Neato Upcoming Movie

Anybody seen one of the few showings of Azur et Asmar, a.k.a. Azur and Asmar? It's a French animated movie about "the story of two boys raised as brothers, who compete in a dangerous quest through foreign lands to find and free the Fairy of the Djinns, held captive in a crystal palace." Looks incredible.

Here's a trailer:

And here's the French website for the movie. (Click "Visitez le site" to see some cool stuff.)

The website for the U.S. distributor, GKIDS, includes a list of dates and locations to see the movie.

Neato Upcoming Comic

I've really been enjoying Marcos Martin's artwork on recent issues of Amazing Spider-man, and I just saw that he'll be doing the art for Captain America Comics #1: 70th Anniversary Special, with James Robinson writing. It is scheduled to ship on April 1st.

Definitely worth checking out, I'd say. (By the way, note the slick homage to the classic "Captain America punches Hitler" cover.)

Here's the catalog description.

Review: Tamara Drewe

Posy Simmonds's Tamara Drewe (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 2008, 136 pages, $16.95) is an off-beat drama that strolls along like a leisurely walk through the English countryside, at least until people start dying.

The story takes place over the course of four seasons at a writer's retreat on a farm, where the arrival of hot young columnist Tamara Drewe and her rock star boyfriend disturbs the affairs of the couple that owns the farm, their handyman, a writer who farts around in one of the guest houses, and two of the local high school girls. The men are captivated by Tamara while the high school girls obsess over her boyfriend. People sneak around, screw around, get engaged, break off engagements, and dance around wearing pilfered dresses. It's your typical English relationship drama.

The book is not a typical comic book, however, as most of the pages have large chunks of text dispersed in and around the artwork. It's more comic book than illustrated novel, though, and the text does not interrupt the flow of the story. The art itself is quite nice to look at, with solid cartooning that perfectly conveys the emotions of the characters, and plenty of shots of beautiful British boonies.

(click to enlarge ... did you think I meant something else by "beautiful British boonies"?)

The story does sort of take a left turn near the end, but although those events are surprising, they don't feel altogether out of place, perhaps because Simmonds does such a good job creating real, believable people, and the action flows naturally from their decisions.

(click to enlarge)

This is an accomplished, well-crafted work. I very nearly picked this as one of my top ten comics for 2008, and I recommend seeking it out.

By the way, Simmonds originally serialized this story at the Guardian's website, and you can still read the whole thing here. (Interestingly, it looks like Simmonds has reworked quite a bit for the print version -- I compared one randomly-chosen page from both versions, and found differences in colors, facial expressions, and dialogue.) You can buy the book from Amazon here: Tamara Drewe

Disclaimer: This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

The Best Comics of 2008

Here are the Ten Best Comics of 2008. These are the books that stuck with me and jumped off my shelf when I was putting together this list. When I finished each of these comics, I felt satisfied but also didn't want it to be over. They all nailed me in my head, my heart, and my gut.

10. Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday

That's right, let's lead off with this one. Honestly, I'm a little torn about putting this on the list, considering that only two issues came out in 2008. But here is why it makes it: it contains everything I want in an X-Men story. The action and adventure, the romance and the drama, the snappy one-liners and the noble sacrifices and the overcoming of great odds and the bad-ass use of mutant powers = pure superhero pop confection. Oh yeah, and the fact that John Cassaday can draw anything and make it look fabulous doesn't hurt.

9. Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope by Emmanuel Guibert

Emmanuel Guibert's fascinating presentation of the memories of his friend Alan Cope is brought to life by beautiful artwork and Cope's own detailed, thoughtful narration. Here is my full review.

8. Ganges #2 by Kevin Huizenga

Kevin Huizenga captures both the all-consuming nature of video games where you blow away your friends and what it feels like when the layoffs begin at your workplace. Formally daring and with a good heart. Here is my review.

7. Black Jack by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka's black market doctor dazzles with surgical wizardry, while Tezuka himself shows off his considerable artistic talents. Each episode peels back another layer of the onion that is Black Jack, while pushing the nutso barrier further and further. Here is my review of the first two volumes in the series.

6. Northlanders: Sven the Returned by Brian Wood and Davide Gianfelice

Sven is one mean mofo, yet it takes eight solid issues of killing dudes in the frigid North for him to claim the title of Baddest Viking You Ever Saw. But he gets there by the end. Full review here.

5. Essex County volume 3: The Country Nurse by Jeff Lemire

You can't help but root for these good people who are living unhappy lives because of ill fortune and their own mistakes. A sad story that spans decades but remains deeply personal, this one goes right for your heart. Here is my full review.

4. Scalped by Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera

It already started out strong, and now Aaron's writing seems to be hitting that sweet spot where he could take this story in any direction at any point and the readers will follow him without question. He's earned it with his fearless plotting and rich character work. Plus, this world is so well-constructed and organic that it feels like (1) Aaron's not inventing characters and scenes so much as uncovering what already was there to be found; and (2) he could tell stories about these people for a long, long time. And yet, I know that it will have to end one day, as the series is inexorably building to the ultimate confrontation between Bad Horse and Red Crow; it's going to happen eventually, and while I already know that it will be incredible, I also already know how much I will miss this series when it is over.

3. The Punisher by Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov

Kind of like how I miss this one. 2008 saw the release of the last part of the "Long Cold Dark" story as well as all six issues from Garth Ennis's final Punisher MAX story, "Valley Forge, Valley Forge." Ennis manages to tie together his unbelievable run with a story that has callbacks to nearly every page of the series, while providing us with one more look into the dark, dark world that is Frank Castle's life. And on top of it all, Valley Forge, Valley Forge is both a tribute to American soldiers and a condemnation of the American military, an excavation of Vietnam and a sobering reflection on our current war. It's pretty rare for a mainstream comic book to aspire to be social commentary, and rarer still for that comic book to succeed as such. That The Punisher manages to do so without losing an ounce of suspense, dark humor, or balls to the wall action is a testament to the masterful ability of Ennis. Plus, over the course of the series he's created some of the most villainous villains that I've ever seen grace the comic book page: these dudes are so evil, and yet it seems entirely possible that people like them exist in our own world. Scary stuff. This comic is so, so good.

2. Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw

A gripping story about a family unpacking a lot of emotional baggage and coming to terms with divorce. Superb storytelling, especially in the dynamic scene of the older son crawling through the claustrophobic tunnel of splinters to the treasure chest of memories. And that reveal of the younger son's true face killed me. Here is my full review.

1. All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

Where else could I put the best superhero comic book of the decade? Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely knocked this one out of the galaxy. You just won't find anything better.

Honorable Mentions:

I don't read everything that is published, and I know that there are many good books out there that I haven't uncovered, books that probably would have had a good shot at making this list. There also are several books that I own but haven't yet read, including Omega the Unknown, Lynda Barry's What It Is, and the recent volumes of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal. And I don't own but am itching to see Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole, Art Spiegelman's Breakdowns, and Eddie Campbell's The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard. Finally, I'm really, really hoping that Joe Kelly and J.M. Ken Niimura's I Kill Giants and Brett Lewis and John Paul Leon's The Winter Men get collected editions in 2009, since I didn't get the singles.

But although I may have missed out on a few great books -- and man, that list above seems daunting -- I did read a lot. And there are many books that I liked and recommend but did not put on this list, for one reason or another: Posey Simmonds' Tamara Drewe, the Linda Barry-edited The Best American Comics 2008, Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba's The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, Matt Fraction and Barry Kitson's The Order, and Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark's Daredevil. Also, I'm really enjoying Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant, a goofy and hilarious webcomic strip. (Here are some of my favorites from this year: Foundin Fathas, Boat!, Playing With the Boys, For Candace, In Service of the King, and E For Effort.) I'll put all these comics in the "honorable mention" category.

That's it for 2008. Thanks for reading.

Breaking News

Comic book industry to ask for federal government bailout

• Public in uproar over DC Comics Executive Editor Dan DiDio's decision to fly to Congressional hearing via invisible plane.
• Marvel Comics Editor in Chief Joe Quesada said to be planning to use bailout money to fund new webcomics initiative -- UPDATE -- webcomics initiative a complete failure, comics ruined for all time.

The Six Best Comics of 2009?

I'm going to put up my own "Best Comics of 2008" list sometime before the new year, but before I do that I wanted to talk about what I am most looking forward to reading in 2009. These are just the ones that I know about -- I am sure that there are a ton of comics that aren't on my radar yet that will be great.

Here are six books due out in 2009 that I can't wait to see:

1) Paul Pope, Battling Boy (First Second)

I really, really enjoyed Paul Pope's Batman: Year 100, and his art just seems like it is becoming more and more confident. I have no idea what Battling Boy is about, but it looks like a blast. See an incredible-looking page here.

2) David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (Pantheon, due out June 2)


This sucker has been brewing for a long, long time. And even now, they still haven't put up a cover image for it. But hey -- after what he did in Batman: Year One, David Mazzucchelli really can't do anything to mess up his legacy. According to Pantheon's web site, Asterios Polyp is "[t]he triumphant return of one of comics’ greatest talents, with an engrossing story of one man’s search for love, meaning, sanity, and perfect architectural proportions. An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait." Can he deliver? Read more about it here.

3) Brandon Graham, King City 2 (unknown) and Multiple Warheads (Oni Press)

(click to enlarge)

Brandon Graham's stuff is unbelievably awesome, and like Pope, he seems to get better with each new page. I'm counting both of his projects as one book, because I'm not sure if King City 2 actually will come out in 2009. Apparently it's in the can, but I think the lid on the can may have been closed and the can spirited away to a deep dark basement vault -- we already were robbed of reading it this year when publisher Tokyopop slightly imploded and decided to sit on it. Hopefully that just means Graham can shop it around and get it onto the shelves through a different publisher. (To me, the fact that he started to post pages from it on his blog, and then stopped abruptly, implies either that he's got somebody interested, or Tokypop threatened him over it. I'm hoping it's the former.)

But we still have Multiple Warheads, his post-WWIII werewolf saga. That two-page spread above is from that, and it sounds like he'll be putting out several issues in 2009. How can you not buy them after seeing that picture? You must and you will.

4) Jeff Lemire, The Nobody (Vertigo, due out July 7)

I recently wrote about how much I loved Lemire's Essex County trilogy, and now he has moved to Vertigo for his next original graphic novel. Here is a sneak peek.

5) Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, untitled Batman project (DC)

(this is the variant cover to issue ten of
All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder)

Don't know much about this supposed ongoing monthly from Morrison and Quitely. (See here for the news being broken.) I didn't love Morrison's recent Batman stuff, but All Star Superman was the best superhero comic book of the decade.

6) Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, Incognito (Marvel/Icon, mini-series starting in January)

A story about an ex-super villain hiding out in the witness protection program, done by the guys who are kicking ass with Criminal? Yes, thanks. Looks fantastic. Here are the first nine pages. The question is, will it be more awesome than this?



What are you looking forward to reading in 2009?

***Edited to add: Here is my post on the Best Comics of 2008.

***Edited again to add:  And here is my post on the Best Comics of 2009 -- see if I predicted my favorites!

Review: The Lagoon

Lilli Carré's graphic novel The Lagoon (Fantagraphics, 2008, 80 b&w pages, $14.99) is an eerie musical poem of a comic. It won't knock your socks off, but this weird story manages to be both creepy and pleasant at the same time, which is kind of fun.

It's the same off-kilter feeling that Carré acheived in her short story The Thing About Madeline, recently published in The Best American Comics 2008 (here's my review). That one was about a woman fleeing her humdrum life after coming face to face with herself. The Lagoon is about a family living next to a swamp inhabited by a creature that lures people into the waters with its enchanting singing. Some of those people don't come back.

The book is also about sound -- rhythms, noises, music, tapping, etc. Carré plays around with how sound can be displayed and used in comics, and this experiment fits well with her lyrical, whimsical art.

I particularly liked seeing how the creature's siren song became a physical object, wrapping itself around people and slithering in and out of the weeds. You can see this in the following two pages (click to enlarge):

Carré raises a lot of questions about what is going on, and I guess is content to let many of them remain unanswered. I kind of wish she had gone a little further with the story, though -- I wanted to know more about this creature and this family. I guess I wanted more of a resolution, too. This was a nice way to spend an evening, but I wouldn't mind seeing her tackle something bigger and deeper with her next project.

Here is a nifty slideshow of the book:



You can buy it from Fantagraphics here or from Amazon here: The Lagoon

Disclaimer: This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

Review: Essex County vol. 3: The Country Nurse

I was hit pretty hard by the first two books in Jeff Lemire's Essex County trilogy of graphic novels, and now the final volume, The Country Nurse (Top Shelf, 2008, 128 b&w pages, $9.95), made my heart hurt all over again. It's good stuff.

Like those earlier books, The Country Nurse works as a stand-alone story, but I'd recommend reading the trilogy from start to finish, so that you really can understand how all of the characters are connected. Moreover, this volume contains a pretty key moment for the characters featured in volume 1, Tales from the Farm, that only will resonate properly if you've already read that one.

This book spends a day with Anne Quenneville, a nurse who travels about a small town trying to make the lives of her patients just a little bit better. We already met her in volume 2, but now we get to learn more about her life and history. It also reveals more about her patients, who we know from the previous books. The story flashes back and forth between Anne's day and an episode in the life of her grandmother, ekeing out a living in 1917 in the Canadian wilderness as a nun watching over an orphanage.

Here's why these books will kick you in the gut: these are very likeable, nice people, and yet everybody is unhappy because of past mistakes or ill fortune. Everyone is a little broken, everyone has suffered a loss of youthful hope and vigor; a loss of a loved one or of health; damage physical or mental. They are long-suffering people who bear it silently, for the most part. Grudges are held for years. Secrets are kept hidden. Family members go decades without seeing or speaking to each other, unable to express their love for each other. It just kills you, knowing that if they could just bring themselves to face their problems they might be happier, but also understanding that they can never really go back to the ways things used to be. What been lost for them is irretrievable.

(click to enlarge)

Even poor Anne, a sweet woman who is just trying her best to help others, has had a pretty crummy time of it.

(click to enlarge)

And the beauty of these books comes from watching the moments when some of these people, who have been grimacing their way through life, instead decide to affirmatively deal with their problems. Everything from their pasts begins to bubble up and out, unable to be contained. Will they be happier? Will they make peace with their own mistakes?

This is tremendous drama.

Oh, and I liked the art too: scritchy scratcy black ink, backgrounds that make you feel like you are living in Essex County with the characters, and expressive yet nuanced acting.

I really loved these books and highly recommend them.

Lemire currently is working on a graphic novel for Vertigo called The Nobody. I'm looking forward to that, although not without feeling some regret that he isn't making more Essex County books. I could read another trilogy about these characters and still want more.

See a preview here.

You can buy the book from publisher Top Shelf here or from Amazon here: Essex County vol. 3: The Country Nurse

Disclaimer: This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

Review: Nocturnal Conspiracies

Nocturnal Conspiracies (NBM, 2008, 120 pages, $14.95) is the most recent work by French creator David B. to wash up on American shores. It's a comic book dream diary, and as such, although there are some interesting incidents and it works as an excellent showcase for Mr. B's striking artwork, it feels a little slight.

The book's full title is Nocturnal Conspiracies: Nineteen Dreams from December 1979 to September 1994, and it really is just that: David B. has transcribed nineteen of his subconscious exploits onto the page. Each episode seems like an accurate depiction of a dream, if that is possible. Some of the dreams run in a relatively straight line for several pages and feel like short stories, with proper beginnings, middles, and ends. Others jump from one strange environment to the next weird encounter to the next off-kilter adventure, often in the space of a few panels. Almost every panel includes David B.'s narration, informing the reader what the heck is going on and helping to link each sequence together.

Most of the dreams involve violence and are peopled by armed members of dangerous groups: gangsters, terrorists, gestapo agents, armed soldiers, khmer rouge, and straight-up "killers" are all featured. There are lots of chases, lots of hiding from the bad guys. It's all a little spooky and paranoid.

(click to enlarge)

But even though Nocturnal Conspiracies does what it does very well, I didn't love it. I'd rather read a (graphic) novel, something with a plot and characters that develop over the course of the book. I believe that this originally was published from 1999 to 2000 in three volumes as les Incidents de la nuit, which means that David B. was creating this at the same time that he was working on what would become his widely-acclaimed book Epileptic. That was a pretty heavy memoir of his childhood, detailing his brother's epilepsy and his own retreat into fantasy and art. I would think that making Epileptic was incredibly draining, and I wonder if Nocturnal Conspiracies was the result of the creator just needing to let off some steam.

But that is not to say that you shouldn't read this -- it's definitely an interesting and unique work of art. It looks like David B. just wanted to let his pen to run as wild as his dreaming mind, freed from the strictures of the narrative format, freed from actually consciously thinking up stories at all, depicting everything as he remembered dreaming it.

And even though it's not exactly what I'm looking for in a comic, I still found a lot to enjoy about it. For instance, I really dug dream seventeen, which included both this page:

(click to enlarge)

and this one:

(click to enlarge)

It's obvious this guy is a major artist, but this didn't feel like a major work. Mostly, it just made me excited to read his next book.

See a preview here. You can buy it from NBM here or Amazon here: Nocturnal Conspiracies: Nineteen Dreams From December 1979 to September 1994

By the way, it looks like publisher NBM just started up its own blog. Definitely worth checking out.

Disclaimer: This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

Today's Required Reading: Dick Hyacinth's "Final Best of 2008 Workbook/Checklist"

I would hope that everybody reading this already subscribes to Dick Hyacinth's blog (Dick Hyacinth's One-stop Hyphen Shop, a.k.a. Dick Hates Your Blog); his blog was one of the ones that made me want to start writing about comics.

So, in case you missed his post from last night, go read it. I think it is amazing how I've spent countless hours this year reading comic books and yet I haven't read many of the books on that list. And it's not like I'm not trying, or confining myself to just reading superhero stuff either. There is just so much great work out there, and there just isn't enough time to read it all. At least this year I know about almost all of these books already; last year at this time I wasn't nearly as dialed in to the comic book world and might have recognized a small fraction of the books on the list.

Also, in case you are making your holiday shopping lists, I'd add two books that Dick didn't have in his list: 1) Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds (I'll be putting up a review of this one soon); and 2) All Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Both are certainly worth consideration when picking the top ten books of the year. Also check out Jeff Lemire's Essex County Vol. 3: The Country Nurse -- I will be reading this next, and I expect that it is just as good as the earlier volumes, which I really loved.