Franchising: Dragons: Riders of Berk

It's not a surprise that the popular How To Train Your Dragon films and subsequent TV show Riders of Berk have spawned a comic book. The movie featured a young Viking boy named Hiccup who befriends a dragon, the ancestral enemies of his people. Eventually, he manages to fix the dragon's wing and ride him as he comes to understand that the dragons are enslaved by a master dragon; Vikings and dragons team up at the end in a film filled with wit both charming and vulgar. The first volume of this new comic series, Dragon Down, was written by Simon Furman and drawn by Iwan Nazif. There's an inherent problem both with the TV show and this comic, which is that the original premise of the first film (Vikings vs dragons) was a huge part of its appeal. The new status quo of dragons living with Vikings is such that new conflicts have to be manufactured that are inevitably less engaging than the original premise. For example, in this book, the antagonists are a group of outcast vikings who use a runaway dragon as bait to trap Hiccup and force him to train dragons for them. These characters are little more than ciphers.

The misunderstanding that leads to the dragon of one of Hiccup's friends running away is far more interesting as a conflict, and it's what really drives the story. The rest feels like obligatory action. This is not helped by the wooden dialogue that lacks the snap the film and TV show carry. Losing the solid voice work from film does a lot to blunt the comedic and dramatic impact of the characters, leading to an adaptation that feels forced. That's especially true of the attempts at jokes and some of the initial character interaction; it's as though Furman felt obligated to do some minimal level of introduction for the reader that revealed something about the characters, only his attempt was so surface that it was hard to tell the difference between most of the characters. The character relationships which were so sharply detailed in the original film are mostly shunted to the side in the comic. On the other hand, Nazif's linework is excellent. He had the imperative to stay within a certain set of designs in order to be consistent with the look and feel of the cartoon, but his art is lively and fluid. That fluidity makes what is otherwise a dull story readable. I'd love to see him turned loose on something other than corporate art, because his talent for comedy, adventure and simple motion on the page is obvious. I do commend the publisher (Titan Books) for not forcing him to draw in the same 3D style as depicted on the cover; instead, the coloring and format is such that it plays to his strengths as a stylist. In order for this series to succeed on its own, there has to be a deeper exploration of individual characters that's only hinted at here; otherwise, it will simply pale in comparison to the source material.

New Books From Yeti Press

After a successful Kickstarter, publisher RJ Casey has published a number of new books from his imprint, Yeti Press.Most of these books are by relative newcomers, but a number of them are printed in lavish color. In general, these books have an all-ages vibe to them.

Bird Witch, by Kat Leyh. Leyh collected the first few issues of her minicomics series in this book, and it's an attractive package. This is a well-developed but character-based fantasy story that slowly builds its backstory around the friendship of young witch Nina and her new friend Tali, who is of a race that is part bird. They initially bond over flying (Nina with her broom, Tali with her wings), and Leyh skillfully establishes their friendship and personality types before introducing a conflict in the form of the Bird Witch, an evil being that captures rare types of birds for her own ends. There are chase scenes, reversals, desperate plans and a last-second rescue by a relative. Leyh is definitely of the Kate Beaton school of cartooning in terms of her line, body language and simply-designed characters. Color adds texture and depth to her work, making the world feel real and making Tali all the more exotic because of the rich colors and patterns of her clothing. Later chapters in the book flesh out the world a bit, as Nina is revealed to be the daughter of a forest warden, who protects the magical forest against evil creatures; this is her ambition in life as well. There are bits and pieces of subplots and foreshadowing laid down for future chapters, but the real focus on the book is the way in which Nina and Tali quickly bond and find ways to get into trouble. Despite the extensive use of color, it all feels organic rather than part of an assembly line, like the Amulet books.

Pecos, by RJ Casey and Eric Roesner. This is sixty pages of total nonsense. Casey writes and Roesner draws the adventures of Pecos Bill, a bounty hunter in some crazed, mythical version of the old west that includes a demented, opium-dealing Johnny Appleseed and a Paul Bunyan who is all too intimate with his blue ox. Pecos Bill is one of those "one-upping" kind of characters, where everyone tries to one-up each other by talking about his deeds in the first story. Things are a bit silly and crazy throughout the book, but Casey takes it to the next level in a sequence where Pecos Bill rides one of Paul Bunyan's sperm while he's having sex with Babe the blue ox, then plants explosives inside Babe's body while singing a deranged song to the tune of "Home On The Range". It's a pretty magnificent gross-out gag, one that justifies the tamer and duller jokes earlier in the book, which are fairly disposable. Roesner's exaggerated and grotesque character design does a lot to carry the book, though it's uneven at times and some of his storytelling was difficult to follow at times.

Rose From The Dead, by Andrea Bell. This supernatural romance book feels like something Slave Labor might have published twenty years ago. Bell's character design and use of color are both quite appealing, as she makes the graveyard setting both spooky and funny. It's the story of long-time friends Jack and Roz on Halloween, when Jack is finally determined to tell his whirlwind of a friend that he's in love with her. She can't quite stand still long enough for him to tell her, and all of this is interrupted by skeletal ghosts, one of whom drags Roz into his grave. This is a charming comic, even if the relationship between Jack and Roz isn't exactly novel, and Roz makes for a compelling and clever heroine. The problem with the book is the page design. The panel-to-panel transitions are frequently confusing, as the order of the panels is often unclear. The dialogue and action is frequently vague enough such that it doesn't help clear this up any. Once Bell is able to clean that up a bit, she'll be on her way, because she has the skill to create fast-moving stories with clearly-defined characters and add just the right amount of humor.

Poops Boobs Poo, by Sam Sharpe. This is a killer collection of gags greatly inspired by Ivan Brunetti and the tradition of classic single-gag cartooning in places like The New Yorker. The gags run from the silly (a squirrel talking about how it bothered him just how much he liked nuts), to the edgy and violent (a man holding another man's severed head saying "You tell me this now?" after Moses brought down the ten commandments), to the gross (an amusing fisting joke). There are bad puns, penis size jokes and even a few call-back gags throughout the book. Sharpe has two things on his side: the level of craft in constructing his gags and his draftsmanship. Take the cartoon above, for example. The reader is immediately drawn to the figure in the middle thanks to the way he's positioned on the page. The reader immediately understands that he's a cyclops, that he's unhappy, and that his friend is exuberant after walking out of a film. Searching for context (and going from left to right), the punchline immediately becomes evident thanks to the "Blast-o-rama in 3D" poster. Some of Sharpe's gags had images that existed solely to set up the caption as the punchline, while others used words to set up a funny image as the punchline. He doesn't go quite as far as a Brunetti or a Ryan in most of his gags, in part because he's more about the laugh than the shock, but he's not afraid to get pretty transgressive. Sharpe is a thoughtful, interesting young cartoonist and it was fun to see him cut loose on this kind of gag, almost as an academic exercise.

Well Come, by Erik Nebel. This is a vivid, funny and sometimes gross series of silent cartoons about the interactions of various cartoon shapes. Some are sharply delineated as people, and some are shapes that blend, bleed or outright take over other shapes. Some shapes complete others, making a new mouth or a smile. Other shapes infiltrate or steal parts from other shapes outright. Nebel's use of color is almost psychedelic in its brightness, and the thick, glossy paper allows the color to really soak in on the page. The semi-connected mini-narratives bring to mind certain Lewis Trondheim comics in the way that blobs interact with other blobs in a frequently violent and/or visceral manner. The Team Society League collective's gross comics are another touchstone, though Nebel mostly resists gross-out gags in favor of a gentler sense of humor. The use of color reminds me a bit of Paper Rad a bit, though without the greater weirdness and depth of strange narrative. What you see is what you get on these pages, and Nebel's adherence to following the logic of each gag to its ultimate conclusion works well on page after page. It's the sort of book that you never quite want to end.

Retro Golden Age: The Shadow Hero

Gene Luen Yang has made a career out of exploring issues related to racial identity, personal beliefs and the relationship between the two and the importance of family. The themes surrounding his first major book, American Born Chinese (shame, identity and connection as an Asian-American) may not dominate any particular work, but they're always there in one form or another. Yang has always had two major flaws as a cartoonist: his treatment of these issues is often too didactic and on-the-nose; his art style is far too slick and slightly bland to sustain my interest as a reader. As he's continued to explore variations on these themes, his storytelling has subtly begun to shift in ways that improve the reading experience. His epic Boxers/Saints finally and openly grappled with issues of faith in a way that he had only hinted at in earlier works, and while it firmly came down on the side of his own Christian faith, he allowed for a surprising amount of ambiguity and criticism of the way Catholicism was spread in China.

In his newest and most lighthearted book to date, The Shadow Hero, Yang further buries the more polemical qualities of his ideas in an action comedy romp. The background of why he chose to do this book is almost as interesting as the book itself. Yang learned of a Golden Age cartoonist named Chu Hing, the first Asian-American cartoonist. He created a superhero in 1944 named The Green Turtle, who appeared in the pages of Blazing Comics for just a few issues. A bare-chested hero who mysteriously never showed his face, Yang theorized that Hing wanted to make his hero explicitly Asian (or Asian-American) but wasn't allowed. So the theory goes that Hing deliberately kept his face hidden so as to allow the reader to make up their own mind.

As a storyteller, what Yang excels at most is structural problem-solving. He almost always throws in a plot-related knuckleball to keep the reader off-balance, and structures his plot around those game-changing story tentpoles. As such, The Shadow Hero is Yang's master class at plot structure, pacing, managing sub-plots and the use of broad characterizations to act as plot movers. Yang chose to fill in the many missing elements of the Green Turtle's origin and background and in so reverse-engineering the story, found ways to create a funny, compelling and exciting adventure. All of Yang's themes are still intact, just buried somewhat underneath the comedic and visceral elements of the story. At its heart, The Shadow Hero is all about the experience of Asian-American immigrants (the story takes place in the 1930s), as both the heroic Hank (later the Jade Tortoise) and the villainous Ten Grand both turned out to be the manifestations of animals spirit gods that had protected China for centuries. Yang is able to reference the casual racism towards Asians of the day, including from a putatively-heroic character, and then let it drop as he gets back to the story.

Yang isn't afraid to go broad in this story. Hank goes from being kind of a nebbish to a tough, capable hero who even manages to acquire a super-power. That said, he's a straightforward character compared to his mother, Hua, whose vacillation between shame and excitement is portrayed with great affection, especially because of the ways in which coming to America broke her spirit. Yang channels a bit of Derek Kirk Kim in the exaggerated way he writes her, especially once she gets it in her head to turn her son into a superhero. Throw in Hank's eventual fighting mentor Uncle Wun Too, villains like Mock Beak and the three beautiful but deadly daughters of Ten Grand, and one finds Yang dipping into outsized Asian character types while gently mocking them. Indeed, Yang is careful to give us the interior lives of the people behind the characters, so to speak, a view not seen in traditional Western appropriations and grotesque attempts at making Asians solely monstrous or objects of laughter. A good example is when Mock Beak thinks he's being attacked by a Caucasian super-hero, he uses the sort of pidgin English vernacular in order to try to convince his assailant that he's a simple and obedient immigrant. When he realizes that the Green Turtle is the son of a man he killed, he coldly reverts back to his true self. It's the kind of simple but effective scene that underlines Yang's commentary without taking over the narrative.

A major part of the book's success is the work of artist Sonny Liew. A veteran of many quasi-mainstream projects, his light touch and sketchy line were built for farcical action stories such as this. When he needs to get "loud" on the page and depict action and movement in an exciting manner, he's up to the challenge. When he needs to draw scenes exaggerated for comedic effect (like when Hua tries to give her son superpowers by dunking him in toxic chemicals and other hazardous methods), he takes great delight in adding all sorts of eye pops that make the scenes laugh-out-loud funny. When he needs to get romantic or quiet, Liew reins it in appropriately. The story is still very much structured like a Yang story, but it's clear that he gave Liew a great deal of leeway in just how to get across the action and humor. The supplemental material that Yang includes, including a Green Turtle story, is fascinating both in terms of revealing his inspirations as well as the elements Yang had to reverse-engineer in order to make his story work. Having that kind of pre-programmed structure seemed to greatly benefit him as a storyteller, and the result is perhaps his best all-around work to date. This is a story with a lot of layers disguised as an enjoyable goof, and that seems to be precisely Yang's speed.

New Articles at Cicada, Foxing Quarterly

Those interested in my reviews may want to check out my reviews of books by Rutu Modan and Nicole Georges over at Cicada. I've also started a new weekly minicomics review column over at Foxing Quarterly. New editions will appear every Thursday. The first column was about Whit Taylor's The Anthropologists. 

Two From The Louvre: Nicolas De Crecy and Enki Bilal

NBM's had some success in publishing the translated versions of comics originally published by France's Futuropolis inspired by the famous Louvre. The series has been so successful that NBM just reprinted Nicolas De Crecy's Glacial Period, the book that kicked off the series. NBM is notorious for reprinting European comics at a much smaller size than their original albums in order to save costs, but the reprint is pretty much identical to the original in terms of size. For a long time, not printing the original big album size made economic (though not aesthetic) sense, as Americans seemed to actively resist buying any kind of comics in this format. With the slow acceptance of European comics in American book stores and comics shops and a greater insistence on maintaining the fidelity of the original comics (and a willingness to pay for such fidelity), NBM is now showing a greater willingness to take risks and publish comics in such a way that properly flatters the art of their creators.

In the Louvre series, this has been especially important, since most of the books have been light on narrative and heavy on Louvre-inspired imagery. One of the oldest and greatest art museums in the world, the sheer variety of works in the Louvre means that no two artists would react to its holdings in the same way, even in a museum with a number of pieces so famous that even laymen are familiar with them, like Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. De Crecy was interested in the concept of interpretation and wove a funny tale around an old story concept: what would archaeologists from the future make of objects from our society from today without any kind of hermeneutic context? In this case, in a future world where climate change has induced the titular Glacial Period, a group of explorer-archaeologists manages to find the Louvre, buried under ice and snow. Like the proverbial blind men examining an elephant, each explorer's background and biases makes the Louvre seem like something different. In one remarkable sequence, one explorer sequences paintings to create a "history" of an island nation that was a city of vice and carnal pleasure, whose economy was based on water, and that fell in a torrent of fire and monsters rising from the sea.

This is one of many silly interpretations that is only brought to bear after De Crecy carefully spends time establishing his characters. There's the grizzled veteran who's a misogynist, the idealistic archaeologist, the clever daughter of an explorer who now functions as his legs, and the genetically altered dog that proves to be the most important character in the book. Named Hulk (after one of the "old gods"), this talking and intelligent creature is part pig, giving it a nose that can actually discern the ages of the objects it smells. When the artwork of the Louvre starts talking to him (including a score of Jesus Christs in one of the book's best jokes) and tells him what the Louvre actually is and how it's in danger of falling into a crevasse, Hulk saves the day by getting them to combine into the shape of a dog and run out. It's a ridiculous ending to what is really a silly book, one that lampoons scientific hubris with lines like "What beings are naive enough to express themselves through drawings?" What distinguishes it is De Crecy's wonderfully scribbly, fragile line and the beautiful watercolors that have almost a burnt quality.  De Crecy also does a fine job balancing images from the Louvre with an actual story.

The same can't be said for Enki Bilal, the well-regarded fantasy and science fiction cartoonist, in his Phantoms of the Louvre. Those expecting a mind-blowing series of Louvre-inspired drawings will be bitterly disappointed. Instead, Bilal spent most of this project looking inward, imagining the phantoms and/or muses that might have inspired or played a part in the creation of each work of art. He then spins a biography of each of these figures' life from cradle (including birth weight) to grave, creating a frequently rich imaginary history. It's not an accident that he hits on famous works like the Mona Lisa and Hammurabbi's Code, because it's fun and tempting to come up with historical fiction surrounding these works. The same is true for the famous Christ Dead, as he comes up with a detailed backstory for Longinus, the guard who pierced Christ's side with a spear. It was actually more interesting to see Bilal conjure up the lives for other works, imagining Frans Snyder's Fish Market and seeing a boy who was born in a fish market and became a daring sailor. Bilal also imagined Lakshem, attached to the piece Human Headed Wood Bull, as an ancient man who had a special rapport with bulls. Analia Avellaneda was a color savant who was an assistant to El Greco, before her involvement in a romance led to her being poisoned.

To be clear, this book does not contain anything resembling comics. Instead, there's a big image of the original work of art overlaid with a "phantom" drawing by Bilal. That's then explicated by a small image of the original piece, Bilal's extended text regarding the phantom's history, and then a small reproduction of his original drawing. Those drawings are pretty rough and sketchy, and the result seems overblown and overproduced. I would have loved to have seen Bilal pick maybe five or six of these phantoms and actually draw a story instead of the padded, tedious and undercooked package that we saw here. Indeed, the novelty of the book quickly wore off after the first couple of phantoms, and Bilal even started repeating himself in terms of ideas, as several of the phantoms were killed by jealous lovers. Several had ancient, mystic qualities. Bilal spent a lot of time thinking about the phantoms but didn't seem to want to spend very much time actually doing what he's best known for (drawing), which is certainly unfortunate for those who might shell out for this book hoping to see his virtuosity on display.

Brit Comics: Collins/Laurie, Lunney, Cowdry, Decie

Metrodome and Crawl Hole, by Craig Collins and Iain Laurie. This macabre and darkly humorous duo continue to be a perfect writer/artist pairing. In Metrodome, the Scottish creators cleverly created super-powered/monstrous characters by combining random words from a local free newspaper, spawning such combatants as "Leaking Anger", "Blood Fog" and "Sex Axe". They combatants were then thrown into a city setting and there was much carnage, as Laurie channeled his inner Rob Leifeld ni the way he employed an excess of lines, grotesquely contorted mouths, and exaggerated figures. Collins and Laurie then channeled their inner Johnny Ryan (by way of Prison Pit) in developing plot-free, visceral, bloody and funny scenes of violence. It's essentially two artists playing around but committing to a premise with great enthusiasm and seriousness. Crawl Hole is a collection of short stories. "House of Mercy" is a bewildering story of a man bringing his father to a place where he has to fight masked men until he is eventually rent limb from limb; it winds up being an elaborate and grisly form of assisted suicide. "The Quiet Burden" is about an elderly man living a mundane existence, except for when he gets a call about the "vengabus", which are Lovecraftian creatures that live in his basement. Then he must don a mask and chop them up with an axe. Once again, Laurie's ink-spattered, lively visuals and interesting page design complement Collins' ideas perfectly. "Regression Artifact" combines the awkwardness of seeing an ex at a party with the secret knowledge that they are demonic/fantasy creatures who played out their conflicts on a battlefield. At four pages, it's perfectly paced and boasts a great punchline as well. That's a big reason for their success: they understand how to pace a story for maximum effect, allowing Laurie's visuals to pound the reader without becoming repetitive. Their take on horror is smart, funny and genuinely unsettling.

At The End Of Your Garden and At The Theme Park, by Lizz Lunney. Reading these Lunney comics is like watching a long-form improv performance. Bits of random strangeness turn out to be running gags that provide structure, like "The Girl With The Lion In Her Hair" in Garden. With a simple but expressive line, green ink and jokes that center around vegetation, we get advice from a chicken that's being prepared for an oven, follow two indolent cats as they buy items to delight themselves, listen to a talking tattoo make its recipient regret getting it, and ponder what it would be like if things like baking and interpretive dance were our dominant forms of communication. With a simple, clean line, Lunney neatly arranges what are essentially sketchbook gags into a minicomics format where their tenuous connections add to the humor of each individual joke; here the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In Theme Park, we follow the cats around as they wait endlessly for various theme park rides, encounter mysterious "foodz", and make jokes about a "ten hour build-up for ten seconds of intense pleasure" and connect that to golf. There are wistful autobiographical tidbits as well, as Lunney explores the nature of a theme park's mandatory fun with stories about her past and wishes that she could simply ignore anxiety. Mixed in with the same kind of silly sketchbook jokes as in Garden, and you have a short yet reliably amusing package that doesn't outstay its welcome.

Down Town, by Richard Cowdry. These bleak, cruel and funny comics are sort of like if Bazooka Joe became homeless and was relentlessly tormented by the police and the dregs of society. The simple line, classic comic strip character design and surprisingly dark and brutal violence makes for a stew that's both hilarious and slightly nauseating. Cowdry makes it work by following a sort of gag-strip code, full of characters slipping each other dynamite, abusive clowns who desperately need their victims in order to be happy, and deliberately unseemly gags about alcoholics. Because it's all in a familiar rhythm and structure, Cowdry can go as dark or silly as he wants and it all makes sense. Whether it's a couple of "boys will be boys" terrorizing a neighborhood, only to be sold off to a sailor, or a mentally ill person being taken off their government benefits and given a "portable living unit" (ie, a barrel) to "maximize the flexibility of your job search". The strip is ruthlessly satirical, mining some of the same territory as Ruben Bolling's Tom The Dancing Bug but adding a more visceral, slapstick quality to his comics. Punch and Judy get turned into a much meaner and more hopeless version of Andy Capp, while a homophobic and racist man gets emasculated by his wife thanks to a classic "pants-falling-down" gag. I could have easily read a book full of these strips, and their mix of social & political commentary and flawless comedic timing make them unusual in the world of comics.

Pocket Full Of Coffee, by Joe Decie. Decie is the rare memoirist whose of humor tends to drive his comics. His comics are almost doggedly quotidian in terms of the sort of details he explores, but he is careful to avoid hackneyed observations as a means of eliciting a quick laugh. Instead, his comics are set to a low comedic burn, as every detail of both his writing and drawing has a dry, droll quality.Observations about his scruffy appearance by way of his young son's merciless judgment are a good example of this; his son tells him that he looks "really scruffy". Decie takes off a wrinkled shirt and asks if that's better, but he knows "even when I try really hard, I impress no one". The drawings in this sequence find his son bouncing from room to room and Decie standing still; his use of grey here adds a great deal of life to his character drawings and gives the backgrounds of sense of solidity. One of my favorite features of a Decie comic comes when he goes for a walk; in this comic, his observations are peppered with assorted outbursts from his son, including "Can I have a sister?" Decie then reveals his painfully ordinary to-do list, which includes ego-boosters like "Write to-do list" but also includes the momentous "Propose to Steph", an item which was checked off but not seen or even mentioned as an event in the comic. Decie even mocks his own "gentle observations" at the end of the book with a bathroom humor joke, but the truth is that he does have that poetic autobio touch of a John Porcellino turned to mostly comedic and lighthearted ends.

Brit Comics: Lil

Noir and crime comics can be tricky things to nail, especially since it's the atmospheric details related to character and setting that are key to transcending mere cliche'. Unfortunately for creators Michael Young and Marc Crane, their Lil is choked by cliches, and the sheer bleakness of the story does little to ameliorate the story's many problems. Regarding detail, the characters in Lil seem to veer between being Southern or from Brooklyn. The creators seemed to borrow most of their dialect from TV shows and slipped in a great deal of British slang as well. Considering how over-the-top purple the prose was from the very beginning of this first volume, the fact that they couldn't get their American characters to talk like Americans in a consistent manner was akin to listening to an actor badly flub a Southern accent. There are artistic flubs as well, like a man eating a traditional English breakfast in an American diner.

Beyond the nagging details, this comic's biggest crime is that it's dull. Too often, it mistakes lengthy, wordy confrontations and/or monologues for character development and action. There's a sense where the creators are trying to merge a noir sensibility with something more violent, visceral and edgy ala Quentin Tarantino. The problem is that the dialogue is so painfully mannered that there's no chance of getting to know the characters (and the titular character Lil in particular) as characters. I like the idea of Lil being a self-destructive, self-loathing, junkie/alcoholic who looks for fleeting thrills by sleeping with strangers, because there's no real pretense that she's a likable character. However, with the exception of a single intriguing plot point that's given little development, the book mostly consists of her wandering from sleazy sexual encounter to confrontation with her dealer to a tedious encounter with a disgusting customer at her diner. There's no momentum, and the images are bombarded by page after page of wannabe tough talk. Sixty pages of functional but uninspiring art, lurid scenarios that surprisingly lacked much in the way of visceral impact and tough-guy nihilism could have easily been boiled down to five or ten pages at most.

Noir stories work best when wrapped around a plot that inspires movement and action, and Young & Crane have one in the revelation that someone has been stalking and photographing Lil for most of her life. Everything we needed to know about Lil was revealed in her monologue on page three; instead, the fact that Lil is world-weary and disaffected is repeated on page after page. There's the germ of a good idea in Lil, but the creators got lost in trying to develop it.