Omnivoracious

Graphic Novel Friday Spotlight: Shadows, Empire, Heavenshields, Bibles, and More

Every Friday, Omnivoracious will turn the spotlight on one or more graphic novels, with future installments also including news, relevant links, and interviews. You can let me know who or what you'd like to see featured by commenting on this post.

Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa (First Second) - A rich allegory in which a man and his son embark on a journey to save their family, while haunted by three shadows. Their trip takes them to many strange places, and although the underlying symbolism is at times obscure, the emotional pay-off is definitely worth the experience.

The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation by Siku (Doubleday) - To me, there's something crazy about trying to render the Bible in graphic form to begin with, given that the rich texture of the language provides much of its power. A manga Bible seems perhaps even crazier, given the stylizations of the form. The results, though, seem much weirder than even that, which I mean as a compliment. Either the Bible was always odd or Siku has chosen to dramatize the stranger bits. I'm not sure the standard manga approach really adds anything new to the experience, but it's a worthy experiment that manga fans in general should consider checking out.

A New World for Lemmy Caution

I love Godard, so whenever I find a new interpretation, I'm pretty excited.

BoingBoing reported this morning that the next Scott Teplin exhibition at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York would be Alphaville, based on the 1965 Godard film about a futuristic city where the hero, American private eye Lemmy Caution, meanders until he learns that, basically, love has been weeded out of human experience.

Teplin's version doesn't look quite so dark. In his vivid pen and ink and watercolor drawings, Teplin has created his own Alphaville, preserving the humor and sense of confusion of the original with modern-day rooms that play with scale and unexpected juxtapositions.

Even if you won't be in New York for the exhibition, which runs May 1 through June 7, 2008, you can see previews from the gallery or Teplin's site of the Alphaville drawings, the alphabet rooms (like the "O" shown here), and photos of an artist book set “Sinker Down and Out,” which the gallery describes as "a Kafkaesque journey of a donut’s travels through the digestive path."

One of the Alphaville drawings will also be the cover of McSweeney's #27, due out in early summer.

And, if you're into seeing art in progress (I'm a sucker for it), you will probably enjoy Teplin's blog, Future Trash, which shows the evolution of the drawings as he's been working them out.

After discovering Teplin's awesomeness in his work and his blog, I was excited to also discover that he and I (and fellow Omnivoracious contributor, Paul) worked on the same book: Beasts! (2006) for Fantagraphics. His Loathly Worm can be found on p. 121. --Heidi

2008 Eisner Award Finalists Announced

(Just one half of one table of comics considered during last year's judging weekend.)

The Eisner Award finalists for best comics/graphic novels have been announced, in a dizzying array of categories. So many categories, in fact, that I'm just going to let Amazon readers peruse it all themselves, and say I'm happy to see such imaginative fare as Shaun Tan's The Arrival, Jeff Lemire's Essex County, Jason Shiga's Bookhunter, and Matt Kindt's Super Spy making the list. The 2008 Eisner Awards judging panel consisted of John Davis (director of pop culture markets, Bookazine), Paul DiFilippo (SF and comics author), Atom! Freeman (owner of Brave New World Comics in Santa Clarita, CA), Jeff Jensen (senior writer, Entertainment Weekly), and Eva Volin (supervising children's librarian for the Alameda Free Library in Alameda, CA).

Having been a judge last year, knowing how much effort goes into the process, it's mind-blowing that they survive the experience. In addition to their regular reading, the judges are flown to San Diego and basically locked in a room for an entire weekend to read anything they've missed and to thrash out the finalists.

Moomin Moomin Moomin: Bliss for the Whole Family

 

Everybody give a big thank you to Drawn & Quarterly Press, which has begun reissuing Tove Jansson's Moomin comic strips in graphic novel form. The second volume just arrived at my door and like the first it's a beautiful oversized book featuring the antics of the hippo-like Moomin and his family. From dealing with obnoxious neighbors to doing ridiculous things for love, the Moomin family's adventures are funny, surreal, sometimes melancholy, and always rich and whimsical. In less skillful hands, this would be fodder for sticking one’s finger down one’s throat in revulsion at the treacly whimsy of it all. However, Tove Jansson was a pragmatist and also, if her work is any indication, a wise person. Beneath the gentle surface of Moomin there is a sly, wicked wit and much non-didactic commentary about the world and people’s place in it.

Something must be said about the effortlessness of these comic strips. There isn’t a word or image out of place. I cannot think of another comic strip that gives me as much pleasure as this one. There is also something uniquely calming and stress-relieving about reading Moomin that I can’t quite put into words but has something to do with the effortlessness I mention above. As Neil Gaiman says, "A lost treasure now rediscovered--one of the sweetest, strangest comics strips ever drawn or written. A surrealist masterpiece. Honest." You owe it to yourself to check it out.

The Art of Bryan Talbot

Bryan Talbot's on a roll. The prolific artist and writer produced a bona fide masterpiece in Alice in Sunderland, which hit my Bookslut list of the top graphic novels of the year at #1, and this month he has a beautiful full-color retrospective of his talent, The Art of Bryan Talbot, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. Arranged chronologically, the book covers early underground art, posters of and for rock stars, and, of course, sketches, drawings, and art from some of his most famous work, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Judge Dredd, and The Tale of One Bad Rat. It's a well-deserved honor and a book that art fans and comics fans alike will want as part of their collection. I recently caught up with Talbot and asked him about his approach to his art.

Amazon.com: What motivates you and keeps you passionate about your art?
Bryan Talbot: I really don't know, I've never considered doing anything else. Writing and drawing is what I do. I suppose it's because I enjoy the results.

Amazon.com: How sensitive are you to falling into ruts and do you take conscious steps to avoid repeating yourself too much?
Bryan Talbot: It's easy to get into habitual ways of drawing things and I'm as much guilty of this as anyone else--after all, it's part of what makes a recognisable personal style. But I always try and think a lot about each image beforehand, try and envisage the best way of approaching it. When it comes to creating graphic novels I always deliberately work on something completely different to the previous one. After the non-genre realistic The Tale of One Bad Rat, I did the adult SF adventure Heart of Empire. After that I did Alice in Sunderland, which was different to anything I'd done before. Now I'm working on a steampunk detective/thriller with anthropomorphic characters. I've been describing it as Sherlock Holmes meets Sin City--with animals! If I didn't do something different each time I'd get very bored.

Don't Get Any of That Blood on the White Suit: New Tom Wolfe

The big publishing news last week was that Tom Wolfe, after 43 years (!) at the thrifty Nobel Prize factory over at Farrar Straus Giroux, has signed with Little, Brown for his upcoming novel, Back to Blood (not listed on our site yet), for the reported sum of $6 to 7 million (a sum which his last book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, would not have come close to earning back, it has also been reported). Now this week New York's Vulture blog has gotten its greedy mitts on Wolfe's 28-page proposal for the book, about a half-a-page of which they share with the general reading public. It's a fictional (but of course heavily reported!) expose of the racial politics of Miami, covering "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition." "Our story begins"--so begins the proposal--"inside the mind of a young Cuban policeman." I dunno--who do you trust to tell a complex modern tale of race and class and get "inside the minds" of its principals: Richard Price? Junot Diaz? Or Tom Wolfe? He wouldn't be my first choice, but we shall see...

Also via Vulture, a link to comics blogger Laura Hudson's mom's very funny review of The Best American Comics 2007, edited by Chris Ware. Her response to the navel-gazery (which, I should note, I at times adore): "There’s a tendency to want to say to a lot of those stories, 'hey, suck it up a little.'" --Tom

Our Family's Holiday Book Recap

Heidi and I just got back from a long holiday break, including three family xmases and a New Year's trip to Vegas (in which we learned that 8-month-old Silas could care less about the Bellagio's fountains, but he loves fireworks and trying to eat Keno tickets). Silas and his cousin got plenty of books, so I figured I'd share some of the highlights:

• Winter in White: A Mini Pop-up Treat: For my money, you can't beat The Night Before Christmas for yuletide Robert Sabuda pop-up madness, but my mom got Silas this smaller, more subtle Sabuda pop-up and it seems like just the right scale.
• Gallop: Why hasn't this been done before? The low-tech, zoetrope-like animations (patented as "Scanimations") in this stout little board/pop-up book are weirdly compelling. A horse, cat, turtle, eagle, etc., comes to life on each page--without batteries or a screen--looking much like primitive Muybridge animations. The effect is too subtle for Silas (who finds everything fascinating), but kids who are even a little older will appreciate the coolness. I'd think that Robert Sabuda would be kicking himself over not thinking of this first, but he's got an admiring blurb right there on the back cover.
• Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?: I'm such a sucker for Eric Carle's illustration style, and this board book has fun rhymes and repetition, too. Plus, all the animals in this particular book are endangered, so you can have fun reading a loud while also feeling terrible about destroying the planet. (How much habitat did I destroy from buying yet another board book? I don't even want to think about it.)
• Moomin books: My comics-loving friends and my Finnish friends (okay, one Finnish friend) couldn't believe that we'd never heard of Moomin. Moomin "is, like, the Mickey Mouse of our country"--with, I now know, an amusement park and everything. I loved a clever and goofy die-cut kids' book with the Moomin characters called The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My, but grownups and older kids will get way more out of the popular and very fun comic strip, a densely idiosyncratic serial that's more like Barnaby or Krazy Kat than more current strips. It was originally published in English in the 1950s in the London Evening News and has been collected in nicely oversized hardbacks by Canadian comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly. I devoured volumes one and two.
• The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: This was the sleeper hit of Christmas, for Silas' almost 5-year-old cousin, and for me and his dad. It should be noted that this was from the library, because we couldn't find it anywhere--despite trying, since Silas' cousin carried it with him everywhere, even though the entire beat-up book was in black and white, and he couldn't read the entries. He just kept asking, "Who is this? Who is that?" And we'd tell him, "Oh, that's Kang the Conqueror. Let's see, he's, uh... from the 40th century. And... he traveled back in time to become a pharaoh." And so on, through hundreds (thousands?) of entries. This seemed like classic, mastery-of-arcane-knowledge boy reading--like the way I (and his dad, coincidentally) would read the Guinness Book of World Records cover to cover and back again growing up. We never did find the Marvel guide in print before Christmas, so he could have his own copy, but it looks like an updated edition is coming out this spring. (We got him another slightly age-inappropriate book instead, DK's Spider-Man Ultimate Guide, to feed his growing Spidey obsession. We got bonus points because it matched his pajamas.)
• Drawn to Enchant: This wasn't a gift for anyone but just a book that I was carrying around reading, which has a ton of amazing illustrations, images, and ephemera, from children's books going back well over a century. I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone who isn't particularly interested in kids' literature, but Slate (where I originally learned about it) has a great slideshow of the highlights, including my favorite, an early sketch of Gandalf and Bilbo by Maurice Sendak, from a book that was never produced:

--Paul

Age of Bronze: The Story of the Trojan War

   

Part One of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze: Betrayal, originally scheduled for July of this year, is finally out from Image Comics in a handsome graphic novel edition. For those who haven't been following this saga, it's the tale of one man's quest (that's Shanower's) to detail all of Ancient History's greatest legend in comics form. If you were disappointed with the movie Troy and you're not sure you want to go back to the original source material, definitely check out Shanower's creation. He rather effortlessly has managed to re-imagine the myth as an illustrated narrative. If you think that's easy, just check out the list of character names with descriptions in the back of the book--or the copious bibliography of research materials.   

Comics: Not Just for Grown-ups Anymore

Françoise Mouly, art director for the New Yorker, and her husband Art Spiegelman have parlayed their love of comics into a mission to help kids learn how to read. Following the success of the RAW anthologies for grown-ups, then the Little Lit comics for young adults, Mouly and Spiegelman have launched Toon Books, a line of full-color, original comics for children ages 4+, i.e., kids who are just learning to read.

Mouly, who says her family learned their love of reading from comics, got grade-school cred for the books by getting feedback from librarians, teachers, and kids in Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and Pennsylvania. She also met with the Maryland State Superintendent of Schools, who is planning to use the books in K-3 classrooms as part of the Maryland Comic Book Initiative.

In a recent Publishers Weekly article, Mouly talked about her ambitions for Toon Books:

“Comics are the gateway to literacy for young kids,” said Mouly, who expects Toon Books to transform books for early readers the same way RAW influenced indie comics. “RAW showed that comics can be taken seriously,” she said. Little Lit... “was an intermediate step using the RAW model. Now there are more comics for kids 10–12 years old but not for very young kids.”

Toon Books will release three titles in spring 2008: Benny and Penny by Geoffrey Hayes (April), Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons by Agnes Rosenstiehl (May), and Otto's Orange Day by Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch (June). And, exciting news for Spiegelman fans whose little ones aren't quite ready for Maus--in the fall he will release his own Toon Book, Jack and the Box. --Heidi

Drawing a Blank

   

In The Rejection Collection Volume 2: The Cream of the Crap,
Matthew Diffee continues to highlight what happens to the hundreds of cartoons submitted on a weekly basis for one of the 20 coveted slots in The New Yorker. The storied New Yorker received one less submission from Diffee this week as he was kind enough to create an exclusive cartoon just for Amazon.

--BTP

Amazon.com Exclusive from Matthew Diffee
Here's a cartoon that's very different from the rest of mine. This one, unlike the others, has never been rejected by The New Yorker magazine. I did it especially for Amazon. Would it have been rejected if I had submitted it? I think I can safely say yes. That's not to say it isn't any good. It's just the mathematics involved. Like all the regular cartoonists in The New Yorker, 90 percent of my work gets rejected. Yep, it's sad, isn't it? We all do ten or more cartoons a week, pitch them to the magazine, and on a good week they'll take one of them. The rest disappear forever--at least they used to. Now we save our rejects up and put the best of them in The Rejection Collection. This is volume two, and just like the first one, it's full of cartoons that make the cartoonists laugh and the editors cringe.

That's because, in most cases, these are wildly inappropriate for the pages of a sophisticated literary magazine. I think you'll see what I mean when you take a look. And if you ask me, just knowing that these gags were ever submitted to The New Yorker at all makes them a little bit funnier--maybe 6 percent.

 

New on Amazon Wire: Talking Schulz with Michaelis

Our latest episode of Amazon Wire features an interview I did with David Michaelis, the author of a new biography of Charles Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts. You can listen to the interview on our Wire blog, and for a quick glimpse you can read the short Q&A excerpt I posted on our blog back soon after I did the interview back in June. We talked at BookExpo America back in June (cue the background noise for convention-floor atmosphere), well before the book came out (and even before there was a full advance copy to read), so we talked more about the strip than Schulz himself, since I didn't know the full story yet.

I've since read the book--and liked it a lot, it's one of my favorite books of the year--and I must say I'm completely flummoxed by the apparently controversy that's surrounded the book. (See here and here as well as some 1-star customer reviews on our site.) Well, not completely--I can certainly understand a family's discomfort with a biographer's take on the life they knew so well. But the idea that this is a hit piece that paints Schulz merely as a bitter, miserable man bears almost no relation to the book. You read many biographies that give you the sense that the author came to dislike his or her subject while writing about them (Arnold Rampersad's recent Ralph Ellison bio, while certainly respectful of his achievement, gave me that feeling, and made me not like Ellison--long a hero of mine--as much either), but I didn't get that sense at all from Schulz and Peanuts. Schulz comes off as unhappy and often difficult, to be sure, but never unlikeable (and always a genius). One of Michaelis's main points is that Schulz (as he himself said on many occasions) cultivated that unhappiness as a spur to his art; perhaps if his biographer has emphasized that simmering misery in a way that his family finds excessive, it's because his main goal is to see how the life led to the art. In any case, I came away from the book with more admiration for Schulz rather than less, and with a fair bit of admiration for Michaelis as well.

Coming up next week on Wire: an interview our former classical music editor, Tom May, and I did last week with Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic whose excellent new history of twentieth-century music, The Rest Is Noise, must be the first book of classical music criticism to hit our top 100 in a very long time. --Tom

Ben Templesmith and the Spike TV Scream Awards

So I'm watching the Spike TV Scream Awards for SF/Fantasy/Horror, at first because nothing else was on, and then because they actually have to put their hands into a glass box of scorpions to pull out the envelope with the winner's name on it, and I nearly fell out of my seat when the Best Comic category comes up and 30 Days of Night by Ben Templesmith and Steve Niles flashes across the screen...and then proceeds to win.

If you've been living in a cave, you may not know that 30 Days of Night is now out as a major motion picture--and that Ben Templesmith is an amazing artist.

Of course, if you liked 30 Days of Night, you should check out Wormwood, Gentleman Corpse, Templesmith's latest project. Involving tentacular terrors, fungus, and, er, a gentleman corpse, this graphic novel is by turns funny, horrifying, and always brilliantly illustrated. The art has the color range of a strobing squid, in a good way, and there's a definite grand guignol feel to it all.

As for the Spike TV Scream Awards, I recommend them highly, having finally seen them. There's something to be said for an awards show that includes appearances by Harrison Ford and Ozzy Osbourne and Quentin Tarantino (inexplicably shouting "Do we share the same fungus?" over and over again) and Kevin Smith and Bruce Campbell (entering with the immortal line "Has Dame Judy Dench ever sat in a pile of intestines for seven hours?"). It's got a healthy sense of camp--kind of the anti-Academy Awards. Not to mention, plenty of scorpions. Expect more from Ben Templesmith about upcoming projects in the near future. In the meantime, check out this fascinating interrogatory with the man, from the cult site Skull Ring.

-Jeff

I Shall (Eventually) Read All the Best Books of 2007

This has been a weird year for books in our family. Heidi and I had our first kid in April--a boy, Silas, charming and no doubt doomed to bibliophilia, the poor guy--but that means I've been reduced to hit-and-run, guerrilla tactics in my reading. I'm fighting an increasingly asymmetrical struggle: the baby's naps get shorter, the stack of books I want to finish gets taller.

I've put my years of kids-book reviewing for Amazon to good use (as I hope to do in my posts to the Family Room), so I've at least had the consolation of satisfying reads with Silas, like Hug and Chicka Chicka ABC. But for sheer recreation, I'm definitely skewing now more towards nonfiction (esp. politics), comics, and anything else that I can quickly pick up and put down w/o completely losing the thread.

That's all my way of saying: Even though my survey of 2007 books hasn't exactly been encyclopedic, I have no reservations recommending I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets as my hands-down favorite. This bizarro time capsule rescued from the earliest days of superhero comics (1939-1941) is like a sublime, demented brick over the head. The collection--complete stories of "Stardust the Super Wizard," "Fantomah: Mystery Woman of the Jungle," and a couple others--surpasses itself in fantastical weirdness with nearly every panel, like an eight-year-old's dream of what a comic should be. Almost better than the work itself is the comic afterword by editor Paul Karasik, "Whatever Happened To Fletcher Hanks?" in which he recounts his pursuit of the renowned but forgotten outsider artist behind these obscure comics.

A panel from "De Structo & the Headhunter."

P.S. Speaking of short, satisfying reads, I should also mention my favorite zine of 2007: Man Why You Even Got to Do a Thing (hopefully already known to other fans of the Ignatz-winning Webcomic Achewood). --Paul