The Rabbi's Cat: It's as good in motion as it is on the page

The Rabbi's Cat
France, 2012
Directed by Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux
Based on the comic by Joann Sfar



Joann Sfar has such a particular, idiosyncratic style of artwork that one might not expect his comics to translate all that well to animation, but this adaptation of one of his best-known (in the United States, anyway) works proves that notion wrong. If anything, Sfar's artwork makes a lovely transition to movement, with his tactile shading providing a lush, textured look to surfaces while still retaining a hand-drawn look, the characters moving with a nice combination of realism and cartooniness, and beautifully detailed art filling the screen, mostly sticking to a single style but occasionally shifting to distorted or simplified exaggerations for dream sequences and the like. It's absolutely lovely, a joy to watch play out throughout the film's running time, and along with some excellent voice acting and a plot that just kind of meanders along in whatever direction it feels like going, it makes for a wonderful, whimsical bit of entertainment, but one that also provides some thoughts to ponder if one is so inclined.



For those unfamiliar with the source material, the story follows a cat and his owners (if a cat can be considered to be owned by anyone), a rabbi and his daughter who live in Algiers in what appears to be the 1920s or 30s. Early on in the story, the cat eats the rabbi's parrot, which gives him the power of speech and kicks off all sorts of interesting shenanigans as the rabbi tries to teach him about Judaism. Later, the cat loses his power to talk, and the plot heads off into some weird places, as the rabbi ends up caring for a Russian Jew who fled to Algeria, then goes on an expedition with him to find an Ethiopian Jerusalem that was supposedly the origin of both the black and Jewish races. It's an odd and kind of flighty plot, but what exactly happens isn't really the point; it's more about following around these characters as the cat struggles to understand humanity and religion, even though he would just prefer to spend time with his mistress, the rabbi's daughter. But for viewers, any time spent with these characters is a treat, with the voice acting and animation allowing them to display a real warmth for each other, both a physical closeness and also the kind of affection and irritation that families have.



The discussions of religion are fascinating as well, with the cat attempting to learn about Judaism but fighting against a lot of the ideas on logical grounds with a feline contrariness, while allowing viewers to understand the comforting feelings that faith can provide. The rabbi himself has a wonderful attitude, solid in his beliefs but willing to say he doesn't know when the cat prods him with an inconsistency or contradiction. Later on, he meets up with an Arabic cousin who joins the trek to the Ethiopian Jerusalem, and they make a wonderful pair, holding what seem like conflicting beliefs, but willing to accept each other for what they are and share each other's joy and sorrow. It's a rather feel-good look at religion, an inclusive, accepting atmosphere that puts people before dogma (while still acknowledging, through both Jewish and Muslim characters that appear in the story, that there are those in any religion who are much more concerned with the letter of the law than with its spirit). It might be a rose-colored view of a past that never was, but by making some of the most contentious religions on the planet seem warm and friendly, it provides a window into what can make beliefs so important to people, without condemning those who don't toe that particular line.



Religion aside, the film is a gorgeous trip into a world that springs to life from Sfar's imagination, and it's full of great visuals, goofy asides (including a meeting with Tintin that reveals him as kind of a racist, or at least a condescending jerk), cute character moments, love and warmth between people (and animals), expressive flourishes, nice voice acting (I like the way the cat's meows don't try to replicate an actual feline sound, but just consist of actor François Morel saying "Meow"), and a wonderfully realized setting. It turns out that there was no need to doubt the suitability of Joann Sfar's sensibility for animation; it ends up being a perfect realization of the look and feel of his comics. And hopefully it won't be the last time we get to see it either.

Rohan at the Louvre: And also in crazytown

Rohan at the Louvre
By Hirohiko Araki
Published by NBM



Hirohiko Araki is an inspired choice for the line of European graphic novels published in conjunction with the Louvre, given that his work seems (from the outside viewpoint of someone having never actually read any of his comics) completely nuts, but also quite creative. This book is actually a spinoff of Araki's series Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, starring a manga artist named Rohan who has the power to "read" people like a book, which means their faces actually peel open like pages, allowing him to see the words printed underneath, which are apparently their life stories. He gets a chance to visit the Louvre in order to view a cursed Japanese painting that was made with "the blackest color in the world", an excursion that ends up being disastrous, as the painting, which had been sealed away in an abandoned underground archive, unleashes the ghosts of Rohan and his museum worker companions' ancestors, the vengeful spirits visiting gruesome fates on the living. It's pretty weird, with plenty of striking imagery, and maybe some sort of message about learning from the past? It's hard to tell, and it's curious why the Louvre would commission work like this, since it only barely features any imagery of the museum itself or any of the actual artwork that resides there. Perhaps it's meant to foster the idea that all sorts of unknown treasures are hidden away in the Louvre's vaults, waiting to be discovered (or unleashed)?

That's kind of beside the point though; this is really all about Araki being weird. There's a bizarre energy to his art, from basics like costume design (Rohan wears his inverted Jughead hat at all times, as if it's part of his head) to the poses characters strike, which often consist of odd bodily contortions or flamboyant gestures:



And while exaggerated emotions are common in manga, Araki's characters seem especially prone to crazy outbursts:



And that's during the "normal" parts of the book; when the ghosts attack and things go really crazy, the atmosphere turns creepy, and the horrors inflicted are rather disgusting:



The plot is oddly-paced too; Araki spends the first fourth of the book relating a tale from Rohan's youth, when a woman moved into his grandma's boarding house, expressed interest in his budding manga career, told him the story of the cursed painting, and cried a bunch about her failed marriage before disappearing. Then the story jumps to the present and the rest of the book consists of what ends up being a rather brief visit to the museum before ending abruptly after Rohan escapes. He apparently learns some sort of lesson about honoring the ghosts of the past or something, but it's hard to take anything away from the proceedings other than a general feeling of unease.

But it's a neat comic nonetheless, a nice chance to see manga art in color, which is a rarity, at least for work that has been translated into English. It also seems like a good sample of Araki's work, something that might point readers toward his other stuff, with expectations of nonsensical craziness and eccentric art, and the feeling that anything can, and probably will, happen. Jojo, here we come.

Athos in America: Jason in transition?

Athos in America
By Jason
Published by Fantagraphics

 

All six of the stories in this latest volume from Europe's eminent purveyor of deadpan, blank-eyed, funny animals are quite good, but two of them especially seem to stand out for me. The first (or last, according to how the book is ordered) is the title story, which sees the return of the main character from The Last Musketeer as he tells his story to a New York bartender, recounting his travels across our great country. It's one of those sort of romanticized portrayals of the United States that you occasionally see from Europe or England, a celebration of the openness of the land and the possibilities available here, while still acknowledging that it's not paradise, and the cruelty of life still reigns supreme. I love the gentlemanly tone of Athos' conversation with the bartender, and with a closing montage of the sights and sounds of America, it's a nicely subdued ending to the book, whose previous stories featured plenty of violence and stormy emotions.



Of those stories, the one that really struck me as something interesting and different from Jason is "A Cat from Heaven", which I hope isn't autobiographical, even though it seems to be. In it, Jason portrays himself as an awful jerk, giving his girlfriend/wife a black eye during an argument, threatening to kill her, acting like a dick to his friends and fans, and just generally being an asshole. It's startlingly stark and emotional, making for a weird disconnect, since it's portrayed exactly the same as in all of Jason's other comics, populated with his minimalist animal characters. But just by giving the character his own name, it becomes raw and personal, like something out of an Adrian Tomine or Ivan Brunetti comic, the artist's soul being laid bare on the page. Maybe it's all an exercise, an attempt to add something a bit darker to his usual style, or maybe it's an anguished confession, but whatever the case, it proves that Jason isn't sitting on his laurels and cranking out repetitively quirky stories in his usual style; he's pushing himself to do new things and communicate through his art, and it's wonderful to watch.

Minicomics, and others not so mini

So...Buttons #4
Written by Jonathan Baylis
Art by David Beyer, Jr., Thomas Boatwright, Fred Hembeck, Eric Kim, T.J. Kirsch, Tim Ogline, Paul Salvi, Noah Van Sciver, and Paul Westover
Self-published

If you've read any of the previous issues of Jonathan Baylis' minicomics series, you know what to expect with this one: autobiographical stories illustrated in a range of styles, possibly adhering to a theme of some sort. The theme for this issue is "movies", sort of, along with various somewhat-tangentially-related anecdotes. Baylis alternates between talking about his history and discussing movies and directors that he likes, touching on subjects like the New York Mets, origami, his time as a Marvel Comics intern, Jewish comedians, King Kong, Robert Redford, Sam Fuller, Jim Jarmusch, Dino DeLaurentiis, and OCD M&M eating, always lending a personal touch, as if he's having a conversation with the reader, a sense enhanced by his on-panel appearances. It certainly helps to have a number of talented artistic collaborators; regular series artists T.J. Kirsch and Thomas Boatwright bring a nice, cartoony familiarity to their particular subjects (candy, Star Trek, and Redford for the former, Kong, Jarmusch, and Alfred Hitchcock for the latter), while Fred Hembeck brings the Marvel Bullpen to life wonderfully, Noah Van Sciver gives New York sports fandom a nervous, jittery energy, and Eric Kim lends placid romanticism to the subject of origami. It's really nice work all around, another installment of good autobiographical comics in the Harvey Pekar mold. Baylis can probably keep doing this for quite a while to come, and he definitely should.
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More More Mores
By Joey Jacks
Self-published; buy it from Quimby's

I always hate to get into a pointless "is this a comic or not" argument (even with myself), but it's hard not to at least address the issue with this minicomic/zine, which consists entirely of abstract drawings like the one on the cover, without any narrative linking them other than similarity in style. But whether or not it's worthy of the label of "sequential art", it's still pretty fascinating, all sorts of weird shapes smashed together to make whatever the reader/viewer wants to interpret it as. Are these topographical maps? Alien landscapes? Circuit diagrams? Inscrutable flowcharts? Who knows? The level of detail, which seems random, yet calculated, forming different configurations on every page, makes for page after page of examination, even if you have no idea what you're really looking for/at. There's little like it, which makes Joey Jacks a minicomicker to watch; I'd love to see what else he can do.
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Coffee and Beer Money
By Becky Hawkins

Self-published

Becky Hawkins seems to be operating more in the stereotypical minicomics mold than Joey Jacks, filling her pages with autobiographical tales and self-analysis, in an appealing, if not exactly groundbreaking, manner. This issue of her "French Toast Comix" series sees her enjoying karaoke with friends, having adventures while working on a cruise ship, and lamenting her interpersonal skills and relationship difficulties. It's engaging stuff, especially when she relates an art-based epiphany or considers her unflattering depiction of herself. The shifts in artistic style are also interesting, some pages drawn simplistically and sketchily, others using rougher linework, some experimenting with heavy shadows, some filling in nice background details; she seems to still be trying out different instruments and techniques from strip to strip, sometimes just jotting down a gag or observation, other times putting together multi-page anecdotes, working toward a consistent, natural personal style. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for more comics from her; it should be interesting to see how she develops.
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Dinopopolous
By Nick Edwards
Published by Blank Slate Books

Blank Slate's Chalk Marks series seems to be a less-artsy answer to Fantagraphics' Ignatz line, taking the form of large-size pamphlets with high production values, but containing more populist types of stories, in the sci-fi, fantasy, kids' adventure, character-based drama, and autobio genres. This particular entry by Nick Edwards is pretty excellent, a great dose of wacky cartooniness that fills pages with detailed whimsy and beautiful designs. It follows a boy named Nigel and his talking dinosaur Brian on an archaeological adventure  involving aliens, communicable diseases, and evil lizard-men, and it's funny, exciting, and adventurous in its cool use of the comics page, with the tails of word balloons and discriptive insets snaking expressively toward their objects, panel layouts taking unique forms like a tunnel winding across a two-page spread, and trippy inter-dimensional weirdscapes that seem like a cross between Steve Ditko and Brandon Graham. I wasn't previously familiar with Edwards, but after this, I'll be on board for whatever I can find by him, whether it's more adventures in this world (which is primed for further exploration, featuring likable leads, an arch-villain, a Basil Exposition-like dispenser of missions, multiple layers of secret civilizations and dimensions, and a sense of anything-can-happen fun) or something completely new. I hope I don't have to wait too long.
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Monster Christmas
By Lewis Trondheim
Published by Papercutz

Lewis Trondheim is kind of a sure thing when it comes to making entertaining kids' comics, and this is no exception. This one is the second in a series (although, oddly, it is being published in English before the first book, perhaps in order to be out by the titular holiday) starring what appears to be super-deformed versions of the bird-creatures Trondheim uses to depict himself and his family in his diary comics, along with a four-armed, three-legged, ten-mouthed monster that sprang to life from the children's drawings and became a sort of family pet. This one sees them take a ski vacation, on which they end up meeting Santa and getting caught in the middle of a chase between him and another, more ferocious monster. It's funny and lively, told entirely through images accompanied by past-tense narration by the children, who relate all the details with a mixture of childlike wonder and incomprehension. Trondheim captures that kid's-eye-view of the action really well, the kids commenting on everything as if it's fairly normal, treating the crazy events as only slightly outside the norm, since most everything is new and exciting to children. The actions of the parents is especially well-depicted through this filter, with their irritation, exasperation, exhaustion, and fear conveyed mostly through captioned descriptions like "Dad says that to save Santa we'd risk getting ripped to pieces and smashed by the monster and that it might be dangerous. We say, 'Oh...okay.' So everyone gets back in the car to continue the trip". It's all wacky, lively, insightful fun, another entry in the growing library of good Trondheim comics for all ages that are available in English. Here's hoping for many more to come.

Little Nothings: I think they're somethings

Link: I forget who, but somebody pointed out the cartoonist Seamus Heffernan to me, specifically the excerpt from his soon-to-be-released Xeric-funded comic Freedom, which is excellent, and has me really wanting to read the whole thing. It's historical fiction, set prior (and maybe eventually during?) the American Revolution, and just the few pages previewed there demonstrate a real facility with storytelling. This guy is someone to watch.


Little Nothings, volume 4: My Shadow in the Distance
By Lewis Trondheim
Published by NBM



Lewis Trondheim is a pretty great cartoonist, and his ongoing series of journal comics is a wonderful demonstration of his skills. He manages to capture interesting, humorous moments from his life and travels and lay them out in panel form such that the essential comment, conversation, observation, or experience is perfectly communicated. Considering that most of the experiences being related here involve world travels, pretty much every page here is interesting and enjoyable, with Trondheim covering a wide variety of experiences, from travel and sightseeing to conversations and human observations. It's wonderfully done, just from a writing perspective, with the cartoonist's humor and particularly French viewpoint on life shining through even in translation.

And then there's the art, which is as much of a draw as the stories being told, if not more so. Trondheim starts from a goofy position, depicting himself as a sort of bird-man, and everyone else as some sort of animal-person, which is a delightfully odd conceit, but works quite well in terms of reader identification. Once you accept that Trondheim's version of reality is populated by strange animal-human hybrids, it's fun to see what sort of creature will pop up next, and they all seem to fit together as normal people, found wherever one travels.



And since those travels take Trondheim all over the world (he visits Utah, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Argentina, Angouleme, Germany, and the African island of Mayotte in this volume), he gets plenty of opportunities to draw the sights, which end up being beautiful representations of reality, grounding the goofy anthropomorphism in the real world and, along with the relatable details (that is, irritations) of travel, emphasizing Trondheim's feet-on-the-ground experiences. Trying to go off-roading in a rental car in a Monument Valley desert, viewing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans simultaneously from Tierra del Fuego, and remarking on the way Prague transcends its tacky touristy-ness from eight feet up are just a couple of the many moments that are wonderfully captured here.

And yes, the art which delineates all of this on the page is gorgeous stuff, fluid linework that manages to wring all manner of expression out of animal eyes, beaks, and snouts, and especially the absolutely beautiful watercolors that give such depth and texture to everything, especially the breathtaking skies:

 

The coloring also works excellently to separate Trondheim's borderless panels from each other and make them stand out on the page, as well as to emphasize his own individual character within those panels. There's an interesting recurring motif in which the colors encircle Trondheim, yet drop out in the center, leaving the area around him uncolored to emphasize a particular moment, or perhaps to isolate him against other people:

And I love the way the colors often fill a panel boldly, centering attention on the important details in the middle, but fade at the edges, seemingly depicting the fuzzy periphery of Trondheim's memories:



It's a beautiful-looking book, and while it's not exactly groundbreaking or "important" in what it captures, it's a wonderful example of the autobio/journal comic, capturing interesting, funny moments in the life of somebody who is so good at relating that sort of scene, whether real or fictional. After four volumes, one supposes Trondheim could keep doing this in perpetuity, and if he does, the comics will almost certainly be worth reading.

More examples from the book can be found at NBM's blog.

Kinky & Cosy: Not as descriptive a title as I was hoping

Kinky & Cosy
By Nix
Published by NBM

There's a pretty great tradition of European comics in all manner of genres and formats, and North America is pretty sorely lacking in what we get to experience of that output. However, as welcome as any new translated European release is, sometimes one wonders if there might have been something a bit better to import instead. While this comic strip collection from Belgian cartoonist Nix is nicely-designed (dig those googly eyes peeking out through holes in the cover!) and does have its charms, it's not exactly an example of sterling wit and brilliant cartooning that was begging to be unleashed on American shores. Instead, it's a pretty standard "evil kid" type of comic, following the title characters as they cause trouble at home, in class, and in various other social situations (cheating off each other's tests, that old gag where they sit on each other's shoulders and wear a long coat to sneak into a nightclub, that sort of thing), rarely moving beyond of expected behavior or doing anything outrageous enough to offend. It's mildly amusing stuff, mostly contained within three-panel strips, staying within recurring situations and variations on punchlines. The occasional bits that break out of this structure are the most interesting parts: photocomics starring the cartoonist and his pals dressed up as the characters, an extended storyline involving the girls' mother falling in love with the neighborhood recycling bin, a series of puzzle pages at the end of the volume. Of course, there are also a series of Dilbert-esque strips in which the mother complains about not being able to work her office computer, so not every deviation from the norm is successful. The art isn't anything to write home about either; solid black outlines around fairly crude characters, blank backgrounds, mild grotesquerie without anything especially disturbing. It's kind of mediocre, but it is at least a decent example of the rhythms of Franco-Belgian humor, different enough from what is usually published on this side of the Atlantic to be somewhat notable. It would be nice if it was funnier, better drawn, more offensive, etc. though.



For more examples of individual strips, check out NBM's blog.

Shorties: Porn, Teens, Birds, and Elephants

Chester 5000 XYV
By Jess Fink
Published by Top Shelf

Well, this is certainly a pornographic comic. Yep, it's a full-on, hardcore, penetration-and-ejaculation sex-fest, and one that does its job, at least when it comes to stimulating arousal (TMI?). But luckily, it's a really good story as well, full of nice, stylish artwork, humor, and character development. Plus, it's pretty unique, being a steampunk story about an inventor who builds the eponymous robot to pleasure his wife so he can have more time in the lab, only to see her and Chester fall in love, leading to jealousy and retribution, all with sexy complications.

As naughty as all this is (and I can't emphasize the naughtiness too much, with most of the book being taken up by sex scenes that last dozens of pages), it's great to see Jess Fink's style unleashed, as she distorts her figures in orgasmic pleasure and surrounds them with expressively decorative panel arrangements, but still making every emotion and action perfectly clear while keeping the story completely wordless (outside of sound effects, of which "Vert!" is an unforgettable addition to the lexicon). It's a lovely object, and while it's not for kids (or prudes), it's a really fun read and a great example of the unlimited potential of comics.

The comic can be read online at Fink's site, but I recommend the physical version.
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Lucille
By Ludovic Debeurme
Published by Top Shelf

Maybe it's the European tradition this comic comes from, but it takes a little getting used to. The borderless panels aren't laid out in a consistent manner, so each page has a unique arrangement of cloudlike images that do read intuitively, but are definitely different from the comics norm. And within the panels themselves, the thin, somewhat bobble-headed characters live lives of quiet desperation, such that there doesn't seem to be much going on for a fair portion of the story, at least at first. But sticking with the story yields rewards; French cartoonist Ludovic Debeurme quickly establishes his teenage characters, an anorexic girl and a somewhat delinquent boy with an alcoholic father, then, after letting readers cringe at their awful lives for a while, throws them together and lets the inevitable young romance blossom.

While it's very cute and romantic and everything, what's nice about the book is that it doesn't end with their escape from their lives. They quickly and believably connect (Lucille's appreciation of Arthur's goofy teenage antics makes perfect sense for someone who has been forced into an environment of life-or-death seriousness), and it does seem like running off together will solve all their problems, but Debeurme sticks with them and shows that emotional issues don't instantly disappear when one runs away from them, and maturity doesn't instantly bestow itself on one either. Lucille still struggles with anorexia, and Arthur is still antisocial and prone to anger, and while their attempt at a new life is appealing, it seems doomed to fail. Interestingly, the book ends on a "to be continued", so while the story does come to something of an end, Debeurme evidently still has more to tell about these characters. This thick volume is a quick read, but it feels pretty substantial, and it's nice to see such confident storytelling in a style that isn't often seen on this side of the Atlantic.
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Reunion
By Pascal Girard
Published by Drawn and Quarterly

Pascal Girard is kind of a jerk, but at least he recognizes it. Or maybe he's just exaggerating in his self-deprecation, portraying himself as an arrested adolescent still mired in popularity contests at his ten-year high school reunion. Either way, he comes off as a doofus who obsesses over his perceived coolness (both in the past and the present), starts exercising just so he can lose weight to look good to his old friends, stalks girls he used to have crushes on (even though he currently has a girlfriend), cheaps out on the beer he brings to the reunion, attempts to ingratiate himself by bringing along some pot, and almost skips out on the whole thing, even after all his frantic preparations. It's not a pretty picture, but it is a funny one, with Girard making himself look like a fool, capturing his uncertainty and worriedness through the jittery lines of his artwork and delivering plenty of comeuppance to himself as he constantly fails in his attempts to make himself look cool. It's an amusing portrait of a near-universal experience, a relatable depiction of the way returning to your roots can make you fall into old roles, even as you are trying to demonstrate how you've risen above them. One comes away from the book wanting to spend more time with Girard, even as he's endeavoring to make himself look like the worst person in the room.
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Elephant Man
By Greg Houston
Published by NBM

Man oh man, Greg Houston's comics are hilariously weird and silly, full of grotesque imagery, funny names, dumb jokes, random plots, and constant absurdity. This one takes the form of a superhero parody, but the parodic aspects are kind of weak and halfhearted (Stupid codenames! Corny catchphrases! The old "nobody recognizes Superman when he wears glasses" gag!), with the real appeal being the exuberantly odd art and humor, the book full of ramshackle storytelling that seems to consist of whatever Houston felt like drawing next, scratchy lines cohering to form crazily distorted characters (even those that are supposed to be good looking sport jutting foreheads, squinty eyes, protruding teeth, and greasy hair), word balloons and captions full of irascible, rambling text, and any chance for silliness being jumped on and flogged to exhaustion. It's a pretty unique sensibility, and Houston certainly seems to be having a ball coming up with funny concepts like a villain who is a walking punchline, being the fused-together body of a Rabbi, a priest, and a duck, or a group of girl vigilantes who sport baroquely detailed hairstyles, as if the hairstylists of the court of Louis XIV worked on the cast of Jersey Shore. It's a stupid comic, but purposefully so, with the "hero" apparently attaining his fame purely out of pity, the villains being incompetent morons who only commit crime out of jealousy, and pages filled with wonderfully detailed grime and ugliness. This is a highly entertaining bit of nonsense, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
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What I Did.
By Jason
Published by Fantagraphics

Of the three books collected in this volume, Hey, Wait... is a really evocative portrait of how childhood experiences can affect one throughout his entire life, and The Iron Wagon (which adapts an early-twentieth-century Norwegian novel) is a pretty good murder mystery that makes good use of Jason's deadpan style, but it's the middle entry, Sshhhh!, that really sticks with me, immediately jumping to the top of my favorites among the cartoonist's works. It's a silent comic, making excellent use of Jason's facility with pantomime as it follows a bird-man throughout his life, taking an absurdist approach to events that somehow makes things like a baby arriving via mail or a skeleton following the main character around seem relatable and poignant. The universality of the circumstances that Jason depicts is what is so striking here, so that even though the character is inhuman and inexpressive, we recognize things like the acceptance of death's inevitability, the loneliness of lost love, or the combination of pride and sadness felt when a child leaves home. Being one of Jason's longer books, the chapters of the story accumulate until the bird-man becomes a sadly human figure, somebody scrabbling to maintain his unique person-hood under the assault of life. It's sad, wonderful, exhilarating work, a great example of how amazing Jason is at what he does, and how nobody else can do it like him.

It Was the War of the Trenches: War is hell, etc.

Elsewhere: I wrote about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at The Factual Opinion.  I liked that one.

Links: A new Abhay Khosla comic!  I guess he did this as a minicomic to sell at a local convention, but he also posted it online, and it's as hilarious as you would expect.

Here's a pretty amusing webcomic: God Hates Astronauts.  Be sure to read from the beginning; it's a superhero parody, but while it starts out as a "ha ha, this is lame" sort of thing, with dumb names and powers and bears and such nonsense, it quickly changes into something weirder and funnier.  You'll see what I mean.

It Was the War of the Trenches
By Jacques Tardi

It has been said that it is impossible to make an anti-war movie, since the depiction of war onscreen necessarily conveys such an excitement and intensity that even death can seem entertaining.  That notion is debatable, but the same statement can be disproven for the medium of comics on the basis of one piece of evidence: Jacques Tardi's World War I graphic novel It Was the War of the Trenches.  By focusing on the sense of ever-present death and complete inability to survive through any means other than sheer luck, Tardi completely dispels any sense that war is heroic, or even a worthwhile endeavor.  It's a harsh, ugly look at the depths to which man can sink, with little in the way of redemption throughout.  It's persuasive enough that it renders most any other argument against war unnecessary.

The book collects a series of stories that were published in French magazines over the course of most of the 1980s and early 90s, making for a series of unconnected vignettes following the cannon fodder soldiers who dwelt in the trenches on the front lines of the war between France and Germany.  Tardi pulls no punches here, showing their grim, ugly existence, as they dwell in the mud and rain, subsisting on stale rations before periodically leaving their only relatively protected shelters for ventures into the barbed-wire-and-bullet-filled "No Man's Land", often dying horribly.  Each tale only lasts a few pages, as Tardi follows one soldier or another until their story, more often than not, reaches a bitter end, but he makes good use of the space each man gets, allowing them to narrate about themselves via captions or dialogue, making each individual seem fully realized and human, and all the more tragic when they are inevitably slaughtered.

This might seem like an endurance test, a litany of death upon death, but Tardi does vary his approach enough that each new tale is unique, presenting a fairly encompassing view of soldiers' experiences, although never venturing above the lower-most link on the chain of command.  Some men get a chance to leave the front lines and glimpse a life of normalcy before being sent back into the meat grinder; others get stranded in the crater-pocked wilderness and try to survive on their own; still others find themselves in bombed-out towns searching for food and safety.  We might get to see somebody's personal history or flash to their loved ones before the worst happens, usually quickly.  Or, somebody might get wounded and end up suffering horribly as they slowly die, alone in a muddy pile of fellow corpses.  The stories are fiction, but they are based in heavily-researched fact, and that much is obvious in every nasty detail that Tardi includes on the page.

No, reading this book is not an especially enjoyable experience, but it is a necessary one, an attempt to convey the way war cheapens human life, turning men into disposable objects, bullets to be fired at the enemy with no regard for their own right to existence.  There's a certain contempt on display for those who are in power and treat their men with such disregard, a disgust that the reader shares when the French officers order their artillery to fire on their own lines in order to force the men out of the trenches to attack the German lines, or, in a sequence lifted from the Stanley Kubrick film Paths of Glory, soldiers get sentenced to death for retreating from an impossible assault when ordered to take a German position.  One can't help but be horrified at the ugliness to which men will sink, whether they are fighting for their lives in the mud or giving orders from well behind the lines.

The book ends with a character giving a lengthy monologue that acknowledges all the various factions and nations involved in the war, displaying a sort of sorrow for all the people dragged into a pointless conflict, yet still containing a bit of dark humor at the circumstances that brought them all together.  He also rattles off some staggering statistics about the number of people killed and maimed, the amount of land and resources destroyed, giving a full picture of the damage that war can do.  It's a change from the intimacy of the rest of the book, a chance to zoom out and see the full effect beyond what is experienced by individuals, and it makes for a great bit of punctuation to end this slog through the depths of human ugliness.

Yes, this is an unpleasant book (even extending to the art, which does its job as well as everything else in making the war look ugly, muddy, dirty, and bloody; defining each character well but making sure to show the awfulness of their circumstances), but one that everyone should read, not only for a sense of history, but to see the horror of death and the suffering of those forced to partake in it.  The idea that people would be less likely to engage in war if they witness its effects is something of a pipe dream, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to open people's eyes to it.

Low Moon: Hey, a Gary Cooper pun, why not?

Elsewhere: I've got a review of the latest Fringe up at The Factual Opinion, but I apparently missed the deadline getting my Dollhouse review in, so that one won't be up for another day or two, I think.  Also, I contributed an entry to a list of the best graphic novels of 2009 to a site called Flashlight Worthy Book Reviews.  It's a pretty good list, also including entries from blog luminaries like Jog, Sandy Bilus, Brigid Alverson, Johanna Draper Carlson, and David Welsh, so check it out.

Links, all about Dash Shaw for some reason: Shaw has apparently gotten into the world of animation after his series of shorts on IFC.com, so he's tackling a bigger project, a feature-length animated film called Slobs and Nags, which is being produced by Hedwig and the Angry Inch's John Cameron Mitchell and features the same team of animators and musicians, plus the addition of Frank Santoro.  Wow, that's cool.  Here's Shaw's announcement, with a link to more information.

And since Shaw is super-prolific at the moment, here's a neat short comic that he did for Vice, called "The Haunted High School."  I liked it quite a bit.

Low Moon

By Jason

What's better than a new story by Jason?  Why, several in one volume, of course!  This book collects the titular serial story that ran in The New York Times Magazine, along with four other stories of a similar length, making for a good deal of great material, equal to two or three of the album-sized volume in which his comics are usually delivered.  And all the better, I say; the more of Jason's weird energy and quirky, poignant storytelling that I can consume at one time, the better.

Jason's style of storytelling probably needs no introduction, so suffice to say that I'm always beguiled by the weirdly relatable inexpressiveness of his anthropomorphic animal characters, and the way that he puts them in such fantastical situations yet still makes their emotions and actions seem real and believable.  It's kind of a mystery how well he's able to do it, crafting easy-to-follow stories in such a minimalist style, but luckily, they're incredibly enjoyable, so one can easily get lost in them, forgetting questions of craft and technique because those aspects become all but invisible.

The five stories included here all traffic in the same sort of alienation and unhappiness that is his forte, with some of them going off into (or starting from) more surreal directions than others.  "Emily Says Hello" sees a hapless assassin picking off a group of men one by one at the behest of the eponymous woman, who rewards him with sexual favors, but never actually emits any warmth toward him or provides an explanation for why she wants them dead.  It's pretty dark, but fascinating in the emotions it evokes and the way the story suggests so much happening beyond its panels.

"&" is a similarly downbeat tale, alternating between two men who are similarly pursuing futile goals: one trying to steal some high-priced artwork in order to finance an operation to save his mother's life, and the other trying to get the woman he loves to agree to his proposal of marriage by killing all the other men she chooses over him.  The latter storyline is pretty darkly comic, with its hero's quest spiraling more and more out of control with each subsequent murder, and the goal becoming increasingly distant as his object of affection keeps choosing others ahead of him.  As a counterpoint, the former story goes in a completely different direction, full of slapstick comedy like something out of a Marx Brothers' movie.  Jason switches storylines on each page, so the two moods get intertwined in a fascinating manner, jumping between light and heavy quickly enough to give readers whiplash.  And then he brings it all together in a perfect Jason ending, fading out on a lasting image that sticks in the memory hauntingly.

The title story is a bit less dark than those already mentioned, but no less rich in quickly-defined but interesting character interactions.  It's a Western, starting with a man returning to a town with an apparent grudge against the sheriff.  But, in typically quirky Jason style, it turns out that the dispute between the two of them involved a chess match that the sheriff won, and now the man has come back for a rematch.  It's rather goofy, the way the characters all treat the match as seriously as if it were a pistol duel, but the real richness of the story comes through the character turns, the way the sheriff has become a washed-up drunk and has a rocky relationship with the local schoolteacher, the bruised honor of his rival, or the quiet resolve the various deputies have in preparing the sheriff for his rematch.  It's fascinating to watch Jason put this all together, creating a sort of melancholy wistfulness and tiredness through the body language and sad inexpressiveness of the characters.  He manages to convey so much so simply, whether in a pained back-and-forth:

A surprised reaction:

Or the choreography of a humorous barroom brawl:

It's a darn good entry in the artist's long line of stories that keep the reader coming back to find new layers of the work.

The final two stories, "Proto Film Noir" and "You Are Here", aren't quite as good as the others, and they suffer a bit for coming at the end after the highs of the first two thirds of the book, but they're still quite interesting and full of the same surreality.  The former sees a caveman wander into a domestic scene and begin an affair with the wife, then kill the husband, but every morning, the victim shows up at the front door, ready to eat breakfast.  No matter how many times or how gruesomely he is murdered, he wanders in with a "Good morning!" and a resolve to do some gardening.  What does it all mean? Who knows, but it gives Jason a chance to come up with more darkly comic violence.

As for "You Are Here", it sees a bickering couple argue via blacked-out word balloons, followed by the wife being abducted by a big, green alien.  The husband then spends the next several decades building a rocket which he can use to find her, while his son grows up, builds a family of his own, and then repeats his father's mistakes (signified by the reappearance of black word balloons), ending up splitting with his wife and joining his father in the search for his mother in the finally-completed rocket.  It's a strange story, seemingly metaphorical for the way a broken marriage might seem inexplicable to a child, but not really holding together as well as most of these.

But even lesser Jason stories are still like nothing else in comics, and considering the quality of the book as a whole, there's little to complain about here.  It's another great example of the strange alchemy that Jason has mastered, drawing readers in to compelling tales of people caught up in oddly familiar situations, even when they're dealing with something that's off-kilter from reality as we know it.  That's the Jason touch, and long may it continue to grace our pages.

Why I Killed Peter: If only another violent act here had also been metaphorical

Elsewhere: I reviewed Greg Houston's graphic novel Vatican Hustle over at Comics Bulletin. Man, that is one crazy book; I really dug it. Also, I did my usual blah-blah about Fringe and Dollhouse for The Factual Opinion. No Venture Brothers though, because I managed to miss last week's episode; I'll have to try to find it before the season finale this Sunday...

Why I Killed Peter

Written by Olivier Ka

Art by Alfred

Wow, this has to be one of the most disturbing comics I've ever read. Other comics might feature plenty of shocking material, whether it's gore, death, the supernatural, or any number of other horror tropes, but something like this, with a true story of just about the most awful thing that can happen in real life, is the stuff of nightmares, haunting the thoughts of readers who can't shake the understanding that this isn't some far-fetched attempt to scare, but a bit of all-too-real horror that continues to affect people every day. That terrible act: child molestation, which isn't a subject anybody wants to dwell on, but is one that we must realize harms those affected in life-long ways, as demonstrated by this autobiographical graphic novel written by French author Olivier Ka and illustrated by the singly-named Alfred. It's a striking bit of therapy on Ka's part, relating the childhood experiences that affected his life, especially one terrible incident in particular, and then moving on to show how damaged he was for decades afterward, until he eventually manages to get some closure through the act of putting it all down on paper.

Ka revisits several periods in his life, heading each section with "I killed Peter because I'm [age] years old", and relating a memory from that time. His parents were kind of hippie-ish, open to free love and extra-marital affairs, but he also spent some time with his grandparents who were strictly Catholic, filling his head with visions of hell if he commits any sin, including playing with his "peepee". As with any child, he's still forming ideas of sex and intimacy as he gets closer to adolescence. And then Peter enters their lives; he's a priest, but not a cold, strict, uptight one. Rather, he's joyful and prone to laughter, playing the guitar and spending time with the family without trying to convert them to his religion. He seems like a good friend of the family, and young Ollie spends his summers at Peter's summer camp, Happy River. It seems like a fun, carefree time, but there are ominous intimations even early on, at least in Alfred's art. The placid serenity of the woods is depicted with harsh swipes of black ink, as if danger is lurking in the shadows:

And Peter's scary dog looks like a ferocious beast:

Tellingly, the dog becomes something of a bond between Ollie and Peter, as the latter allows the former to walk it, something he does for nobody else. It's something scary that is shared between them and encouraged to keep separate from others, just one way in which Peter's relationship with Ollie gets creepy and weird in ways that a child can't quite understand.

And then the incident happens, with Peter proposing that he and Ollie sleep next to each other and rub each other's bellies, a disturbing idea that only becomes more so when we see it happen. Alfred's depiction of Peter's proposal is scary, with his juxtaposition of the massive older man against the frail child emphasizing the priest's disgustingly predatory actions, and the bright, sunny atmosphere of the scene acting as an ironic commentary on the darkness of the scene:

But that's nothing compared to the literal darkness of the actual molestation. It's a scene that is just awful and horrible, making the reader want to look away from the page, even though we don't actually see anything that happens; our view is limited to dark, shadowy images and Ka's narration:

It's ugly and terrible, and it stretches on for page after page, forcing us to wallow in the terrible event. While we'll never have it burned into the very core of our being like Ka, it's an approximation of his experience, a never-ending horror that not only seems to last forever, but lingers unforgettably in the memory.

After this, Ollie moves on with his life, but never really recovers from the deep emotional wounds of the experience. His parents split up, he drops out of school and has personal problems, but he eventually gets his life together, falling in love and forming a family of his own. But the scars are still there, as can be seen in incidents like a heated argument with friends who decide to have their child baptized, or a panic attack that comes over him when he enters the church at a friend's wedding. He starts to sink into a depression, experiencing nightmares that demonstrate the extent of his inner pain:

As with so much of this book, that sequence is incredibly effective, showing all the different ways in which Peter hurt him. This was a trusted family friend, and the way he used him in a perversion of an act of love and then cast him aside like garbage, it's no surprise that Ka was still reeling more than twenty years later.

Eventually, Ka decided that he needed to write down the experience, doing what he could to exorcise it from his system. This led to the book being made after he began working with Alfred, a friend and colleague, but the two of them decided to return to Happy River and try to get some closure. Little did they know that Ka would end up confronting Peter himself and forcing him to face the extent of his actions, but that's exactly what happened. It's a harrowing scene, with Ka placing us in his head as he faces the cause of his emotional turmoil, and rather than try to approximate it with linework, Alfred actually switches to photos, depicting the several pages of the confrontation as pictures that have been altered with moody colors to reflect the emotion of the scene:

That's how the book ends, with the note of, well, not triumph, but at least satisfaction that Ka was able to recover from his trauma and make the person who hurt him face what he did. Would that be enough for Ka to regain some semblance of sanity and continue with his life? Who can say, but what he has done here is a powerful work, exposing the extent of the damage that one person can inflict on another, and the total horror of somebody abusing their power on an innocent child. It's a scary book, but eventually a life-affirming one that shows how people can survive, even when subjected to the worst crimes imaginable. Ka has a strong voice, sure of his words, and he found a perfect collaborator here in Alfred, who brings a sort of European clear-line style to the characters, but also fills pages with gorgeous colors and emotional artistic effects without overtaking the story with his style. It's a great package, and if you can stomach its awful contents, it's one that shouldn't be missed.

Photographer follow-up: length-based art appreciation

In yesterday's review of The Photographer, I noted a sequence that played out over several pages that featured a continuing background, but I was only able to post a portion of the whole scene. However, I did figure out how to post the entire thing elsewhere and link to it, so you can see the full extent of Emmanuel Guibert's work (click to enlarge and see non-distorted):

This is actually nearly four pages of comics, with two panels per tier, but I separated them and laid them out horizontally to demonstrate the way Guibert makes the whole thing work as one long walk through a detailed landscape. It's pretty gorgeous, like one of those scenes in a Woody Allen movie in which two characters have a conversation while walking down a Manhattan sidewalk and the camera just follows them, never looking away. But what struck me was how well the changing landscape matches the mood of the scene; at the beginning, when the conversation between Didier Lefevre, the photographer of the title, and Juliette, the leader of the humanitarian mission to Afghanistan, is limited to a fairly benign subject, they are crossing smooth ground:

As they move into trickier cultural and religious matters, the terrain gets a bit more uneven:

But when Didier springs his news that he's going to leave the party and travel back to Pakistan on his own, the path gets especially rocky, befitting the change in mood to one of conflict and argumentation:

Note also how Guibert moves the characters up to the foreground at the most important moment, and how Juliette is cut off by the edge of the panel, caught completely by surprise:

We don't even get to see her reaction; she's so taken aback that she stops in her tracks. See how in the next panel, Didier has turned back to talk to her as she remains in place. Then they continue walking, but it seems less of an amiable chat than before, judging by the less-casual body language and changing positions of the characters. The pacing also works to convey the tension, with a big rock blocking our view for a moment, making it seem as though Juliette has paused to consider before making her decision:

She accepts that she can't control Didier, and he's going to have to manage on his own, as rash as his decision might be. At that point, the ground smooths out again, and it also works as a sort of fade-out, as they walk off into the distance and end the scene:

It's a great example of Guibert's command of the comics form; all this technique is subtle, not even noticeable unless you choose to look more closely and examine the workings of the art. This is just one scene in the book; the rest of it is full of stuff like this that demonstrates Guibert's storytelling mastery. He's certainly one of the current greats on the global scene. I can't wait to see what he'll do next.