nixsight

Ah, balls… Started this post a couple of weeks back, then lost the bugger in a stupid saving mishap. Let’s try again…

Y The Last Man Vol 9: Motherland/Vol 10: Whys & Wherefores – Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra (with Goran Sudzuka & Jose Marzan Jr)

For a few months, “Y The Last Man” was my obsession.

With a high-concept premise, a mission-critical set of mysteries, and subplots and character arcs that flowed alongside and across each other in a perfectly natural way that washed over the reader like stir-fried genre-mashed awesome, the series was that rarest of things – an extended narrative that almost makes all of the cliches, like “page turner” and “couldn’t put it down”, acceptable to use.

Add to that a setting and scenario that couldn’t help but breed satire, social commentary and thought-provoking conflict, and characters that actually have their own characters, rather than just being extensions of the writer’s personality, or puppets at the service of the story, and you’ve got about the best long-form narrative in mainstream comics in probably over a decade.

In fact, though it’s a shade more populist than “Sandman”, and a tad less profane than “Preacher”, it’s a more consistent work than either of those hallowed books – it never quite hits Ennis’ best excesses, or Gaiman’s literary verve, but it never suffers the – however rare – terrible dips in quality that both of those books suffered, especially just prior to their final acts.

And the final two volumes of “Y” are no exception. Vaughan keeps things popping as much as in previous books, and Guerra does a good job of keeping the large cast and by now impressive array of plots and subplots coherent with clean lines and consistency of characterisation.

It’s tough to talk too much about the overall story in these two books without ruining the mysteries that run across the whole series, but what I can say is that I found that across the board, they paid off perfectly. The mystery of the dying men doesn’t overshadow the culmination of the various emotional twists and turns, and Yorick’s journey of romantic notions and reluctant maturity pays off nicely.

The only thing that jarred a little for me was the inclusion of a “decades later” epilogue, but that’s a personal prejudice – it’s actually handled pretty well here, but the trope is a bugbear of mine, paradoxically signalling as it often does the gleeful evasion of real closure, and the unwillingness to leave any ambiguous space for the reader’s imagination to try and decide what happened next. I can’t shake the feeling that if it was worth telling those stories, it was worth telling them properly, and if it wasn’t, best to leave them alone. Otherwise, what you’ve got is the same half-hearted and brusque storytelling that featured at the end of the first attempt at filming “Lord Of The Rings”.

Still, like I mentioned, despite my epilogue bigotry Vaughan handles it well enough here. It’ll be interesting to see how that, and the series as a whole, fares on the inevitable ten-volume re-read. I will keep you posted when it happens!

You can get Volume 9 and Volume 10 for under a tenner each, but personally I’m going to replace my copies with the quite delightful hardcovers, which you can get for around £12. Volume 1 is out now, and Volume 2 is on its way.

Wasteland Vol 1: Cities In Dust by Anthony Johnston & Christopher Mitten

Nothing about Anthony Johnston’s previous output would have suggested that his first real major work, or at least his first real opus, would be an epic world-building post-apocalyptic dustbowl fantasy.

That isn’t to down-play the creative successes he’s had before, but I believe “Wasteland” is his first long-form creator-owned work, and that world-building element is attended to with such a lot of love and detail that it feels odd that this is so unlike anything else Johnston has written.

It’s also, despite some very clear and open influences, possibly the most truly inventive the writer has been since the shocking innovation of “Frightening Curves“, way back at the beginning of his published career. Again, this isn’t to downplay the other books Johnston has written, so much as to indicate how truly lovely a thing “Wasteland” is.

Mittens has a scratchy and keen expressionistic art style that evokes a couple of the 2000AD greats – Mcmahon for the frenetic, Ezquerra for the clearness and individuality of the character designs – and dips into the techniques of Teddy Christiansen and even Ted Mckeever, while still retaining a very fresh finish.

If there’s a flaw in this first book, it’s that so much occurs in it that it on a couple of occasions outsteps its creators. While Johnston perfectly establishes the wagon train wilderness elements to the story, the introduction of the clearly integral and complex intricacies of the city sociology and politics – when it drops into the story – cracks in hard, and gets a little confusing.

The same too can be said for Mitten’s art, which handles the pace of large action set-pieces perfectly, but breaks apart a tiny bit amid the chaos of those scenes when large casts are involved. The expressionism, married with the fact that we haven’t long known these characters, can mean that while most of the time you can keep track of what is happening, it can be hard to see who it is happening to.

Mind you, it’s fair to say that both of these things might be perfectly intentional – the idea of the battle so horrific that the carnage transcends identity is something that war movies have been playing with for a while now, and if Johnston intended the politics to contrast completely with the plight of those in the desert at this point, the gambit almost completely pays off, because it does.

Needless to say, if you like the idea of a world where cowboys fight tusken raiders while wrestling with destiny and psychic powers, have ever loved a Mad Max sequel ever, or just like a damn good piece of world-building, it’s worth seeking out this first volume. If you enjoy it as much as I did, you’ll probably find yourself looking out eagerly for the next installments.

The first volume of “Wasteland” is called “Cities Of Dust”, and you can get it at Amazon for £6.99.

Minx Titles: Water Baby by Ross Campbell – Token by Alisa Kwitney & Joelle Jones

The now defunct Minx line was a bit of a mixed bag, really, wasn’t it? I’ve still yet to collect all of them, so can’t really talk with any authority on the subject, but of the books I have picked up, there’s a recurring theme of intelligent and innovative concepts in comics that end up hobbling themselves at the production stage by trying to fit to an imaginary remit.

My initial thought – which I now only consider in the archest of ways – was that it was odd for a series of books aimed at the modern teenage girl to be almost entirely written by men of varying ages. I bring it up because it ties into something I’ll be mentioning in a bit.

That imaginary remit I was talking about applies to the idea that teenage girls, as a demographic, want to read about a specific, and that that thing is somehow different from what most normal, as yet unobsessed with continuity and spandex, teenage boys will want to read. Of course textually there may be points of friction – a boy is less likely to sit still in his seat while reading an adolescent female character discussing insecurity about her breast size – but girls weren’t turned off by, for example, the fact that Harry Potter was a guy.

In these books, however, the urge seems to have been to create mainly female protagonists, and though that isn’t a problem in itself, in some cases it has made for some quite strained check-listing of what are seen to be relevant touchstones for the particular audience they were going for.

“Water Baby” and “Token“, I’m pleased to say, suffer very little from these problems.

“Water Baby” is the story of Brody, a surf-punk girl with a bad attitude, an only marginally platonic female best friend and a deadbeat boyfriend who can’t be relied on. The book opens with Brody losing her leg in a shark attack – a quite harrowing scene which is echoed over and over again in scenes which are shocking, especially considering this particular line of books.

However, the replacement of her leg with a prosthetic doesn’t seem to be as much of an inconvenience in Brody’s life, and certainly isn’t as much of an irritation as the reappearance of her now ex-boyfriend, who starts sleeping on her couch.

Ross Campbell does a beautiful job of the characterisation of the cast, who almost universally challenge you to like them through a barrage of quite unsavoury traits, and his gorgeous uncompromising art which – as with his series “Wet Moon” – idealises the imperfect in his female characters is consistently engaging here. As well as this, there are several moments of transgressive body horror, as the otherwise unaffected Brody has dreams and hallucinations of her transformation into the shark that took her leg, that wouldn’t be out of place in a book like “Gyo”.

However, despite Campbells writing and art being on top form, the narrative never seems to get to it’s point – an issue compounded by the fact that at times the suggestion is there that there is one – and ultimately it ends with the reader feeling that it could have either been much shorter, or needed to continue for a lot longer. There’s a half-hearted attempt at a last-few-pages character revelation, but with no build-up along that particular emotional track, I found the book coming up short.

There’s nothing really wrong with stories of youthful existentialism and alienation that never really go anywhere and just kind of peter out with little resolution – Bryan Lee O’Malley’s excellent “Lost At Sea” is a great examination of individual isolation that does almost exactly that – but because “Water Baby” kept acting like a book that wasn’t about that, and I think if Campbell hadn’t been working to an odd remit, it might have turned out a bit differently.

I’ve less to say about “Token”, but that’s mainly because – out of all of the books in the Minx line – it is the only one that is damn near perfect, and oddly almost manages to make sense by its very existence of that imaginary demographic I was talking about.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that this is the only one of the books I’ve read written by a woman. The gender question has nothing to do with the quality of writing, but might have some bearing on how much the writer in question felt they had to fit to some sort of paradigm – I can imagine a female writer not feeling nearly as itchy about writing for teen girls as a male one, and though Campbell’s book doesn’t pull punches at all, Kwitney doesn’t seem as self-conscious about including or excluding girly or ungirly moments as some of the other writers seemed to be.

In fact, “Token” is the most unashamedly milieu-aping of the books. Set in 1987, it follows a fifteen-year-old girl called Shira who lives in Miami with her dad. Her best friend is a cocky eighty-year-old woman, her grandmother lives nearby, and she doesn’t have a lot in common with her classmates, who are for the most part much better off and more shallow than her.

Over the course of the year, her widower father falls in love with his secretary and starts having less to do with Shira, the popular girls at school start to pick on her more, and a shady, mysterious boy from the wrong side of the tracks starts to show an interest in her. Shira starts to rebel, shoplifting and talking back, and…

And the thing is, that sounds like schoolyard trash, but between them Alisa Kwitney and Joelle Jones craft it into an engaging narrative that at no point tries to claim it is anything special or groundbreaking, and in the process somehow manages to be just a gorgeous piece of work. Kwitney’s dialogue – and Shira’s narration – is charming, and Jones’ curved line is both cartoony and realistic, and there’s only one storytelling hiccup (which does unfortunately fall on the first few pages.

When I eventually have all of the Minx titles, and if it sounds agreeable, I shall probably take a look at the whole line. They are, as it stands, remarkably cheap, but I’m guessing stocks won’t replenish, so I will have to get a move on.

Both “Water Baby” and “Token” are retailing at just over £6, and both are well worth a try, though the latter is a much less reserved recommendation!

Space Raoul by Jamie Smart

Jamie Smart is the awesome comic creator of “Bear” at Slave Labor graphics, and the by turns cruel and cute character design and cartoon apocalypse of Fumblog.

Space Raoul is his Dan Dare homage – Dashing, Heroic and Ruddy British, he flies around the universe with his assistant Quibble, he performs acts of gentlemanly heroism and space captaining almost hourly, before getting back home in time for a nice cup of tea.

The character is utterly ridiculous, and the stories often anarchic. This book collects several appearances of the good captain from the various places where he has seen print.

The humour is often stupid, but always fun, and the art vascillates wildly between tightly rendered black and white, sumptuously painted colour, and hastily dashed off heavy inks and computer colouring. It is quite the most adorable thing.

Love The Way You Love Vol 1 by Jamie Rich & Marc Ellerby

Difficult to comment too much on this, because I thought I was buying the first collected book, and what I actually got was the first issue.

From the slim chapter contained within, its a fairly self-consciously hip romantic comedy, set really very deliberately indeed in the music scene. I am going to have to get hold of the rest of it, because I’m a great fan of Ellerby’s work.

However, Ellerby’s art isn’t as assured here as it is on his own strips, and I don’t know if this is progress on the artist’s part, or if it’s just that his natural instincts as a storyteller work much more clearly when he is running the whole story, and there are places here where his abilities aren’t played to by the script.

I’m not as eager to see how this story plays out in full as I am to see his recent “Chloe Noonan” comic!

Lifelike by Dara Naraghi & Various Artists

This book was a bit of an oddity – a hardcover collection of short, slice of life stories, written by Dara Naraghi – who I have never heard of – and various drawn and painted by a large collection of variously talented artists, some of whom I had heard of and some that I hadn’t.

I picked it up for a song – the song was kind of a made up on the spot one that involved a little dance and had a monetary value of about £4, and I’ll be honest, I only picked it up because it was a cheap hardback, and felt like a bargain.

I was, as it happens, pleasantly surprised. The quality of the stories is very variable – not unusual for a collection of short stories – and Naraghi’s choice of subject matter and writing style are serviceable or functional, more than exceptional. However, the medium lacks voices in this area, occupying as it does the middle ground between the truly self-indulgent arty comics, the naturalistic or anecdotal diarists and the mainstream, so the book is unusual enough – and presented prettily enough – that I’m glad I picked it up.

You can get the book at Amazon for around £13, but it’s also worth looking in your local Forbidden Planet, as I picked mine up there for just a few quid.