Chasing Inspiration: Bubbles and Gondola

Bubbles and Gondola (NBM) is an odd little book.At its essence, it's a book about writing, or rather, a book about inspiration. Artist Renaud Dillies poses an interesting idea in the course of this story about a mouse named Charlie: inspiration is sometimes scary, a thing to be avoided. Writer's block is a result of fear as much as it is a lack of ideas. Over the course of the book, Charlie (a writer), comes face to face with the emissary of Solitude, a bird who offers him all sorts of helpful advice. Charlie is alone in order to work, but the solitude of the desk and his fear of inspiration causes him to constantly waste time. His feeble attempts at writing all end up on the trash heap, the result of being on the titular gondola ride that simply circles around and around. Charlie shares a meal with his family, attends a carnival, winds up playing in a band at a bar and throws back a few as he battles this vertigo. Despite the whimsical drawing and fanciful setting, one can't help but feel that this is an intensely personal book for Dillies. This isn't simply a book about writer's block, but about a specific kind of aspiration and the blocks against that aspiration.

Later in the book, Charlie talks to a city worker that the the lights he put up for the carnival are beautiful things that inspire happiness, if only for a brief moment. He compares it to a child blowing bubbles, to "make things prettier, and ultimately more bearable". He's getting at the existential purpose for creating art: to make things that inspire that sort of feeling in others. It's an awesome, terrifying responsibility if one thinks too much about the effect and less about the process of creation. It gets back to Lynda Barry's invocation of the two questions that destroy creativity: "Is this good? Does this suck?" An artist cannot think about the impact of a potential work and create at the same time, and that gets to the heart of this book. That theme is carried out with a falling motif: Charlie is afraid to fall and afraid of heights, and is constantly put in that position in this book. When he finally drunkenly falls from a lamp post and then later drops a beloved coffee mug, the impact of both events frees him. In a sense, the ship painted on the side of the coffee mug is now freed from his own imagination, which allows him to free his own imagination and start to write.

Dillies' anthropomorphic style feels quite familiar, mixing George Herriman with contemporaries like Lewis Trondheim. The cute, whimsical nature of his drawings is given weight with page after page of dense hatching and cross-hatching. The book's muted color pattern also reminds me a bit of reading a children's fairy tale book of some kind, an idea further advanced with several dream-like sequences. I thought the art acted as a counter to the intense nature of Charlie's struggle; the cuteness of the characters belies their sense of pain, just as it's impossible to immediately detect emotional anguish in someone at first glance in real life. The fantasy sequences further serve to deflect Charlie's angst, even as Dillies circles closer and closer as to why his mouse is suffering from writer's block. It's difficult and even painful at times to create something beautiful, especially when the artist spends a lot of time trying to figure out if something they create is beautiful as they're creating it. The answers to the two questions must always be made by others, which is both incredibly difficult to swallow and the only way an artist can be productive. Dillies suggests that embracing fear is the only way to overcome it and reach back to the simple feeling of being a child blowing a bubble--or scrawling something on a piece of paper.

NBM Spotlight: Yslaire/Carriere, Nix, De Crecy, Geary

Let's run through a number of recent releases from NBM.

The Sky Over The Louvre, by Bernar Yslaire & Jean-Claude Carriere. This is the latest volume of NBM's series done in conjunction with the Louvre and French publisher Futuropolis. It's also the biggest and flashiest, with the script written by legendary French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere and art by hugely popular Belgian cartoonist Bernar Yslaire. Carrier wrote most of the scripts for surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel as well as scripts for Milos Forman and Louis Malle, among others. This was his first comic, and what was surprising was how relatively spare the text was. That was partly illusory, as there are several text sections, but the creators found a way to emphasize image above all else. Yslaire is a scratchy and scribbly penciler whose line reminds
me of MAD's Mort Drucker, believe it or not. His characters have long, narrow faces, prominent and pointy noses, puckered-up lips and retain a lively naturalism even when their actions are cartoony. He wisely uses a highly muted palette so as to make the actual paintings depicted in this book really pop off the page.


That's a fitting treatment, considering that the book is about the earliest days of the Louvre right before Robespierre's Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Its main protagonists are the famous painter David (founder of the Louvre) and Robespierre himself. As a narrative, The Sky Over The Louvre is simple, as it follows the two friends as their relationship fractures in light of The Terror and Robespierre's obsession with David depicting the Supreme Being in a painting. The through-line of the narrative focuses on a mysterious young boy named Jules Stern, whose presence becomes the catalyst for the conflict between the book's protagonists.


Thematically, this book is complex. The precise relationship between Jules and David is unclear, though the homoeroticism surrounding the aesthetics of the Revolution is quite evident. The intersection between art and politics is another major theme, as David is happy to act as official portrait propagandist for the Revolution (painting portraits of martyrs and training
future generations of artists). Robespierre is portrayed as a somewhat sympathetic figure despite the paranoia of the Terror; he's an idealist given absolute power. Still, David is willing to along with this until Robespierre becomes obsessed with depicting the new Supreme Being, reintroducing the specter of religion back into the culture. Once the guillotine caught up with
Robespierre, it didn't take long for David to glom on to his true model for Supreme Being: the "handsome like antiquity" likeness of Napoleon.


The book is filled with people facing a vacuum of morality, as the Committee For Public safety's reliance on "reason" becomes just as capricious and merciless for the people of France as the old monarchy. As a result, it's easy for Committee members to attempt to justify their actions in the interest of rooting out traitors and protecting the Republic, a story that doesn't have to be presented as a history lesson for it to become instantly familiar to a modern reader. At the same time, David's willingness to sell out the revolution and Robespierre's absolute devotion to his principles (no matter how insane) muddies the waters as for whom the reader should feel sympathy. At just 66 pages, The Sky Over The Louvre moves along at an economical clip, quickly & efficiently setting up its protagonists and their conflicts. That efficiency allows for long looks at historical paintings, while the oversized album size provides a proper format for appreciating the sumptuous art.


Salvatore Volume I, by Nicolas De Crecy. This compendium of the first two translated volumes from De Crecy is slyly charming both in terms of its narrative and its aesthetic appeal. The story follows a dog mechanic named Salvatore who surreptitiously steals parts from his customers in order to build a strange vehicle to take him to his true love, half a world away. De Crecy uses an anthropomorphic style that's both cute and slightly disturbing. The character design is disturbing because De Crecy clearly finds it funnier to draw his characters closer to animal than human, and as a result his choices of pig, bull and cow lead to hilariously grotesque and bloated figures. The narrator of the story is frequently harshly judgmental, so much so that even the characters comment on the narrator from time to time when it explores and sometimes condemns their questionable moral decisions.


What I like best about this comic is the way De Crecy slips between whimsical flights of fancy and harsh naturalism. One of the main characters in the book is a myopic pig named Amondine. Her husband worked at a slaughterhouse until he was downsized--and the form that this downsizing took was his being turned into meat! It's one of many quietly grim gags in this book, like a piglet of Amondine's being captured and strapped to a cross by a group of goths before he's rescued by a teenage anthropomorphic cat. While there's a definite narrative to follow in this book, what makes it delightful is De Crecy's willingness to follow a tangent for a long time. There's an extended sequence where the half-blind Amondine drives her car off a cliff but doesn't realize she's in great peril as the car bounces on an airplane, soars off a ski lift, and crashes on a roof. This is one of many such sequences in the book, and that incidental character material winds up being the true meat of the book. The rich colors by Ruby & Walter mesh perfectly with De Crecy's scribbly line, complementing the relaxed energy of the pencils without overwhelming them.

The Lives of Sacco and Venzetti, by Rick Geary. This is the latest in Geary's "Treasury of XXth Century Murder" series, and each volume tends to have a different theme depending on the historical event he chooses to cover. Famous Players was about the ways in which the magic of Hollywood was truly founded on lies and illusions that in many ways poison the art that proceeds out of it. The Terrible Axe-Man Of New Orleans was about the ways in which fear can spin out of control, take on a life of its own, and wound the psyche of a city. Sacco & Vanzetti is the rare Geary book that's more about the trial than it is about the crime (though there's certainly a great deal of detail about that as well). As always, Geary editorializes as little as possible, but this case was considered worldwide to be a matter of red-scare blaming and a railroading of two innocent men.


Geary does acknowledge that there's at least the possibility that the gun that killed one of the victims of the crime could have belonged to Sacco (thanks to advanced ballistics techniques), but the fact that the judge was quoted as delighting in punishing the two Italian anarchists and the legal system made it impossible for any appeal to have a chance of success certainly demonstrates that the prosecution lacked anything near the sort of proof necessary to earn a conviction. The case was a simple matter of xenophobia and a fear of the anarchist movement driving the legal system and derailing justice, and there is an obvious resonance between this story and the current xenophobia in the US. As always, Geary's pencils are incredibly tight, as he's the master of hatching. The detail on suits alone makes this book a visual feast, but it's the way he brings people alive that's truly impressive. The facial expressions and body language of the men and women in court is what secretly tells the story; a sneer from the judge, a raised eyebrow from a lawyer tell much more than their actual words. I'm eager to see what he intends to tackle next.


Kinky & Cosy, by Nix. This translated collection of gags about marauding teenage sisters is billed as "shocking! disgusting!" as well as "darkly subversive". It's certainly mild in comparison to actual shock humor, and the gags themselves are more hit than miss. That said, there's a certain self-possessed weirdness about the whole enterprise. The hardback cover has cut-outs for the googly-eyes that pop out from underneath it. There are bizarre, entirely self-indulgent fumetti segments in the book featuring various men dressing up as Kinky, Cosy or their parents. There's an entire section devoted to "Brain Teasers": mazes, matching images, and assorted counting games featuring the strip's cast. Of course, they do things like throw anvils at the teacher, so it's not quite a typical activity page.

Nix's work reminds me a little of Joe Daly, only without the existential ruminations and level of detail in his art. The best way to read it is not to expect shock or killer gags, but instead to settle in and enjoy the strange rhythms of this book. As silly and absurd as this world is, it's clear that Nix has a great deal of genuine affection and enthusiasm for it. He seems to enjoy dropping in on these characters to see what odd thing they're up to with little concern as to either traditional comedic set-ups or lock-solid punchlines. Instead, we get strips about the mother's various forms of vibrator (including buying one from a roaming vibrator truck and finding a miniature alien space probe) as well as her falling in love with a recycling bin. Kinky & Cosy is a singularly odd entry in an increasingly crowded market of edgy humor books, one that's gentler in nature than one might think at first but is not distinctive for its actual jokes.

TCJ Post #28: The Year of Loving Dangerously

Rob reviews the new book from Ted Rall & Pedro Callejo, THE YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY, over at The Comics Journal.

Embedded: Joe and Azat

Rob reviews the new book from Jesse Lonergan, JOE AND AZAT (NBM).

Jesse Lonergan's JOE AND AZAT occupies some unusual territory. Part of it is a slightly distanced account of a country under totalitarian rule like Guy Delisle's trio of Asian travelogues. Part of it features the sort of first-person reportage of someone who sought to become part of a community before telling its story, like Joe Sacco's work. There's certainly a sense of the sort of chaos and corruption that Ted Rall brings to the table in his comics. These are all important features of this story, but the real focus of the book is on a single relationship: the friendship between the narrator Joe and his Turkmen friend Azat. It's a friendship of remarkable tenderness on the part of both men, and this book seems like a tribute not only to that friendship but to the dreams Azat held so dear.

The book is "loosely based" on Lonergan's own Peace Corps experience in Turkmenistan after the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of the former SSRs fell under the influence of brutal strongmen, many of whom took their leadership cues from Caligula or Pol Pot. That bit of data quickly becomes a background detail of the book, along with the way daily life was often an ordeal. Part of the point of the book was the way Lonergan's stand-in Joe marveled at and struggled with the way Turkmen redefined logic and reality as a matter of course. Part of that craziness was the injection of the ideas of capitalism into a society that didn't have a lot of natural resources nor any understanding of how it worked after 70 years of socialist dictatorship.

Lonergan's line is decidedly unfussy and even cartoony. His figures are simple and expressive, and he varied the visuals through two strategies. First, he employed a variety of panel sizes and shapes, with the use of big circular panels to highlight drama, emotional tension or panoramic views. Second, he made extensive use of negative space both as a way of breaking up the page and creating transitions, as well as it being another method of heightening emotional tension. It's obvious that Lonergan really enjoyed drawing Turkmen characters, from their bulbous noses to their angular facial features to their complexions. Their easily-identifiable characteristics made them perfect for cartoon representation. Lonergan clearly contrasted the figure of Joe with the Turkmen, given that the character was blond, bespectacled and had sort of a weak chin. He was far from the ideal Hollywood American that the Turkmen imagined him to be, yet that was the way he was seen.

The synecdochic manner in which the Turkmen treated Joe spoke to the way that America represented something they desperately wanted to emulate without understanding how to do so. When the realization started to dawn that the Turkmen perhaps were not only not all going to be rich and famous like in the movies, but also in a sense left completely out of the cultural discourse, a sense of panic ensued. That sense of abjection, of being thrown down and marginalized, was embodied by Azat's brutish brother. He combined a sense of entitlement (riches and glory without work) and resentment of a lifestyle out of his grasp with a desperate sense of not just being left behind, but being forgotten. There's a funny but powerful scene at the end where Azat's brother punches Joe out at a wedding, and then embraces him when he learns that he's leaving, shouting "Remember me!"

Azat, on the other hand, is an inveterate optimist with boundless enthusiasm. For him, becoming friends with Joe was the equivalent of becoming friends with America. His approach was the opposite of his brother's--he didn't want Joe to do something for him, but rather wanted to present himself to Joe as a great ambassador for Turkmenistan. It wasn't fakery on his part, but a genuine desire to create a link between what he thought of as two great nations. His greatest fantasy was for Joe to fall in love with a Turkmen girl and remain in the country, their children growing up together as friends. That fantasy was due in part to Azat being forced to marry out of convenience instead of getting to marry the girl he loved. At least if he was with his friend Joe, he'd have some kind of love in his life.

Despite being the narrator, the character of Joe is very much a cypher. He wanted to experience another culture, but didn't want to do it as a tourist. At the same time, his desire for immersion had its limits, both in terms of involvement and time. He wanted an experience as part of the Peace Corps but not a conversion. Azat wanted Joe to want Turkmenistan to be his home, but Joe was only ever on a journey that had his own home waiting at the end. Beyond learning that he wanted a new experience, we learn little of Joe's desires or personality. He's entirely a reactive character, a reader surrogate who keeps people at a bit of a distance. There's a closeness that develops between Joe and Azat, but Joe knew their friendship had an expiration date in a way that Azat never wanted to admit. Lonergan's approach here is different from Sacco's in that his Joe character isn't simply there to collect the stories of other people, but to have his own experience and fulfill his own desires. The fact that these desires are presented rather superficially shifts the focus entirely to Azat as a protagonist.

Joe becomes, in some sense, the object of desire for both Azat and his brother. It was odd to read a story so heavily dependent on a single narrator that revealed so little about him, yet at the same time presented another culture to the reader through his eyes. It made the story resonate with tenderness yet still feel a bit cold and distant to the reader. Joe never really commits himself to the people who meets in Turkmenistan, and that lack of commitment on the part of the narrator led to a lack of connection to me as a reader. It's still a tremendously entertaining read, but it wound up perhaps being a bit breezier than the author might have intended. It's a fascinating book in a number of ways, flooding the reader with all sorts of visceral images, from the bazaars to eating to drink in huge crowds. What we are left with is a snapshot, not a fully formed and rounded image.

Two Takes On Murder & Suffering: Famous Players & Arlene's Heart

Rob takes a look at two very different looks at murder and violence: FAMOUS PLAYERS, by Rick Geary; and ARLENE'S HEART, by Victoria Frances. Both books are from NBM.


Rick Geary has long been comics' go-to man for grisly historical events, with his series of books on famous and mysterious deaths from NBM. After many books on 19th century deaths, he's only recently started to dip into the 20th century, and FAMOUS PLAYERS doesn't really solve a mystery as it does tear away a facade. It's about the death of Hollywood film director William Desmond Taylor and the hysteria that resulted after his murder was discovered. In a very matter-of-fact manner, Geary first lays out a brief history of Los Angeles, how the film industry came to dominate it (much to the consternation of the locals) in the 1920s, and how Taylor figured into it. Our tabloid and gossip obsessed culture certainly didn't arise out of a vacuum, and Geary draws a pretty straight line between the murder of Taylor (along with the trial of comedian Fatty Arbuckle) as the events that gave rise to the overwhelming popularity of scandal sheets as well as a repressive film code that stunted film for nearly fifty years.


Geary's storytelling is both methodical and leisurely. He wants to make the reader understand the era, one that he clearly has some affection for. It's obvious that he spent a lot of time with photo reference of the era, given the loving reproductions of not only the principals of the event, but chapter-leading illustrations of other famous stars of the era. Of course, scratch the surface, as this murder did, and one can find all sorts of hypocrisy. This wound up being an unsolved murder, but Geary carefully takes us through all of the known (and substantiated) evidence in a methodical manner. He first recreates the discovery of Taylor's body by his cook/valet (and his subsequent hysterical reaction), the arrival of the police, a weird pronouncement by a "doctor" who subsequently vanished, and curious onlookers & neighbors who disturbed the forensic evidence. Throughout the book, Geary uses intense hatching to add texture and weight to his otherwise thin line. It also gives a certain power to his caricatures, bringing his comics a certain nervous energy that brings his characters to life. Lastly, it draws the reader's eye around the page, given his spare use of spotting blacks.


After stepping the reader through the craziness of the body's discovery, Geary then takes a step back and tries to recreate the night of the murder, based on witness testimony. Geary scrupulously tries to stick the facts as they were known and debunks gossip and outright scandal sheet fabrication that tried to fan the flames of sensationalism. Of course, there was no need for sensationalism, given that truth was far stranger than fiction. Details of Taylor's life eventually emerged, creating a portrait of a man who changed his name and left his old life behind (one hat included a wife and daughter) after he came to terms with the true nature of his sexuality. This would be a trend in Hollywood that continues to this day: the unfortunate closeting of sexuality to deflect press scrutiny and preserve public image.

That digging revealed a long list of potential suspects with all sorts of motives: jilted starlets, drug-dependent actresses, psychotic mothers, studio heads, past and current servants, former soldiers under his command and a host of others. Geary patiently noted how each of them were debunked or dismissed as potential suspects, given alibis and shaky motives. The fact that the case was unsolved, combined with the multiple trials for Arbuckle, drew a lot of national vitriol from various public morality groups for Hollywood. This led to the shackling Hays code, which restricted film content for decades. As an aside, it was an interesting coincidence that comic books rose to become such a cultural force within a decade of the code's enforcement, especially since they were rife with precisely the sort of images the code banned. This book doesn't really have an ending per se; instead, it posits the murder of Taylor as the first chapter of a bizarre series of tragedies and scandals--some coincidential, others self-inflicted--that the land of make-believe and fantasy continues to generate. It's telling that in the book's final image, Geary reveals that Taylor is interred in the Hollywood Forever cemetary under his real name--the illusion stripped away in the face of mortality.

If Geary's book plumbs the source of mystery and misery, Spanish painter Victoria Frances seeks to wallow in the pain of human misery so as to give it a name and exorcise it. In ARLENE'S HEART, Frances touches on nearly every kind of pain experienced by the downtrodden of the world as a sort of dark fantasy world that is experienced as a cleansing gauntlet by her doll heroine. Painting in the Japanese "dollfie" style, we are introduced to Arlene, a homeless girl who makes dolls and whose fondest wish is to become a doll herself. After she dies of cancer (which included a scarring mastectomy), she gets her wish and becomes a doll who starts travelling unseen through a world that has some magical qualities (like a woman reborn as a butterfly) but is mostly horrific. We are introduced to oppressed gay and transgendered people, abused women, women oppressed by religion, children with cancer, abused animals, junkies, homeless old women (who doubled as witches), people suffering the effects of war and landmines, and children suffering from poisoned environments. The doll empathizes with each of them as she searches for her heart, and she finally finds it in the city, a discovery that gave comfort to all.

This book (and it's illustrated prose, not a comic in any sense) is enormously heart-felt, earnest and well-meaning. Frances has great skill as a fantasy/gothic painter. Unfortunately, the book is as subtle as a sledgehammer, with Frances feeling that she needed to spell out her fairy-tale symbols that fairly screamed out their meaning on the page. It didn't help that she also tacked on an epilogue that further explicated the meanings behind her images. The other problem with the book is that her airbrushed and photorealist style has a cold, distancing feel. As a reader, I felt no empathy with the parade of woe that Frances relentlessly described on page after page. The book's climax, where Arlene befriended a seal only to see it clubbed to death by hunters, felt more like a Johnny Ryan joke than a definitive condemnation of cruelty visited upon the innocent. Frances was ambitious in trying to create a personal work that dealt with political issues, but she overreached from the book's start and wound up with a pretty-looking mess that bordered on kitsch.

Treasure Troves: Bringing Up Father and Happy Hooligan

Rob reviews the NBM "Forever Nuts" series reprints of two classic comic strip series from early in the 20th century: BRINGING UP FATHER, by George McManus; and HAPPY HOOLIGAN, by Frederick Opper.

If this decade is the golden age of comics reprints, it's only fitting that NBM (one of the oldest alt-comics publishers) should launch a series of reprints from the golden age of comic strips. With their Forever Nuts series, NBM is collecting "classic screwball strips", comics that would have a profound and lasting influence on the history of American comedy and pop culture in general. Frederick B. Opper's HAPPY HOOLIGAN was one of the earliest popular comic strips, evolving past 19th ideas of cartooning and creating formal ideas that would quickly become conventions. George McManus' BRINGING UP FATHER, which debuted a decade later, was one of the first modern strips, making a different sort of draftsmanship popular, one that would be the standard for comedic strips for fifty years. The design of both books is simple and unfussy in trying to present the strips in a fairly large format. BRINGING UP FATHER puts two strips on a page, whereas the Sunday-only HAPPY HOOLIGAN has one six-paneled strip per page. BRINGING UP FATHER also has a handy notes section, contextualizing the fashion, news and pop culture references that McManus threw into his strip.


The approaches NBM used for these comics was quite different in the collections. For BRINGING UP FATHER, they reprinted the first two years of the strip in their entirety. On the other hand, NBM printed a sampling of strips from 1902-1913 for HAPPY HOOLIGAN. From a historical standpoint, it's interesting to see the way that McManus slowly honed his craft, refining his storytelling and line over time. From a reader's standpoint, it made this collection a tough read on occasion. In part, that's because the strip had a simple premise that McManus did variations on over and over again: Jiggs was a common laborer who somehow struck it rich, but never wanted to abandon his old friends, food or drinking habits. His wife Maggie and daughter Nora, on the other hand, were inveterate social climbers who were constantly embarassed by his behavior. Jiggs inadvertently behaving badly spurred virtually every gag in the series; in later years, McManus would punch up the strip considerably by having Maggie react violently, throwing plates & rolling pins at him.


In later years, McManus would find ways to add a lot more variety to his settings and set-ups, making something funny happen or get stated in every panel rather than relying on his predictable punchlines. In the early years, McManus frequently recycled gags with little variation. There were also obviously days when deadlines for other strips led to some lazy storytelling decisions: no backgrounds, smudged & hurried lettering, awkward character placement, etc. Still, he could afford the occasional stumble due to the sturdiness of his class-clash premise and his masterful character design. Newspaper comic strips were aimed at the common working man, and so it was no surprise to see a strip mocking the mincing excesses of the upper classes become a huge hit.


When McManus took Jiggs' family on a European vacation, he opened up a new world of possibilities of gags and embarassing situations for him. The language barrier experienced in various countries fueled any number of gags, as did jokes like Jiggs being confused by the canals of Venice, repelled by lederhosen in Germany and baffled by the food in France. McManus was also able to build jokes around boat and train travel, often stretching them out for weeks. It was obvious that this nearly year-long trip abroad reinvigorated him as an artist, because some of his most beautiful and complex drawings came during this portion of the book. When McManus took the time to construct a fully-realized environment for Jiggs to bounce off of, that's when the strip really started to shine.

As the strip went on, McManus became more and more comfortable with his hero, varying his poses and gestures for the greatest comedic impact. The squatness of his character, with his gut thrusting forward and a slight stoop in his back as a result, made him funny-looking to begin with. It also gave the strip a certain propulsive quality, as a Jiggs who always looked like he was tipping forward was funny to watch move from panel to panel, drawing the reader's eye. McManus was a dutiful observer of popular trends in any number of areas, but most especially fashion. His women (including Maggie), were always adorned with the latest styles, giving his strip a certain verisimilitude to the readers of its time even as McManus was mocking fashion. Still, it wasn't until Maggie became a more worthy opponent for Jiggs that the strip truly became great. This volume was about laying out how the artist of one of the longest-running strips of all time got his start and providing a complete document of this process. At some point, I think it would be beneficial for readers to see a single greatest-hits volume of McManus' work, with material drawn from across a few decades.


This was roughly the approach used for HAPPY HOOLIGAN: a smattering of strips across time. As a reader, this approach really worked. Opper very quickly got a reader up to speed on what was happening and what might be coming up next in a story, and the variations on the strip's simple theme that were featured in this volume were quite clever. Simply put, Happy Hooligan was a hobo (wearing an iconic tomato can on his head) who tried to helpfully butt into other people's problems, only to make things much worse and draw punishment from everyone around him (especially the police). He was accompanied by his yellow-clad brother, Gloomy Gus, who first predicted doom and then usually made a point of somehow managing to profit from his brother's woes. Over this decade's worth of strips, Opper introduced their British brother Montmorency (who talked like a duke but dressed like a hobo), their three nephews who were more clones than brothers (and who obviously influenced Donald Duck's nephews), and characters from other Opper strips like Alphonse and Gaston (the ridiculously polite Frenchmen).


The difference between the two books is as much where the cartoonists themselves stood at that point in their careers. McManus was in his late 20s, coming into his own with his first big hit. This volume recorded his growing pains as he tried to keep his concept fresh and found him not always succeeding. On the other hand, Opper was 40 when he created Happy Hooligan and had been an enormously successful, popular and influential cartoonist for twenty years. He was one of the stalwarts of the legendary humor magazine Puck, where he worked in a finely detailed style after his cartooning idol, Thomas Nast. This was a cartoonist at the height of his powers who then embarked on a second act for his career as a newspaper comic strip pioneer. Indeed, Opper deliberately dumbed down his style to appeal to a wider audience, both in terms of the complexity of his line and his subject matter.


Even dumbed down, Opper proved repeatedly that he was a master. There's a fluidity in his strips that was often absent in the more illustrative early strips of the era. The panel-to-panel transitions, the way he drew action and violence, the way he layered gag on top of gag and the way he gave the reader something to look at in every panel was a direct progenitor of both classic animation and artists like Milt Gross, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder and Al Jaffee (for starters). Opper's characters had a touch of the grotesque in their design, with googly eyes, odd postures, and crazily colored clothes. This collection also had the advantage of jumping forward in time and cutting some of the repetitiveness of the premise, as Opper kept adding characters and doing different variations on his theme. One of the funniest was Opper taking months to get his characters on a boat to Europe; they were prevented week after week from even getting on the boat--and it was a big event when they did.

It must be noted that neither strip was really meant to be read in collected form, and some of the repetitiveness of the strips was intentional to bring new readers up to speed quickly. As such, I wouldn't recommend reading either one of these volumes straight through. A week's worth of strips at a time is what I would recommend a day in order to keep the reading experience fresh. That said, Opper was more skilled at taking a simple premise and finding endless ways to come up with creative variations, like a blues guitarist working with three chords and still springing forth with memorable creations. For the casual fan of comics history, I might wait for future volumes of BRINGING UP FATHER to see McManus at his best, but every fan of gag cartooning in particular needs to read HAPPY HOOLIGAN.

Two Kinds of Adaptations: First Time and The Raven & Other Poems

Rob reviews a couple of recent releases from NBM, both of which feature artists adapting stories from a single writer. THE RAVEN AND OTHER POEMS is illustrated by Gahan Wilson, while FIRST TIME is an erotica anthology featuring a host of artists interpreting the stories of Sibylline.



I always thought that CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED was a truly odd duck in the world of comics. They essentially mangled works of literature, paring it down to a more palatable length and getting industry hacks to illustrate them. That approach changed with the 90s revival and current reprinting and expansion of same by Papercutz, a division of NBM. These comics use high production values and try to match artists with subject matter that seems right up their alley. In the case of illustrating THE RAVEN AND OTHER POEMS, legendary NEW YORKER cartoonist Gahan Wilson could not have been a better choice. It's important to note that this volume is not a comic, but rather a series of poems with accompanying illustrations. The illustrations are subservient to and not in concert with the text, but nonetheless echo the sheer obsessive passion of Edgar Allan Poe.



Wilson manages to create a vibratory quality in his line by combining a lot of loopy lines that leave a lot of space with dense cross-hatching. The way he constructs his figures is fascinating, piling on geometric shapes that add up to characters. His proficiency in depicting the morbid made him an ideal match for Poe, but there's also a playfulness to his line, a sense of whimsy, that also fits in with Poe's lilting verses and sharp wit. While the illustrations for the titular poem were appropriately gloomy, the real show-stopper here was what Wilson did for the poem "The Conqueror Worm". This apocalyptic, gruesome poem feels like a predecessor to HP Lovecraft's stories, and Wilson's grotesque stylings live up to Poe's decriptions. Fans of either Poe or Wilson should seek this book out, even if Wilson declined to really attempt to adapt it to comics form.


Adapting erotica into comics form has mostly resulted in predictably inane narratives and/or art that that failed to arouse. Of course, the line between pornography and erotica is as nebulous as the very definition of porn itself. The anthology FIRST TIME valiantly tries to fly under the banner of erotica as its concept surrounds stories fleshing out first experiences with various aspects of sexuality. The writer, Sybilline, is a woman who wrote each story from a woman's perspective, in a further attempt to subvert the usually male-centric nature of porn.



The results were decidedly mixed, both in terms of narrative and arousal. While the concept of "first time" was clever, the stories themselves were remarkably predictable, even when a deliberate twist was thrown in. For example, the story about a woman "meeting" a man in a bar who was actually her husband lacked any sense of mystery. Some of the more light-hearted stories (like a woman buying her first dildo) weren't actually funny, just inane. The dialogue didn't help matters in most of the stories, especially those that tilted more towards accounts of specific sexual acts rather than fleshing out actual characters.

A notable exception was "1 + 1", a story about a woman's first lesbian experience. The cartoony art by Virginia Augustin was sharp and angular, adding an air of whimsy to what would turn out to be a sad story. While the "twist" of her one-night-stand being a woman was telegraphed, the way the affair turned out added a downbeat tone to a book mostly about fulfillment. In terms of pure sex appeal, the story "2 + 1", about a woman's first threesome, was the most visceral in its visual approach. Sometimes this was a bit much (like the depiction of the first kiss), but artist Vince's relentless commitment to details both explicit and decorative made the otherwise standard story a success.



The book's best story was a silent one adapted by Dave McKean. An anthology of this sort consisting entirely of silent stories might have been considerably more powerful, given the eye-popping quality of what McKean did here. It's about a man masturbating to an x-rated film on TV, his wife discovering him and seducing him, and the not-so-shocking ending where she turns on the film herself. McKean switches back and forth between a distorted photorealist style for the film and a sort of cubist/futurist take on the couple. This approach is the best in representing the kinetic qualities of sex in the entire book, as opposed to a series of still drawings.

Overall, the book feels a bit betwixt and between. The characters are well-developed enough for us to care about their sexual escapades. The stories are mostly not whimsical enough to get us to laugh with the characters as they get into sexual situations. The imagery, with the exception of McKean, is mostly the sort of stuff we've seen in other places. While the feminine perspective in narration was appreciated, it didn't seem to say much that hasn't been done in other volumes of erotica. Hopefully, if there are future volumes, they'll let the artists pursue newer avenues of representation regarding sex and won't worry about if the results are truly "erotic" or not.

Knots Tying Knots: Dungeon Zenith, Volume 3

Rob reviews the latest collection of translations from the DUNGEON: ZENITH series, BACK IN STYLE (volume 3), by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar and Boulet (NBM).

The third volume of the english translation of DUNGEON has been long-awaited, but I wouldn't recommend reading it until one has reread the first two volumes. The saga becomes increasingly plot-heavy here and immediately follows the events of the last volume. There are some ways in which the fantasy send-up/homage by Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar reminds me a bit of Jeff Smith's BONE. Both started their series on extremely lighthearted notes and spent a number of pages carefully establishing character relationships. Once Smith spent a couple of years doing that, it was off to the races with a quest, action scenes, plot twists and the like. He had earned his audience's trust before he simply shipped his characters all off into their wars by carefully but casually dropping mysterious clues as well as seeing them interact in a mundane matter. We knew each character's quirks, desires and loves as well as the ways in which they interacted with each other, which made the conflicts they wound up later all the more involving.

DUNGEON's first volume (with each volume collecting two of the original French albums) introduces us to an anthropomorphic duck named Herbert and a peculiar lizard named Marvin. Herbert's a smartass dungeon flunky and Marvin's a fierce but quirky warrior, and the whims of fate throw them together. Their hijinks manage to simultaneously parody sword 'n sorcery stories while at the same time put together a startlingly intricate, straight-faced fantasy epic. Seemingly trivial or even farcical details from these stories either have complicated backstories (explored in the Early Years stories) or have serious ramifications in later years (as detailed in the Twilight stories). The "main" narrative, or the "Zenith" story, mixes humor with action, making neither seem out of place.

That said, there's a certain grimness to be found in the two stories in BACK IN STYLE where one can begin to see how Herbert and Marvin wind up in such dire circumstances in the future. That's felt in the Keeper being kicked out of his own dungeon at the end of the first story (after a series of cleverly designed action pieces that ramped up the tension and the stakes in succession) and Herbert returning to his home city and finding a deadly welcome in the second. Both stories have a downbeat, uncertain ending--a far cry from the more neatly tied-off story threads in earlier volumes. Despite the intricacies of the plot, building on dozens of story developments from prior volumes, these stories work because of the way Sfar & Trondheim found every aspect of the story on character relationships.

Herbert and Marvin are obviously the foundational relationship of the series, but the interactions between Herbert and his oily nemesis Delacor established a delightful, mutual aggravation. Delacor's general sliminess (hiring a lawyer to seize the dungeon) made him a source of friction for everyone he encountered. The ass-kicking princess, Isis, was another interesting catalyst in the way she prodded Herbert and moved so easily in the company of thieves. The dungeon Keeper himself emerges as a sympathetic character, taking on a paternal quality to his minions when he realized he was about to lose it all. Herbert's parents are introduced in this volume, and their complicated relationship with him adds another layer of intrigue to what was once a seemingly simple parody character. Even seemingly incidental characters like the postman Pollyplume, a sad sack thrust willingly into an exciting new life, add
new perspectives to the saga.

The most startling change to be found in this volume is that Trondheim passed on the art duties to Boulet. For the most part, Boulet stays faithful to the character design that Trondheim established. However, the quality of his line is much slicker and clearer than Trondheim's slightly ramshackle line. The effect is a jarring one; the idiosyncratic nature of Trondheim's art was a perfect fit for the slightly off-kilter nature of a saga that was half serious and half joking. Boulet doesn't really try to make funny drawings; even ridiculous scenes have a slickness to them that takes a while to get used to. I almost would have preferred an artist try a completely different approach (like in the Dungeon: Monstres side-series) than this sort of hybrid approach. That said, Boulet did quickly master drawing a cast of thousands and really is a master at propelling adventure stories forward. The sequence where Herbert and his friends escape from a tavern by taking to the rooftops and eventually flying away was a particular highlight, a spectacular and visceral set of panels that perfectly balance drama and wisecracks.

Despite missing Trondheim's line, the Sfar/Trondheim duo did not disappoint in this latest volume, taking crazy story risks and throwing in plot twists and character reversals at the drop of a hat. DUNGEON remains my favorite genre-related series of all time, and anything that helps new volumes appear more quickly is fine by me. If Boulet is going to be the regular artist for Zenith from now on, it'll be interesting to see how he adjusts his style in future volumes.

Fending Off Stasis: Little Nothings 2

Rob reviews the latest collection of Lewis Trondheim's strips from his blog, LITTLE NOTHINGS 2: THE PRISONER SYNDROME (NBM).



Cartoonists are often known for living a sedentary, secluded lifestyle. By its nature, drawing is usually a solitary pursuit, demanding hours of labor. The great Lewis Trondheim, through his comics blog on his website, seems dedicated to being the exception to this rule. The strip that lends this collection its name discusses "the prisoner's syndrome" wherein a lack of activity leads to a further lack of desire for activity, creating a vicious circle that leads to stasis and intellectual death. Trondheim has always been interested in not just art but what it means to be an artist and how this relates to being a human being in general. In his "At Loose Ends" autobio strip, he obsesses over the relationship between age and creativity and how it seems to have affected so many cartoonists. His LITTLE NOTHINGS strips act as a diary strip, of course, but they also seem to serve a larger purpose. There's a lushness to his drawings and use of color that establishes that he's drawing and coloring simply to keep that act pleasurable. By the same token, writing about amusing, poignant or bizarre moments of his own life (even if he does take creative license with certain details) is an easy way to keep a creator's story-creating facility sharp. He's "drawing from life" in both senses of the phrase--drawing what he sees, and drawing from his well of experiences.



He's careful to draw himself on the move as much as he is at home. To combat prisoner's syndrome, he intentionally accepts as many invitations to appear at comics festivals as possible. Staying in motion and seeing new things seems to be key to him to stave off intellectual decay, and these strips are a sort of exercise he's sharing with readers. Trondheim expertly elicits an emotional response from each strip, be it laughter or sympathy. What separates him from most other journal comics is that he's hilarious and a master at framing small moments into punchlines. Some of that humor is physical, like the way he draws himself swatting at tiny insects. Other strips delve into his own fantasy world, delving into some paranoic daydream. Others are situational, dominated by his own internal narrative as he negotiates his world.


Of course, I'd urge anyone interested in this book to also pick up the first volume in this series. There are echoes of the first book that sound strongly in the second. For example, when his family took in two cats in the first book, he immediately worried about one of them dying, but consoling himself that the other would be around. He has to face up to the mortality of one of the cats in this book and how it relates to his internally generated belief in karma and bad luck. Another digression in this book concerns Trondheim's adventures as president of the Angouleme comics festival, an honor he received in the first volume. He depicts being in charge as not what it was cracked up to be--he can't even get an open bar at his hotel. When the torch is passed to a new artist at the end of the festival, Trondheim allows himself a moment of self-pity, even if he is winking a bit at himself while doing it.



That dry sense of humor is what I like best about Trondheim's authorial voice. It allows him to get away with all sorts of slapstick and physical humor without seeming too silly, and also allows him to write about more serious topics without seeming too ponderous. It helps that his style, depicting characters as anthropomorphic animals, is enormously expressive & clever without being cloying or too cute. His characters are his vehicles of expression, slightly abstracted for comedic effect, while his backgrounds are often lush and naturalistically depicted. With the characters, he wants us to "read" them in the context of a narrative. With his backgrounds, he wants us to look at them (and of course, he wants to look at them as well).


Of course, Trondheim lets us in on a little secret: one's life narrative is not the same thing as one's life. Details can be forgotten or omitted, or shaped to fit a story better. His partner calls him out on one strip where he depicts his family as deliberately "defiling tradition" by opening their christmas presents early. In a later strip, his partner provides more details, showing that the way Trondheim drew it omitted crucial context and information that changed the nature of the event. Trondheim drew a corrective strip but also fumed, "I can't even do what I want." That moment, and later strips where he's reading blog comments on things he discusses in past strips, reflects his own self-awareness about the difference between narrative and experience. As readers, we are fortunate that Trondheim is a master of connecting micronarratives and simultaneously embuing them with a wide range of emotional possibilities. He's a born storyteller and can't help but spin even the smallest moments into narrative, his mind in constant motion to combat the prisoner's syndrome.

Baser Instincts: Miss Don't Touch Me

Rob reviews the recent English translation of MISS DON'T TOUCH ME, written by French author Hubert and drawn by the team of Kerascoet (NBM).


Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics once noted, a number of years ago, that what the American comics market lacked was "good crap". That is, there were plenty of adolescent super-hero comics around and a decent number of literary/art comics, but not much in the way of a true mainstream for adults. He also noted that the French were especially good at producing "good crap"; comics that one wouldn't elevate to the highest levels of art, but were still compelling in a number of ways and told a great story.

MISS DON'T TOUCH ME, recently published and translated by NBM, is a perfect example of "good crap". It's a murder-mystery story set in a turn of the 20th century French brothel. Such a story could be remarkably exploitative in the manner of a Cinemax erotic thriller, and there indeed some of those elements present. What makes this story rise above the inherent limitations of its setting and genre is the way Hubert depicts the most lurid acts in a somewhat blase' fashion. In a sense, this is as much a workplace story as it is a thriller, as the girls in the brothel have schedules and the madame fills out ledgers. Hubert also gets in some sly social commentary regarding class, especially with regard to whom ultimately takes the fall for the murders.


Above all else, it's the playful, almost bigfoot art from the husband-and-wife art team Kerascoet that gives the book a number of odd tensions. They are the artists behind the Early Years stories of DUNGEON, and their sensibilities unsurprisingly lay somewhere between Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar. Their character design has a playfulness to it that retains the practiced sexiness of the brothel's women but adds little tics here and there. There's also more than a little touch of the grotesque and the exaggerated in their character design, like the plump madame, the gangly cocaine dealer and the brutish & stumpy member of royalty who is a regular at the brothel.



The story operates on another level: fish-out-of-water situation comedy. The story follows Blance, a naive and virginal maid, who demands entrance into the brothel after her sister is murdered in cold blood and turns up as a victim of the serial killer called "The Butcher of the Dances". She manages to finagle herself a job as "Miss Don't Touch Me", a dominatrix who furiously whips those who "misbehave" and is never touched. The other women of the brothel take an instant dislike to her--especially since she replaced someone murdered by the "Butcher of the Dances". The artists take an interesting risk in making their protagonist shrill and neurotic, managing to both play this for laughs and heighten tension when she's in danger. Visually, Blanche is all angles--sharp nose, switchblade body, pointy chin. Only her eyes, when bugged out, add any roundness to her features. That heightens the contrast between her and the other women in the brothel, who are of course all curves.

After we are introduced to the premise, the story is a series of seeming allies being untrustworthy and characters with mysterious motives becoming life-savers. The story's shifting sands keep the reader guessing as to who's really responsible for the crimes, even if Blanche quickly becomes gripped with certainty as to the identity of the killers. The climax of the story, when we learn just how wrapped up certain members of the brothel are with the serial killer story, is nasty and visceral in a way that's unexpected. After a number of light storytelling touches (especially with the introduction of Josephine, a transexual African-American prostitute whose shtick is to resemble Josephine Baker), the end was particularly grim. Kerascoet depicted Blanche's eyes bugging out of her head when she was committing acts of violence or generally alarmed, but in that final scene, there was a certain steely resolve in her eyes.



While Blanche does take her revenge, the story doesn't exactly have a happy ending. Blanche is still a bit adrift and realizes she has nowhere else to go but the brothel (a bittersweet realization), the real killers go unpunished because of their prominence in society, and one of the story's few seeming innocents goes to a swift and brutal execution. Those odd minor notes modulate the story's lurid nature. That luridness is almost always present in stories playing up the intersection between sex and death, and the artists do little to downplay those scenes, but the story's characterization and underlying commentary prevent it from wallowing completely in filth. Indeed, Hubert, through the story's prostitutes, notes that it's the rest of the world that's wallowing in filth and hypocrisy; only the prostitutes are getting paid for providing an outlet for it. That's a realization that dawns on Blanche at the story's end, and may be why we see her crack a little smile when she realizes that this is her home. MISS DON'T TOUCH ME is both exploitative and in turn commenting on the nature of exploitation, and that natural tension of ideas is wrapped in a tightly-wound murder-mystery plot and turned on its head by the art.

Order Out Of Chaos: Nocturnal Conspiracies

Rob reviews the collected translation of David B dream comics, NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACIES (NBM).


Upon reading David B's intriguing collection of dream comics, NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACIES, I was struck by just how apt the title was. David B carefully selected dreams that had a similarity of theme: dream adventures involving skullduggery, mystery and a sense of trying to make connections and hint at vastly enigmatic scenarios. In much the same way our unconscious creates dreams as a way of processing our fears, fantasies and random images, so too does the creation of a conspiracy theory serve to establish connections for events that are otherwise too overwhelming to even contemplate. A conspiracy theorist is a sort of detective, somehow managing to ask the "right" questions and make connections that "they" don't want you to know about--"they" representing the overarching masters of whatever fuels that particular conspiratorial paranoia. Conspiracies serve to explain evil, chaos, misfortune and anything else that is terrifying in the world. In both our daytime and nighttime identities, there is always this urge to impose structure on what we experience.

In the case of NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACIES, David B at first seems just a step behind the overarching menace of his unconscious. He is an active agent in his dreams, sometimes working within the conspiracy, sometimes working against it. He had long ago framed the woes in his life in militaristic terms, so it's no surprise that as he grew older, these terms would subtly shift to more closely resemble guerilla warfare, terrorist activity, gangster movies or spy stories. The dreams in this book are part of a shadowy world where every action has melodramatic overtones, as though it were part of a vast adventure story where David B is an essential character. He notes that many of his dreams have a cinematic feel, where he is "performing", but that sense of being an actor in a plot (in every sense of the word) pervades every dream.

The narrative nature of David B's dreams lend them a ready-made structure that lends itself well to the overlay of dream logic and jarring transitions. Beyond the organization of imagery, it's David B's shadowy, angular art that draws the reader in. The comic is mostly in black & white, with streaks and shades of midnight blue. It's that blue that gives the comic its night-time feel, that sense of moving in shadows. The first few dreams of the book offer variations on assassination plots, gangsters, terrorists and the secret masters of the world. "The Attic", dreamed in 1983, dips into horror. What makes this dream so unsettling is not just that the attic in question is inhabitated by Bosch-like monsters, it's the control they have over the other people in the space, forcing them to have sex. When the dream shifts scenes to a more typical "adventure" mission, David B can't shake the feeling that the dream really ended in the attic. It's one of the more chilling images in the book.

Other unsettling dreams include "Massacre", where we see stark images of human brutality in Africa; it's interesting that in the dream David B personalizes this kind of image in that one of the dead was a friend of his. "The Eye" finds David B killing an innocent man so as to avoid the Khmer Rouge, while "The Children" combines the action-adventure elements of his dream with the horrific notion of terrorists gunning down children.

There are lighter notes in this particular dreamscape, however. "The Cat" is a short dream where David B turns the tables on a guardian animal (it's one of Giacometti's elongated cats), eats its tasty, pate'-like brain and rides it around. "The Serials" finds him looking at a series of unusual, attention-grabbing drawings; he discovers that they were favorites of his grandfather. "The Heads", unlike most of the other dreams in the book, leaves off David B's narration as we see the fate of a giraffe-headed butcher, his head bouncing down the street and winding up as head cheese for a rival.

As the years go on, David B starts gaining more control in his dreams. In the early 90s dreams like "Fat Cop", "Blind" and "The Eye", he not only manages to evade danger and outwit his opponents, he starts to wield genuine power. In "Fat Cop", he's a detective and uses mental powers to push around a corrupt commissioner. In "Blind", he and his wife turn the tables on assassins invading their homes and strike out to recruit help against whatever other forces are arrayed against them. In "The Eye", he evades both an assassin and a guardian bull thanks to his own cleverness.

Arranging the dreams chronologically subtly gives them an overriding structure, even though none of the dreams are directly related to each other. They naturally flow into each other, with dream logic allowing the reader to except rapid changes in scene, theme and tone. This makes an interesting companion piece to Jesse Reklaw's THE NIGHT OF YOUR LIFE; in both cases, the artist has to interpret imagery that was half-remembered and fuzzy, yet at the same time vivid and immersive. David B's dream comics are where the conscious meets the subconscious and both his wit and visceral sense of storytelling shine through.

The Details of Armageddon: DUNGEON MONSTRES VOLUME 2Lew

Rob reviews the latest collection of stories from Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's DUNGEON series, DUNGEON MONSTRES VOL 2: THE DARK LORD (NBM).

Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar are two of my favorite cartoonists in the world, in part because of the dizzyingly broad range of subjects they're interested in. Trondheim's work ranges from abstract, conceptual comics to slice-of-life to autobio to children's books to rip-roaring adventure. He automatically becomes one of the best artists in any genre he chooses to work in, and fantasy comics are no exception. He and Sfar didn't just choose to create a lark of a series to affectionately parody fantasy and role-playing tropes in DUNGEON, they wanted to create a genuinely involving story that worked on multiple levels. They wanted the adventure aspects of the story to be simultaneously exciting and silly as they built an entire world, Tolkein-style. As such, they set out a plan to tell the story of the titular dungeon in its glory days (the "Zenith" stories), to tell the story of its origins (the "Early Years" stories) and its downfall ("Twilight")--and planned to write a hundred volumes in each series!

If that plan wasn't ambitious enough, there are also side volumes that tell smaller, funny stories of the main characters ("Parade") and volumes that focus in on particular characters at particular times ("Monstres"). DUNGEON manages to be the rare series that is simultaneously complex and simple to follow, zeroing in on a few characters over time and expanding the cast from there. It's by far my favorite genre-related series of all time, enjoyable on every level. Of course, given the scope of this project (which they may never complete), Sfar & Trondheim have recruited a number of different artists to step in to draw the stories. NBM is reprinting each series two volumes at a time, and DUNGEON MONSTRES 2 is the latest edition. This volume features art by Andreas, known for his Lovecraftian horror stories, and Stephane Blanquet, an artist who specializes in the grotesque.

Both artists are inspired choices. In the first story, "The Great Map", Andreas' horror background is merged with the funny animal character design aa we follow the rabbit warrior Marvin the Red on a quest. The story does get a bit confusing if you haven't read the Twilight stories, so I'd recommend brushing up on those volumes so as to avoid confusion. That said, the
specifics of the quest are less important than Marvin's confusing love life, somehow trying to simultaneously pitch woo to two very different women at the same time. Marvin is one of the best characters in the entire series: a young warrior oblivious to the larger events of the world naively seeking glory. His single-mindedness in the face of total chaos is both exciting and hilarious, as he's both hero and comic relief.

The second story, "The Dark Lord", is drawn by Blanquet. His style is so distinctive that it was impossible to completely subsume within Trondheim's character design. This wound up working out quite nicely, as his monsters were especially gross and the violence especially visceral. This story follows what happened after the downfall of Herbert, the duck hero of Zenith who had become corrupted by power in later years. This story gives us a number of important details as to exactly how Herbert wound up in such a horrible position (he wound up being possessed by a dark entity connected to various objects of power he had collected) and follows him as he cleverly gets out of one near-death experience after another. Following such a haunted character after focusing in on such a naive character like Marvin was an interesting contrast, and I especially like the way that Trondheim & Sfar connected the two stories, telling them from different points of view. Any fan of Trondheim and Sfar should be reading DUNGEON, and any fan of DUNGEON should probably pick up every volume. This volume was an unexpected visual feast that was still entirely within the sensibilities of its writers.