I’ve a standing rule that where possible, I’ll watch the film version of a story before I’ll read the book that it’s based on. Most of the time the, book is the original – and as such the intended, definitive – version, and generally this makes the book the purer, smarter version of the story. Or at least it’s difficult not to see it that way, if you encounter them in chronological order.

However, I think that a film can be a good example of its medium and still be a disappointing adaptation of a book. Knowing this isn’t enough, though – it’s really difficult to seperate the two in your head as you go. Even if you know that intellectually you should enjoy each on its merits, reading is a much more active mental and emotional process than watching a film, and after living a novel for the amount of time it takes to read it, it’s impossible not to have expectations when taking that experience into a cinema.

My feeling is that the effort to process all this while watching a movie is more hassle than it’s worth, so I reason that if I watch the film first, I’ll get to enjoy both. You have to be a certain sort of lunatic to retroactively dis-enjoy a film if when you eventually read the book you find it’s different – why would you do that to yourself? – and as I’m almost immune to plot-twists, it isn’t as if having a plot laid out for me in film is going to ruin my enjoyment of it in text.

(To clarify, I don’t mean that I’m immune to plot-twists because I work them out – I have never understood the desire to outsmart a story that so many people seem to have – it’s a story, people – it’s not a destination, it’s a ride. The way my mind works, it’s constantly ticking over possible places the story can go as I enjoy it, so a film falling in line with one of the vague thoughts I had about it is a pleasant buzz, not a groundbreaker.)

It’s one of hundreds of little tricks I use to make living among your species bearable – this way round, trying to work out why they made certain changes during the adaptation process can be an enjoyable exercise, rather than the disappointment spiral it can become if I’ve already got an emotional relationship with the original when I get to the copy.

So, anyway, that’s why I wasn’t going to read “The Road” before the film came out, but I’d heard so much about it that I put it on my birthday wish-list anyway, because I half expected not to get it till much later anyway.

When it turned up unexpectedly, my resolve held – it sat on the side with “No Country For Old Men” and “Let The Right One In”, waiting till some time in the distant future.

The next book I was going to read was David Baddiel’s “The Secret Purposes” – it’s a heady book that has been sitting on the pile for ages, now, and a recent reference on a “Numb3rs” episode to the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg problem prompted me to tackle it. However, I over-read a conversation on Twitter about things that make people cry, and Baddiel himself mentioned “The Road”, prompting another wave of love for the novel that got me curious again.

I’m now fairly convinced that all of the people who contributed to that conversation were part of a conspiracy specifically designed to break my spirit and further diminish my ability to cope with the world around me, because that book… that book is beautiful, but it’s the sort of beauty that makes you just so, so sad.

Following an undefined man and boy through an American wasteland that has fallen to an unspecified apocalypse, the whole novel operates almost bereft of all context – you don’t know how the world ended, you don’t know where the man and boy are going, you only have the dimmest sense of where they came from. The world is vague and vast and hazy, while at the same time the resources and hope available to them is diminishing.

Half the book passes giving the impression that the man and boy are all alone in the world, but wary of predators. But then you hit a tipping point, where McCarthy shows us that this isn’t necessarily the case. Though there are encounters with people turned feral and cannibalistic by the future, there is also the pervasive feeling, every time they reach a new, desolate settlement, that there actually are other survivors, subsisting in the ruins, but caution wins out over need for community, and the man persistently pulls them away from any potential encounters.

As time passes, you begin to realise that even if there is some sanctuary of civilised individuals somewhere on the road ahead of them, some hope, they may have come far too far for too long to be able to recognise it any more.

Tonally, the book is basically like that bit in “I Am Legend” with the dog, but the whole way through, and without the relief provided by the Shrek thing and the Will Smith noodling. If you’ve seen it, you know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, I’m not going to recount it here – not because I’m worried about spoilers, or because the film wasn’t great, but because I really don’t need to relive that moment ever again.

It’s an incredible book. It’s written in a spare, contemporary and often almost deliberately obtuse way, that in the beginning requires patience at the same time as it’s impressing with moments of literary flair and inventive mood-writing. I’m pretty sure some of the words are just plain made up! It isn’t the most accessible of novels, being both relentlessly sad and awkwardly, unapologetically poetic rather than literal, and while this isn’t a proper criticism, it does make it difficult to recommend unreservedly – I don’t think I could blame someone for giving up a couple of dozen pages in.

But in making a point of avoiding reader gratification, it makes for an immensely rewarding read in the end. I’m actually almost dreading the film, because this isn’t a book that wants to appeal to everyone, but almost by accident makes anyone that likes it actually love it, and those books are the ones that make for the patchiest, most confused adaptation.

“The Road” is available for £2.99 here, or $7.99 here.

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

The last non-fiction book I had read before this was David Simon’s “Homicide – A Year On The Killing Streets”, and prior to that, you have to go a few years before you get Michael J Fox’s biography “Lucky Man” – yes, yes, I have incredible taste.

The truth is, I wouldn’t have even heard of Evan Wright or “Generation Kill” if it hadn’t been for Simon’s own TV adaptation of this exceptional book.

Wright’s beautifully nuanced piece of war reporting describes the invasion of Iraq through the eyes of First Recon, who were among the first US soldiers to make their way across the confused social and physical geography of the country to take Baghdad in the early weeks of the war. Wright was an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone with the First Recon, and through a rigid journalistic approach to his experiences, he paints a picture of highly competent young men placed in the most extreme of circumstances, at the mercy of the sort of bureaucracy and leadership uncertainty that most of us face in our own much less life-or-death careers.

The writer is honest from the off about his left-of-center ideals, and if anything this makes the book more effective, as he examines his feelings about the war through a growing sense of admiration for the men around him. By default, he has to write more of himself into the events than Simon did in “Homicide” – the earlier work was the result of a year of being in the car with actual Baltimore homicide detectives, but the role of detective is a naturally reactive one – without a crime there is nothing to detect. A cop has to know how to fire his gun, but firing his gun at people isn’t the key objective of his job. A Marine’s whole existence is about making things happen and moving on, not trying to work out what it means afterwards.

It stands to reason that an embedded reporter in one might draw more fire than one in the other, and when you’re in a vehicle with four other men, and that vehicle’s stated mission is to draw enemy fire to give away enemy positions, it makes sense that your own response to this completely surreal new experience you’re having would make it into the account you give of it.

One gets the impression that Wright had half expected to write a “War Is Hell” piece, and there’s something of that here, for sure – but there’s also a sympathetic ear and an honest voice that makes the account often hilarious, always profane, and ultimately incredibly human, from the smallest individual foible of the soldiers to the largest and most insane excesses of the military.

The book comes highly recommended, and can be picked up at Amazon here.

Other People: A Mystery Story by Martin Amis

“Other People” is a story about a beautiful amnesiac girl – Mary – and her relationship with the city that she comes aware in – London – the people that she meets, and her own fractured sense of identity. It also seems to be about everything and everyone else… how we interact with each other, how we measure the differences between good and bad and worthless and worthwhile, and how we become either good or bad people, either by decision or default.

The “mystery” of the subtitle is, perhaps obviously, Mary’s past and real identity. She is observed and accompanied in her loosely defined quest by a cast of characters that vary wildly, from the dangerously unreasoning to the alcoholically soft, the cold and knowing to the awkwardly besotted, and these characters, while often caricatures, are crafted in sure and easy prose.

The fact is, Amis is so good that I almost don’t feel qualified to have an opinion on his writing. He effortlessly makes statements, or strings together prose, that stick with you for hours after you’ve stopped reading, and shifts tone and pace from the earthy and uneventful to the frenetic and abstract so smoothly that the reader doesn’t even notice. Many of his better passages make me feel like never writing prose again!

It doesn’t feel like this is going to be the case at first. “Night Train”, the only other Amis book I’ve read thus far, begins at cleanly delivered noir prose and maintains its clarity throughout, but “Other People” begins in delirium – at first, Mary doesn’t know who or what Mary is, and Amis persistently forces us to see through her eyes, so instead of definitive environments and surroundings the first two chapters are a cavalcade of abstractions and allegory, and the reader has to close the gap between amnesiac description and reality themselves.

It is as Mary learns new things – words and actions and the way things work – that the narrative voice clarifies; as a reading exercise it is fascinating, and it’s easy to imagine that Amis wrote it in a similar spirit, as a test to himself.

However, there is a rich vein of humour running through the writing that, while often veering into darker places, is fairly simplistic and easy on the reader, and helps you through the author’s greater excesses. By the end of the first act, the pages zip by.

The only thing I’m undecided on is the ending, which devolves into high metaphysical noodling – the writer’s equivalent of a beautifully played but overcooked guitar solo that takes place at the end of a song instead of around the middle where self-indulgence is more appreciated. Despite the experimentation of the book’s opening, the more artistic literary leaning of the book never quite hobbles it – it’s not just a worthwhile read, it’s also a fun one, that reflects Graeme Greene’s keen observational eye and wit more than JG Ballard’s heady and heavy idea-grinding. But somewhere around ten or so pages from the end, it becomes apparent that the sort of closure the reader wants isn’t what’s on the author’s mind, and it leaves one feeling decidedly nonplussed.

Still, it is a hell of a read, and comes highly recommended, if you are the sort of reader whose day isn’t going to be ruined by an ambiguous ending!

Amis tends to turn up in charity shops a bit – that’s where I found both this and “Night Train”, but you can also pick it up at Amazon.

Bad Things by Michael Marshall

Michael Marshall, or Michael Marshall Smith, is another writer on the short, short list who makes me very uncomfortable about my own writing, though he is an utterly different kettle of fish from Martin Amis.

Having said that, until now I have found his output under the name Michael Marshall – which he uses for his more mainstream, thriller novels – has always left me faltering just a little bit in the first few chapters. Don’t get me wrong: as a thriller writer, he has a deft touch and a willingness to do awful things to his characters that means you are never on a steady footing.

But whether it’s because of my love for his work as MMS, or something to do with his narrative style – solid and hard prose that retains his tendency for more whimsical spot-on characterisation and observations, that I much prefer in speculative rather than real-world fiction – I’ve always found my enjoyment of the beginnings of his thrillers have left me feeling nostalgic for his more off-beat, earlier novels.

The simple fact of it is no-one is better at generating brilliant, thought-provoking ideas, and folding an exciting narrative around it. And when I read the spark of whimsy in his prose, it makes me want more.

But anyway, the reason I bring it up is that this is the first of his “Just Marshall” novels where I was fully hooked, with no reservations, from the first few paragraphs.

The novel opens with an account of terrible loss, and persists in a fairly bleak manner for several chapters as it introduces its cast of characters. However, the sadness of tone is alleviated by the crispness of the writing, and I suppose it’s possible that Marshall’s self-control in keeping the narrative diversions minimal and to the service of the book are what made all the difference in my relationship with this book above all of his ultimately great “Straw Men” sequence.

(You know, he’s done a few of these now… it might just be that I’m getting used to the idea that this is what he writes now. An unkind critic might suggest that I could have done this a while back, at the point when he had put out more MM books than MMS, and saved myself the upset. But that critic would be unkind. And should fuck right off.)

It’s hard to say too much about the novel without ruining the process of discovery that the reader goes through, but Marshall has created a backwoods town setting worthy of a Stephen King Maine story, and in John Henderson, his narrator, he has written a sympathetic addition to what is admittedly becoming a bit of a trademark roster of first-person nails-hard but a bit nihilistic every-man characters.

Ignoring that particular trend is one of those concessions you make as a grateful reader, getting to sit down with another well-paced and insight-rich piece of thriller writing by an author that you love. The downside is that if Amis makes me feel a little dumb writing literary prose, Michael Marshall Marshall Smith makes me feel clumsy when it comes to both speculative fiction and the very rare bits of thriller I want to write.

“Bad Things” is at this writing priced at under £4 at Amazon, and is worth every penny.

The second issue came out this week. Don’t have the time to review it properly, but whether or not you’ll like it will depend on whether you like this next image:

That’s right: Robin is fighting conjoined triplets… who can kick-box holes in walls!

Don’t worry, though… there’s still plenty of time to make up your mind about the new series. Just bear in mind that next month:

BAT-QUAD BIKE-GOD!!

The Sea #1-3/Flower Eater – Will Kirkby

Will Kirkby’s “The Sea” sneaks up on you. Each book is a cute, horizontally bound half-sized mini-comic, allowing the story to unfold in the three-panel chunks normally reserved for joke-centric funnies or webcomics, and indeed the first few strips in each follow that micro-delivery formula pretty well, although the joke set-up is used to deliver an immediately pretty macabre story.

This, for example, is the first page:

The simple, expressive cartoon lines, often taking a fixed view of the main character through each micro-chapter, adds to this sense of a fairly basic story, about a man adrift at sea with his somewhat troubled past – a claustrophobic monologue carrying us along.

However, as the story continues, what appear to be isolation-fuelled hallucinations reveal themselves as a much deeper mythology, steeped in allegory and half-revealed mysteries.

Kirkby’s linework, often reminiscent of Scott Morse – which he can take as a massive compliment, if he likes, because I love Morse – gets across a lot of information in not a lot of space, primarily because it is so simple and stylised. I see further Morse similarities when we get to the next book, and the third one, each of which dealing with a whole new character and situation that follow their own paths, until eventually weaving back into a broader narrative, opening up and deepening the mythos as they go. One of my favourite comic series of all time, Scott Morse’s “Soulwind” took the same approach, but Kirkby is the first person I’ve seen doing it mini-comic style.

In the later installments, Kirkby’s style becomes more simple and at the same time more ambitious, with lovely compositions like this one:

This refinement of Kirkby’s composition is a welcome thing, as well, because it makes the subtle complexities in the narrative easier to parse – the one complaint I have about the first book is that at times there is a persistence of line that means scenery, props and characters flatten against each other, and Kirkby’s beautiful visual caricature-style characterisation became problematic for me when in that same book, a second character is introduced who looks so similar to the first that I thought it was just him having a funny turn.

It’s gorgeous, though, and if there’s no immediate sign that a collection is coming, you should definitely go over to Kirkby’s Livejournal account and pick up each issue right now.

Slightly less involved, but a lot more fun, is Kirkby’s attempt at a 24-hour comic, “Flower Eater”.

A bit of a martial arts fantasy story, “Flower Eater” is a flighty mix of Yuen Woo Ping style fights, and surreal fantasy elements, such as the fact that the characters gain power and insight from the consumption of petals with magical properties – an idea that I remember and love from Jeff Noon’s books, but that might well be sourced from somewhere else.

Not as coherent as “The Sea”, and with much looser (and sometimes not as easy to read) art, “Flower Eater” is more of an item to pick up if you happen to have a couple of quid extra in your pocket, but it’s a cute curiousity, and I love that cover.

Harker #1-3 – Robert Gibson/Vince Danks

“Harker” is the nearest thing we’ve got in comics to a proper, unpretentious and contemporary British detective story… that I can think of at this exact moment in time.

Concerning itself with the gently eccentric investigator Harker, and his long-suffering assistant Critchley, as they freelance murder investigations for the English police force, the comic gets its hands dirty in some pretty dark places – this first story involves a gruesome murder with the possibility of light showers of satanic worship and cults later on – but it never dwells too much on the horror and bleakness of the human condition.

Instead, the outlook of Harker is one of tired indulgence, playing off against the more exuberant and enthusiastic Critchley. The feel of the book is heavily reminiscent of another Morse – Inspector Morse, that is – and when Harker admonishes Critchley for what he sees as flights of fancy, it’s difficult not to think of Morse’s withering dismissal of his partner Lewis.

Come to that, the dialogue is sharp and witty, while notably not particularly gritty, and in a genre where loosely researched forensic or procedural fetishism gives rise to the sort of earnestly delivered techno-babble we’re more used to seeing on an episode of “Star Trek TNG”, it’s refreshingly human.

Gibson and Danks have done a really good job, here, striking a great balance between writing and art – hard to do, because Danks’ artwork could be show-stopping. Beautifully detailed environments and great linework… it seems obvious to these untrained eye that a lot of reference work has gone into these pages, but rather than treacling up the acting or layouts, Danks uses some great composition to create really impressive scenes and sequences, with dramatic expressionism worthy of Eduardo Risso, but linework that gives the page great depth. Compare the splash page in miniature, which could be straight out of “100 Bullets”, with the full size image!

The other artist Danks sometimes reminds me of is Arthur Ranson – this is a VERY GOOD THING, because Ranson is one of my favourites.

But Danks never showboats, and he knows when the dialogue needs room, which is a distressingly rare trait in a comic artist. For his part, Gibson writes charming-as-fuck characters, and delivers detective work with just enough detail to let you know what’s going on and create a layer of authenticity, without sweating the quantum level stuff.

The pair only really make one misstep for me – there’s an exercise in experimental storytelling in the third issue, with a  sequence of splash pages set in a pub as the pair brainstorm the case so far. The framing is identical throughout the scene, and it looks like it’s intended to firmly place the characters in their location, and create a sense of moment-to-moment progression – reminiscent of an Alan Moore scene where interesting stuff is going on in the background for the engaged reader – but there’s something off about the actions going on behind them, which aren’t really interesting enough to get the real-estate, and some of it even seems to run out of sequence. It’s possible that I’ve misunderstood the scene, though, and it’s a tiny gripe over an otherwise excellent three-issue run.

All issues of “Harker” can be bought in comic form, or as a cheaper PDF download, from the Ariel Press site, here. Rarely for a small-press comic, the plan is for “Harker” to come out on a monthly basis, which is awesome.

Urban Beasts #1 – Daniel Hartwell/Anna Rubins & Karen Rubins

I first saw the Rubins sisters work on an ambitious and unusual small-press series called “Dark”. It was a great piece of work, with raw and expressive art, and an allegorical story that showed a hell of a lot of promise, and only tailed off a little in the final act.

I’ve seen Karen Rubins art in various places, as her art style has evolved and she has aligned herself with a keen manga aesthetic, though thankfully never losing her endearing rough edges, but I didn’t know what Anna Rubins had been up to until picking up “Urban Beasts”.

Set in contemporary Oxford, this first issue concerns itself with introducing the series, primarily a socially out-of-practice guy called Milo who suddenly starts seeing the people around him as animals, and the beautiful and confident Caipora, who plays with animal totems with a shamanistic vigour.

Beyond establishing these two characters and their unique situations, this first episode shows a city in the middle of a volatile protest, with Caipora heading toward the middle of it. There isn’t room for much more, but there’s enough here to be thinking about. The comic shows rather than tells, so you don’t really know where it’s going until you’ve picked it apart for yourself – a process that’s aided by the fact that unlike many Western artists, Karen Rubins has picked up more of the storytelling techniques of Japanese comics than the superficial ones.

Where “Dark” was an arthouse comic, rooted in the poetic rather than the narrative, “Urban Beasts” is a much more accessible book, and the higher production values on it mean that with very little polish it could fit pretty neatly into the Vertigo stable. Not that it needs to, you understand – it’s a perfectly lovely comic, sitting where it is.

You can pick up the first issue of “Urban Beasts” at the Itch website, which is here.

Leek & Sushi’s Manga Show – Various

This book is a bit of an oddity – an anthology to celebrate an anniversary that I was a little perplexed by, composed of stories based on the number 150, chosen from competition entries.

There’s a peculiar framing sequence, introducing the strips in the style of a variety show hosted by a leek, representing Wales, and by extension the UK, and some sushi, from Marks & Spencers. Or, well, Japan.

The content of the strips, as well, is very variable, ranging between styles and genres seemingly randomly, and across a broad range of experience on the part of the creators – one story, for example, was contributed by a 16 year old boy.

The whole thing should be a mess, really – it’s put together in such a ramshackle way, the conceit of the framing bits is a little lame, and perplexingly the cover design is oddly crass.

But what actually happens is that, aside from the cover, it all comes together to create a pretty fun book. The Leek and Sushi segments quickly win over the most cynical of readers – me – because at a really basic level, their cynicism-free dialogue is adorable, and their comedy beats verge on surreal – and some of the contributions in the book verge on the awesome.

Even when the strips aren’t great – some stories carry their imperfect art, and the art on some stories papers over some not so good writing – I don’t think any of the stories are worthless, and even when they are derivative, the exuberance and enthusiasm of the overall book predisposes the reader to be forgiving. There’s a general feeling of random energy – like a grass roots manga version of “The Muppet Show”.

At £6 for a little over 200 pages, the book is an oddity, but a cheap and diverting one that serves as a nice showcase of creators just beyond the boundaries of pro comics, and it’s another book that you can pick up at the Itch website.

Mephistos #1 – Naniiebim

One of the first things one noticed, walking into the small-press main hall at Bristol, was Naniiebim’s table. This was partly because it faced the main entrance, but mainly because the designwork on the two comics on display, as well as the promotion material, was stupidly eye-catching.

If you take nothing else away from what I say about Naniiebim’s book, you should take this: These items are the most perfect expression of the technique that Frank Miller started fidgetting around with way back in 1994 with “The Babe Wore Red”, when he started adding the highlight colour to the starkly black-and-white “Sin City”, that I’ve yet seen.

Still, I walked past without succumbing to temptation a couple of times, because, well – despite the books I picked up at the convention this year, I have always been a little suspicious of Western Manga comics, most especially because they always seem to require that additional “-style” to describe them properly, and that sort of “culture at one remove” thing confuses and confounds me.

When I formed the prejudice, it was a valid one – backwhen, artists drawing in a Manga style were similar to the creators in the same generation who were drawing in an “Image” style – copyists first, artists second – and reading their work made for a quite empty and unsatisfying experience, because it was little more than an aesthetic shell over untrained, middle-of-the-road storytelling.

However, now the style has been around for long enough that a generation of talented artists, for whom Manga has been a staple rather than a novelty, and who have been paying attention to the ways in which the style presents its stories, as well as the way it looks, have started drawing comics – and many of these creators are kick-ass artists and good instinctive storytellers who could make a comic work regardless, but have made a considered choice to use Manga tropes and techniques.

All of which is to say that “Mephistos”, which is apparently part of the “Here Be Demons” series – though not knowing that series doesn’t affect one’s enjoyment – is a confidently told and nicely presented romantic comedy, about a shy woman and the mysterious stranger next door, and what happens when they meet.

There’s a pleasing looseness to the linework here that at times can make for confusing sequences, but really pulls together for the character work. The writing, as well, has a vagueness to it that does create some uncertain ambiguity in the earlier scenes, but all of that becomes irrelevant once the reader gets a clearer sense of what is going on between these two characters, which happens pretty quickly.

The characters, as well, are so likeable, with the girl, Maria, having a shy elegance, and the guy, Meths, who is gruff and rakish and oddly rugged. Though not a lot happens in this first issue, the chemistry in the book is pleasingly reminiscent of one of those old movies, where Audrey Hepburn meets Cary Grant and they bicker and flirt their way into an affair.

There are some beautiful bits of presentation art in the book as well, that set a more smouldering scene than the slapstick of the events displayed. I got the impression that Naniiebim and Will Kirkby are stable mates or collaborators of some description, and though his comics and art style seem a million miles away from Manga, some of the posters that the two were given away, showing a mixture of their art, were perfectly complementary. Both are worth keeping an eye out for.

There are samples of the book and details on where to buy Naniiebim’s work right here.

- – -

And that’s that… finally done. It’s taken me a stupid amount of time to write these books up, and this doesn’t even include the Fantagraphics bundle I got at the same time – which probably deserves it’s own post.

These are small press, though, and as such each issue will probably still be in circulation once you read this. Support the creators by going and looking at their work, and if you like it, buy it. And give them love. Comic creators love the love!

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.

The Mighty #1 – Peter Tomasi, Keith Champagne & Peter Snejberg.

The Mighty is one of those alternate-timeline what-if-the-superman-paradigm-had-played-out-differently books that have proliferated and persisted since twenty minutes before Alan Moore wrote Miracle Man, and show no signs of stopping any time soon.

It feels like we’ve seen most possible iterations of this type of story by now – though apparently not so much that I won’t still check them out.

However, Tomasi, Champagne and Snejberg do such a good job of painting their particular scenario, with it’s sincerely written human viewpoint, a believeable and interesting wider political and corporate context, the suggestions of intrigue or conspiracy, and enough questions asked and left unanswered about the central character’s backstory that you certainly want to see where the next issue takes the story.

However, I don’t know if I’d have been so intrigued by the book, if it wasn’t for Snejberg’s solidly drafted and workmanlike art, which was in contrast to some of the showy but weak art I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks.

Hotwire: Requiem For The Dead #1 – Steve Pugh

None of that weak art is present in the first issue of “Hotwire – Requiem For The Dead”, a new comic from Steve Pugh, published by Radical.

The cover smartly gives Warren Ellis’ name equal space with Pugh’s, though this seems like a bit of a smart marketing ploy, rather than any real indication of input – as I understand it, the book is based on story ideas that the two were kicking around a while back, and this book is written and drawn by Pugh on his own.

The comic, set in a London of the future which is both dystopic and not entirely unfamiliar, follows it’s hero, the pale-skinned and impudent Alice Hotwire, an exorcist detective chasing down incidents of Blue Light. Blue Light is a term used by the establishment of this future to describe ghost activity – because apparently all of the traditional words for it sounded too spooky.

The comic gets straight into the action, with us finding Alice in the middle of a dramatic – but apparently not that unusual – mission. However, the character soon discovers what she believes may be evidence of a sinister shift in the status-quo, and finding herself at odds with her fellow police officers, she has to look in some unusual places for help.

I’ve been a fan of Steve Pugh’s art since he fully rendered the Strontium Dog: Feral strip in wax crayons, in 2000AD. It was a lot more awesome than that makes it sound.

That strip was written by Garth Ennis. Since then, he has worked with a pedigree of writers that includes Warren Ellis, Brian Wood, Jamie Delano and Grant Morrison, as well as working again and again with Ennis.

Either something has rubbed off on him, or he was already a naturally gifted writer, because this comic is a cracking good read. I’ve never read anything written by Pugh before, but his ear for dialogue and the clarity of his plotting is extremely slick and punchy.

Though the whole book is infused with a very old-school Ellis aesthetic, Pugh’s approach to the book makes for a refreshing change from other books on the market – including many of Ellis’ own current output – it’s clear that Pugh is having fun with this book, and he approaches the writing with an eye to the craft that’s lacking in a lot of artist-turned-writer/artists.

At the same time, Pugh manages to pull off something rare with the book’s art. There’s a lot of digital work on the pages, but the art is still consistently gorgeous, though that isn’t the unusual thing about it. What’s unusual is that this beautiful art never works against the storytelling, which is pretty much clear and has a sense of structure and composition throughout.

In fact, in some ways, Pugh’s painterly approach here looks more like his work on 2000AD than the linework I’m more used to seeing from him. And that’s an interesting thing about this comic – it feels like the sort of artifact that many of the strips in 2000AD in the last two decades have aimed for – with their fully rendered digital art and their pseudo cyberpunk settings – but have more often than not faltered and failed to master, because of either a lack of clarity in the art, or a lack of sheer invention in the writing.

Which isn’t to say that “Hotwire” is a particularly groundbreaking book – it wears it’s influences from cover to guts, and though it’s a pretty fresh concept, the genre and narrative are familiar – but it is impressive enough to stand out in a sea of pretty run-of-the-mill, joyless comic releases.

XTNCT: CM ND HV G F Y THNK YR HRD NGH – Paul Cornell & D’israeli

… And it’s interesting that “Hotwire” would make for such a good 2000AD action strip, because “XTNCT” is pretty much the other 2000AD ideal – a truly unusual raw science-fiction concept, with utterly alien characters, but one that actually works.

Written with invention and passion by Paul Cornell, and with frenetic and distinctive art by D’israeli – who it’s fairly obvious I’ve got a bit of a comic fan crush on – “XTNCT” is the far-future story of a squad of genetically engineered dinosaurs, created by the last few humans to war on each other. It was originally published in the Megazine – 2000AD’s more mature, younger sister – and it is pure, distilled comic awesome.

Cornell is on some kind of fierce mission with this strip, and it shines through. Each chapter takes a different one of the dino-soldier’s viewpoints, and each has a unique voice – which allows for some smart narrative trickery – and despite their alien nature, the story, and their mission, follows a natural and satisfying path.

It only slightly falters in the final chapter, and only then because there are so many ideas crammed in before the end that they almost aren’t given enough room to breathe.

D’israeli’s art works perfectly with Cornell’s script. The artist likes to change up his style with each new project, and here he has opted for a clear and thick line, and almost cartoony production design. It complements the often comic and always outlandish nature of the protagonists perfectly – the character designs, incidentally, are just superb.

The soldier that acts as the id for the team, Raptor, has a peculiar, vowel-free speech pattern – the name of the series is a Raptor-ism – which allowed the writer to use more bad-swears than would normally be politic for the magazine, and the bold shapes and black-and-white bluntness of the art allows similar latitude with the violence, which is extreme, but never looks gratuitious.

I’m not playing it particularly cool, I realise – it’s obvious I loved the book, from it’s beautiful hard-cover production through Cornell’s thoughtful and provocative introduction to the books slow build to a hard and decisive conclusion. This was especially pleasing, because it wasn’t one of those books that I was expecting great things of – it’s purchase was the result of itchy Amazon fingers and D’israeli’s name on the cover.

I hoped, at most, for an average but pretty slice of daft science-fiction, and instead I got something that felt a little bit like that fizzy feeling I got when reading “The Ballad Of Halo Jones” for the first time – that enervating feeling that you literally couldn’t have imagined some of the stuff you were seeing for yourself.

For clarity’s sake:- “XTNCT” isn’t anything like “Halo Jones” genre-wise – it’s just full of that same sense of unfettered imagination and a conscious creative heart.

“Incognito” is the latest collaboration by Brubaker and Phillips, and is being released alongside their noir masterpiece “Criminal”, through the Marvel imprint Icon.

This book, however, is a return to the smart, hard-nosed real-world super-hero narrative of their earlier work on “Sleeper”.

“Sleeper” was a gem of a book, making tough choices issue after issue with the pre-existing Wildstorm Universe, that was only minimally limited by the requirements of working with franchise characters – mainly because Brubaker and Phillips invented most of the ones that they used in the book, and mainly because Brubaker is that damn good at this, and very versatile.

However, there was always the fact of that broader continuity pressing down on the book, and while it didn’t affect one’s enjoyment of the series, it did mean that it was hard to see it entirely apart from the rest of that universe.

“Incognito” is something entirely new, and at this point totally self-contained, and it benefits from this from the off. This isn’t Brubaker scratching at the fringes of someone else’s superhero world, and forcing it into his vision, it’s him building his own from the ground up. Or from the protagonist out, really.

Brubaker’s usual superb characterisation is at play again, here, as he explores an intriguing idea – what if there was a “witness relocation” programme for super-villains, but one of them got bored? – which might be cool but ultimately gimmicky in another writer’s hands, but in his becomes a very real and layered examination of a nihilistic and misanthropic psyche, the nature of villainy, and of boredom, and otherwise a damn good yarn.

It always feels like Sean Phillips is upping his game when you see a new book by him, but then, it always feels like he is, and if one looks at his work between books, I think the quality is actually pretty consistent. I think this is just what it looks like when someone is really very good at their craft – a natural born artist.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t take a lot of work – Phillips has been doing this for a lot longer than one would think, considering his age – but every illustration, and the layout of every panel, is so well considered and beautifully drawn that it’s as if he’s doing it purely by instinct – comic art as air.

There is prettier art, but hardly anybody straight up draws comics as well as the man, and maybe the feeling that he keeps getting better is actually that the level of his storytelling is so consistently great compared to the rest of the field.

I actually can’t wait to see what happens next.

Kick-Ass #5 – Mark Millar & John Romita Jr

John Romita Jr is another example of a great artist who favours storytelling over bells and whistles, and I am a long time lover of his art, but I have to admit that his work on “Kick-Ass” hasn’t been my favourite of his, up till now.

However, I don’t know if it’s the remains of the Christmas spirit, the relief at finally seeing a new issue, or a nonsensical and uncharacteristic amount of goodwill built up in me for Mark Millar by the not-actually-awful “Wanted” movie – nonsensical because I’m deeply aware that the good things about the movie were mostly where the film totally deviated from his comic – but I really enjoyed this issue.

After a really reaching and agitating couple of issues, things seem to be moving again, and the book is living up to it’s potential strengths once more. The “real-life” aspects of the titular character’s life once again ring true – to at least a “decent teen drama” level, if not a really authentic teen lifestyle one.

I was particularly enamoured of the dilemma of what to do when faced with performing a potential act of heroism that wouldn’t involve simply beating up a street thug, and as such could potentially be instantly and arbitrarily fatal – though I think the fact that Millar couldn’t resist slipping a particular and hackneyed superhero rescue trope in there, as if treading hilarious new ground, was a sign that he hasn’t dropped all of his bad habits overnight.

But yeah, I really liked this issue. On balance, I think this series is going to make an at least enjoyable trade paperback.

Posting this remarkably late – on the fourth of the New Year – for which there is no excuse. Except, of course, there are plenty of excuses – it is, after all, hard drinkin’ season.

For the sake of organisation, I’m predating the post to a little earlier. Of course, I’ve long since realised that I’m the only person who cares about these things, but it feels only right to mention it!

Northlanders Vol 1: Sven The Returned – Brian Wood & Davide Gianfelice

Brian Wood is an oddity among comic creators – aside from one diversion into mutant territory a few years back, he has almost exclusively made a living off the beaten narrative track, while still working predominantly with one of the mainstream publishers.

So that he decided to write a comic about vikings, and that DC were willing to publish it under their Vertigo imprint, isn’t as much of a surprise as it could be.

That it’s really, very bloody good shouldn’t be a surprise either. Wood has a naturally understated writing style which isn’t showy at all, and maybe doesn’t grab for readers like the writing of some of his contemporaries, but the quality and craft is consistently present.

The story he’s come up with here is a classic epic saga, taking in this volume the point of view of an accomplished Viking on his return home to find his lands stolen and his estates taken over by his corrupt uncle Gorm and his uncle’s organisation.

This story spans the first eight issues of the book – a pretty decent sized volume for a trade paperback – and Wood lets his story breathe, with supporting characters weaving in and out of Sven’s personal mission convincingly, and his own motives and responses to events evolving and shown convincingly throughout.

Davide Gianfelice brings clean-lined and European art to the book, stylised but always clear and with an eye to story-telling that isn’t common enough in modern comics. It takes a few pages to get used to, to tell the truth, and Dave McCaig’s colouring has an unusual colour palette that takes a bit of time, too, but once the reader’s eye is onside, it’s vivid and lurid and lush.

For some reason – maybe the paper stock or editorial will – this book is retailing cheap – $9.99 or £6.50 for 200 pages – and as a loss-leader it deserves to garner the ongoing series a lot of attention.

Fishtown – Kevin Colden

“Fishtown” is a beautiful hardcover IDW book collecting a Xeric Award-winning weekly webcomic by Kevin Colden.

The book is set in Philadelphia, and follows the story of four teenagers involved in the murder of a sixteen-year-old boy. Though the case dealt with in the book is inspired by real events, Colden avoids detailing the crime itself, instead opting to examine the varied motives leading to it, and the emotional aftermath for the perpetrators following it.

It’s a self-assured piece of work, with beautiful art and nicely muted monochramatic colours that match the production design of the book, writing that builds layers of meaning rather than battering you over the head with it, and dialogue that parses as perfectly real.

There’s a documentary feel to the book, which unfolds mostly through interview sessions with the teens, and never takes the obvious route to telling the reader what is happening. It’s effective and creepy, as well as very human.

If there’s a problem with the book at all, it’s that sometimes – especially in the first third of the book – this allusive rather than explicit quality, coupled with the flatness of the delivery and Colden’s functional character art, makes what is going on a little obscure.

Having said that, the book follows such a pleasingly circular structure, with the interview timeline and the actual flashback timeline looping back on themselves, that you want to go back and read through from the beginning again almost straight away, partly to get a clearer sense of what happened, and partly for the love of it.

Criminal Vol 3: The Dead And The Dying – Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips

Both Brubaker and Phillips have been doing sterling work throughout their respective working careers, and each of them has this in common – they consistently produce awesome, authentic work, and they both make it look easy.

When they met, it was murder. Literally-ish.

I love seeing each of them work with other artists/writers – in Brubaker’s case, it’s always a joy to see him work with Michael Lark, for example – but when the two collaborate, they usually produce noir-esque perfection – even when they’re working superheroes.

“Criminal” is the ultimate expression to date of the collaboration’s noir work, and the previous two books have been superb. The latest volume is as consistently good as previous outings, with Brubaker’s characterisation and dialogue on form, and Phillips’ art richer and sometimes more expressionistic than his earlier work, which works well with this story.

The story here is a little different from the previous outings, because over the course of the three chapters contained herein, only one storyline is examined, but from three different vantage points. It’s a Rashomon tactic, not unfamiliar in contemporary cinema.

The slight flaw with this approach is that Brubaker opts to arrange the chapters chronologically backwards, so that we see the catalystic character’s story, leading up to the events in the first chapter, last, which in the comic medium creates an emotional redundancy that knackers the overall effect here.

Each chapter works beautifully as a self-contained story, but if I’d been buying the books month-on-month I might have been frustrated by the lack of story progression. From a writer with less goodwill stored than Brubaker, it’d feel like gimmick writing.

Still, a lovely book, and it’s always cool to see these guys working together. I’ve got “Incognito” by the partnership to review for next week, so the hits just keep on coming…!

Y: The Last Man Vol 6 to Vol 8  – Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra (with Goran Sudzuka & Jose Marzan Jr)

“Y: The Last Man” moves on apace – volume 9 is currently out of my reach, with Amazon out of stock and my local comic shop for some reason retailing it at a higher price than other volumes, but it will be mine!

At this point, the quality of the writing and art is a given, but it’s always worth mentioning that across these three volumes, the killer team of Vaughan and Guerra remains consistently outstanding, with the regular contributions by Sudzuka maintaining the quality and the whole thing pulled together nicely by Marzan, Jr’s inks.

So, all that may go without saying, but it’s always worth mentioning. It’s rare enough in comics that it’s always worth mentioning.

The impressive thing here with Vaughan’s writing is that despite the fact that two or three chapters back he seemed to reveal the last pertinent plot secrets, he still manages to pull twists and turns out of the hat that keep the reader engaged.

These books continue the quest to find Ampersand, the last male monkey. Along the way there are diversions, intrigue, dangerous liaisons and full-frontal male nudity. Vaughan breaks the mystery of Beth’s condition, and of who Dr M and the ninja are. There’s more information about Agent 355, and we see what happens when the world finds out that there is still one last living male.

Vaughan closes the loop on his secrets with near-disregard for leaving himself nowhere to go. At the same time, he goes back and fills in the blanks where we didn’t even realise there were gaps, through both flashbacks and by revisiting past supporting characters.

The thing I’ve noticed the most in these last few volumes is that every scene or encounter that Yorick and his entourage have had, no matter how incidental it might have seemed at the time, isn’t forgotten – and is actually vital to the ongoing book.

I’m actually wondering whether that’s going to turn out to be a superficial thing, actually. As I read the series first time through, with the speedy momentum of it, it seems to make perfect sense, but I wonder whether it will all read as a little too tightly packed and convenient in retrospect.

I’m fairly sure I’ll find out soon enough – we’re near the end, and I think I’ll find it hard to resist a second read-through soon after completing it.

Kochalka is an artist who is used to sharing his life and process with his audience – for years now he has been posting and publishing daily diary strips, sharing the most intimate details of his life with his wife, cat and kids, as well as his personal – and often not particularly flattering – personal musings.

As well as this, it’s fair to say that the majority of his other output has been keyed in to Kochalka’s own real world, with fictionalised extrapolations of his relationships, friendships and even existential personal crises making up the core of many of his books.

It’s fair to say that this isn’t a guy who makes comics to make a living – he makes comics because he has to, and has found that he can make a living doing it almost incidentally. Even when he’s making stuff up, you get the feeling that it’s still happening for him, at some level.

So then there’s this book. Which is, I suppose, an even more open examination of what Kochalka’s relationship to his work is, disguised as a mixture of journal pieces that are a little longer than his daily strips and editorial/manifesto pieces.

The name of the collection is a bit misleading – the book itself seems more defined by the contrast between the definitive and proclamatory nature of his two “Craft” essays, and the more expansive and meditative “Reinventing Everything” stories. The “Cute Manifesto” itself, more than anything, seems to give the book it’s aesthetic product design – in which Kochalka allocates each story with an image of his son. The tract that takes the name, also included, is worthwhile, but doesn’t carry the same weight as the previously mentioned items.

First up are the two “Craft” essays – though I find it a little odd, calling them essays. Each is only a few short paragraphs long, though they both pack a punch.

In “Craft Is The Enemy”, Kochalka – in response to issue 188 of “The Comics Journal” – takes the heavy-footed stance that an artist who spends all of their time trying to perfect their artistic “craft” will never produce the perfect piece of art that they are longing for.

Instead, he makes the – probably quite valid – point that great technical skill isn’t vitally important to create this masterpiece, and that the way to create is to just create with the skills you have right now. He cites Cezanne and Pollock as examples of people who did this, creating work that outshone their poor draughtsmanship through sheer willpower and self-belief.

As a call to creativity, it works pretty well – it’s a hyped up piece, and he says within the text that it is the result of an adrenaline rush. Unfortunately, the wording makes it sound like a call to arms, or a formal standpoint, and it doesn’t work so well as that. When Kochalka refers to established creators as “hopeless”, I think he’s attempting a tongue in cheek tone, but it sounds more like a genuine critique, which requires that the rest of the text be scrutinised.

That’s when you find that there’s no real meat to the opening argument that Kochalka makes – true, his enthusiasm convinces us that you don’t need to be a skilled artisan to produce great art, but there is no effort to qualify the statement that the opposite is true – that being technically brilliant disqualifies you from being a great artist.

As letters go, it’s perfectly worthwhile, but having it presented in a book like this should indicate more content to the argument.

With “Craft Is Not A Friend”, Kochalka tries to clarify what he was saying in the first letter, though in doing so he actually muddies the water a little more, and comes across as a bit more rambling than in the first. It doesn’t help that he opens the letter with:

“Okay, I will say it again in a different way for the idiots who couldn’t understand me the first time.”

As with the “hopeless” jibe before, it’s quite possible that Kochalka was trying to inject a little rock and roll or humour into his words, but it falls a little flat, because it doesn’t inform the piece with fun so much as a sense of petulance on the part of the writer.

This sardonic tone is actually something that Kochalka manages perfectly in his whimsical but often dark and neurotic strip-work, but in text, it doesn’t quite pan out.

Which is a shame, because if anything, this short essay could stand to be expanded on. As with the previous piece, it seems a little light, but he’s actually saying stuff in this piece, the jist of which is that there is no point getting yourself worked up about achieving “quality” in your technique, because “the notion of quality is meaningless”.

The irony of this is that as time has progressed, Kochalka has himself become objectively better as a draughtsman, with his art style and line now fine-tuned and consistent at a level that it wasn’t in his earlier work. There’s a good sample across his work in this book, in fact.

“Sunburn” is Kochalka from 2000, and is most unusual for the fact that he has opted to draw himself, and his surroundings, in a more realistic style than usual. Kochalka almost exclusively draws himself and his wife as elves, and adopts a simplified style to draw everything else, including his cat.

Here, he and his cat are “real”. It fits the piece, which is an extended examination of the related ideas of “existence” and “place”, told as the moment-by-moment thought processes of the artist as he follows himself through simple everyday processes.

There is a happy negativity to Kochalka’s work that I can get behind – a kind of fatalism that has worked out that yes, life is pointless and noisy and ridiculous, but that’s more reason to party, not less.

I like this strip better in the context of this book than I did as a standalone piece, for some reason.

The two “Reinventing” strips are my favourite parts of the book – they are the affecting and beautiful heart around which it assembles itself.

“Reinventing Everything Part One” is a lovely exploration of the beauty in small things, and the nature of play, as well as the nature of nature. And the nature of artificial worlds, such as the ones you find in computer games.

He also looks at an idea that I have some sympathy for, which is that the things we create – our technology and ourselves – are as in synch with the natural world as the things that we don’t, because that’s how nature works. He uses the example of a butterfly’s wings – butterflies are a favoured topic for Kochalka.

He also touches on a theme that will form a much bigger part of the second part of this strip. Though I can’t remember the timing, I think that “Reinventing Everything” was in part an attempt to formulate a philosophical response to the enormity of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. One of Kochalka’s examples of horrible things that we should endeavour to find some beauty in is a stark image of the “exploding buildings” from that day – an image he puts in direct counterpoint to that of “stumbling baby kittens”.

It seems trite, but it’s also very insightful. Kochalka was clearly shaken by the attacks, as was pretty much everyone in reach of a TV on the day – for someone with an already well-developed sense of the cycles of life and death, and the pointlessly bad things that happen, the process of framing things in the way that I mentioned above is a way of applying an ideology that was never expected to deal with something quite so huge and terrible in a way that makes sense.

“Reinventing Everything Part Two” is a brutally honest, and honesty beautiful account of the way in which Kochalka and his wife expanded that process out into their real lives.

It begins with their horrified reaction to the events of September 11th 2001, and through their – frankly due – decision to have a child afterwards. The period is compressed – although of course he dealt with the whole pregnancy in his diary comics – to take in the birth of the couple’s son Eli, and his immediate thoughts afterward.

Despite his complaints about craft, Kochalka’s skill at capturing the couple’s emotional  responses to the events with simple visual metaphor is truly awesome in this segment of the book. Childbirth is portrayed as a sequence of devastating waves, through which he tries again and again to keep hold of his wife. And there is a chilling scene – in which Kochalka cuts himself no slack – toward the end, as he momentarily muses on an attempt to reverse the passage of time.

“Don’t fight life” is the simple statement that he makes at the close of the story, and again, this is the sort of lofty statement that most people would make with the specific intent of making me vomit, but Kochalka totally sells me on it.

“The Cute Manifesto”, despite giving it’s name to this collection, is a slight and sweet strip – almost a poem in strip form, about the importance of cuteness in our lives.

Kochalka makes the attractive statement that “Everything is born cute”.

He goes on to explain the various reasons why we should embrace cuteness over the more prevalent ugliness in the world, because we “Live for beauty”.

It’s a sweet and naive piece – I mean that the piece itself has a sweet naivete to it, not that I think Kochalka himself has a superficial or daft view – that is kinda uplifting despite or because of it’s brevity. It’s easy, in fact, to imagine Kochalka delivering much of it in a quiet moment at one of his rock shows, with a knowing half-grin that says “I know it’s bollocks, but then, isn’t it all? If you have to chew on bollocks, you might as well chew on the sweet bollocks for a while.”

Okay, that was a digression.

There are a couple of beautifully dark images in the strip, through which Kochalka hammers home his view, and it all ends on a nice long portentious sounding tract.

By contrast to the simplicity of “The Cute Manifesto” and the free-ranging inclusivity of the philosophy of “Reinventing Everything”, “The Horrible Truth About Comics” brings Kochalka’s focus right back to one or two tight and specific questions.

Essentially, these questions are “what is art?” and “what is good art?”.

Okay, that is a massive simplification, but what can I tell you? It’s Christmas Eve, and Girl One is sitting downstairs with the dog and the Christmas tree in a fashion that, simply put, demands cuddles.

I read “The Horrible Truth…” when it came out, and thought it was an interesting ramble about art and comics back then. In the context of this book, it’s interesting how much ground he covers in the strip that he also went over with considerably less finesse in the two “Craft” essays.

The other fun thing about this story textually is that at the same time as Kochalka takes a simple train of thought and just runs with it here, the form of the strip itself is much looser and casual than in “Sunburn” or “Reinventing Everything…”.

Whole pages are given over to pacing and cogitative beats, allowing you to mosey on along and let yourself wander along the same pathways that Kochalka does. Unlike those other stories, this one genuinely feels like Kochalka is actually trying to work it out for himself as he goes, rather than the quite definitive tone of much of the rest of the book.

This is carried through to the lovely little explanatory note that has been added to the back of the book, “Spelunking For Slippery Cave Fish”, in which Kochalka explains that despite the grand declarations made in the rest of the book, Kochalka uses the absolutes contained within not to necessarily convince his audience of anything he is saying so much as to try and work things through himself.

It’s a process that I can relate to, and I’m glad that he acknowledges it at the end, because without it, those first two essays might have left too sour a taste in my mouth for me to heartily endorse the book.

As it stands, if you don’t already own most of this book, it is definitely worth your money. If you do already have some of it, but haven’t seen “Reinventing Everything…”, it is probably worth picking up for those stories alone.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think!

Darwinia

Five things about Darwinia:

Like “Uplink” before it, which was also by tiny outfit Introversion, the game is plotted and designed to feel completely authentic to a PC gaming experience – that is, the interfaces and mythos of the game is supposed to be taking place within your computer, so you’re fully immersed.

A beautifully designed game that does wonders with it’s simplistic visual style.

Stripped down and basic resource management, research models and consistently smart gameplay make picking the game up deceptively easy, but allow for endlessly variable ways of playing, and despite the lack of realism to the world of the game, gives the truest “God game” experience available in ages.

For all of these reasons, and it’s relatively short campaign length, I played it from start to finish, almost solidly over a week.

World Of Goo

A decent sized free demo of this is available at Valve’s Steam, but you can find more out about it here. Here are five things about it:

What might have passed for an ambitious and nicely put together online Flash game is elevated by slick presentation, beautiful visual design, and a world-beating physics engine.

Like Darwinia, simple but robust game mechanics allow for every player to play it differently, as many ways as they like.

A perfectly realised cartoon world, reminiscent of Jhonen Vasquez’s work, give this 2d game an extra dimension – of awesome! Or at least, of great, unique character.

The death-traps and puzzle-solving appeal utterly to any number of the hardcore gamer’s OCDs, and reward abstract skill and a fuzzy approach to solution building, as well as more traditional or methodical gaming strengths.

Basically a very smart physics engine given life through cool and simple character animation and nice gameplay flair, which put together will make for endless fun, and probably means that the second I have a few spare pennies, I will be buying the whole – cheap – game!

Left 4 Dead

Another free-demo download from Steam, this one, only just out. Five things about it:

This should be an easy sell, being a zombie survival-horror game developed by the team who brought us Half Life 2, and based on the same engine.

It doesn’t flinch on the hyperviolence and intensity, with the remit to bring the player as close to the feeling of being stuck in a modern zombie horror movie as possible.

Cosmetically beautiful – great looking and atmospheric lcoations, with cool voice acting, and genuinely scary zombie designs and action, and an intuitive control system.

In the single-player campaign missions really smart team AI make for a nicely immersive experience, though you get a strong feeling that they make it too easy, with their perfect aim and lack of confusion, and the game will really come into it’s own in co-operative play.

However, and this may just be because it’s a demo, the fluidity of your character’s movements around the locations feels a little flat in places – more Doom 3 than Half Life 2, and the pacing of the calm moments to intense and frenzied zombie attacks – in which it’s sometimes difficult to see what is going on, though again that’s probably part of the fun in multiplayer – makes for an experience that at this point is a little two-note. Though perhaps the full-game allows for a more developed sense of place, and more nuanced gaming.