does in the end is create a story so rich that the reader will have a difficult time separating out the fact from the fiction. It is not impossible to believe what the dogs are thinking and dreaming because Abadzis has done his job of treating them as equal to humans. He includes supporting documentation at the end of the book but none of it (from what I can tell) is the true life story of Laika, and certainly not her autobiogrpahy. There is the ring of truth to every panel, so much so that I initially thought it might be eligible for the Siebert Award until my boss reminded me that the award went to books that were entirely non-fiction. Oh, yeah. That would preclude elements like talking dogs and unverifiable conversations -- or would it?

Up to now I have left out a crucial bit of information: this is a graphic novel. It almost shouldn't make a difference and I left that bit of information out from the beginning deliberately. The question has come up about how one is supposed to review a graphic novel without showing pictures of the work. The answer is already out in the form of printed music reviews and reviews of gallery openings. True, for the casual review those items appear in print with either photos to document the work or with references to other shared cultural knowledge that a reader can draw conclusions and inferences from. But it is possible to discuss the graphic novel in terms of it's content and never talk about the art; not because the art isn't worth mentioning but because the graphic novel is no more successful than any other media without a good story to hang it's decoration on.

Ultimately, I'm not sure who the audience for this book is, but I know that they will be richly rewarded for their interest. I believe if you click on the panels below you can read the page more clearly, or if you'd like to check out the excerpt from this book that includes this page you can visit the First Second website.