Girl Detective

After Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, I wanted to read Josh Neufeld’s graphic “novel” (narrative, I’d say), A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which depicts New Orleans and some of its inhabitants before, during and long after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
Neufeld was a Red Cross volunteer in the aftermath of the hurricane, and began by chronicling his experiences online, which eventually led to this book.

The city itself is almost a character, since the book begins with the storm before it moves into the people. There are seven main characters in a rotation of five stories. They have different ages, ethnicities and religions. Some left; some stayed. Some returned; some did not.

A.D. New Orleans shows, in pictures and text, an up-close reality very unlike the lawless chaos the media was so eager to emphasize. As with Zeitoun, the personal is political, and the specifics point to universalities. This book makes it all too easy, and decidedly uncomfortable, to imagine oneself in one (or several) of the characters’ shoes. Highly recommended.

The Scott Pilgrim comic series by Bryan Lee O’Malley is about the 20-something slacker kid of the title and his efforts to woo and win the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers. There are many obstacles along the way, like his chaste romance with high schooler Knives Chau, and Ramona’s seven evil exes, whom Scott must defeat in combat. Lucky for him he’s the best fighter in the province. (He’s Canadian.)

I think my favorite is volume 1, since it epitomizes the out-there, wacky visual humor of the entire series, and often made me laugh aloud. My least favorite was volume 3, since it wasn’t as funny. My favorite character was probably drummer Kim Pine (below, left).

The entire series of six is a fun-filled ride of manga-inspired goofiness that I highly recommend.

Oh, and the movie’s good, too.

Remember when I reviewed Dragonflight a little while back, and we had a great discussion in the comments about better books for tween and teen girls where the main character has a relationship with another girl and is not defined by the boys around her? Foiled, a graphic novel by the prolific writer Jane Yolen, is one of those better books.

Aliera attends the smallest high school in New York City. She fences, hence the pun of the title. She doesn’t always get along with her parents, but she has a good relationship with her cousin. They play a D & D like game every weekend and talk about what’s going on with Aliera, like fencing tournaments and cute boys at school. Not much goes on with the cousin, as she’s confined to a wheelchair with rheumatoid arthritis.

When Aliera gets asked out on a date by the ridiculously named cute boy Avery Castle, things begin to get weird in that “hey, magic is real!” way. And they do not unfold in a predictable or saccharine manner. Aliera is funny, charming, and easy to relate to. Her fencing skills are cool. The art, by Mike Cavallaro, is manga influenced, and easy to read and engage with. This book sets the stage for further books, so it’s a beginning rather than a complete story. I will definitely read the next book in this series, and would recommend this one unreservedly for tween and young teen girls who like fantasy.

The blurb on the front said Batman R.I.P. is “as good as superhero comics get” and it was from IGN, a pretty trusted source for geekiana. I’ve been reading Morrison’s reboot of Batman and Robin, and like it a lot. This was the story that led up to it. So I took the bait, bought the book, read the book, and the same thing happened as almost always happens when I read a Grant Morrison book; I thought, “Huh? What? I don’t get it…”

Here’s what I think it’s about: A villain group called The Black Glove has sworn to destroy Batman, in a way that put me in mind of a book I liked much better, Daredevil: Born Again. They involve the Joker, who they refer to as The Master. They do, in fact, manage to make some Very Bad Things happen to Batman–poison, madness, drugs, kidnapped girlfriend, etc. And in the end a helicopter goes down, with one of the bad guys and with Batman. Do you think he’s dead? For real? This time?

Grant Morrison said in an interview that the villain’s reveal would be one of the most shocking things in Batman’s history. After reading the book, this confused me. First, because I found at least three main villains (possibly a fourth), and a whole lot of secondary ones. Second, because when I finally figured out which one I thought he was talking about (I’m still not completely certain) it wasn’t shocking.

In the wake of my confusion, I looked up reviews, most of which are excellent. But the excellent reviews came from comic-book critics and fans who had been reading the various Batman titles all along. That isn’t me.

I have geek cred. I’ve read comics for over twenty years, and even worked in comic shops. I’ve read a lot of Batman. But what I’ve read were often stand-alone graphic novels, like The Dark Night Returns, The Long Halloween, The Killing Joke, Mad Love, etc. I don’t read every issue of every Bat title. I have a general sense of what’s going on in the major universes. I know the main characters and history. And that wasn’t enough to appreciate this book. There’s lots of good stuff in it; Grant Morrison is a good writer and a very clever guy. But I think this collection is better suited for medium-high to high Bat fans who follow the ongoing books. It couldn’t quite stand alone, I thought.

I did it! I finished 15 books in 15 days! Woot! And for those of you attempting this folly with me, thank you. For those of you reading along, thank you. For my family, who were even more neglected than usual, thank you.

I encourage everyone who participated in this project to comment. By everyone, I mean those who read 15, those who tried, those who considered it, and those who just read the reviews. What was your favorite, or least favorite? How many books did you move off your TBR shelves? What’s the biggest insight you take away?

And now, last but definitely not least, #15: Asterios Polyp. David Mazzuchelli was the artist/collaborator with Frank Miller on two of my favorite superhero graphic novels, Daredevil: Born Again, and Batman: Year One. Both are classics, and good examples of superhero books for those who dismiss superheroes. Asterios Polyp is Mazzuchelli’s first solo work, and it’s a masterful one. Having just finished it, I look forward to reading it again. It also made me want to read The Odyssey; few books have that power.

Asterios of the title is an Updike-ish architect. Recently divorced, his apartment building is struck by lightning. He grabs three items and his wallet, and takes a bus to the middle of nowhere. The story alternates between the present, where he works as a mechanic in a small town, and the past, his marriage to the artist Hana. Throughout, the art and story focus on duality, yet together they achieve something that transcends either/or.

The art is highly stylized (formalistic, the reviews call it) as is the use of color, playing with variations on cyan, magenta and yellow. Each character has their own font, as well as their own art style. The many layers of artistic variation are dizzying but exhilarating.

Asterios Polyp was just awarded the first-ever LA Times Book Prize for Graphic Novels. For more reviews, check out those from

New York Times
Scott McCloud
Entertainment Weekly
The Comics Journal

And, to sum up my 15/15/15 reading: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; Shakespeare Wrote for Money; Eats, Shoots and Leaves; Mercury; Chocolate War; Unwritten; Ex Machina: Dirty Tricks; Buffy: Retreat; This is Water; Desperate Characters; Borrowed Finery; The Slave Dancer; Stitches; The Catnappers; Asterios Polyp.

favorite book read: can’t pick just one! Asterios Polyp, Stitches, Catnappers, Slave Dancer, Chocolate War
least favorite books read: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Retreat and Ex Machina: Dirty Tricks
# of books out of 15 moved off TPR shelves: 14, 5 of which had been there over a year
lesson learned: do this in winter next time–late December or early January
next book: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
book on deck: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
next book project: Baroque Summer

For those reading along in the 15/15/15 project, the 8th book means we’re more than halfway there! My 8th book was a huge disappointment. It’s the 6th graphic novel collection, Retreat, of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book series, which has been written sometimes, and overseen always, by Joss Whedon, who referred to it as season 8.

I’ve tried hard to like it, and to find the good things about this series, because I have a huge affection for the Buffy television series, even if I thought seasons 6 and 7 were poorly executed (barring “Once More with Feeling”, the notable exception).

The comic-book series posits that there is now an army of slayers, spread around the world, training in unison against the forces of darkness. There’s also a big bad, named Twilight, who’s gunning for Buffy and her army of slayers. In “Retreat” the Twilight army keeps getting closer because they can track magic and power. Buffy and the Scooby gang head to Tibet to look up an old friend who might have something to say about using less magic and less power.

Penned by Jane Espenson, a Buffy scribe from the later seasons, this story was a mess. The humor was infrequent and unfunny. The art was hard to read; I often couldn’t tell which character was which, and if it wasn’t a close-up, the details were, literally, sketchy. The threats weren’t threatening, the relationships didn’t have depth, and while it ended on a mysterious cliff hanger, the bottom of the page had the audacity to read “The End”. I don’t care to find out what happens next. I’ll leave the character of Buffy in mid air (really) and be done with this series.

I loved Darwyn Cooke’s art and storytelling on DC: The New Frontier, volumes 1 and 2. In the back pages of the excellent comic-book series Criminal, I’ve noted Ed Brubaker’s regular recommendations of the Parker novels by Richard Stark, a pseudonym of the prolific Donald Westlake. So when Cooke’s adaptation of the first Parker novel, Richard Stark’s Parker: the Hunter, was published, I wanted to give it a shot.

With shaded pencils and minimal color, Cooke combines Stark’s words with his own distinctive art to create a great new story. The book was less of a whodunnit than about how Parker, a hulking, double-crossed bad ass, is going to take his revenge.

The night air was crisp. Parker was suddenly famished. He headed for his hotel, a hot shower, and a thick steak.

This is classic noir. There’s violence, and unflattering portrayals of women. As with the show Mad Men, I took this as a snapshot of a particular time and could enjoy the book on its retro merits, though some might not be able to.

Westlake died recently, and while his Parker books have been adapted before, most notably in Point Blank starring Lee Marvin as “Walker” and the less successful remake Payback with Mel Gibson as “Porter”, Cooke’s is the only one he allowed to use the Parker name.

I respect Grant Morrison’s work. But I don’t always get it. I’m fairly certain the deficiency is me, as I’ve read about the zillion obscure-to-me referents he used for whichever book I didn’t care for or understand, like his All-Star Superman. So I approached his take on Batman and Robin, Batman Reborn with trepidation.

From moment one, I was in the driver’s seat, first in the bad guys’ car, then in a Bat vehicle. Morrison tags between these two scenes, and quickly situates us in the Bat-universe:

Robin: I told you it would work. All I had to do was adapt my father’s blueprints.

Batman: I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Damian…

Robin: “Never use real names in the field.” Your words.

Batman: You’re paying attention. Good. You know, I’d have killed for a flying batmobile when I was Robin.

A few pages later, we learn which former Robin is the new Batman, because apparently Bruce Wayne is dead.

I have a passing familiarity with the Bat-universe. I knew who Damian was, and guessed who Batman was, before Alfred confirmed it, though I don’t know who all the Robins have been. This reboot, then, is not only for regular readers of the monthly Bat titles, but also for casual fans of the Bat. It’s quite good, and in the Morrison/Quitely tradition, often gruesome.

There are villains aplenty, like Pyg and the Flamingo, and a new antihero, the Red Hood. The first trade paperback collects issues 1 to 6, but doesn’t resolve everything. Even if you bought the individual issues, the collected edition is a good investment to avoid the ugly, intrusive ads. I look forward to the rest of the series; so far it’s a wild ride.

In the wake of my book-feeding frenzy for the Tournament of Books, I decided to catch up on comic books. While I’ve shifted from buying monthly title to buying collected graphic novels for most books, there are a few I won’t wait for, and Ed Brubaker’s noir and pulp series like Incognito and Criminal are among them. Not only are they on high quality paper with strong art from Sean Phillips, but there are no intrusive ads, there’s an informative author page in the back, and a noir/pulp related article. Neither of the latter are in the collections; Brubaker calls them the canvas goodie bag reward for those of us who buy the single issues, and I’m happy to do so. The quality of the story, art, and back matter is of the highest in comics.

During a break from the ongoing series Criminal, Brubaker and Phillips launched Incognito, about an unhappy guy in witness protection. The twist is he was a super villain, and got his powers taken away and witness protection for giving evidence against his former boss, The Black Death. In a nod to The Matrix, his fake last name is Anderson. In a nod to indie-comics great Harvey Pekar, he’s an angry file clerk. The topsy turvy ethics of the book, along with its dark humor, make it fast, bumpy, enjoyable ride. A sequel series is due this summer, 2010.

After Incognito, Brubaker and Phillips returned to the world of their Criminal series with “The Sinners“, and returning character Tracy Lawless. Tracy’s a killer, but only of those who deserve it. This is a slippery place to be, and Tracy doesn’t exactly finesse it. He’s having an affair with the boss’s wife, can’t figure out who is killing the boss’s peers, and has a guy from his past on his tail trying to drag him back where he came from. Things don’t end pretty, but there’s a lot to satisfy in this story. I don’t think we’ll be seeing Tracy again, at least for a while, but I was glad to consume this story in one fell swoop, having bought the issues but not read them till now, when the story was complete.

These are for fans of noir, pulp, crime, and comics. Violent and dark, they’re not for everybody. But if you like what Brubaker and Phillips do, you’re going to like most of what they do, so check them out, if any of this sounds like a good thing to you.

Volume 13 of the comic-book series Fables, The Great Fables Crossover, is a welcome respite from the near-unrelenting darkness and violence of the last few volumes. This compilation includes issues from Fables, Jack of Fables, and The Literals miniseries.

How thoroughly you enjoy this book may depend on how well you like the character of Jack. You know, Jack: Frost, Horner, the Giant Killer, Be-Nimble, and the Bean Stalk, etc. I stopped reading the Jack of Fables series when I found him more insufferable than funny. And while he has some good bits in this volume, especially his meta-textual intos and outros, anytime he was on page I couldn’t wait for him to get off.

More entertaining, I thought, was learning more about The Literals, characters like Gary the Pathetic Fallacy, Mr. Revise who can edit stories permanently (ever heard of the four little pigs? He’s why not.), and the Page sisters, who are kick-ass librarians with magic powers.

The villain this time is not the bad guy from The Dark Ages. Apparently he’s taking a back seat during this romp. No less evil, though, is Kevin Thorn, who is able to write worlds in and out of existence. He’s struggling for the words to unmake the world, which has gone on so long without his intervention that he’s appalled by how things have turned out: The Big Bad Wolf is in human form, married to Snow White, and a father? Gepetto became so much more than a puppet maker? As he struggles against his twin Writer’s Block, the Fables and Literals race to eliminate Kevin before he does the same to them.

Pink elephants! Theocratic badgers! Girls with glasses and really big guns! Babe the blue ox, insane and funny! Plus a little girl who’s not as sweet as she looks. This is a fun, clever diversion, too heavy on Jack, but a nice break until we get back to the good and grim stuff, which I’m sure will happen soon.

I’d read about and been interested in Logicomix, a comic-book fictional history of Bertrand Russell and his struggles to clarify the foundations of logic and mathematics. My husband G. Grod is a math geek, and a fan of Russell and Kurt Godel, who is instrumental in the history, as well as Alan Turing, who plays an important role in framing the end of the narrative. I’ve become a fan by association of these great thinkers, so the subject interested me. Then when it was added to The Morning News 2010 Tournament of Books I decided to buy it for G. Grod for Christmas, as a not unselfish gift that still wasn’t exactly a bowling ball with “Homer” on it.

Doxiadis seems to be the instigator for the book, but it is certainly a team effort, both in production and in narrative, since all the creators are also included in and commenting on the work, a clever method of self-reference, a logic term that Russell’s Paradox is an example of. Christos Papadimitriou is a professor of computer science and author of a book on Turing. He was consulted and involved both to confirm the broad strokes of Russell’s story and legacy, and to engage the creative team in an effort to better the book. Art and color were done by husband/wife team of Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. Interchanges among the creators frame most chapters, and offer commentary on the ambiguities in the story. Russell mostly narrates his own story through a frame of a lecture, starting with his childhood as an orphan in the severely regulated house of his grandmother and his introduction to mathematics by a charismatic tutor.e

The authors do an admirable job of portraying both the characters involved in the evolution of logic and mathematics, and in the explication of some complex examples of both, which could easily have bogged down the narrative, which instead proceeds at a lively clip. Russell is a typical hero in the classic mode: orphaned, struggling in childhood with overbearing adults, moving on to his quest (for the foundations in logic), struggling with monsters (a streak of mental illness in his family, also found frequently in his colleagues), and, as in the real world, coming to an end that is both happy and sad, depending on how one views it, but certainly complex. It’s because of Russell and his colleague’s heroic narrative that Doxiadis thought to make the story in comic-book form, which works well. The art is clear and easy to read. while also embodying at times more than one level of meaning.

In the end, though, I didn’t find this to rise as high as some exemplars of the comic-book format, like Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Persepolis/Persepolis II by Marjane Satrapi, and Maus/Maus II by Art Spiegelman. The story is good, the art is good, both together are better than either alone, yet somehow it never became far more than the sum of its parts, as the above titles did for me. Logicomix is entertaining, provocative, educational and very good, even as I felt it didn’t quite achieve the true greatness of its subjects.

DC Comics decided to do for Batman what they did several years ago with Superman. They had a two-part story written by a comics great (Alan Moore) that ended the series running at the time, then started the titles again from 0. (Making comic-shop employees everywhere groan.) For Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader, they tapped Neil Gaiman and artist Andy Kubert. Set at the funeral of the Batman, friends and foes take turns telling stories, as the reader tries to figure out what’s going on.

“Where am I?”

“You’re here. In Gotham.”

“Am I dreaming?”

“No, you aren’t dreaming.”

“This is Gotham. I mean, I know it’s Gotham. But…it’s strange. I know Gotham like I know myself.”

Typical of Gaiman, the story focuses on the power and relative truth of stories. Included in the Deluxe hardcover edition are 3 other Gaiman Batman-related stories. Kubert channels past masters as the appearance of Batman and the style of the stories changes. It’s a nice edition of a good tribute to a great character but better perhaps for fans of Batman than for fans just of Gaiman because of the comics backstories that inform it.

As with The Wild Things, I’m suspicious of novels based on other mediums; I’ve been disappointed too many times. But when I asked C, the second-in-command at Big Brain Comics, what he thought of Peter and Max by Bill Willingham, he replied that he picked it up and a long time later realized he’d been reading one of the best Fables stories in the series, and it wasn’t even the comic book.

Fables is an ongoing monthly comic from DC/Vertigo, written by Bill Willingham and mostly illustrated by Steve Leialoha. It posits a small neighborhood in NYC where storybook characters live in exile, and a farm in upstate New York where the animal and other nonhuman storybook characters live in seclusion. It’s won scads of awards, and is a complex, entertaining series in the tradition of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. I recently enjoyed the twelfth graphic novel collection, The Dark Ages.

Peter and Max is a standalone novel about Peter Piper and his brother Max, who live in the land of Hesse:

The caravan belonged to the Piper family who, as their name implied, were traveling musicians., Just as Millers mill and Fletchers fletch, the Pipers piped. At least three out of four of them did. The father, Johannes, and his two sons, Max, the eldest and young Peter, all played the long pipe, which was sometimes called the single pipe, or occasionally even the flute as it was still known back then, before some enterprising soul came along later and decided all true flutes should be turned sideways to play…

The family had no home, except for their wagon. They lived the life of happy vagabonds, traveling here and there, throughout the year, going to festivals and fairs, and every other sort of scheduled celebration, where they’d make their living by letting anyone call the tune, provided they were willing to pay the Pipers. (38-9)

They are staying with their friends the Peeps when Hesse is invaded by the emperor’s goblin troops. The families flee for the town of Hamelin through the black forest, but soon are separated when Max’s jealousy of Peter takes a serious turn.

The novel alternates between modern time and the past as Peter and Max take separate but always intertwined paths. It’s set before the Fables/Empire war in the series’ time line. Both stories have fierce momentum that drive the past and present stories to a satisfying conclusion. The novel is well illustrated by Leialoha in black ink, which adds to the storybook feeling, as does the violent content, consistent with fables of old.

I found this a great addition to the Fables oeuvre, with many takes on legends involving Peter, pipers, and the Peeps. It would also be good for those unfamiliar to the Fables comic-book series, as an introduction to the series, especially for those not yet familiar with the complex literary and visual joys of the comic-book medium. Highly recommended.

Prompted by a recent article at The Comics Reporter (link from The Morning News) on the collaboration between comic book writer and artist, I pulled my copy of Daredevil: Born Again off the shelf. It’s written by Frank Miller and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. Even at twenty plus years old with garish colors, it remains undiminished as a classic of the superhero genre.

It opens on a skinny, defeated-looking woman hunched over a cigarette in a smoky room with a smug-looking man:

It’s a hot day. Like all the rest. All two years of them. Two years… and the motion picture epic that turned into just another come-on isn’t even a memory…like all the rest except this one has a special glow to it. It’s not every day you sell your soul. That’s not way to think. Grow up. It’s the eighties. You do what you have to. And you have to do it…

“Daredevil. Okay? I said it. I said the name. And he’s got another name. And it’s written down right here. You want it or not?

Matt Murdock’s ex-girlfriend, Karen Page, is a junkie now, and she sells his name for a fix. It gets back to his nemesis, the Kingpin, who systematically breaks down and takes away all support in Murdock’s life until he’s not only on the edge, he’s gone so far beyond it that no one knows if he’s coming back. While the title kind of gives the ending away, it’s the marriage of words and pictures, and how they detail Murdock’s fall and resurrection (in all its Catholic imagery) that compelled this reader through the book.

The recent runs of Brian Michael Bendis and Ed Brubaker got a lot of kudos from the critics. But their artistic collaborators (Alex Maleev, who largely made the Bendis run, IMO, and Michael Lark with Brubaker) are hardly mentioned, and often not named on the covers of the collections. Ng Suat Tong’s collaboration article makes a good point. If a writer writes a decent script, and an illustrator draws well, you get a good story, sometimes even a very good one, as when Bendis and Maleev worked together. But only when there’s a true collaboration, and the writer and artist are working together, and both bringing more to it than each could individually, do you get a great work, a classic, like this one. And to give a collaborating artist second billing, or no billing, as noted by Tong, “should be cause for consternation if not disgust.”

This was not the case with Born Again, on which Mazzucchelli receives equal billing with the much-more-famous Miller. Mazzucchelli is receiving his own share of praise this year for his first solo work, the graphic novel Asterios Polyp.

Earlier this year when League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1910 came out, I realized I’d missed The Black Dossier. After reading it, I can’t discount that I may have skipped it on purpose. Alan Moore’s fore story, illustrated in lavish detail by Kevin O’Neill, is nearly swamped by the profusion of back story. All have merit, and some of this is wildly enjoyable, but still, it was a bumpy read.

Mina Murray (fka Mina Harker, of Dracula) and Allan Quatermain (he of King Solomon’s Mines, not Port Charles), former secret agents of the crown, are back in Britain after a protracted stay in the Americas, in which they avoided the Big Brother regime back home. As before, Moore plays fast (but not loose) with British historical fiction and pop culture, and references in this one include James Bond, The Avengers, Woolf’s Orlando, Orwell’s 1984, Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series, and more. Murray and Quatermain seek the black dossier of the title, which fills them (and the reader) in on what they and their colleagues like Fanny Hill and Orlando, have been up to for literally ages.

In what I found an unfortunate choice, the dossier is included in its entirety, albeit in chunks that alternate with Murray and her beau getting chased, beat up and shot at all over England and its environs. The dossier material is often in single spaced small type and while illustrated, it’s not really in comic-book format as is the main story. I found the frequent switches in narrative disruptive, distracting, and worse, unnecessary. I didn’t need six pages of the adventures of Fanny Hill, eighteen on Orlando, three by Bertie Wooster, or five by a Kerouac-ian beat poet. I wished many times that Moore and his editors had chosen instead to excerpt the dossier. Small doses of the fictional history would have worked as well, or even better. Then the book could have had a “director’s cut” that included all of Moore’s back matter for those, unlike me, who want it. Shorter excerpts would have gotten the same info across, still been as clever, given the reader more credit, plus not exhausted, annoyed and sometimes bored this one.

Page count total is about even. 98 pages of fore-story, and 93 pages of back. Given the density of the back matter, it felt far longer than what it was purported to support. Plus, much of it had been alluded to or flat out recorded already in the extensive back matter in LoEG v. 2.

As with the other LoEG books, Jess Nevins has done extensive footnoting of Moore’s nigh-endless references. Unfortunately, the notes for Black Dossier are no longerat his site, but at Comic Book Resources, and in a book called Impossible Territories. Trouble is, for me, these are interesting, but like adding insult to injury. Part of the fun of Moore’s work is getting the references I can and knowing I’m missing some but not worrying over it. Really, though, what I’d prefer would be a “Previously on” segment that covers the basics, rather than pages of single spaced small type that makes me hunt for things like why Mina is not aging and Allan is young again (they bathed in the same pool of immortality in Africa that Orlando had done). Some details are listed at Wikipedia. Others are at this review at Comics Bulletin.

If I feel up to it, I might compile my own. I need to rest up a bit before I do so, though. Here are a few notes: Jimmy is James Bond, recently returned from Jamaica where he confronted Dr. No. Emma Night will become Emma Peel. Her godfather, Hugo Drummond, was a character in a series of English noir novels. Familiarity with 1984 and The Tempest would be helpful.

ETA: one of the reviewers remarked that Moore’s use of alternate formats to tell the story/stories is very like what he did in Watchmen. It is, yet I found it much less effective here. That was a masterwork, and one with far reaching implications both in story and in the political context of the time in which it was published. The LoEG series, to me, is supposed to be a lark–adventure stories like the ones it’s drawn from. The at-times ponderous alternate material doesn’t suit the type of story, IMO.

I’m rereading the graphic novel collections of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, and just finished the very enjoyable Volume 2. I read it when it came out serially in comic book form, and remember enjoying it less. There were long waits between issues, and they were quite heavy with backmatter that I didn’t enjoy. In the graphic novel collection, I am able to read the entire comic story at once, and the backmatter is collected in the back. That’s where it should stay, IMO. Forty-six pages of single spaced text as Alan Moore does a mock travelogue of every fictional or mythical locale IN THE WORLD. I knew the references to some. I might have enjoyed it more had I known more of them, but I doubt it. Instead, my friend Blogenheimer suggested I visit Jess Nevins’ site, where he breaks down all the references.

Back to the Volume 2 story, though. The team of irregulars–Mina Murray, the Invisible Man, Edward Hyde, Captain Nemo and Allan Quatermain–are under new leadership, after the events in volume 1 and are dispatched to the site of what appears to be a meteor crater. The monsters from Mars soon reveal themselves, and begin traipsing about in distinctive-looking vehicles. It’s up to the team of misfits to save the day, and they’re aided by a reclusive and mysterious doctor.

In addition to the Sherlock Holmes and Quatermain stories, Dracula, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, volume 2 references other Victorian literature, including Gulliver’s Travels, Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.

This is an adventure–sometimes tragic, sometime comic, but always engaging. I found it great fun, once I stopped reading the backmatter.

For those of you have a Google home page, and use Gmail, Google reader, and other Google goodies, go check out the new themes they’re offering in honor of Comicon. I wish someone could explain to me why Spider Woman and not Jean Grey, but there are some favorite kid comic characters, like Owly and Johnny Boo, and some from some of our favorite books, like Robot Dreams and Adventures in Cartooning.

I’m toying with “women in the DC universe” but I’m really not the target market. But still: Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Supergirl–these were my childhood idols. I’m grateful I lived pre-Disney princesses!

I love the idea of related reading–delving deep into topics that interest me. My reach, however, nearly always exceeds my grasp. After I re-read Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I reserved a number of books from the library: The Escapists by Brian K. Vaughan, Dark Horse Comics’ Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, v. 1-3, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (the latest novel by Chabon’s wife, Ayelet Waldman, whom I’ve read much about, though never read) and The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju, (a well-reviewed non-fiction book from 2008 about the censorship of comics in the fifties after their meteoric rise as a medium in the forties). I doubt if I’ll manage to read all of these before something else jumps to the head of the queue, like the Infinite Summer challenge, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

This week I read all three volumes of Dark Horse Comics’ Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, collecting the six-issue comic-book run of a few years ago. Like Brian K. Vaughan’s The Escapists as well as Chabon’s source novel, the series blends fact and fiction so the reader can either wonder (and possibly research) which parts are “really” real, or just go along for the ride. These books include stories and editorials interweaving comic-book history and material from Chabon’s fictional world, with both new and classic authors and illustrators.

Volume 1 has an introduction by Chabon, and opens with the Escapist’s origin, illustrated by Eric Wight, best known now for his comics work for the television show The O.C. It has an eye-catching cover and clever back-cover parody by award-winning cartoonist Chris Ware. I loved the Luna Moth story written and illustrated by Jim Starlin. My favorite piece, though, was the closing story “The Lady or the Tiger, illustrated by Gene Colan and written and with a preface by Glen David Gold (author of the Kavalier and Clay-esque Carter Beats the Devil).

In Volume 2, the standout was the opening story, done in the style of EC’s horror comics, written by comics vet Marv Wolfman.

Volume 3 has stronger stories than 2, I thought, with Will Eisner’s final work, along with a war tale, a noir mystery, a twisted romance and a closing story about euthanasia.

As with any anthology, the quality varies, and the presence of the work by some legends is sometimes more notable than the actual work here. But this is a top-notch production, with excellent covers, heavy paper and great art. It’s a good companion to Kavalier and Clay, and a lark for fans of Chabon’s book to see his fictive comic-book character in actual comic books.

The Escapists by Brian K. Vaughan is one of several comics inspired by Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Like that prose novel, this graphic novel plays with the boundary of reality and fiction. In it, a young man from Cleveland, Max Roth, buys the rights to a defunct comic-book character, the Escapist. He finds two friends to help create a new version of the comic book, then tries to publicize it in the manner of the character’s creators, Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier. It tells the story in real time, with flashback and pages of the fictional comic the team creates, all with different artists to distinguish the changes in story. Like the novel it’s inspired by, The Escapists is clever with sympathetic characters, a layered narrative, and a story both tragic and hopeful. A fitting, post-modern complement to Chabon’s excellent novel.

I first read Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay in the sleep-deprived, surreal days following the birth of my son Drake, now almost 6yo. He was hungry around the clock, so I nursed him lying down so I could read at the same time. I even got a book light so I could read during the night feedings. I remembered the book itself only vaguely, yet the physical act of reading it–nursing, switching sides, wrestling with the book light and an unwieldy hardcover–is still very clear.

I was surprised, then, on this re-reading, to find this book not only extremely well-written and crafted, but also so enjoyable. How could I not remember how flat-out GOOD this book was? Well, I remember it about as well as I remember Drake’s earliest infancy. THAT I don’t need or want to go through again, but this book was a delight to rediscover.

The book details the friendship and collaboration between Josef Kavalier, a WWII Jewish refugee from Prague, and Sam Clay (ne Klayman). The cousins are in their late teens, and break into the burgeoning business of comics by creating a character called The Escapist.

The long run of Kavalier & Clay–and the true history of the Escapist’s birth–began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy’s mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in his bed for his cousin from Prague.

The book is a wild mixture of history, fabrication, Jewish lore, metaphor, comic books, romance, and adventure, all told through a fascinating panoply of complex, engaging characters. I’m a comic book geek, so the lengthy sections on comics history were interesting to me. The book likely would be a tougher read for someone with no interest or experience with comics. Even so, there’s so much going on in this book, I’d be very surprised if a reader didn’t find something to like, even love, in this sprawling epic.