Jiro Taniguchi: A Zoo In Winter

What I've read from Taniguchi before is one (1) collection of short stories – The Ice Wanderer – which were usually strong in the human relations/interplay and nature departments. A Zoo in Winter depicts, if I understand the text on the back cover correctly, how Taniguchi got his start doing manga. It has a lot in common with other "how I started doing manga" stories, but is well worth reading and stands squarely on its own legs. The story is well told, with interesting personalities, crisp linework and a charming love story woven into it.

Taniguchi's alter ego Hamaguchi works for a textile manufacturer, doing odd jobs while dreaming about becoming a fabric designer. The boss's disgraced (= divorced, and having-taken-a-lover) daughter enters his life when the boss trusts him to be her chaperone, taking her on various outings in Kyoto – including the zoo, where Hamaguchi likes to sit sketching the animals. On one of their outings, the young woman has arranged to meet her married lover, and elopes with him.

Hamaguchi's prospects at the company dwindle.

A friend studying at a design school arranges for a visit with a manga artist's studio for an interview to become an assistant, but when the two young men arrive, deadline is approaching at a hectic pace, and Hamaguchi is simply shanghaied into service on the spot, erasing lead art filling in solid blacks. Somewhat terrified, he even ends up doing some backgrounds because the deadline is so tight. The studio works practically all night, gets the art out to the printer's – the editor has been waiting for the pages to get finished and takes them there in a taxi – and Hamaguchi is bitten by the "manga bug".

Taniguchi's pacing isn't exactly rapid; there is a lot of time spent on the various personalities of the studio and their interplay, Hamaguchi's older brother coming to check up on him and to talk him into getting a proper job – but it turns out the brother is actually quite impressed with the work done at the studio – etc. There is also a somewhat bohemian artist friend of the manga sensei who introduces Hamaguchi to drinking and to some ladies. One of those ladies turns out to have a sickly younger sister, and asks Hamaguchi if he could take the sister for some small outings in Tokyo. Hamaguchi accepts. The sister is pretty, sweet, and very frail, and naturally she and Hamaguchi become quite fond of each other. She encourages him to draw a manga of his own, even though he has tremendous problems coming up with a story that works. With her help, though, something finally starts to take shape... and at the same time, her condition worsens, and she has to leave Tokyo.

Hamaguchi works at the story, trying to finish it for her sake, to be able to show it to her, but at the same time, she doesn't want him to see her in her brittle, emaciated state, so she forbids her sister to tell him where she is...

I won't give away the ending, or talk about the many subplots that don't really go anywhere but seem to be in the story mainly because they happened – towards the middle of the book, I actually felt that some of them were distracting a bit from the main plot, but only for a short while. Basically, those parts that don't contribute to the main plot are usually interesting enough in themselves that they aren't a distraction, and what I thought was a distraction was, in fact, a necessary part of the plot (though it was a bit slow-paced; I'll stand by that). Instead, I'll say that this is a both sweet and serious story about a young man finding his way in life, suffering some setbacks but persevering through hard work and the inspiration from a sweet girl; all told with empathy and elegant artwork.

Recommended; well worth your time.

Here is another review of the book. Artwork samples here. Another review, with artwork samples, here. (I recommend taking a look at those samples if you're in doubt whether to buy the book – I don't think the slightly bland painted cover represents Taniguchi's best work; however, his line art, complemented by excellent zip-a-tone "painting", is strong and beautiful.)

Jodorowsky & Boucq: Bouncer. The One Armed Gunslinger

Alexandro Jodorowsky is probably best known for his work scripting L'Incal for Moebius, but he's also written quite a number of other comics. Of those, I've read Juan Solo (English title: Son of the Gun) which I thought was pretty a much a mess, and too violent. In it, Jodorowsky seemed, if I recall correctly, to be charting a person's voyage from violent gangster hell to some sort of personal redemption, but the road there took too many weird and unnecessary turns and wasn't worth it for me, even though I'm a fan of Georges Bess, the artist for that story. François Boucq, the artist, has done his own writing for some decidedly surrealistic, very funny, and extremely well-drawn comics. The art for  Bouncer is also top-notch; a comparison with Jean Giraud's Blueberry art is probably inevitable, and even though nobody beats Giraud in my opinion, Boucq still doesn't come badly off in the comparison.

I've seen a lot of people praising the earlier Bouncer books; I haven't read those, but based on this one, I can't concur. It's basically a mess.

Here's the setup: The one-armed gunslinger Bouncer works in a saloon owned by a disfigured man, Lord Diablo, who obviously cares a lot for him. He's in love with what seems to be the saloon manager, or possibly a prostitute; Naomi. By the luck of the straw, Bouncer becomes the town's new hangman when the previous one dies, and is reviled for it by the townspeople (even though they, thirty seconds before throwing all sorts of insults at him, were shouting at him to pull the lever to execute the murderer). Meanwhile, the big man in the county, a Clark Cooper, is trying to buy Lord Diablo's saloon, threatening to do what he does with the small farms he's busy gobbling up – burning it down unless he gets what he wants. Bouncer throws him out. He buys guns for five hoodlums and sends them to kill Bouncer. He also bribes the town sheriff to back up their story.

Bouncer kills the five assassins, and does nothing about the betrayal by his supposed friend the sheriff; he doesn't even quit his position as the town hangman. Instead, he proposes to the Naomi, and on their wedding day, the black man she loved when she was younger but hasn't seen since then comes into town to register the goldmine he's discovered. She spots him, and leaves Bouncer to follow him. Then, Clark Cooper decides to take over their goldmine, so they're framed for a murder they didn't commit – in fact, Cooper has enticed his sons into trying to kill each other – and it's pretty darn obvious that it's a fake charge. Nevertheless, the sheriff goes along with it, and when Bouncer refuses to hang the woman he loves and her lover, he is first knocked unconscious, and is then forced to drink copious amounts of whisky. When he's so dead drunk that he's docile, the sheriff, the judge and other upstanding citizens lead him and the prisoners out to the gallows, puts his hand on the lever to hang them, and pushes it.

They hang.

Bouncer takes a revenge of sorts by helping a family stand up against Clark Cooper's hired murderers when they come to kill them, and then, wounded, takes refuge in an opium den – where the beautiful young Chinese woman running it has fallen in love with him and nurses him back to health. Etc.

There's a lot more happening in this rather fat graphic novel – 170+ pretentious pages – but it's mostly of the same variety. Old Western clichés are piled on top of each other, strung together by a not-very-believable plot, with odd sorts of relations between the characters which may be intended to be refreshingly original but instead only serves to make the story less believable. The aforementioned Blueberry also uses a lot of Western clichés, but it takes them seriously, and moreover, takes the job of stringing them together with a believable story containing human relations, interactions and reactions that the reader can believe in seriously. Jodorowsky seems to think that if he only puts his character through enough hell, it'll make for a good story; but it doesn't. Instead, Bouncer reads like the work of an inexperienced scriptwriter who hasn't learned his craft, and who ignores storytelling basics in order to throw out what he (mistakenly) thinks are some really cool situations – much like a lot of really crappy movies, like Mission Impossible II or Rambo.

Like I said, this is a mess. Towards the end, Jodorowsky even throws in some pseudo-mystic, New Age-y stuff from Bouncer's Amerindian father. While it may go some ways towards redeeming Bouncer in the story, it certainly doesn't redeem the story itself. It just seems tacked on for no good reason.

I can only say that I'm sorry that Boucq couldn't get a scriptwriter that matched his excellent art – or that Jodorowsky didn't have an editor that could take his basically unfinished story and made it work before it went to the artist to be drawn. Not recommended.

A four-page sample from the book can be found at the Humanoids homepage.

Lewis Trondheim: Little Nothings Vol. 4. My Shadow in the Distance.

Lewis Trondheim is one of the modern biggies in French comics, and justly so. Not only is he very productive, he also maintains a high quality on his output. He may be best known for his Dungeon series, but he has done so much more, in a variety of genres (indeed, even the Dungeon series may perhaps be said to contain several different genres). The Little Nothings (Les petits riens) series collects his autobiographical, comics-format blog posts in a 126-page books.

The theme for this book – a theme is discernible – is Trondheim's travels to various comics events all over the world and his parallel problems with polyps and the nasal and even eye complications they cause, eventually leading to an operation. Trondheim tells about his various worries (especially in connection with his health problem and the unpleasant operation) and reactions to the vicissitudes of life and travel, and also references the somewhat odd discussions he has with colleagues on the science of zombies – like how could zombies survive if they went for cows instead of people and how Peyo's The Black Smurfs was in fact the first "living dead" story.

These one-page little vignettes are drawn in a simple, clear style that gets the point across in an effective manner, and beautifully painted in watercolors. They range from personal semi-philosophical observations to semi-sarcastic comments on everyday occurrences and set-backs. A lot of it concerns Trondheims own little neurotic tendencies; my favorite is probably his running gag about how he while packing for each voyage feels that he's getting to be a rather experienced, savvy traveller, and how he then invariably fails to pack something he needs to bring with him. (Yes, I do in fact at times get some almost Peanuts-ish vibes from this book, why do you ask?)

In fact, I love this – it's simple and clear (due to a combination of the ordinary-life subject matter and the clear line drawing style) and beautiful while not lacking depth (those lovely watercolors… plus some of Trondheim's observations are quite good). It's also at times quite charming, and a joy to read. Warmly recommended.

Get a peek at the contents via Amazon.

Mattias Elftorp: Våra gator... ("Our streets...")

This is a 16-page mini-comic under Seriefrämjandet's Dystopi imprint. In it, Elftorp's heroine Information has taken some heavy drugs and hallucinates that she's flying during a "Reclaim the Streets"-type event. The police arrives to break up the event, and TV sets start raining down from the surrounding skyscrapers, putting a swift end to the police effort. The end.

The results, apparently a good thing in Elftorp's world.

Basically, the ideational content of the book is that a) it's right to take over the streets for what you want to do, regardless of what the authorities or other people inhabiting the city think or say; b) taking drugs will make you feel like you're flying, and doesn't have any discernible averse effects other than perhaps not being able to react quickly enough when the police arrives; c) using extreme, quite likely lethal violence against the police is A-OK.

In other words, it reads like a parody of violent and stupid anarchism, but unfortunately, Elftorp seems to be quite sincere. More's the pity.

Even though a questionable – to say the least – content can't be redeemed by a skilled execution, looking at the style to find something worth praising in this book, I find nothing. The art is sketchy and, to be honest, looks like crap, and the writing is ponderous and trite – "A powerful voice screams out its anger and its hope for fundamental change", which quite frankly isn't any more sophisticated prose than I'd expect from a moderately talented high school student.

So what you get is basically egotism combined with drug  propaganda and a vote in favor of extreme violence. Anti-recommended.

Brian Michael Bendis & Romita Jr.: The Avengers Vol 1 (2011)

OK, so this is what I chose to start with from yesterday's haul; it collects Avengers vol 4, #1-6. The story in brief (sans spoilers): Steve Rogers is reforming the Avengers. Immortus/Kang the Conqueror suddenly appears before them, and after the short but obligatory fight tells them that time itself is broken. Ultron has taken over the future, and can't be defeated – except by the Avengers' children, and once in power, they're going to destroy Time. Kang can't have that, so if the Avengers don't fix things, he's going to destroy everything – because what's the point of being the ruler of time if time doesn't exist, anyway?

Kang then returns to the future, a future where he has some rather surprising allies as well as an unexpected boss. The Avengers remain, debating what to do and to what extent they can trust Kang. Eventually, they decide that they have to construct a time machine to check his claims out, and since Reed Richards isn't in, and Iron Man doesn't trust Vincent van Doom, they approach the Kree Marvel Boy Noh-Varr instead. While the time machine is under construction, they are attacked, first somewhat inexplicably by Wonder Man, then by creatures from another future led by Apocalypse. A massive fight with the latter ensues before Iron Man manages to solve the situation in a rather clever way.

Then, Wolverine, Iron Man, Noh-Varr and Captain America go to the future to try and settle the situation there – arriving right into the battle royal between Ultron and one of several armies Kang has assembled to defeat him (failing every time) – whereas the rest of the team go to contain the outbreak of chaos that has hit New York City due to the disturbances in the timestream, including a Martian invasion (complete with Killraven) and Galactus.

So the part of the team remaining in our time has its work cut out for it, but it doesn't really work as much more than a placeholder for them while the real story is resolved in the future. That story is, on the other hand rather good, so I won't spoil it for you with details.

Anyway, it's a decent read; Bendis tendency towards the glib in his dialogue veers into "annoyingly glib" territory in the first chapter or so, but once the action starts, he stays clear of that trap. Some of the action sequences aren't really necessary but seem thrown in just to have some action sequences, but that is pretty much par for the course. The second half, when you get the explanations for much of what has gone before and various plot twists are thrown at the reader and elegantly resolved, is a rollicking good read, and lifts the book into "recommended" territory. The Wonder Man bit is almost completely irrelevant to the story, but I expect that it is part of a subplot that is to be resolved later.

John Romita Jr. is his old competent self with massive heroes and villains, good storytelling and excellent posing of the characters, well worth your while. Klaus Janson does the inking, so it's of course great – except a couple of pages in the last chapter that seem rather rushed; but they may be by Tom Palmer who also contributed (deadline crunch?).

Finally, big kudos to colorist Dean White who does one of the best coloring jobs I've seen on a mainstream Marvel title. He doesn't overwhelm the line art with colors, but is capable of some rather nice painting and spectacular effects when it suits the story. The end result is very good; helping the storytelling along, not intruding on it, and looking darn nice in the bargain. Again, kudos for that.

So, how good is this Avengers collection, then? Well, it's not a masterpiece but it's certainly recommended; a classical Marvel tale about time travel and threats to the Multiverse with plenty of plot twists. Good, solid and nice-looking superhero entertainment – and that's nothing to sneeze at.

Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar: Donjon 1 – Ankhjärta (Dungeon Vol 1: Duck Heart)

Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar are a couple of "big new stars" in the French comics biz... but having made their grand entrance on the comics scene in the nineties, the "new" part doesn't really apply anymore – except that they haven't seen a lot of publishing in English or Swedish until this last decade, so they're a fresh new acquaintance just waiting to be made for a lot of potential new readers. And boy, do they deserve all the readers they can get, because Donjon/Dungeon is quite charming and utterly entertaining.

Basically, the story of this first album in the series is as follows: in an anthropomorphic universe, a dungeon owner keeps his dungeon well stocked with both treasure and monsters in order to lure adventurers to it. Then, when the adventurers are killed by the monsters, he loots their bodies for their possessions, thereby gaining enough loot to keep the dungeon going, and even expanding it (and his treasure). One day, he is threatened by some rather creepy creatures and decides to let a very heroic barbarian in his dungeon investigate them. Unfortunately, his lowly employee Herbert (a duck) manages to get that barbarian killed, and in order to cover up his blunder and avoid punishment, he takes the barbarian's place and is sent out on a mission he is woefully unprepared for.

Believing Herbert to be the barbarian hero, the dungeon master sends him off on his quest (after a very well-written and amusing conversation, which is symptomatic of most of the dialogue in this book – it's frequently witty and entertaining like an old Thin Man movie). But just to be on the safe side, he then sends his top fighter, Marvin the Dragon, after Herbert to aid and support him on his mission. Together, they take on the menace to the dungeon, learning more about each other and even becoming friends in the process. Herbert even does some heroic stuff, which is a bit against his nature, but also necessary if he's ever going to be able to draw the sword he took over from the dead barbarian – the sword is sentient, and adamantly refuses to allow Herbert to draw it until he's proven that he's worthy by performing three heroic deeds without its help.

The story is clever, using a lot of standard fantasy and Dungeon and Dragons clichés in an amusing manner – while simultaneously telling a pretty straight action/adventure and buddy story. Sfar and Trondheim throw in a whole bunch of weird and unpredictable twists and turns in their story, but these are done with supreme storytelling self-confidence, and don't go against the grain of the series' universe, that the reader simply accepts them and happily go along for the ride. The only quibbles I have with this book is that the lettering is a bit more on the "arty" than the "readable" side, and the artwork is a  bit scribbly for my tastes, even if it does tell the story more than adequately.

This is not a Dungeons and Dragons satire or parody; instead, it's a humorous adventure – something the Franco-Belgian comics tradition is so good at – in an untraditional setting. It's not done quite in the elegant manner of the old masters, like Franquin, Peyo or Goscinny; but it is done with a special elegance all its own, managing to be both funny, odd, and engaging in the process.

It's excellent. Recommended.


Here is a review site with lots of pro-Trondheim-and-Dungeon reviews (in Swedish).

Doug Wright: Nipper 1963-1964

If you want wholesome, family-oriented fun, then Nipper 1963-1964 is certainly for you. Created by Canadian comics artist Doug Wright, it ran from 1949 to 1980. Reading it, I am reminded of Bil Keane's The Family Circus, which featured the same sort of easily recognizable family situations for readers to chuckle at – even though Keane's artistic skill was more of the "clear depiction" variety and Wright's was of the "beautiful, exact rendering" type, and there is a bit less sentimentality in Wright's strip (as rightly pointed out by Seth in the link at bottom). However, just like Keane's creation, Nipper is also a window into our recent past, into the roles and looks of yesteryear – something I rather enjoy, especially as it is minus the ideological trappings and/or nostalgia that often accompany such looks back when they're written today.

The 100+ pages of Nipper in this collection, two full years of the weekly strip, detail the life of a middle-class family in a Canadian suburb, featuring a harried husband and a housewife, and their two rambunctious boys. The strips are mainly about the antics of the boys and the futile attempts of their parents to control them, with the power struggle between the two lads as another common theme.

I feel somewhat the same about this strip as I do about The Family Circus; it is very well crafted entertainment, but in the long run, it can't quite keep my interest up. The gags in it are actually just a little bit too recognizable after having seen them in so many comic strips and TV shows. However, it's still worth reading the whole book to savor Wright's art; his ink line isn't all that elegant in itself, but the overall design and draftsmanship is so good that the completed panel still looks rather elegant and snappy. There is good drawing skill on display on every page (and Wright needed it, too, as his was a silent strip, making his drawings all he had to tell his stories with).

Even though this book isn't really for me – I doubt that I'll be paying seventeen dollars for another of these collections – if these samples tickle your fancy, by all means, drop by Drawn and Quarterly and order the book. Any effort to preserve the work of the great cartoonists of yesteryear for prosperity is worth encouraging.

So, I can't really recommend it, unless your taste in comics runs a little differently than mine, but kudos D&Q for doing their bit for comics history anyway.

Here is cartoonist Seth's appreciation of Wright.

MAD About the Oscars. 38 Best Picture WInners (And Losers!)

MAD Magazine is an institution, and while I haven't been as amused by it in recent years, it's still an institution that commands respect. And since a lot of that respect was built upon the wonderful Mort Drucker-drawn movie parodies, naturally I consider this collection of those parodies a gem and a must-have.

Let's start with the good stuff: the overwhelming majority of parodies in this collection are drawn by Drucker. Legend has it that when the Brooklyn native Drucker came up to visit the MAD offices looking for work, William Gaines was listening to a baseball match with the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio. He told the young artist that if the Dodgers won, he'd be hired. The Dodgers won, and Drucker was hired.

If it's a true or merely great story, I don't know, but whatever the reason Drucker was hired, it was a stroke of genius as he would go on to become one of the great caricaturists of the century, and possibly the greates artist in the quite impressive MAD lineup.

Also, you have to give the MAD writers credit. They don't really do all that much satire in their movie parodies IMO; "parody" is a better description, but they also do an excellent job of pointing out plot flaws, ridiculous premises, etc. You'd really be hard pressed to find a better review of a film than the MAD version of it – when I was a kid, I hardly ever went to the movies, but I knew all about the big films anyway, because I'd read about them in MAD. In fact, I think you could put together a very decent education as a movie writer and/or director basing the curriculum entirely on reading MAD movie parodies – they are that good at the basics of storytelling, plot structure, and pacing.

It's not perfect, however. These stories are from the 1960s and onwards, and the zeitgeist has changed as regards many things – most notably, IMO, the views on gender roles and homosexuality. Too often, these movies reflect a view of gender roles that can seem not just old-fashioned but even insulting today, and that can be reflected in the parodies as well. Also, homosexuality was okay as the basis for tasteless and pretty crude "jokes" in those days that we're less likely to accept, or find particularly funny, today. Mincing gays is a stereotype that has outlived itself, IMO. Similarly, throwaway lines about Arabs smelling badly isn't, fortunately, considered OK in polite society anymore, either.

Plus, more than a few of the movies that were considered great in their day haven't aged all that gracefully. This doesn't really affect the quality of the parodies, of course, but it does make some choices seem less important than others. Fortunately, most of the movies in this collection do belong to a "you really should have seen this movie at least once" canon. You'll find movies like Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest here – and I wonder if that last one doesn't somehow represent an artistic peak for Drucker; his portraits of Jack Nicholson in it are just marvelous.

…And then I go back to the book and check the other stories and realize that dammit, he's been so great for so long that it's practically impossible to name an artistic "peak"; it's a very, very long plateau at a very, very high level.

The rest of the artists in this volume range from the great (Hermann Mejia doing "Lord of the Rings"), over the very good (Angelo Torres and Jack Davis) to the "meh" (Tom Richards and Sam Viviano). Fortunately, most of it is indeed great, and most of the movie parodies are good to very good efforts from the writers.

Recommended. And hey, it is a classic.

Chris Giarrusso: Mini Marvels Ultimate Collection

How would the Marvel superheroes and -villains behave if they were kids? What would their lives look like? Peter Parker, for example, couldn't be a photographer for the Daily Bugle if he was just a kid. He could, however, deliver papers for them. However, naturally Venom would compete with him for the paper route, and even if he would be able to keep it, delivering the paper to the Osborns' house would entail the Green Goblin trying to kill him every morning.

How do I know this? Because it's all in Chris Giarrusso's excellent Mini Marvels, of course.

There's plenty to parody in the Marvel Universe. You can do it in a short strip, having, for example, Harry Osborn complaining that his father wants to spend quality time with him – which is hardly surprising as it turns out that that means him being dragged along after the Green Goblin's flier. Giarrusso did a bunch of strips like that, spoofing events and characters of the Marvel Universe, and they were published as "Bullpen Bits" in the back of standard Marvel comics. The feature eventually expanded to one-shot issues which were then collected into paperbacks, and Mini Marvels Ultimate Collection collects those and what is apparently a previously unpublished story in 216 (mostly) hilarious pages. You can see how Giarrusso evolved as an artist by comparing the earliest strips and stories with his most recent story, "Hawkeye and the Crimson Crown" (which, if I understand things correctly, hasn't been previously published). BTW, Giarrusso writes the best-damn-Hawkeye I've seen in any Marvel comic, bar none. The character has never been better than it is here – with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but with quite a bit of justification considering the patronizing, belittling attitude he's getting from his fellow Avengers and other superheroes.

Anyway, here is an example of Giarrusso's early drawing style, a shot of the Fantastic Four – not bad, but a tad, well, maybe we could call it "naivist". It works – especially as it's finishing up a sequence where a cured Ben Grimm has suddenly and inexplicably turned back into the Thing – but it lacks some of the dynamism and confidence of his later work.

Apart from the obvious humor to be mined from the relationships between the characters, Giarrusso is also a skilled humorist in his own right. Not only is he good at coming up with silly situations and fun story lines, he's good at milking situations for their comedic value. One of the techniques he uses is to have a character fixating on something and persevering with a phrase or theme, simply refusing to let it go, thus creating an ever more absurd situation for any character unfortunate enough to have to interact with him. The funniest example of this is when poor Thor has been given an armor by Iron Man (who plans to make a bundle from selling armors to the general public, with extra PR from having the other superheroes using them), and Odin apparently thinks it's all part of Thor having been corrupted by Earth's pop/rap/vulgar culture...

Giarrusso does use this technique several times, but it works so well that it doesn't get old. Like, for example, when the Hulk's talent for speaking in excellent haikus is not just explored, but beaten into the ground – in a most amusing manner.

So this is a gem of a book – funny and charming, and while it caters extra to the sort of person who knows his or her Marvel history just a little bit too well, it's still funny even if your knowledge of Marvel lore is somewhat less-than-obsessive. Marvel would do well to let Giarruso create more of these wonderful stories; he's clearly a talent worth more exposure. I'm getting his G-Man collections from Image, now. They won't give me the extra amusement that comes from from spoofing my favorite superheroes, but they do feature his comedic talent, and based on Mini Marvels Ultimate Collection, that talent should be enough to carry those collections as well.

...And just because I love Peanuts, a bonus sample of the brand of humor in the early strips:

Giarrusso is at his best with the longer stories, where he has time to work more on the relations and interactions between the characters as well as their various hang-ups, but the strips are usually good for a laugh. The only slow part of the book is not-quite-a-dozen page-long jokes about Red Hulk - Blue Hulk. Other than that, it moves between the poles of "funny" and "brilliant".

Warmly recommended!

Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown

If you turn a comic strip into an animated movie, and then the animated movie into a "graphic novel", what the heck will you end up with?

OK, so animated movie versions of comic strips aren't always so hot. They frequently suffer from timing and pacing issues, and perhaps the characters don't sound quite the way they do in your head when you read the strip, etc, etc. In short, there are problems with turning a comic strip into film, and the Peanuts films of yesteryear certainly weren't perfect – although it was Peanuts, so of course I watched them if I had the opportunity.

Anyway, if you turn a comic strip into an animated movie, and then the animated movie into a "graphic novel", what the heck will you end up with? Answer: a surprisingly enjoyable read. Kudos to Stephan Pastis and Craig Schulz, who did the adaptation, and Vicki Scott, Bob Scott and Ron Zorman, who did the art. (Oh, and the colors by Brian Miller work well, too.)

Now, keep in mind that this isn't exactly original material. The film is based on Peanuts strips, and being a fan since the age of about five I've read basically all of them (and the majority of them more than a few times each...), so with each page of this "graphic novel" consisting of one or two jokes from the strips or Sunday pages, there wasn't much to surprise me... but the jokes were so strong to begin with that they survive the transition (at least for me, who still have the impact of the original strips very much alive in my memory).

The story is basically about how Linus needs to kick his blanket habit, because first of all, his blanket-hating grandma is coming to visit, and, second and more importantly, it irks Lucy. Various attempts to curb the blanket habit are made, all of them failing. Interspersed with this are scenes from a) Lucy's unsuccessful attempts to get Schroeder to reciprocate her love for him, b) Schroeder only caring about his music and Beethoven, c) Snoopy and his food issues, d) Sally's unrequited love for Linus, e) Charlie Brown's insecurity and inability to fly a kite, f) Pig-Pen's inability to achieve anything even resembling cleanliness.

Finally, after another of Snoopy's many attempts to steal Linus' blanket ends in calamity for everybody, the gang confronts Linus and lets him know that they're not at all happy about his addiction to that blanket. Linus responds with a quite stirring speech about how yes, he is dependent on his blanket, but don't they all have various hangups, and who are they to tell him the he has to give up his?

This speech is basically the only thing I don't remember having already read in the strip, and if that was added by scriptwriters Pastis and Schulz, then they should be commended for tying what is really a rather disparate collection of anecdotes into what becomes a story that actually works, thanks to that speech – and the surprising revelation of one member of the Peanuts crew who isn't a neurotic. Can you guess who? (Well, you're going to have to, because I don't want to give it away. The writers did a good job on this dénouement, so they deserve getting readers coming into it with open minds uncontaminated by spoilers in reviews.)

For $20, you get 80 well-drawn pages that work surprisingly well, drawn in a 60's Schulz style (I imagine it's easier to create fluidity of motion in that style than in Schulz' later art style), with some 80 or so Peanuts jokes, plus a good conclusion. It was worth it for me, because I'm a Peanuts fanatic and the dollar price is currently rather low relative to the Swedish Krona. If you think it's worth it for you too, you'll get a bonus of a half-dozen pages of character sheets and other background material done for the movie.

Well, I'm recommending it, anyway. Schulz was one of the truly great comics artists, and it's nice to see his legacy kept alive in a manner that is faithful to the spirit of his work.

Morvan, Bessadi & Trannoy: Zorn & Dirna #3

Zorn and Dirna are two kids who live in a world where Death has been imprisoned and nobody fully dies – if they're killed by decapitation, however, their soul goes into the person who killed them. This has created all sorts of havoc in the world, and to get rid of what is essentially moving, rotting corpses, a "death factory" has been created where such decapitations are done on an industrial scale, by unfortunate people who have to do this sort of slaying until they just can't take it anymore – and they're slain themselves, their souls going into their killer.

Now, Zorn and Dirna have been born into this world with a very valuable talent: together, they can kill somebody properly, releasing their soul from this world. This makes them very valuable, of course, and a lot of players are out to get ahold of them, but as the third album begins, they are together with their father Seldnör – who became a vicious bounty hunter in his grief when he lost his family (before Zorn and Dirna were born) – and the soul of their mother Splata – in the body of the hugely muscular person who decapitated her in the "death factory". Meanwhile, they are being hunted by the evil Crown Prince's army, full of vicious sadists... (My review of #s 1 & 2 is here.)

So, the family is reunited at last, and Zorn and Dirnas mother's soul has become dominant in the body of the man who decapitated her – the shock of seeing her children catapulted her consciousness to the top. Seldnör's love for his wife is reignited, but she is  alas a man now, and this creates some awkward situations. (There are also some sentimental scenes that actually approach "sugary-sweet", which doesn't really fit with the harsh bleakness of the rest of the album.) The kids learn how to use their power for good purposes, like freeing the soul of a tortured, dying animal, but they have other problems than the soldier horde stalking them to deal with: The other souls inhabiting the same body as Splata are getting annoyed with her hogging the body and calling all the shots, and the kindly old lady offering the family shelter from a mountain winter storm isn't all she seems to be. Well, she's an old lady, but she's not exactly kindly.

There is good and bad in the Zorn & Dirna series. The art is good, if occasionally overwhelmed by the coloring, and the world that writer Morvan has created together with Le Gall, Bessadi and and Trannoy is impressive and works very well as a setting – a little bit too well, even, as the full measure of its viciousness is shown to the reader, with the cruelty and gruesomeness shown in explicit detail. It's very unpleasant, and it detracts from my reading experience as I feel it to be more exploitative than honest – especially in conjunction with the sugary sentimentality and melodrama of some other scenes. The subplots hinted at in the third paragraph above are resolved well, however, and overall I consider this a good read worth your while. I just wish they'd toned down the melodramatic parts, both the violence/gore ones and the sentimental ones. There are still ample possibilities to show that a world is horrible without getting quite so gory.

So: Recommended, if not as wholeheartedly as I'd like to – and not for young kids.

Hans Lindström: Feminister ("Feminists")

I don't think Swedish cartoonist Hans Lindström really hates women, and maybe he doesn't even hate feminists. Maybe he's just angry at the particular variety of feminists who make unfair generalizations about men, and who don't back up their arguments with facts and logic. I can understand that; heck, I get angry at that sort of thing from time to time as well. But just as anger can be a good source of energy while a lousy choice for controlling the steering wheel, putting out a collection of cartoons that are all about your anger doesn't make for a good read. That rule applies to feministic cartoonists as well as to Lindström, and Lindström's Feminister collection fails because he can't get over his anger at feminists in general and former Minister of Gender Equality Margareta Winberg in particular.

"MEN ARE BEASTS!".

And it's a shame, because those cartoons that aren't about that – which would be about half of them, the rest could be given the heading "Women" or somesuch, making this largely a misnamed collection – are sometimes quite good, like the woman who runs over her husbands legs with the lawn mower, severing them, and then apologizes profusely: "Just like you said yesterday when you beat me: 'I'll never do it again'!" Or two hefty, middle-aged women walking down the street, one of them with a torn-off forearm clutching her purse strap: "Today's purse-snatchers just aren't up to scratch."

But such gems are too few and to far in between. Instead, the reader gets way too much "feminists hate men", "feminists are flat-chested and ugly", and "Margareta Winberg's an idiot". Mind you, I don't necessarily disagree with the last one, but it's just not very funny – especially the third time you read it.

And that's the second problem with this collection: in several cases, Lindström just repeats a joke he's used in a cartoon a couple of pages ago. While he's perfectly entitled to disparage feminists all day long if he wants to – we do have freedom of speech, you know – this is just unprofessional, and ripping the buyer off.

So, I can't really recommend this. Though I will note that I've seen people react to Lindström's cartoons with pretty much outright hate, sometimes even people who themselves seem to have aspirations to be "provocative" but who really just seem to be sticking with rather bland assertions about how racism, sexism and oppression is bad, and how superficial mass media are bad for democracy, etc., so I will give Lindström some credit for having more personal and artistic courage than those who'll stick with what is entirely politically correct for the editors of the magazines and newspapers they cater to. Unfortunately, being angry and at least sort of gutsy doesn't make for a good cartoon collection. You need a whole bunch of actually good cartoons for that, as well.

I'll expand that to a general observation: I've seen quite a few cartoonists from the other side of the spectrum here in Sweden – let's face it, Lindström's pretty much alone on his side – and one problem that is pretty much general is that they frequently fail when they try to make political, ideological and/or sweeping generalization, and succeed when they get into the specifics of their own – or ordinary people's – everyday lives. Often, they'll resort to what is rather simplistic rhetoric (like Lindström mostly does in this book), stroking the prejudices and/or egos of their chosen audience or cause (or themselves), which makes for quite boring reading if you want something intellectually stimulating. But when they can get to the level of "this happened to me, and this is how I feel about it", that brings an intensity and authenticity to their work that'll grab me as a reader even if I don't agree with their ideological interpretation of it.

Anyway, not recommended.

Thomas Ott: The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8

Swiss comics creator Thomas Ott does his comics on scratchboard (you can see video of his work process here), and does so very well; the medium isn't just a gimmick, he not only does very good graphic work with it, he also uses it to tell good stories – in pictures only; the narrative is wordless.

The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 (or, in Swedish, Numret 73304-23-4153-6-96-8) is a graphic novel about an executioner who at the start of the book finds a strip of paper that belonged to the he just executed. On that strip of paper is a number: 73304-23-4153-6-96-8.

…Hold on, that's not exactly right. In fact, it's probably more wrong than right. Instead, The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 is a graphic novel about a number on a strip of paper. At the start of the book, it is used as a bookmark by a condemned man in his Bible. He sometimes takes out the strip of paper and looks at it. When he's been executed, the executioner finds the strip of paper lying next to the electric chair and for some reason puts it in his pocket before he goes home.

The next day, a series of remarkable coincidences occur, all of them having to do with the number on that scrap of paper... A stray dog has part of the number tattooed on his ear, the winner of a marathon race on a picture in the newspaper is wearing another part of the number, and the phone number on a poster from somebody looking for the stray dog provides the next part, etc.

The man follows these randomly occurring numbers, which results in his life markedly improving, in terms of both money and relations. But then, something happens, and his life takes an increasingly bizarre downwards turn...

I won't reveal the ending, which is quite logical but only if you accept the somewhat absurd universe Ott's story takes place in. There is no particular reason why his life should suddenly improve so radically, nor why it should then so suddenly take a turn for the worse. One might think of it as punishment for killing people as an executioner, but there is noting in Ott's wordless narrative signaling that. Instead, it seems just the random cruelty of a capricious universe – which may of course be more frightening than if things happened for a reason.

This graphic novel works very well; Ott is a master of his craft and creates interesting graphic images that also work very well to tell the story. The story is logical, engaging, and frightening – although, like so many other "graphic novels", it contains roughly the story material of a short story, rather than a novel. (In fact, I kept thinking of a thematically somewhat-similar science fiction short story while I read it – but Ott's story is of course original and stands quite strongly on its own.)

Ott tells his story in a four-panel-per-page grid, which makes for a steady, very readable pacing, and uses larger panels comprising the space of two panels or a full page, when it suits the storytelling. The storytelling flows nicely without getting static, and at not-quite 140 wordless pages, it's a quick but not superficial read.

Recommended. This is well worth your time.

Mark Schultz, David Hine & Moritat: The Spirit vol 1 – Angel Smerti

Will Eisner's The Spirit stands out as one of the truly great comics of the forties. There is a lot of talk about comics' "Golden Age" this and "Silver Age" that, but, but the harsh reality is that most of the comics put out during those eras weren't very good (though in fairness, in the "Silver Age" plenty enough were). You had a lot of sales in the "Golden Age", so it certainly were a "golden" age in that sense of the word, but the art usually wasn't particularly great, and nor was the writing. However, they did establish a lot of exciting concepts that were to be put to better use in later, more sophisticated times, so let's give them credit for that. Also, artists like Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert and Gil Kane debuted during the "Golden Age", and they would go on to become major pillars of the comic book industry.

And, of course, Will Eisner. The giant who not only created The Spirit, but who also pioneered the "graphic novel" format in the US. Kitchen Sink published a lot of his work in the eighties and nineties, and it's well worth seeking out, if you can find it. It was later republished in the DC Archives format, which, if you haven't encountered it, is mainly characterized by being in color, hardcover, and horribly expensive.

Well, now that DC had their hands on the Spirit, they thought it would be a good idea to publish new stories about him. A previous series, by creators like Darwyn Cooke and Sergio Aragonés & Mark Evanier, lasted 32 issues, and made the impression on me of trying to stick rather close to what Eisner had created. This new series, well, not so much.

The first story arc is written by Mark Schultz of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs fame, and sets up the new Spirit universe. The Spirit narrates a short intro to the book, informing the reader that "Central City destroys all that lives within its rotten borders. It was once a booming frontier town, then a hub of lake and rail transport. But prosperity never filtered down from the wealthy few to the workers, the average Joes and Janes".

Now, I don't mind a bit of economic populism, but Schultz lays it on so thick that it becomes rather cartoony in character – and hence, annoying. If this were the only problem with his tale, Angel Smerti, this wouldn't matter much. But it isn't.

First, this bit of economic populism stands alone. It is not mirrored in the tale itself, which says practically nothing about average Joes and Janes but is an attempt to tell an essentially Eisneresque story about the Spirit being targeted for a hit by the crime lords of the city, hiring an expert assassin from Europe. It also tells us that Commissioner Dolan is so undermined by corruption in the police department and pressure from above to be practically useless at his post, and that he has a somewhat naïve, activist daughter. There's also a young black street urchin, Imani, helping the Spirit with intel on what goes on in the city. Finally, this story introduces thr new villain, Angel Smerti, who lived through the wars on the Balkans and came out with a talent and propensity for murder, and was further trained in military special forces to become something of a super-sniper. Naturally, Angel Smerti turns out to be an extremely hot young woman.

Well, I can live with that; it's not like Eisner himself wouldn't have been capable of creating the same sort of character. Unfortunately, Schultz also turns her into something of a female super-soldier who easily beats up The Spirit and hefts his unconscious body about, and that goes beyond the boundaries of credibility, as does a psychological/moral conversion that Angel Smerti undergoes towards the end of the book. In his stories, maybe Eisner could have pulled something like it off, because he had only seven pages to work with and had to deliver stories with breakneck pacing – that way, Smerti beating up the Spirit would probably have been dealt with in two panels, and a swift kick to the shin followed by cracking the Spirit's skull with the butt of an assault rifle would have been something I could live with. But here, the story is three chapters, each of standard comic book length, and Smerti beating up the Spirit for several pages practically necessitates that she's a female Captain America (physically if not morally), and undermines the believability of the rest of the narrative.

So no, this collection's titular story doesn't really work. The second offering is the Frost Bite four-issue story arc about a killer new drug making the rounds in Central City. It is also a bit on the naïve side – Ebony is now a tough, pretty young black woman with more guts and compassion than common sense, and like Ellen and Imani, she's not much more than a stereotype – not the same stereotype that the original Ebony stereotype was (and Eisner, whose sensitivities evolved along with the society he lived in, was well aware of that when he looked back on the character), but more of "spunky young gal does stupid things but we're supposed to admire her for her guts even if she chooses to disconnect her brain" one; not "insensitive for a modern reader", just "boring".

Anyway, Hine tells a solid story, keeping it well-paced and exciting, but with a tad too many standard plot elements to be a great story. Also, I'm a bit annoyed at the relationship between the Spirit and commissioner Dolan – Dolan' a bit to on the scared side, and the Spirit's a bit too antagonistic towards him. That is of course colored by me having read the original stories with a warmer relationship between the two, and a Dolan who wouldn't be as prepared to compromise with his duty as this one, so I don't know how somebody new to the characters would feel about it.

Finally, the art by Moritat is good, and suits the stories well. He's also good at drawing female characters, which is sort of obligatory for a Spirit artist. (Another plus is that the creators use an Eisner-inspired style of splash pages.) Moritat's drawing style isn't entirely consistent, though. Sometimes it looks like it's inked by Denys Cowan, on other occasions it might look Joe Kubert-inspired. And while I wouldn't say that the first of these two pictures an outright swipe, it does look Dark Knight-inspired – so let's call it a homage. The second one, I have somewhere in the back of my head that I've seen it somewhere in an old House of Mystery (or somesuch) story drawn by… Jack Abel? Dan Spiegle?

The Spirit: Angel Smerty is worth reading – at least the Hines half of it – but it still has some ways to go if it wants to be a worthy successor to the great, great original, the post-WWII stories of which are still highly recommended.

Here's another review of the book.

Brian Michael Bendis & David Finch: The New Avengers 1: Breakout

Brian Michael Bendis is apparently somewhat of a superstar these days. For the last decade, I haven't had the money to follow the US comics scene as I used to do, and I'm still sufficiently unhappy with Marvel's pricing policy that I don't care to follow their stuff particularly closely, but with my incomes going up again (unfortunately at the cost of working more), I've been filling out some holes in my collection. Initially concentrating on Essentials, I've also been getting a bunch of regular TPBs – and one of those has been the first New Avengers collection, happily for me.

I've mainly good things to say about the book. Finch is a good artist, and the inkers have generally done a good job over his pencils. It's strong in composition and anatomy, and the line art looks great; in one chapter, the line looks somewhat like good younger-generation Kubert inked with just a hint of Gerry Talaoc elegance – not too much, to give it that sort of "oily" look that I think a lot of the Filipino inkers of the seventies brought to the page, but just a hint. (Sadly, I don't know which inker is responsible for which pages.) Unfortunately, the colors sometimes overpower the line art (as happens so frequently with computer coloring), and when they go for "dark & moody", the result is just "murky & hard-to-read". Mostly, though, the colors are good, and overall the art is very good.

The writing is good, too. The story is as follows: Attorney Matt Murdock is at a prison for super-powered beings (chaperoned by Spider-Woman and bodyguarded by Luke Cage) to talk with Sentry when a prison break occurs. By chance, Captain America and Spiderman happen upon the the scene as well, and Iron Man also arrives to lend a hand. Together, they manage to keep the prison break down to just a minor disaster instead of a full-blown one, but there are still 40+ super-criminals on the loose. The next day, Cap makes Iron Man a suggestion: Why not restart the Avengers? They did good together, and they are sorely needed to stop those super-baddies on the loose. Tony Stark doesn't quite have the money to bankroll the Avengers these days, but Cap, who is very hard to say no to, persuades him that they can do it on the cheap. Cap then proceeds to persuade Spider-Woman, Cage, and Spider-Man to join as well. As (IIRC) Tony Stark puts it, Cap is a very hard person to say no to... (Although Daredevil and Sentry manage to, at least initially.)

So the team reassembles, and under the leadership of Cap and Iron Man manage to negotiate the hot waters of government bureaucracy as well as kick some serious do-badder butt... But will it be enough to counter the danger that is building in the Forgotten Land?

I won't go into the plot more than that; you deserve to read it yourself. The good thing about Bendis' writing is that it flows very well and that he manages to do a lot of characterization in the dialogue without it coming off as contrived. Also, a lot of what Bendis does with the characters is really good: Luke Cage learns what it means to be in the really big leagues; Cap and Iron Man put snotty S.H.I.E.L.D. directors in their place without being rude about it, just very firm and confident in their status as top-line government-endorsed superheroes; Cap is impressed by Peter Parker's dedication and guts; practically everybody is (justly) impressed by Cap – I love the line about how it's nearly impossible to say no to Cap when he asks something of you, not just because he's a living legend but also because he's so totally honest, true-blue and earnest. Etc.

I do have some quibbles with Bendis' writing, though. Apparently, he lists Aaron Sorkin as one of his favorite writers, and there is indeed a certain TV-ish quality, something of a Sorkinesque glibness to some of the dialogue – as if it tries to press just a little bit too much info and cleverness into too-short pieces of dialogue, where taking a couple of panels more to let it develop more naturally would have worked better. He also occasionally tries to have his characters and the situations they're be more adult than the writing can really support, which leads to it looking a bit silly instead – which is of course also something you can see on TV shows occasionally. But overall, Bendis does good here, and this is a good, strong superhero book. Recommended.


The views of another reviewer here.

Jim Shooter: "Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom: Troublemaker"

Jim Shooter is back. Now he's writing "Doctor Solar" for Dark Horse, and he's doing a very good job of it.

Physicist Phil Solar finds himself in the middle of a singularity when an experiment with a supercollider-generated micro black hole used to generate fusion power. In his last nanosecond of consciousness when shredded to quarks, he somehow took control of the energies swirling around him and remade himself – only younger and fitter, and with control over the energies that had threatened to destroy not just himself, but the world itself.

Or something like that.

Anyway, reshaping himself, and to some extent the time-space continuum, Doctor Solar damaged reality as we know it, generating anomalies that will come to haunt him. The first major threat created by this is the problem he needs to solve in Troublemaker. A writer of shoddy fantasy adventure stories gains the power to make his creations come alive. The first, a huge brawler named Leviathan, is an accident, but when he realizes what has happened seeing Leviathan on television wreaking havoc, the writer decides to make another of his characters, the impossibly curvy sexpot named Glow, come to life. She's a disappointment, though, because the "musky scent" he's equipped her with in the novels turns out to be so strong as to be a major turn-off.

So Doctor Solar not only has to deal with the major disruption of his own life that the accident (actually caused by sabotage) has caused – everybody thinks he's dead, and even apart from that, he's got issues to work through – he also has to track down the fantasy writer, Whitmore Pickerel, and tell him to can it. No more creature creation. Pickerel promises not to, and then, after Leviathan and Glow get together and have noisy sex in his apartment, creates a woman more to his own tastes – beautiful, kind and caring Susan. Then, he creates a protector to protect them against both Leviathan and Doctor Solar.

Only problem is, the protector turns out to be anything but. Instead, he's Mesopotamian god Moloch, come here to Earth to rule it and eat its children. He forces Pickerel to use his imagination to create an army for him with which to defeat Doctor Solar and take over the world, and also takes over Pickerel's newly-created ideal woman Susan as his own. And then he launches his war on Earth and Doctor Solar, and unfortunately, the latter is somewhat busy trying to sort out his feelings for a beautiful young co-worker to give the fight against Moloch his full attention...

In this book, Shooter shows his talent for creating complicated, interesting characters – both Phil Solar and Whitmore Pickerel are more than just cardboard stereotypes – and putting them in situations ripe with moral and other dilemmas. Shooter had a maxim that a character's conflicts was what revealed his/her character to the reader, and it's still a sound principle for storytelling.

He also – like he did very well in "Star Brand", in Marvel's abortive "New Universe" – explores the situation of suddenly gaining tremendous power, and does so in an interesting manner, revealing more and more about Phil Solar and his situation in the process. The trials and tribulations of Glow and Leviathan, trying to make their way in a world they didn't create, and didn't even really know about two days ago, is also interestingly depicted.

So all in all, this is very much worth your while. I have only two reservations. The first has to do with the artist of the first quarter of the book, whose artwork is unfortunately rather weak, consisting to a too-large extent of uninteresting talking heads. Then, Roger Robinson takes over the art chores with a Howard Chaykin-influenced style that works quite OK. The second is the casual raping of Susan by Moloch. It is not shown in pictures, but it's obvious that is what it is, and it does leave a sour taste in my mouth. I know very well that Moloch is supposed to be the ultimate evil and all that, but it is all too common for writers of fiction to throw in a casual killing or rape in order to establish what an evil character they're depicting – see Gladiator, Tombstone and a host of other films for examples of that – and I may be a bit too sensitive on the behalf of the fictional characters being fictionally killed, raped etc, but I simply don't like it. (See Women in Refrigerators for some of the consequences of this stereotypical method of writing. I don't think it has anything to do with misogyny; it's just that the majority of superheroes are men, so it's their girlfriends who take the heat when people around them get hurt by the inherent dangers of their trade – you tend to keep the main character, the superhero, alive for as long as possible, so if anybody'll die that'll have a tremendous negative impact on him, it's more likely to be his girlfriend than him.)

Anyway, recommended. Shooter is an excellent writer, and this does look like a promising series.

Fabian Göranson: Inferno

Inferno is one of August Strindberg's most famous novels, depicting his nervous breakdown and descent into paranoia, occultism and alchemy. Swedish comics creator Fabian Göranson has adapted it to comics form.

The novel starts with Strindberg in Paris, saying goodbye to his wife who's going back to Austria as their little daughter, living there with Strindberg's mother-in-law, is sick. Having just had one of his plays played in Paris to apparently good reviews, Strindberg is apparently having trouble writing, and turns instead to chemistry to make earth-shattering discoveries and become incredibly famous. Since he's nothing but a dilettante, of course nothing comes out of his naive musings and experiments (which, apropos nothing, reminded me very much of bloggers or people internet discussions boards declaring how they've now proved that climate change is a bluff). Well, not quite "nothing" – isolating himself, and the strain of his feverish experimenting, leads Stindberg to psychosomatic illness (eczema) and exhaustion, and he's put in a hospital. However, his mental condition continues to deteriorate, with increasing paranoid ideation and a belief in the spirit world. After that, the book is basically about how he keeps having these paranoid delusions about things that happen to him, coupled with his newly-found beliefs in spirits, and the ventures into Swedenborgianism and brushes with Catholicism those beliefs lead him to.

In the "real" world, Strindberg feels he's being persecuted by a Russian expat, returns to Sweden to be taken care of by friends, and goes to Austria to meet his now two-year-old daughter. The emphasis is, however, on his mental illness, which colors everything he does and experiences (naturally), and how he thinks he's really being persecuted by a punishing spirit.

Göranson sticks pretty closely to the original novel, as far as I can tell without actually reading it, but being a cartoonist takes some liberties with how he depicts it. Most amusing are a couple of instances where he shows people's reactions to things by utilizing thought balloons that depict characters as manga caricatures, but the overall story is ably told too. Me, I like a crisp, clean and strong ink line, so I'm not really a fan of the more murky, somewhat Tardi-ish look I think the artwork has here, but the coloring works well and like I said, overall it is a story well told.

The big problem for me is rather that Göranson sticks a bit too close to Strindberg's original, because after 80 or so pages (out of a total of about 150), I've grown weary of reading about the torments of poor neurotic August, as there is no character or other development really going on, just more and more delusional ideation applied to what is really basically rather humdrum events. When August decides to go Austria to visit his daughter, a refreshing change of pace and scenery makes the book more interesting again, but by then I can't really rekindle the enthusiasm I had for the first quarter or so of the book.

Göranson has stated that he views Strindberg's Inferno as to a large extent self-ironic, a "look how stupid and crazy I behaved, wink wink" sort of book. I can't really agree with him all the way there, as I have a very hard time seeing Strindberg as capable of real self-irony, but there may well be something to it – the English Wikipedia article mentions (unfortunately without supplying a source) that "evidence also suggests that Strindberg, although experiencing mild neurotic symptoms, both invented and exaggerated much of the material in the book for dramatic effect" (which would lead me to revoke at least some of the sympathy I felt for him while reading about his miseries, if it's true).

Anyway, Göranson is an able comics creator and has created a work that is well worth your time – not least because it means you'll save the time it would take to read Strindberg's own novel. So the book is recommended, if not unconditionally – had Göranson chosen to free himself from Strindberg's original just a bit more (like perhaps taking some more cartooning liberties à la the manga storytelling imagery), I would probably have upgraded my recommendation.

Showcase Presents: Aquaman vol 1

I'm not one to say that it's a waste of time to read comics – a tradition that I uphold by not talking about the terrible "Dredger" – but I came close with this.

I'm being a bit unfair here, because this clearly isn't a comic for grown-ups, or even for teenagers. The stories are at first mainly about finding new (or not so new) ways of having various sea creatures stop criminals – like having Aquaman's pet octopus Topo and his octopi pals use lots of bows and shoot arrows at them, or using a swordfish to puncture something, etc. It's all based on the rather weak gimmick of Aquaman being able to use "fish telepathy" – which isn't even much of a superpower, since apparently almost any human who needs the help of fish can use it if they concentrate hard enough (or if the scriptwriter is sufficiently stuck for a solution, and sufficiently lazy) – and after a short while, it becomes rather tedious.

This schtick was sufficiently similar to what I'd seen in early sixties Superman stories that I had to look who was writing this stuff, but the name Robert Bernstein was unknown to me (turned out he was a "Superman" writer, though). Then I learned that the editor was Mort Weisinger, at which point I went "say no more!".

Anyway, there is development. Aquaman gets a sidekick – Aqualad – who wants them to have a home, so he turns an underwater cave into a home, complete with trophies. Also, Aqualad says stuff like "Leaping sea lions!" a lot, and Aquaman starts being referred to as the "Sea sleuth". Holy derivative, Batman! Also, the daring duo gets a recurring character, a sea sprite with magical powers and a somewhat wicked sense of humor...

The first half of this collection is drawn in a somewhat cartoons-influenced style by Metamorpho co-creator Ramona Fradon, who leaves the comic in 1961 (and later in the sixties takes break from comics to raise her daughter) and is replaced by Nick Cardy, for those who like that sort of thing – and Cardy does have a strong style and handles posing the characters well. He's not a Joe Kubert, bit when the inking is good, his art looks good.

This is, in the end, a kiddie comic. I'd say that "Adam Strange" is for kids up to 12-13 years old; this is for kids up to maybe 9-10. Us adults... Well, unless you can rationalize it by pretending that "I'm reading this to learn more about comics history", this one's not something you should spend any time reading, and it doesn't have the excellent art or fun creativity of some other old DC comics to recommend it – so I'm not going to recommend it, either.

Alison Bechdel: Fun Home. A Tragi-Comic

Alison Bechdel has reaped accolades left and right for "Fun Home". Well, I'll have to place myself in the less-than-auspicious company of those who disagree.

This is an autobiographical work about Bechdel growing up in the shadow of an emotionally distant, literature-reading, stickler-for-aesthetics, secretly-gay father. It's what seems a remarkably love-poor home she shares with the rest of the family; in fact, it seems downright impoverished on emotions. Comparing Bechtel's story to my own childhood, it's more or less like all emotionally charged episodes of people actually relating to each other have been edited out, if they ever even existed. The father is forever refurbishing the house – somewhat akin to what he does with the dead in his part-time job as an undertaker – or shutting himself away in a book, and his emotional austerity even seems to have affected the way Bechtel is telling her story.

And that is what ultimately make this story not for me. Bechtel's own emotionally detached storytelling, wherein she mainly just depicts a scene and then comments upon it in an almost clinical tone of voice, leaves me, in the end (and somewhat ironically), cold.

The story starts out strong, with more and more of the secrets behind the façade being first hinted at and then more and more exposed, depicting episodes building up the tension and pressure of the story – including Bechtel's own sexuality (she's a lesbian) becoming also more and more obvious and part also of the story.  But somewhere halfway through, she loses me. The narrative isn't really building to any climax or revelation – we already know just about everything we're going to learn about her relationship with her father and her sexuality, so it becomes mainly repetition of things that we have already been basically told, and there is also no real resolution to her relation to her father. Basically, her time at college becomes a bit of a "and then this happened, and then this happened, and then..." narrative.

There are a number of literary allusions used, and I've seen them mentioned in reviews as an example of the quality of the story, but to me they don't really offer all that much; they're not sufficiently advanced or original to really deepen the depiction Bechtel's situation and relationship to her father to make me a fan.

As already pointed out, I seem to be in the definitive minority on this book, so I'm perfectly happy if you prefer to check out "Fun Home" for yourself (and who knows, perhaps you'll find the somewhat detached storytelling a feature instead of a bug like I did) but I doubt I'll be returning to it. Give me Li Österberg's work any day.

Sven-Bertil Bärnarp: Medelålders plus ("Middle aged-plus")

There is a phenomenon known as "recognition humor", wherein the humor of a joke (gag, skit etc.) lies not so much in the wittiness or inventiveness of the joke as in the fact that the reader (viewer, listener etc.) recognizes the situation, mood or characters of the joke from his or her own experience. Several comic strips have been based on this; for example, many of the early American newspaper strips went for the family setting for that very reason, and the successful Scott - Kirkman collaboration, "Baby Blues" started out very much in the "something for all new parents to recognize themselves in"vein even if the characters would later develop individual characters that would elevate the strip beyond that (much like Scott & Borgman's "Zits" or any other really good strip IMO).

Anyway, "Medelålders Plus" is about a man who suddenly realizes that he's retired, not just middle-aged, and his crosswords-solving and flowers-growing wife. They're a happy couple, not making any big waves and rather happy about that, vaguely worried about encroaching old age but not particularly anxiety-ridden. In short, ordinary people.

And ordinary people seem to like the strip. A lot. Me, I don't know how ordinary I am (but not being particularly extraordinary, I suppose I am, at that), and while neither "middle-aged-plus" nor in a happy, stable relationship with a crosswords-solving and flowers-growing wife, I do know and have known a few people who remind me quite a bit about the couple in the strip – relatives, and friends of my parents. So there is still some element of recognition there for me. It's not quite enough to make me a fan of the strip, but it is enough for me to understand why many people are.

For me, the strips can be sorted into three categories: laugh-out funny, amusing, and those that just sort of pass by. The laugh-out funny ones aren't all that frequent, but after a lifetime of reading comics, not many are. Still, there's something very funny about a recent retiree standing by his window annoyedly looking out at some workers digging a hole in the street obsessing about their low productivity, yelling advice and exhortations that they can't possibly hear, and in the final panel having to go lie down a while because he's become all stressed out. Similarly, it is amusing to read about the social interplay and relations that develop around the recycling center, where people regularly meet who otherwise wouldn't even know the others existed. Etc.

I'm not all that big on recognition humor myself, so "Medelålders Plus" isn't quite my cup of tea – those laugh-out loud strips don't come often enough for me – but it's a likable, low-key strip that gives voice to a demographic that certainly isn't particularly well represented in either comics, movies or the news, so more power to it for that.

Article in Swedish about the strip here; samples (also in Swedish) here.