Sequart Reprints: Sardine, Tiny Tyrant, Black Diamond Detective Agency, Professor's Daughter

The newest Sardine In Outer Space book is more of the same. Sardine, her uncle Captain Yellow Shoulder and Little Louie fly around the universe having light-hearted adventures. They're always running up against space dictator Supermuscleman and his mad scientist Doc Krok. This edition gets a bit meta, as our heroes are not only aware that they're the stars of a comic, but that they also only get 10 pages a story! Guibert and Sfar run with this idea in "Why Don't We Make A Movie?", where famous movie director Kubik tries to convince the gang to let him make a movie about them. The plot he describes comes to life as our heroes have a big space fight with Supermuscleman, but Sardine tells Kubik that his ideas aren't quite as exciting as their real lives.

The book is at its best when the premises are at their most absurd, because the plots are repetitive. The best stories include a visit to the Kingdom of Yummy, with fields of french fries, wild Burgeegies, the ketchup eruptions of Mount St. Heinz, and Weddingcake Mountain--with the King and Queen atop it. Along the meta lines, "The Sabotage Artist" is about a plot to make Sardine's comic unpopular by adding poorly-drawn characters, thanks to Supermuscleman. Then there's the Queen of Applet and her agents Dotcom, Clickalink and Doubleclick, who steal a statue and get tracked by the kids. As I noted in my review of the previous edition of Sardine, the book is best read a bit at a time, because there's not a lot of story or characterization to latch on to. However, it's ideal for younger children, especially those just getting into "real" books and comics. While Sardine's set-up is limited, the wacky scenarios that Guibert cooks up and Sfar playfully draws is a great way to get kids into comics.

Tiny Tyrant, on the other hand, is a stunningly hilarious work because of its tight plots and superb gag resolution. That's no surprise, considering that Lewis Trondheim is a gagman supreme, in addition to his many other talents. He's aided by the fantastically clean & expressive art of Fabrice Parme, whose style is reminiscient of 1960's animation. This clear-line style is a nice match for the frantic and energetic stories of young King Ethelbert, 6-year-old ruler of Portocristo. The king is a spoiled brat and terrorizes his ministers and citizens with his whims. The design of this book is fantastic: panel frames are left out. Instead, each story has a pastel background that brings the most out of the linework and the bolder colors used for the figures.
With the knowledge that Ethelbert is a little spoiled brat who will happily threaten those who disagree with him, Trondheim concocts plots that come up with an escalating set of problems and then devises an unexpected solution. In "The Ethelbertosaurus", the king is told of a dinosaur fossil being found. He immediately wants it named after himself, but balks when he sees it's a tiny creature. Wanting a larger dinosaur, he demands that his scientists create one. Through an unlikely series of events, one is created that immediately menaces him. The creature is sent back in time with Ethelbert (by accident), and the story resolves itself with a wacky set of events that is topped by a punchline that cleverly folds in events from earlier in the story.

What makes these stories so funny is that Trondheim stacks gag on top of gag, giving each story a momentum that plows toward the punchline at the end. Parme is more than up to the task of illustrating these gags, given his exaggerated figures and facial expressions. In "Safety First", Ethelbert is assigned a personal bodyguard. In order to test how good he is, he takes out a contract on his own life, and we proceed to see his bodyguard rescue him from catastrophe after catastrophe. Parme drawing "the Dastardly Detroiters" popping up out of a bunch of garbage cans is a hilarious image, one of many in a story that has genuine excitement from panel to panel. Once again, the final punchline is not only funny, it unexpectedly references an earlier plot point.

In The Professor's Daughter, Sfar and Guibert trade roles for what was actually their breakthrough work a decade ago. Guibert's moody, fuzzy art here meshes well with Sfar's melancholy fantasy romance. What I like best about this story is that its most absurd aspects are played straight. In Victorian England, an archeologist's daughter falls in love with the mummy of a former Egyptian pharoah that has come to life. Sfar understands what makes for a compeling story, because the plot is less concerned with the hows of the mummy's return than why he falls in love with the woman. Sfar spins this into a story of a son's relationship with his father, and crosses it with an ocean adventure, a prison breakout, a courtroom drama, and an absurd encounter with Queen Victoria. The comic almost feels as though it was originally twice as long, but Sfar cut out everything that wasn't essential to the story. Indeed, on the first page of the story, we're introduced to the mummy wearing a suit and out on the town with the titular daughter.

Color is a crucial component in the story's emotional narrative; the washed-out tones (watercolors?) evoke their environment so acutely that one can almost feel the fog or smell the ocean reflected in a cabin's light. As delicate as the coloring is, it's the liveliness of Guibert's figures that add drama to the action. The dreamy quality of the art allows the reader to make an easy transition between the action and several dream sequences, as well as even more absurd sequences like two mummies being laid up in hospital beds. While the book certainly has its share of shenanigans, it lingers in one's imagination because of the underlying sadness and emptiness of all its characters. The attempt to fill that void is at the heart of the book, and even the final page of the book has its own moment of tragedy despite what is otherwise a happy outcome. This book just feels like both artists having an enormous amount of fun riffing off each other, using a kitchen-sink approach to throw in everything they wanted in a story, and leaving out whatever disinterested them. It's simply a pleasure to read, from beginning to end.

Lastly, we have Eddie Campbell's The Black Diamond Detective Agency. It's based on a screenplay, and promises "mayhem, mystery, romance, mine shafts, bullets" and it certainly delivers. The story takes place around the turn of the 20th century in the American west--both in a small town and the big city. The anxiety surrounding the changes in the modern world is a running subplot that winds up holding the key to the story's mystery. The story begins with an argument between a man and a woman and the destruction of a train that kills dozens in his small town that is subsequently attributed to him. The man, John Hardin, is the sort of super-competent but haunted hero that's enormously compelling. Throwing him in with the eponymous private detective agency reminded me a bit of "The Fugitive", except the twist is that Hardin manages to disguise himself enough to temporarily join the agency!

While the story has interesting characters and some intriguing twists & turns, it really isn't much more than a rousing potboiler of an adventure story. What distinguishes it is the tour-de-force of design and composition that Campbell creates on the page. He combines his trademark scratchy style with a washed-out palette that perfectly depicts the grit and grime of the era. Acts of violence are in bold penstrokes and brighter color, popping them off the page. The pages go from full-page splashes to smaller grids to panels placed at odd angles to move the eye along the page with confusing images. Those readers who know Campbell from his autobiographical work might forget that his long-running adventure series Bacchus; he's no stranger to convoluted adventure stories. Still, this book isn't in the same league as something like Fate of the Artist, but it's a more-than-amusing diversion.

Once again, First Second excels at advancing comics that are another strain of "new mainstream" books. These comics are accessible to anyone, and the fact that they aggressively market comics for kids as well reflects the vision of the line's editor, Mark Siegel. He wanted comics to attain the same sort of respect and widespread cultural importance that they have in France, and wisely aimed his books directly at the bookstore market, but has done this so as to attract a wide audience. I wouldn't regard any of the books in this most recent wave as Great Works, but they do address comics' need for more solid, accessible and entertaining works. The term "middlebrow" is a bit too much of a pejorative to describe these well-drawn and written comics. These are, however, comics that anyone could enjoy but are clearly the personal vision of the artists involved.

Sequart Reprints: Kid Lit

This article as originally published at sequart.com in 2006.
***
The three comics I'm reviewing in this space are all for children, but the contexts for each are radically different. Kevin Pyle's Blindspot is a lush, imaginative graphic novel aimed at kids 9 and up. Sardine In Outer Space 2 is a collection of stories featuring the wacky adventures of Sardine, a young girl who happens to be a space pirate. The latest Nick Mag Presents is an all-comics special aimed squarely at Nickelodeon's target audience, roughly kids 10 and under.

Going in reverse order, the new Nick Mag can be found on any magazine rack. While it features comics versions of their most popular cartoon characters (Spongebob Squarepants & Fairly OddParents), it also features an array of strips from some of alt-comics' most interesting artists. Comics editors Chris Duffy & Dave Roman (the latter a cartoonist in his own right) have been providing a steady outlet for cartoonists for quite some time. It's odd to see someone like Johnny Ryan in here, considering that most of his regular work is so filthy, but his strips still work because kids like fart jokes more than anyone. It's a particular delight to see folks like Jason Shiga do his thing in here. Shiga loves embedding comics in choose-your-own-adventure frameworks, and so it was a natural for him to do a maze where he's trying to get the Fairly OddParents to grant him wishes to get a girl to fall in love with him. Even better is an algorithm he designed later in the book to determine your perfect mate--with the determining factors being things like "lots of hair vs the color green".

That's just one example of a strip that doesn't feel at all watered-down, even if it's not exactly what the artist would do with their own work. Brian Ralph's gorgeous "Twiggy Stumps" strip, about a boy trying to find a place to stay during the winter, has exactly the same look and feel as his Cave-In or Climbing Out strips. He's not the only ex-Highwater Books cartoonist in this issue. Jordan Crane (with the nom-de-plume Jane D'Rancor) did a strip called "Shortcut", which is in a style very similar to his recent children's book The Clouds Above. Underground legend Justin Green offers a strip about humanitarian ways to kill flies, done in the same washed-out style as his regular comics. The imagination and wit that pervades the personal work of the indy cartoonists here makes the issue a pleasure to read as an adult. I especially liked the humor in Craig Thompson's comics here; he had one page with four completely separate strips, all of which impact the other somehow. Ellen Forney's comic on how to make your own autobio strip is enormously clever, as is her smaller strip that ran along the bottom of several pages.

The best thing this issue does is give a nice outlet for gag strip experts and humorists. Along with Ryan, there's the highly-underrated Karen Sneider, Sam Henderson (with his regular "Scene But Not Heard" strip), Mark Martin, Evan Dorkin & Sara Dyer, Terry LaBan, Gahan Wilson and Michael Kupperman. The latter 's strip, "The Worst Comic Book Villains That Never Existed" could have been out of an issue of his Tales Designed to Thrizzle comic, including characters like Doctor Buckethead, Pants-On-His-Head-Man (the archenemy of Underpants-On-His-Head-Man), and the Crayoniacs. I've long felt that there was a need for a comics anthology that had nothing but humor strips in it, and Nick Mag is the closest thing we have to that at the moment. I honestly can't thing of a better way of getting kids to love comics than this magazine: it's appealing to both genders, it's funny, it's attractive to look at (they don't skimp on production values), there's a variety of styles & stories, and it can be enjoyed without having to understand a lot of backstory.

Sardine is what I would call minor work from two excellent cartoonists, Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert. . Sfar in particular is a huge favorite of mine. This collection of strips is aimed squarely at kids (even the flap on the front cover says "No Grown-Ups Allowed! (Unless they're pirates or space adventurers)"). In these stories, Sardine the space pirate travels with Captain Yellow Shoulder and Little Louie, having all sorts of adventures. They're in constant combat with the villainous Supermuscleman and mad scientist Doc Krok, always foiling their schemes. Each story is 10 pages long, just long enough to establish a conflict and resolution.

What makes the stories fun are the absurd set-ups: a comet covered in carpet, with a ruler that tries to force its visitors to buy some; a planet filled with flies that put bad dance tunes into its victims ears, the kind you can't get out of your head; a giant with video cameras inside its body; a lonely worm that creates a spaceship in a bid to make friends that only scares them off instead. When the stories move away from the oafish Supermuscleman (who gets outsmarted by Sardine so easily that he doesn't make for much of a villain), they're much funnier and weirder. For example, Sardine and Louie are able to save their friends in a flea circus from that video giant by going inside his body and playing soccer--that's because "wherever there's soccer, there's cameras".

The comics are more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. They're in the tradition of a Carl Barks, mixing adventure and silliness. The real highlight of these stories is Sfar's loose, vibrant style. While the character designs are simple and iconic, he still manages to pack an enormous amount of detail in a given panel. This makes his pages easy to follow (some of them have only two panels) but rewarding to look at. The use of color is another major component of the overall visual impact; they're kept bright, basic and even a bit garish. These stories occur in a fantastic world, and their non-naturalistic look and feel adds to the effect.

The main criticism I'd have of this collection is that there's a certain repetitiveness to the stories. Every story details some adventure or misadventure of Sardine and her friends, often against the same set of opponents. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's formulaic, but there's a sense of diminishing returns the further one gets into the book, even if each individual story is enjoyable on its own. From a child's standpoint, this probably isn't a big deal--if they like the stories to begin with. Unlike the Nick Mag, with its wide range of styles, this Sardine volume is best given to children who are already inclined to enjoy this sort of story.

The audience for Blindspot is entirely different, and not just because of the 9-and-over target group. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy named Dean, who retreats into army fantasies as a way of dealing with the alienation he feels in relating with other kids, his family's constant moving around, and the difficulty he has in dealing with authority. The irony is that he chose war and army scenarios as a symbol of rugged freedom, when the military is the ultimate form of regimentation. The key is that his understanding of war is what he reads in comic books, and these fantasies inform his playtime with his friends. Eventually, a frightening encounter with a homeless man snaps him out of his war fantasies.

What makes the book more than a routine exploration of pre-adolescent problems is the masterful use of color. Pyle employed single-color palettes during every real-life sequence, but his use of color was non-naturalistic. He used green (army soldier green) during every sequence where Dean and his friends were playing army in the forest, and used it once again towards the end to reflect a significant change for Dean. He used a light lilac to depict winter, but more importantly, a time of reflection and an attempt at understanding. An aqua-green represented times of crisis in school, or a sequence where he had to go to a child psychologist. Light blue represented both night and the sense of elation that turned into panic when he was faced with a homeless man angry at him and his friends for destroying his hovel--but really wanting someone to unload the story of his own life's misery on. Brown seemed to represent the times when Dean was most grounded in reality. Sometimes this was because of family difficulties, and other times because he was finally able to exult a bit in enjoying himself as a kid in the here and now. There are other shades for other encounters as well, but these were the ones that stood out.

The stand-out stylization that Pyle used came when Dean was deep in his army fantasies in his friends. The art would shift from the simple palette to one resembling old war comics--flat and four-colored, looking a bit like Joe Kubert or Dick Ayers 60's war comics. It was no accident that these sequences (meshing the kids' "play" dialogue into something resembling the dialogue from such comics) had color that was comparatively more vibrant, but in no sense was it meant to be realistic. In a later scene where Dean is at the psychologist's office, he slips into fantasy mode, with the page drawn like Dean's a soldier being interrogated. As Dean relaxes and realizes that there's no threat here, the fantasy fades and we him going back to a more realistic view of the situation.

Dean felt trapped as a child, and the forest where he played represented freedom. The life of a soldier as he saw it in the forest was the ultimate form of liberation: living on your own wits and toughness, righting wrongs, performing tasks that meant something. Being punished for doing poorly in school didn't mean anything to him. What slowly started to change him was seeing images of the Holocaust in a library book; the images of dead bodies started to interfere even with his war fantasies. While that shifted his fantasies, it didn't change his desire for solitude and self-determination. That didn't change until the homeless man (who boasted about his freedom) revealed the devastating details of his miserable life. Dean was finally able to leave that fantasy behind after that as his parents rescued him from the forest and he came to see them, and his life, in a very different light. He understood that there was a thin line between freedom and alienation, and how easy it was to cross that line.

The whole sequence with the homeless man is heralded by a typically clever use of color. Right before that, Dean was out with his friends, having fun on Halloween. He was just a normal kid, and it felt good. This was highlighted by the use of brown in this scene. After he says goodbye to his friends, we suddenly shift to light blue, with only a slight red-brown in the sky as the sun sets. It's the only time in the book that colors are mixed on a non-fantasy page, and here we see the warm feelings represented by brown start to fade into the ominous blue of the night, panel by panel. It's a transition significant enough to make up the bulk of the book's cover.

The understanding that Dean's change in his self was apparent when we see him playing baseball and the color is back to that army-green. Chasing a long fly ball, Dean is faced with his fantasy forest again, probably for the first time. He's finally come to terms with what it represented to him, and he was literally able to turn his back to it and move on. This point is hammered home in the book's final sequence, where Dean's family has moved again. In brown tones, he meets some new kids and befriends them, telling them that army play is "kid's stuff". It's perhaps a bit too obvious a cue after so much subtlety in this book, the only wrong turn in a comic filled with so many right choices.

Blindspot rewards multiple readings as one begins to absorb and understand Pyle's use of color and the subtle shifts in the story's tone as a result. Rite-of-passage fiction is a genre that's been mined quite deeply, but Pyle's sensitivity, skill and cleverness make this book a uniquely rewarding experience. I would recommend it in particular to junior high school students, especially boys.

The Examined Life: Alan's War

Rob reviews the translated edition of Emmanuel Guibert's ALAN'S WAR, his adaptation of the memories and stories of Alan Cope (First Second).

ALAN'S WAR is a triumph, though not necessarily for its surface qualities. As Tom Spurgeon noted in his review, this isn't really a World II book or even a typical biography. I saw it as a personal manifesto of sorts, a conversion narrative. Religious conversion narratives have certain common characteristics no matter the belief, and one of the cornerstones is that the narrative must be told and retold. Alan Cope, the subject of this book, went through a process of deconversion from standard religious practice but took many years to become "reborn", in his own words. The flashpoint of that rebirth was his dawning understanding that personal relationships were not only the foundations of life's meaning, but that he himself had held the key all along to his happiness. That key was personified in the way Cope had the uncanny ability to befriend so many different kinds of people. That ability was due in no small part to Cope's natural ability as a storyteller, someone that people wanted to talk to. His ability to spin interesting anecdotes was his way of applying flint to steel, sparking conversation that might lead to friendship.

Indeed, near the end of his life, that's precisely how Cope became friends with the artist Emmanuel Guibert. A chance meeting led to Cope regaling Guibert with a few stories, and Cope immediately realized what he had on his hands. Cope had spent his later years focusing on his memories, which were no doubt shaped by his new outlook on life. Guibert met Cope on an island off France and learned that Cope was an American who had left his country for good nearly fifty years earlier. Guibert offered to illustrate Cope's memories of World War II and the two men became close friends. There's a sense in which one can sense how much Cope loved telling his story because he was telling it to his friend. It's obvious that Cope regrets what he considers years of lost opportunities to stay close to many of his friends. That sadness pervades the last section of the book, along with anger towards older belief systems that he now views as hindrances. That sadness is tempered by the sense that Cope is finally getting it right with Guibert, giving even the most downbeat of sections a certain bounce.

Guibert's art in this book is simple but stunning. Certain sequences have a level of detail that's breathtaking, while much of his figure work is iconic but expressive. Guibert flips back and forth from pages with no backgrounds (even when climbing a mountain, which was a stark and interesting choice) to panoramic scenes of nature. The book has a washed-out appearance, perhaps mimicking an old book of photographs. That washed-out appearance is literal, this film clip demonstrates his technique. Using that waterjet device to etch the paper with an impression and applying ink to make images appear seemingly out of nowhere is an apt description of what Cope does.

Cope's skill as a storyteller does not lie in the ability to render the quotidian poignant. Rather, it's his ability to bring others to vivid life in his recollections that makes each tangent and detour so compulsively readable. He was naturally drawn to outsiders, individualists, iconoclasts and artists. Even when he was a fundamentalist Christian, he couldn't help but want to be around people who had a certain sensitivity. While they would certainly wind up having a significant influence on his beliefs, the mere fact that he was drawn to them showed that he wanted his beliefs to be challenged. The setting of war, one where an individual is supposed to mold one's identity in the image of his country, was a sharp contrast to the memories that were important to Cope. The way he disobeyed orders and made friends with a local German family and the warm affection he felt toward them was one of the most striking sequences in the book.

One thing that is unspoken but still felt was the way Cope evolved the further he got away from the U.S. and spent time abroad--both in distance and time. The kind of people he met and interacted with, especially as he got away from the army, reflected Cope's own growth and interests. He left America ostensibly because of what he felt was the pernicious influence of fundamentalism and a shallowness of thinking. While this conclusion was certainly valid, leaving America would seem to have concretized his own initial transformation. Abandoning his old country was a boldly symbolic way of abandoning a way of thinking and living that he had come to hate in himself, and this is what America became to him.

Two future volumes are planned, one about Cope's childhood in California and another about the friendship between Cope and Guibert. It's clear that these books are true labors of love for Guibert. The responsibility and opportunity to record and immortalize the stories of his friend are something he obviously takes very seriously, but Guibert never forgets to let each page breathe. There's nothing ponderous about these books, which owes as much to the playfulness of Guibert's style as it does to the breeziness of Cope's storytelling style. A subtle and dry wit pervades every story, making Cope and Guibert perfect complements and collaborators. ALAN'S WAR is a powerful testament to the way memory shapes identity and vice-versa and the way
friendship enriches lives and creates meaning.