Comics For Kids: A Survey Of New Material

A truism in the world of publishing is that comics for kids are one of the few growth areas available.  Whether they're aimed at new readers, readers on their way to developing a lifelong passion for reading, or for the fabled "all-ages" audience that also encompasses adults, there seem to be more publishers who have a real sense of what they're doing in creating comics. 

Let's begin with Francoise Mouly's remarkable Toon Books line.  When she started this imprint, she actually tried to shop her idea (comics aimed at emerging readers from ages two through five in hardcover form), she was rejected across the line because every publisher didn't quite know what to make of her end product.  She saw it through herself and made it an offshoot of RAW Junior, and the results have been quite successful.  In addition to winning several industry awards, the Toon Books have also become staples at libraries.  One of the slight modifications she's made is indicate the specific reading level for each book with an easy numerical code.  One indicates the youngest readers (kindergarten and first grade), and the content focuses in on a single character or two doing specific things while using a limited vocabulary.  Two is the middle level (first and second grade), with multiple protagonists interacting with each other, a larger vocabulary and a story arc.  Three is aimed roughly at second and third graders, as characters interact with the larger world around them, the books are divided into chapters and the vocabulary tops 1000 words.  Mouly has done a nice job of getting cartoonists to write these children's books, but she's also excelled at getting children's book authors to write these comics.

The most recent batch includes three such books, including an author new to the Toon Books line in Philippe Coudray.  His book, Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking, marks the first book of gag comics for kids that Ton Books has published.  It's a legitimately funny book of single-page gags, with four panels to a page.  It's a perfect primer in how to teach kids humor whose punchline takes an unexpected detour from its premise.  Every single joke is a sight gag, making it perfect for kids.  It's an unexpected pleasure to read a children's book where no lessons are to be taught or examples followed other than making the cognitive leap of understanding a certain form of humor.  On the other hand, Geoffrey Hayes contributes a new character, Patrick in A Teddy Bear's Picnic And Other Stories.  Hayes is a remarkable craftsman with years of illustration experience, but his true love was always the comics he would make as a child with his brother Rory.  Done in colored pencil, this book has a warmth and organic feel unmatched by other children's books.  There's an incredible sense of comfort to be found in these pages, even as Hayes playfully and skillfully leads the young reader through a fairly complex set of panels on each page.  He can't help but have images sticking out of panels, having panels disappear altogether, and having other panels act as decorative devices.  For the youngest of readers, Agnes Rosenstiehl returns with Silly Lilly in What Will I Be Today?  The titular character tries out all sorts of professions, from musician to city planner to vampire (!), with amusing variations on each job for the young girl.  Rather than the fluid panel-to-panel transitions of Hayes, Rosenstiehl employs a deliberately posed technique in each panel, allowing a young reader to see how Lilly is moving from panel to panel very slowly.  It's a clever technique that introduces the idea of the passage of time from panel to panel to young readers.  None of these books are cheap (about $13 for 34 pages), but the production design is top-notch.  The Hayes books and the Coudray books are definite keepers for anyone, but if I were buying these for a child, I might check some of them out of a library first to see what they liked best.

A book done in much the same format as the Toon Books is Aron Nels Steinke's The Super-Duper Dog Park.  I wasn't keen on his first book for kids, Neptune, given that it violated the "show, don't tell" rule.  It kept talking about how wacky things were instead of really making things wacky.  With his new book, Steinke (once again working with Blue Apple Books "Balloon Toons" line--they published his second book for kids, The Super Crazy Cat Dance) gets straight to the telling from the very beginning.  An important rule for keeping kids involved in your book is to provide a propulsive sense of momentum and to keep it going, which is what Carl Barks was so good at in his Disney comics.  Here, Steinke tells the reader that a bunch of people are going to a dog park, he follows their car to the park, and then everyone plays in the souped-up dog park until it's time to go.  Using a clear and simple line, he devotes each page to a different part of the park, including a section where dogs make music.  There are lots of eye pops and sumptuous background details, but the characters themselves are kept simple.  There are amusing bits but no real jokes, per se--Steinke seems to be aiming at delighting and amusing rather than trying to make his audience laugh out loud. Steinke is not in the same class as the Toon Books creators, but it's clear that he's making strides in determining his strengths.

First Second aims a lot of their books at young readers, but Nursery Rhyme Comics is their youngest-skewing book to date.  Edited by Leonard Marcus, the book features a murderer's row of cartoonists and illustrators putting their spin on classic nursery rhymes.  Some create entirely new dialogue and narratives to go with the rhyme, like James Sturm's back-talking "Jack Be Nimble".  Lucy Knisley took the rather dreadful rhyme in "There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe", turning a story about a woman whipping her children before bed into a rock 'n roll babysitter who forms a band called The Whips with the children she tends to .  Craig Thompson's "The Owl and the Pussycat" is drop-dead gorgeous, turning this poem into a true romantic fantasy.  Raina Telgemeier makes sure that "Georgie Porgie" gets his for making the girls cry, in her own gentle way.  Jordan Crane really shows off his chops as someone familiar with doing books for kids with his version of "Old Mother Hubbard" that shows off a new dimension to his work: as a bigfoot cartoonist.  Jaime Hernandez' "Jack and Jill" displays his facility for drawing children.  There really aren't many duds here, but the work of the natural cartoonists is better than that of the illustrators, at least in terms of trying to interpret the work in a new way.  The biggest surprise is recent CCS grad Mo Oh, whose "Hush, Little Baby" is superb.  It's funny, playful, visually dynamic and genuinely touching.  I'd be excited to see her do a longer work of this kind.

One of the biggest publishers for children is Scholastic, the company that publishes the Harry Potter books in America.  They usually know what they're doing, although they did turn down Toon Books.  They jumped into comics by publishing collected, colorized editions of Jeff Smith's Bone, then went on to publish Raina Telgemeier's smash hit Smile.  They sent me something odd in a comic booklet of Scooby Doo! A Merry Scary Holiday, by Lee Howard and Alcadia Scn.  This is a straightforward adaptation of an old Scooby-Doo cartoon, a property whose durability is puzzling thanks to the hokey plots and dated 70s quasi-stoner "humor".  There's something weirdly comforting about the stale formula that little kids today seem to like, in so much as it allows the funny talking dog to run around.  This is a faithful enough adaptation, but without the cartoon's sole redeeming quality (the chase scenes that were genuinely fun), it's mostly a bore.  There's a weirdly sentimental ending tacked on as well.

On the other hand, Scholastic struck gold again with the Amulet series, by the driving force behind the Flight anthologies, Kazu Kabuishi. The last couple of volumes have been New York Times bestsellers. It's a tribute to his skill as a storyteller that a new reader can dive right into the fourth volume (I'd only read the third volume but remembered very little from it) and very quickly pick up on the conflicts and character interactions.  Kabuishi makes a couple of interesting storytelling choices in these books.  His character designs are simple and cartoonish, but the backgrounds are done in sumptuous, breathtaking color.  He's gotten better at both as he's developed as an artist, always keeping his characters as the focus of the reader's eye but letting them drink in the lush backgrounds and action sequences when appropriate.  As with most of the material in Flight, the story itself is predictable and formulaic, though he keeps things moving at a quick pace.  It's very much a variation on the Harry Potter story: young person receives a power they're not prepared for, then is thrust into a situation where they have to rise to the occasion to save their family and friends.  There are betrayals and an impossibly powerful enemy, and comic relief characters that come in from time to time.  It moves like clockwork, but it all feels a bit cold and precise to me.

Perhaps that's why I enjoyed their newest offering, Pandemonium, by Chris Woodring and Cassandra Diaz.  There's the usual fantasy political intrigue, magic spells and whatnot (and author Woodring takes it seriously), but there's a jokey quality to the proceedings in this book that give it a level of charm that the deadly-serious Amulet books lack.  The story of Seifer Tombchewer, a boy kidnapped in order to take the place of a missing prince he happens to greatly resemble, is a familiar one.  He's a fish out of water put into a series of dangerous (but frequently funny) situations, and his ability to navigate them (and attract help) surprises even him.  Diaz' art is strongly manga-influenced, dovetailing nicely with the book's more playful aspects.  Woodring tosses in the usual plot twists and hints at future revelations in other volumes, but the book works because the reader gets to know Seifer and his friend Carcassa (the names in the book alone are worth the price of admission).  About the only problem is that Diaz's facility for clearly delineating fight scenes is weak, and the moody color scheme does her no favors in that regard.  I had to read a few pages several times just to figure out precisely what happened during action sequences, which is not a good sign.  Given how much the rest of the book worked, it's a forgivable offense.

Finally, there's the category of the all-ages book.  Fantagraphics' translation of The Littlest Pirate King, by David B and Pierre Mac Orlan.  This edition is done in full European album size, allowing David B's art to really pop off the page.  This is the rather grim story of the Flying Dutchman and his damned crew, cursed to never be given their final rest even as they try to destroy their ship.  Then they come across a baby and raise him as one of their own, planning to kill him when he reached age ten.  Instead, the boy's presence brought the crew of skeletons joy as he ran around the ship, and he wanted nothing more than to be dead so as to be like the rest of his "family".  The crew starts to feel regret at keeping him on board, and so drops him off on land--not realizing that they deposited him on an iceberg, dooming him to a lonely death.  It's a horrific ending as many fairy tales are, one made all the sadder by the possibility of happiness that both crew and boy felt earlier in the book.

From Drawn & Quarterly comes Jinchalo, by Matthew Forsythe.  Forsythe's debut, Ojingogo, effortlessly combined whimsy and menace, and Jinchalo takes that a step further.  The mostly wordless story is heavily influenced by certain manga tropes in terms of character design, but the storytelling is distinctly Western.  It concerns a young girl with a voracious appetite who is charged to go out and get some food for her family.  She meets an anthropomorphic bird with a magic egg, bumps into him, and winds up with his egg.  From there, the girl embarks on a series of bizarre, almost hallucinatory adventures.  At one point, she steps out of the story and drags the artist into things, demanding he fix a particular image.  She winds up traveling into her own future before coming back down to earth with food, but her father gives her a big surprise.  This book is charming, cute and horrific in turns and simultaneously, creating scenarios that any child could follow and both laugh and wince at.  Forsythe's cartooning is excellent throughout, creating images that are familiar in form but entirely his in the way he moves them across the page.  This is a book that will delight, amuse and confound any close reader.

Brief Comments On Genre Comics:Inner Sanctum, Octobriana, Pang, Dream Scar, Necropolis

Time to catch up on a large variety of genre-related comics that have come my way.

Octobriana: Samizdat Edition, by Steve Orlando, Chas Truog and Thomas Mauer.  This is a new story about the controversial public domain character allegedly created by a group of dissidents in the USSR but was actually perpetrated as a fraud by a Czech writer who stole commissioned artwork.  The writer of this ashcan edition wrote a thesis paper on the subject and decided to try his hand at writing a character who's appeared in any number of places (including Brian Talbot's classic The Adventures of Luther Arkwright).  In Orlando's take, the title character is a Russian "goddess of passion" created by a group of pagans who had sex with the corpse of a dead goddess.  It feels like a story in the vein of a Grant Morrison or especially Allen Moore, given that sex and sexual energy are keys to the storyline--especially in how they are repressed. 

Some of the more interesting ideas regarding the story are only touched on briefly, like her quest to be accepted by the other gods, her sexual relationship with Anubis, and her friends the Torn Warlock.  That's a sect of mystics who all happen to be children of Rasputin doing as many good deeds as possible before they die so as to spite their father.  Most of the story is spent on Octobriana hunting down a woman with psychic abilities who's taking people at the point of orgasm and turning them into savage killers.  Despite the nature of the sexually charged violence in this comic, it's all pretty straight-ahead in terms of the storytelling.  In fact, it's overwritten at times, strangled a bit by the multiple narrators in addition to dialogue that also explains what's going on.  Orlando drops the reader into the middle of Octobriana's own story and tries to get them to catch up (with success), but he overdoes it a bit and telegraphs what's going on with the villain of the piece.  The edition of the book I received was a black and white galley; the book's publisher (Poseur Ink) tried a Kickstarter campaign to print the book in color, which did not take off.  I enjoyed the roughness of Truog's (best known for his run on Animal Man with Morrison) art, as it had a sturdiness in its structure typical of old-school superhero illustrators but was a tad more on the grotesque side in this comic.  It would have been interesting to have seen this book in color and with a bit more polish (and perhaps a bit more editing).

Pang The Wandering Shaolin Monk, by Ben Costa.  This is another heavily-researched comic that's a bit clunky in spots but picks up steam along the way.  Costa's approach to telling the story of a rotund monk named Pang is reminiscent of Eric Shanower's reworking of the Trojan War in Age of Bronze: picking and choosing from history in ways the make the most sense to him.  The story is heavily footnoted, which slows it down considerably at the beginning as Costa opts to plunk the reader straight into the middle of Pang's story, filling in background details by way of flashback.  This book is the first volume of a larger epic and so it takes its time in establishing its hero and his world.  We learn a lot of details about Pang's life in a Shao-Lin monastery, how the politics of the time conspired against the continued existence of his temple and how he set out to find a couple of his brother monks as they were all called upon to preserve key texts of the temple.  Pang, who's sort of the Sad Sack of Shao-Lin kung fu fighters, manages to escape an ambush by the skin of his teeth as his entire world disappears before his eyes when the temple is destroyed. 

This volume follows his fish-out-of-water adventures in a nearby city as he searches for his brothers.  There are run-ins with bullying government officials, a meeting with a benevolent inn owner, and feelings of attractions for the innkeeper's niece.  That's pretty much all boilerplate stuff.  Where Costa excels is in his depiction of the quotidian details of everyday life as a monk and juxtaposing that against the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the destruction of the time.  Costa creates a credible romance and adds an unexpected complexity to Yang Yang (his potential love interest) simply by dint of letting their friendship breathe on the page a bit.  He also establishes a series-wide continuity by introducing a mysterious, powerful opponent who works for the government and is after one of Pang's books.  The simplicity of Costa's thick line gives it a sort of supple power that is undermined somewhat by his color palette.  A book like this, with extremely simple figures, calls for muted colors.  That's especially true given the book's many fighting scenes.  Instead, Costa overpowers too many pages with deep reds and purples.  There's sometimes too much going on with his color scheme to quickly understand the action in each panel.  It's unfortunate that the restraint and wonderful simplicity in his line and character design is garbled by these choices, but it made reading a number of pages a chore rather than the romp that Costa clearly intended.

Dream Scar by Adam Jakes (email: bladedtad73@hotmail.co.uk).  This is the fourth issue of "The Continuing Chronicles of Floid" and a strange place to be plopped into as a first-time reader, as Jakes maintains a tight sense of continuity.  He provides a breathless recap page that took me a couple of readings to parse, as it involves subconscious manifestations that emerge separate from their host, a corrupted super-assassin and the brother who loves her, brutal conflicts and a timely resurrection.  This comic isn't what I would call good, per se, but it is relentlessly strange and seems to be a pretty direct expression of the artist's creative will.  The art in particular is fascinating: a sort of cross between Todd McFarlane's use of black wispy lines and monsters, Rob Liefeld's love of cyborgs and strange costumes, and the slightly stiff naturalistic poses of a Tony Harris.  Throw in wonky panel formatting mixed in with moments of beautiful stillness, and you have a comic that's truly all over the place.  The story is a standard quest as the now-recovered assassin is looking for the person who corrupted her, traveling the globe with her friends and family.  This is somewhere between a superhero comic, a horror comic, a fantasy comic and something that feels deeply personal on the part of the artist.  While the comic is frequently a mess and threatens to unravel at any given moment, it's certainly never boring and it's sort of entertaining, so long as one is willing to accept the ride that the artist is offering. 

Inner Sanctum, by Ernie Colon. This can only be described as a vanity project by the longtime comics veteran known for his work at Harvey and various adventure/fantasy comics.  He adapts a number of stories from the titular 1940s radio show and does his best to convey the creepiness that those shows created with their outstanding voice actors.  The problem is that most of the stories are pretty silly and light on actual scares or tension, especially for a modern audience.  Some of the stories are much better written than others, like the zombie tale "The Voice On The Wire" which is more of a murder-mystery tale than a horror story (which helps it succeed).  Others, like the Lovecraft-influenced "The Horla" don't really make much sense, while "Death of a Doll" (about the physical manifestation of the devil) is just plain silly.  What is undeniable is that Colon draws the hell out of these stories.  He mixes a beautifully fluid, clear line with a wonderfully scribbly quality, going heavy on the inks in some stories while seemingly shooting straight from his pencils in others.  He takes an otherwise stupid story like "The Undead" (about a woman who thinks her husband is a vampire) and turns it into something sexy, stylish and creepy.  He imbues "The Voice On The Wire" with bigfoot humor to match it against the sexy sophistication of its protagonist.  He turns a predictable story in "Mentallo" (about a magician who double-crosses a rival after he threatens him) into something that seemingly could only work as comics, as he brings us a page of horrific transformation of the villain at the end.  I would have loved to have seen Colon paired up with a good horror writer for this sort of project, because he's obviously only gotten better as a draftsman.  It's certainly worth a look for fans of the artist.

Necropolis, by Frank Hudec, Spike O'Laochdha, and Crystal MacMillan.  The slick art of O'Laochdha bears a lot of promise, as it has flashes of personal eccentricities that are otherwise buried in the typical naturalistic horror style and the overheated color choices of MacMillan.  Unfortunately for him, Hudec engages in "tell, don't show" storytelling as he tells the reader the backstories of the protagonist, his sister and their city on the first page but starts the comic as though this is all a mystery.  The result, about a man who can see the past of any place or thing by touching it, feels simultaneously anticlimactic and cliched.  Rather than feel like an individual comic book with some real meat on it as a single issue, it feels like a fragment--and a padded one at that.  There are some other technical things that bothered me.  For example, the lettering job was badly bungled, as many of the word balloons are far bigger than necessary on several of the pages, resulting in either a few words in a huge word balloon, or letters that are far bigger than necessary.  That sort of thing would have been forgivable if the reader was given any reason to care about the characters, but the comic has more mood than substance and seems more an excuse to mash up genres as a high-concept exercise than a compelling attempt at creating characters that are emotionally believable in a fantastic world.

Now and Then: Coin-Op Comics #3

Coin-Op #3, by Peter & Maria Huey.  It took me forever to get around to reviewing this stylish and strange little comic, partly because its visual style seemed so familiar yet unplaceable.  Upon rereading it, it finally hit me: the comic, both in terms of form and style, is a mash-up between the distinctive modernist flair of Max Fleischer and the post-modern construction of Matt Madden.  Both of those artists aren't afraid to dip into the surreal or silly as they tell their stories.  For Fleischer, he created an atmosphere and background setting that was every bit as important as the characters he depicted in his cartoons of Popeye and Superman.  The Hueys seize on that with their "Saltz and Pepz" strip, as two Fleischer-esque anthropomorphic dogs try to make their way in a harsh, rainy city.  They eventually fall into a nightmarish, regimented world that's given a dreamy atmosphere with the issue-wide use of a blue-green tint that's meant to evoke the night. 

The Madden influence (which can also be described as a Chris Ware influence or even Richard McGuire influence) involves the Huey's experimentation with panel formatting, as they break up the page with multiple panels while using the full arrangement of panels to create a different gestalt in "The John Lee Hooker Highway Rest Stop Blues."  The Hoeys get even more ambitious with "Jingle In July", which uses a 5 x 4 panel grid depicting action from panel to panel and page to page, but each page also works as a fractured, single image.  It's four quick moments in time as a liquor store is robbed, a truck smashes into an ice-cream truck, a man in a dentist's office runs to stop a man with a jackhammer, a boy on a skateboard plows into a pedestrian, and scores of feathers are released onto the street when the truck gets into an accident.  It has that Madden crispness, with simple but distinct character design and a reliance on the language of comics.  The heavy use of sound effects is very comic booky and aims at creating the sense of simultaneity that the Hoeys are pursuing. 

Those sensibilities are merged in the very odd "The Fred Balloon', a send-up of magical realist stories that features a balloon being transformed by a power line into a sentient being that eventually starts taking over other balloons and forming a DNA strand in the sky.  It's a funny, odd and understated bit of weirdness that is effective because of the "cool", almost metallic color scheme and the overall restraint of the artists as storytellers.  Their graphics sensibility is so indelible (if familiar) that it's easy for them to hang back and let the images guide the text, rather than the other way around.  There are other oddities in this issue, like a series of one-page articles about obscure jazz musicians as well as a collage strip that repurposes photos with new color schemes, a comic-style grid, and swathes of color.  However, it's their most ambitious formal experiments that really carry the issue.  That's not because the experiments are especially innovative (indeed, they all feel familiar), but because they are so entertaining and well-executed.

Step Up: Big Plans #5

As I noted in this review of Aron Nels Steinke's Big Plans #4, he seemed to be a talented artist with a simple but distinctive visual flair who was in search of his voice.  With his Kickstarter-powered fifth issue, he's coming much closer to realizing his potential as an artist.  This is the work of an artist who's much more confident and self-assured than the one who flailed in the first three issues of his series.  It's a visually stylish comic that lets the images do much of the talking.  Reining himself in in terms of his earlier wordiness was his most important move, as he's learned to integrate word and image with greater skill, ease and grace.  It's one thing to be influenced by John Porcellino.  It's quite another thing to put Porcellino's example as an artist who emphasizes the quiet, poetic moments of life and integrate it with one's own aesthetic to create something new.  For Steinke, an artist who seems to burst with enthusiasm and ideas, it's been all about learning restraint and how to express oneself clearly and forcefully while avoiding bombast.

Steinke begins this autobiographical comic with a story about loving guns as a youngster.  I love the way he plays with formatting as he goes from a 12-panel grid (with some of the panels entirely composed of text) to a four-panel grid centered in the middle of the page, to a one-panel shot (where all the panels are still the same size) that emphasizes negative space, to a full-page splash shot, back to the original grid.  It's a clever way of modulating impact and emotion, as well as providing beats and rests for the reader as Steinke shifts the focus from the past to the present, where he witnesses a shooting in a shopping mall parking lot.  His description of the euphoria he felt after he went into the mall after the shooting ended in order to buy a silly gift was interesting.  The story's punchline (wherein his wife suggests that they buy a gun) was an amusing one.  "&F&(*F Old People" was more of a trifle, invoking his rage/passion-inspired Wolf alter ego as its main character.  There were a couple of interesting observations, but it ultimately devolved into silliness.

"Home Alone", on the other hand, was my favorite story in the comic.  This one is the most clearly influenced by Porcellino, as it involves the author walking away from the internet in frustration in order to take a walk to the store.  It's a beautifully-illustrated story, using a number of different visual angles and styles to break up the action.  Steinke uses interesting visual signifiers to depict noise, tying them into the comic's recurring motif: Steinke's feelings of anger and the way in which it affects him in a visceral manner.  The end of the story, wherein Steinke falls asleep after drinking the beer he bought at the store, is all about how drinking was a way to numb the anger.

"Make The Light" is mostly an interior monologue about trying to get to a talk hosted by two beloved cartoonists and the ways in which he acts like a dick to his wife, who is driving.  It's a story about how desire leads to unhappiness when not reined in by compassion, something that dawns on him when he's at the lecture and realizes it's terrible.  It's not what he wanted to hear (especially jokes about cartoonists not making any money), and his guilt at having put his wife through an unpleasant experience is expressed by showing him as almost manic after he walks out of the lecture early.  The simplicity of Steinke's line combined with his eye for decorative details create a beautiful, cartoony environment for his breakthroughs and insights as a person and artist.  His stories flow nicely together and he really takes his time and allows pictures to slowly tell a story.  He's coming into his own as an autobiographical cartoonist, and his use of an emotional through-line that runs in all of his stories is an interesting hook, as well as his mostly restrained style of storytelling (there are a couple of over-the-top moments) in depicting the emotion of anger. 

Transformation: Glamazonia The Uncanny Super-Tranny

The genius of Justin Hall's amusing, satirical take on superheroes by way of a drag queen lens is that superheroes, at their essence, are drag queens.  They stand out from the crowd wearing brightly colored, revealing outfits that draw attention as they prepare to wrestle other men. Their journey is one of transformation from an identity that can't really fully contain who they truly are into their real, colorful selves.  It's somewhere beyond cliche' to point out the obviously homoerotic aspects of superhero comics.  Rick Veitch wrote the definitive statement on that with Brat Pack.  That's not what Hall is after in his collection of short stories Glamazonia, The Uncanny Super Tranny (Northwest Press).  He takes that idea of superhero-as-drag and spoofs it to the end while demonstrating how useful the drag trope is in thinking about superheroes.  Using the deliberately outrageous and delightfully narcissistic patois of drag-speak, Hall gives Glamazonia five different secret origins, has her constantly reject the attentions of a would-be sidekick (Rent Boy), puts her on the grassy knoll at JFK's assassination and has her compete in a Contest of Champions (the prize: super-pets!).  Even better, he collaborates with an all-star team of queer cartoonists in a series of short "One To Glam On" segments that are the best part of the book.  The segment with Ed Luce of Wuvable Oaf is a particular highlight, as Glamazonia gives a group of bears advice on keeping their body hair healthy and free of split ends.

Hall has a way of seamlessly working in more than a dozen different guest artists into the proceedings, using a vivid (and occasionally garish) color palette to provide continuity between different styles.  Everything has such a light touch that it doesn't matter all that much when the art becomes more realistic, or more cartoony, or more deliberately sexy, or more deliberately funny.  Hall also navigates between serious issues (gay-bashing, identity crises as a kid, transitioning) and ridiculous scenarios (wacky time-bending adventures) with ease, using the same snappy and bitchy one-liners would would expect from a transsexual who is an entertaininer.  Glamazonia is unrepentantly sarcastic and self-centered, willing to save the world but not if she's busy with her nails.  She's not so much a real character as she is a smartass alter-ego.  She reminds me a little of DiDi Glitz, Diane Noomin's cartoon alter-ego.  Blond, bewigged, fabulous and a little bit bitchy, but their hearts are in the right place.  Both characters seem to be a way of exercising a particular part of the artists' personality that's ultra-extroverted, outspoken, witty, obnoxious, a little trashy and not afraid to get what they want.

Hall also appropriately skewers all the usual superhero markers, injecting new humor into the origin stories of the likes of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and "the hero of the beach" from the old Charles Atlas ads found in comic books.  That latter story is especially funny, as Glamazonia is transformed from skinny old Mac into a fabulous, bionic super-tranny who goes back to the beach to grab the bully who kicked sand in his face--and makes him her boyfriend!  The best super hero parody is "Rent Boy: Year One", wherein Jon Macy does the art and does a very funny approximation of the grim 'n gritty style of David Mazzucchelli.  The overall feel of the book is breezy but unrestrained in its exploration and satire of both superhero tropes and gay issues.  There's something to offend nearly everyone, if they're looking to get offended, but Hall's sharp wit, sturdy drawing and general geniality makes this an entertaining read from start to finish.

Indulgence: Teleny and Camille

Teleny is a novel that was written in secret by Oscar Wilde and his young circle of writer friends. It's rich and challenging both as a work of literature and as a work of erotica. Jon Macy, a cartoonist who's been making comics for twenty years, decided to try to adapt this novel to comics as Teleny and Camille. A veteran of drawing gay porn and horror comics, he would seem a natural fit to illustrate Wilde & company's frequently florid and sometimes horrific prose.  However, this adaptation has a number of major problems. Some of that lies in the source material. As the clever introduction indicates, Teleny was written serially by Wilde and his anonymous friends; each addition to the manuscript was delivered to a trusted bookseller. However, the result is all over the place.  Some writers are interested in focusing on the romance between a Victorian-age gentleman and a charismatic, foreign-born pianist. Others seek the liberating power of depicting gay sex as explicitly as possible on the page, knowing that if this work was exposed to the public that they ran the risk of hard labor in prison. After a while, it seemed like each writer was trying to top the next in writing elaborate, charged and extremely explicit sex scenes. The bigger problem is that the main characters suffer as a result, feeling more like vessels than vividly drawn, realistic men. Trying to piece together the romantic and explicitly erotic stories and their sometimes jarring tones was undoubtedly not an easy task for Macy.

Macy struggles to create a book that's consistently interesting on a visual level. Certainly, he's up to the task of depicting the book's many sex scenes, up to and including the sensational orgy scene that ends in tragedy. He does a fine job in balancing the beauty and emotion of sex with the raw animal passion of the act, depicting scenes with an expressionist flourish and intricate decorative touches. In the scenes that feature hallucinations or nightmares, Macy's horror background also serves him well, especially when one character dissolves into another. However, virtually all of his other scenes are boring and feel rushed.  Unless two characters are having sex or kissing, he doesn't have a great grasp on how bodies relate to each other in space, nor is his body language very expressive.

Macy drew his own introduction where he talks about how hard it was to adapt this work, especially in terms of what to keep and what to omit. In a moment that recasts that introduction into a moment of self-indulgence, he says "I think Oscar would approve".  After he finishes the book, he bemoans that so many gay-themed stories end in tragedy. His friend tells him that the book already has four or five authors, so why not add yourself to the list? This results in a ridiculous bit of self-indulgence as Teleny and Camille are rescued by a friend and run away to Paris. Frankly, it flies directly in the face of the characters as written; they didn't come to a tragic end simply because they are gay, but rather because of Teleny's pride. Afflicted by debts, he repeatedly refused to let the love of his life help him. Instead, he lied to Camille and slept with Camille's mother, who paid his debts in exchange for sex. Sure, it's a melodramatic ending, but it was clear that this was the direction in which the book was heading. It's very much a standard Victorian-era tragedy, where true loves are prevented from being together. Instead, Macy inserts what feels like fan fiction, complete with dialogue that is anachronistic at best and didactic at worst. While I understand that this was an attempt at self-empowerment after such a grueling adaptation ended on such a down note, it felt like something that belonged in a sketchbook, not as an alternate ending in an otherwise faithful adaptation. It simply didn't make sense and was one of many reasons why Teleny and Camille is a failure, albeit an ambitious and well-intentioned one.

Trust Me: Tom Gauld's Goliath

Tom Gauld's first book for Drawn & Quarterly, Goliath, is his latest in a series of deadpan but heartbreaking comics involving futility and the inevitability of the individual in the face of an uncaring universe.  Gauld's retelling of the story of David & Goliath from the latter's point of view is in turns funny, sad, exasperating and ultimately tragic story made all the more so by the ending that we know is coming.  Gauld turns around the ultimate underdog story into a simple misunderstanding as one man gets swept up in forces beyond his comprehension and happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

In Gauld's story, Goliath is indeed a Philistine solider, but he excels at administration and paperwork and has no skill or stomach for actual battle.  One gets the sense that he was swept up in a war with the Israelites against his will, putting him at the mercy of ruthlessly ambitious generals and vain kings.  Goliath is a fairly gentle soul who also has no interest in the main form of entertainment at the Philistine camp: betting on animals fighting each other.  Goliath is not given to speeches or moralizing, other than choosing to act in certain ways.  One gets the sense that he doesn't quite understand why certain things are wrong--he simply doesn't do them.  However, as the story proceeds and Goliath becomes more and more cynical about his task--to march down into the valley and challenge a champion from Israel to face him, winner take all--we see him almost reach a breaking point with regard to loyalty to his country and army.  His captain, who came up with the scheme thinking that the Israelites would be too scared to send one man against the hulking (but secretly gentle) Goliath, told him to simply trust him.  Throughout the course of the story, that trust is eroded as no one emerges from the enemy camp.  The only thing keeping Goliath there (he had abandoned his old camp to stay in the valley) was concern for the young shield-bearer who came out every morning.

On the day of his death, Goliath is felled by someone who's a combination of his shield-bearer and his captain: someone idealistic, faithful, ambitious, ruthless and crazy.  Only Goliath's concern for his shield-bearer allows David (in full speechifying mode) to get the drop on him with his sling, and that's that.  I don't get the sense that Gauld is passing judgment on David or casting him as a villain (indeed, the villain is really the captain), but rather portraying him as just a kid pushed by circumstance.  He happens to be in the right place at the right time as much as Goliath is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rightfully so, the story ends right after David chops off Goliath's head as the captain's clever scheme backfires spectacularly. 

Gauld wrings a lot of humor out of this story thanks to his spare line and use of simple but powerful figures.  Goliath is really a triangle with an oval on top of that, with two lines appearing as legs and thinner, curvier lines acting as arms.  When the characters are viewed as a distance, this is literally what they become on the page--just shapes.  The heavy use of brown is a nice reflection on the dust on the soldiers.  While it's not an uncommon trick to retell classic stories from the point of view of the antagonist, Gauld is restrained in how far he takes this technique.  He doesn't set out to make Goliath a hero or a tragic figure undone by his own hubris.  Indeed, it's Goliath's sheer ordinariness that makes this such a moving story.  This is the way the world works: the ordinary are punished for things that they have nothing to do with for no reason at all.  It's a bleak conclusion, both alleviated and exacerbated by the many moments of humor Gauld injects into the narrative.