Notes On The Script: The City Troll

Aaron Whitaker breathes new life into the sad-sack loser/slice-of-life genre with his long-form debut, The City Troll. With page after page of simple, expressive art that emphasizes gesture, movement and body language, Whitaker skillfully moves his characters through a love triangle plot with a number of hilarious and moving twists and turns. The genius move Whitaker makes is to take the central conceit of mopey losers--their navel-gazing insistence that they are the center of their own narrative--and have its protagonist knowingly live his life as though he were a character in a story. The story is this: god capped off his creation by bringing to life The Perfect Man. His name is Ian, and all women fall in love with him and all men want to hang out with him. God grew jealous of his creation, so he cursed The Perfect Man by forcing him to be friends with the most loathsome, disgusting, pessimistic creature, and named it The City Troll.

The City Troll, of course, is the imagined alter ego of Paul, a young man with massive confidence problems who survived living with an abusive mother. Whitaker nimbly moves back and forth from depicting Paul as himself and as the City Troll, depending on his mood and state of depression. It's a clever bit of magical realism that fits smoothly into the narrative thanks to his cartoony drawing style. There's another remarkable scene early in the book when Paul (who doubles as the narrator) describes the possibility of love at first sight as being a combination of one's first girlfriend, the "sixth grade teacher who always smelled like cucumber melon scented shampoo", a quirky indy actress, the image that first provided masturbation fodder and one's mother. That leads him to meet Emily. It's a wonderfully-written and drawn sequence, one that's remarkably evocative, funny and charming.

Paul meets Emily but is too petrified to say anything, and she winds up with Ian. The "perfect man" description is quite apt; early in the book, he has to deal with having two women in love with him at once, then having to figure out how to get out of both of them wanting to be in a polyamorous relationship with him. Despite that, he remains remarkably devoted to his best friend Paul, and vice-versa. Paul suffers in silence as Ian dates Emily and they fall in love, even as Emily and Paul spend time together as screenwriters. That leads to a number of funny scenes where Paul tries to become a better person in order to translate that to one of his characters after Emily lists out that character's flaws. That includes a series of funny scenes with Paul, his father, and his father's new hippie girlfriend (named "Understanding").

Paul eventually does take action to try to win Emily, which leads to a clandestine affair. Paul tries to figure out a way to keep Emily and still stay friends with Paul, but it all blows up in his face. The end of the book contains its own critique, as a character who "wallows around in [his] own misery" isn't going to get the girl--especially when that girl has her own City Troll issues. Whitaker throws those clues in when Emily tries to make excuses for why she goes off her anti-depressants, claiming that they impeded her output as an artist. It becomes clear that she's not well by the end of the book in her own way, and Ian is a victim of the pathologies of two friends. At the same time, Paul eventually learns his lesson and makes tentative moves toward change by the end, even if it's not clear that he's learned how to be less selfish or more empathetic.  There's a lot to chew on in this book, which is filled with funny and true-to-life dialogue, odd situations and characters who take on a life of their own. It's one of the more impressive debuts I've seen from a young cartoonist, and I'm excited to see what Whitaker chooses to do next.

A Day In The Life Of A City: Denys Wortman's New York

One of my favorite comic art books from the past couple of years is Denys Wortman's New York, a bok that arose thanks to some digging by the head of the Center for Cartoon Studies, James Sturm. Wortman was one of those famously anonymous cartoonists from the first half of the twentieth century who produced a new one-panel comic four times a week for about thirty years. Other than a couple of collections with limited print runs, the strip mostly just disappeared from the public consciousness the way that so many strips are gone and forgotten, byproducts of an ephemeral form of media. Sturm was fortunate enough to get in touch with Wortman's son, who happened to be sitting on a treasure trove of over 5,000 originals by his father. Sturm, along with former student Brandon Elston, took a selection of these strips to form a narrative of sorts. The narrative doesn't follow a particular person, but rather the life of the city itself over the span of just one day. It's an extraordinary solution to the problem of how best to present this material in a way that doesn't drag.

What's interesting about this book is that the quality of the drawings is far better than a book that simply reprinted his work from newspapers or tear sheets would be. The book is shot directly from Wortman's pencils, which have an amazing power and sheer presence. This is a book about the teeming millions: young and old, rich and poor, working and unemployed, on the sidewalks or at the beach. It starts off in the morning, as housewives hang laundry outside their fire escapes and craggy old men rush to the subway. Young women rush to work as secretaries or factory workers, while middle-aged men try to find ways to collect on bills. Though the strips are not printed in anything resembling chronological order, Sturm & Elston still whip us across the city at work: the theater district, the garment district, maids, janitors, executives, and cooks at diners. With much of the strip running through the depression, Wortman shows us people desperate for aid and jobs. There's a jaw-dropping set of strips set in Coney Island, the vacation spot of choice for the working class. Though Wortman worked with a lot of photo references, he still does an uncanny job at capturing the spirit and the motion of so many people. The beach scenes are memorable because they depict huge crowds of people on the beach, on the boardwalk and under the boardwalk (with some poses that must have made the newspaper's censors a little nervous). He captures that sense of people wanting to pretend that they were somewhere exotic, even if every other New Yorker seemed to be there as well.

Wortman was also aces at drawing kids: out on the street, reading comics, running through fountains, and playing macabre games like "electric chair". His understanding of gesture and body language made every strip come alive, and his attention to detail like clothing is especially remarkable. This book is practically a class on New York fashions over a thirty year period, both of the rich and the working-class. We take a peek into classrooms, hospitals, doctor's offices, and beauty salons. We follow shopping trips and pretzel salesmen. We take a look inside the Museum of Natural History (that blue whale has been in the same place for a long time) and see the game from behind home plate at the Polo Grounds. We see the city in the sun and in the rain, go out on the town to dinner and the theater/movies/opera. We follow sailors going dancing and attend many a wild, late-night party. Finally, we see people make their way home, including one man on an empty subway who nonetheless can't help but stand up out of sheer habit.

Most of the captions to the images were written either by Wortman's wife or someone else; they were more capstones to the images than real gags. Some of them don't even try to be very funny--just accurate. The captions help provide some context and flavor for the images, though most of them could easily stand on their own. What I like most about Wortman's drawing is just how intuitive it is. He seems to know just when to use his charcoals to add some fuzz and shading to an image, and when to sharpen his pencil and let certain kinds of details pop off the page. These are not photorealist drawings, nor are they entirely expressionistic. These captions carry their own sense of reality, thrusting the reader into the image and giving one a true sense of what it might have been like to been in that particular moment, to see a wide range of actions unfolding in front of your eyes. The mass of humanity he depicts in page after page creates an imaginary buzz, as the reader imagines what all those people together must sound like. It's a rare art book that turns out to be a page-turner, but that's certainly the case with Denys Wortman's New York, and that's a tribute to the talent of the artist and the vision of the editors.

Black and White: Nurse Nurse

Katie Skelly's Nurse Nurse is the first book to be published by Sparkplug Comic Books after the death of its publisher, Dylan Williams.  Plans for collecting Skelly's original miniseries had long been in the works, pending Skelly's completion of the story. With the boost of an Indiegogo campaign that helped fund a year's worth of books, Nurse Nurse finally made its debut in May of 2012, eight months after the death of Williams and a few months after it was announced that the trio of Virginia Paine (a former Sparkplug employee), Emily Nillson (Williams' wife) and Tom Neely (Williams' close friend) would take over operations of Sparkplug. Skelly noted that Paine did a lot of production work on her psychedelic epic, and it shows in the way that even Skelly's earliest images pop off the page with great clarity. When we reach the more explicitly psychedelic portions of the story, the pages look especially beautiful.  I would have preferred them going to a larger page size to truly feature that aspect of the storytelling, but the simplicity of Skelly's line is such that no details are lost going to a digest-sized format.

The comic was inspired in large part by Roger Vadim's film Barbarella, which in itself was adapted by the Jean-Claude Forest comic. Both are essentially complete nonsense, and really act as an excuse to indulge in style as well as T&A. Skelly was not so much inspired by the sexual content of Barbarella but rather its style. Each chapter of the book is a chance to dip into a different set of stylistic flourishes, to the point that in Nurse Nurse, style is substance. The story of vaguely Candide-like outer space nurse Gemma finds her going from one set of perils to the next, just barely staying ahead of doom and/or insanity. She winds up on Venus, where a careless chemist has created a goo spread by the planet's many butterflies that causes those who touch it to become super-horny. She is captured by space pirates, who include a masked woman and a half-woman/half-panda hybrid as well as her ex-boyfriend. She commandeers an escape pod to Mars and winds up with mysterious natives who are hosting the most popular pop band in the universe.She winds up having a bad trip but recovers, only to discover that her likeness is being used in a popular TV show.  Investigating further, she is nearly torn to bits by a group of her clones, until she's rescued by her pirate ex-boyfriend. She finally winds up on Earth and simply drops out, laying in a field.

All of those episodic plot points are to be enjoyed on their own, as Skelly throws a kitchen's sink worth of crazy and cute images at the reader. With a very simple and spare line, Skelly tosses in classic psychedelic images, which at its core is all about the ways in which black and white interact with each other. There are a number of pages that reflect that sort of interplay between the two opposites, with figures and background melting into and warping into each other. Skelly is still interested in telling a story, which is why the visuals draw the reader in rather than overwhelm the eye, as a lot of psychedelic art might. Her character designs are simple but effective, drawing in the eye with the use of key details like carefully-placed freckles, odd clothing and body paint. The simplicity of her character design makes the psychedelic quality of her pages all the more effective, since it's still easy to follow the action in every sequence. In addition to character design, character costuming is another important aspect of this comic. In addition to the crisp nurse uniform Gemma wears, the outfits worn by the pirates are a sort of futuristic mutation of 1960s mod fashion. Skelly's use of gesture and body language drives each panel, with character poses that almost look cinematic in their dramatic nature. The overall effect is a breezy, lighthearted, relentlessly strange and amusing narrative that must be accepted by the reader on its own terms. The conspiracy theory and adventure narrative that might have driven other comics are less important in Nurse Nurse than simply enjoying the journey and taking in all the sights.

Great Responsibility: The Death-Ray And Daniel Clowes' Film Career

Daniel Clowes' super-hero story The Death-Ray provoked a lot of very interesting commentary.  The two best articles on the subject are from Isaac Cates (published at the time the original source material, Eightball #23, came out back in 2004) and Ken Parille, upon the re-release by Drawn & Quarterly last year.  I will address some of those points in bullet-point fashion, but I wanted to start with an observation not many have discussed.

To wit: few critics have addressed the effect that becoming a screenwriter has had on Clowes. While film has always been an obvious influence on his work Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron makes that clear, but the humorous follow-up strip where the Hollywood version of LVG is a huge, embarrassing flop that eviscerates Clowes' original text is interesting in light of him adapting his own material for film. Beyond the psychological and eschatological themes that run through much of Clowes' work, the three issues of David Boring (Eightball #19-21, published annually in 1998, 1999 and 2000) are structurally produced like a three-act Hollywood script.  There are so many film-related trappings in this comic that I could film an entire column, but the film-poster cover of Eightball #21 lays it all bare. These comics were created at roughly the same time Clowes was writing the script and working with Terry Zwigoff on the film version of Ghost World.  The infatuation with film so present in this comic may well reflect Clowes' creative enthusiasm in writing the script and seeing it come to life in such a satisfying way.

Conversely, the reality of distributing and promoting a film as well as the all-encompassing nature of its release, may well have had a significant impact on the creation of Ice Haven, originally released as Eightball #22.  Regardless of the motivation, it seems obvious to me that Ice Haven is a reaction to film as Clowes endeavors to put the language and feel of the comic into very comic-book terms. It's as anti-cinematic a comic as I can imagine, fracturing the narrative and look of the comic into newspaper-style strips. There are frequent narrative digressions into killer bunny rabbits and cave men that have nothing to do with the temporal narrative but have significant connections to the emotional narrative that moves in a straight line from strip to strip. More to the point, the character of Vida (the struggling zine writer who proves to be kidnapper Random Wilder's poetic nemesis) is about to quit writing when "a phone call came from Hollywood!" Improbably, she was "being summoned immediately to work on a big movie project!!"  She promises to "be the biggest, richest, most popular writer in history! You just watch dear reader, I'll be the biggest whore ever!"   It doesn't seem to be too much of a leap to see this as a sardonic autobiographical statement about how Clowes felt as an artist while working in Hollywood, especially as he started to take on work that wasn't based on his own comic.

Still, there's a joy at work in Ice Haven that celebrates the language of comics and the way it can easily mash up genre, obscure language, and convey meaning in ways no other art form can. It's still his master work in my opinion, as his formal command of comics is dizzying and his characterization is rich, complex and frequently hilarious. People tend to forget just how funny Clowes can be, and Ice Haven displays his merciless sense of humor at its sharpest. The central conflict of Ice Haven winds up having no teeth, as even the kid who seems like a thug is just all talk. It's all a put-on, a joke Clowes shares with himself and the reader as he makes you do a little bit of work in deciphering the text.

By contrast, The Death-Ray feels uglier and more cynical. It was originally the 23rd and final issue of Eightball, and it feels like a coda of sorts to a certain body of work. Isaac Cates said in his article that the critic Sean Collins said that this book isn't so much a super-hero story as it is the origin story of a serial killer. After the success of the film version of Ghost World, Clowes followed that up with Art School Confidential, an ugly and cynical film that was a huge critical and commercial bomb. If Ghost World represents a film that accurately conveys the spirit of the original and substantive source material, then Art School Confidential represents a film made from the slightest of source material (the original short story is more a rant than an actual narrative) dressed up with an absurd serial killer plotline. Sure, Clowes pokes fun at this with the metatextual commentary of the filmmaker in the story doing something sillier, but the fact is that Clowes wrote a serial killer movie.  In his own parlance, he perhaps "became the biggest whore ever!" There are things to recommend in this film, not the least of which is the daring choice of making every one of the characters completely despicable by the end of the film.  The character of Andy from The Death-Ray even reminds me a bit of Jerome, the protagonist of Art School Confidential: at the beginning of each story, they are naive if alienated.  By the end, they have completely shed any pretense to moral or ethical behavior as a result of being buffeted by the forces surrounding them. Something in them simply snaps, and when they cross the line, there's no coming back.

Steeping The Death-Ray in the language of comics and Steve Ditko's Spider-Man in particular creates a tension between the exaggerated ethical struggles Spider-Man found himself faced with and the fact that Andy and his sidekick/instigator Louie had to create all of their own struggles. In both cases, the "heroes" triumph because of their superior application of violence rather than the correctness of their own moral position. Unlike Spider-Man, and because of the uniquely brutal nature of his titular weapon, Andy only occasionally feels pangs of guilt. He gets to decide who lives and who dies, a power that would overwhelming for anyone, much less the typical Clowesian alienated loner desperate to make connections. Like Steve Gerber's Foolkiller character, the line between "evil" and annoying behavior is a thin one--is it just to murder a jaywalker or litterer?  There are no good or evil characters in this story, per se, just frustrated and angry people. Or perhaps, there are no heroes to be found, but plenty of Marvel-style villains: misunderstood misanthropes who lash out after a lifetime of abuse or neglect, paying back their misery a thousandfold when they find themselves with powers. Louie is clearly the protagonist of his own story (as are all teens) but winds up acting as a sort of malicious Greek chorus for Andy, pushing him and pushing him to act so as to fulfill his own dark and juvenile urges until Andy finally does it. That's when he understands that there's a line, and that he's pushed Andy across it, and there's no turning back now. There is no justice, no retribution, no resolution. Even Clowes teases the reader with a "choose-your-own-adventure" ending, with a couple of them winding up as typical genre resolutions and the third being in line with the rest of the book: Andy keeps living his life and occasionally "falls off the wagon" and kills some more people for ridiculous and selfish reasons. It's not surprising that Clowes' later comics (Mister Wonderful in particular) were far more in touch with humanity and connecting with others in a successful manner (despite many pitfalls); The Death-Ray represents Clowes at his darkest, most cynical and most grim, and I don't blame him for not wanting to return to that place anytime soon.

Total Immersion: Daybreak

Brian Ralph came to prominence with the publication of Cave-In, a wordless story that followed the adventures of a monkey-like character exploring an underground kingdom. It was the clearest distillation of the Fort Thunder group of artists inspired by video games, role playing games, super hero comic books and fine art, wherein the environment is every bit as important as the characters, if not more so.  Daybreak (originally published as a series of three magazine-sized comics by Bodega) transplants this aesthetic to the zombie genre, thrusting the reader into the story by making them a silent character whose first-person view dominates the story.  In this manner, Daybreak mimics the action of a first-person shooter where one's character avatar is entirely off-screen.

What makes the book such a chilling read is that most of the action, and the zombies themselves, are also seen off-screen.  We only get shadowy views of the monsters and charred arms and legs sticking through doors and windows. There is no explanation given as to what caused their emergence or how the world got to be the way it is. It's simply assumed that the reader understands what's going on, and this implied understanding cleverly dovetails with Ralph's skill in quickly bringing a reader up to date with exactly what's at stake in the first few pages of the story. We're introduced to our fellow protagonist, a cheery one-armed man who graciously shares his possessions with you as you move from one charred, burnt-out environment to the next. Every panel is filled with rubble, broken objects and just plain stuff--the detritus of civilization. 

Ralph slowly amps up the action as we learn that it's our fellow humans that are the real cause of concern, not just zombies. Ralph heightens tension with any number of tricks: a driving rainstorm that darkens each panel for several pages. We tumble around the page as a car the one-armed man is driving with you in it tumbles over and over after an accident. The unseen protagonist and their friend are captured by a lunatic who plans to feed them to his "family", a group of zombies he had in his attic. The one-armed man is bitten, leaving the reader/protagonist with a horrible decision to make: when do they kill their former friend? The final page is especially unsettling, because it's unclear just how far along the one-armed man is in becoming a zombie, as we see his facial expression change subtly from panel to panel in a manner that suggests the spark of humanity is still in his burnt-out eyes--but for who knows how long?

Backstory is irrelevant here, because the only narrative that matters is being alive. The question that Ralph poses is what does humanity mean in a world that's the apotheosis of Thomas Hobbes--nasty, brutish and short?  With no laws and no rules, what does ethics mean in this world? Ralph suggests that one's choices while one is still human are the only thing that matters. The one-armed man still wound up as a zombie despite his generosity, but at least he wasn't a head-toting lunatic like the man who tried to kill him with his "family."  Ralph puts the reader through the wringer in scenes where the unseen protagonist is wandering around in the dark with a flashlight before discovering a gang of zombies after he spies only their legs. The frequently silent storytelling approach is doubly immersive: we are immersed in this world thanks to the details in each panel, and we are immersed in how to negotiate this world thanks to panel-to-panel transitions, black-outs, and quick cuts. Ralph's storytelling is absolutely masterful, filling the reader with dread and fear even as he injects moments of hope and black humor, alternating between blindingly quick moments of violence and languid looks around the environment. When the unseen protagonist is unconscious, the story goes on without them, a disorienting but effective technique that helps break tension at particular junctions while resetting it at the same time.The tiniest victories have a great resonance in this story, even as each defeat feels like a harbinger of inevitable doom. The six panel grid works nicely to keep the pace of the story steady, though I did miss the bigger pages of the original comic.

The Line Is Not Always Clear: The Adventures of Herge'

When the slightly abridged version of The Adventures of Herge' appeared in Drawn & Quarterly Volume 4 a decade ago, I remember being knocked out by the story. The episodic nature of the vignettes about the creator of Tintin really did work as a flowing, kinetic adventure story of sorts. The handsome hardback album that D&Q released in 2011 retains most of those thrills, though at 72 pages it feels a little thin to be a book in the American market. From the perspective of a reader who has only the most basic knowledge of Herge's work (I've only read a couple of volumes, unlike the scores of European kids who are steeped in Tintin from a very young age), it's still fascinating to see the authors (Jose-Louis Bocquet & Jean-Luc Fromental) which of  several key moments in the cartoonist's life they choose for artist Stanislas Barthelemy to illustrate.

In many respects, the very first anecdote (from 1914) holds the key to unlocking the rest of the book. Young Georges Remi is hell on wheels, partly because he's been raised to feel as though he's special. The result is a singular opposition to authority and a certain callousness as to the results of his actions. Remi's talent and strong will draw the attention of those who are in a position to aid him, though it frequently put him in a position of controversy. He was accused of being a collaborationist during World War II because he was allowed to still publish; only his fame and popularity spared him from the firing line, something the authors note wasn't true of all those who suffered at the hands of a kangaroo court. He cheated on his wife and denied close collaborators cover credit. To some degree, the writers suggest that Remi himself didn't hold his work in the highest esteem as true art, longing to hang out with the avant-garde' art crowd and even dabbling in painting himself for awhile.

The authors also suggest that Remi was only too aware of his own failings in the way they explore his chronic depression but also in how much his relationship with Chinese national Chang Chong-Jen meant to them both. The inspiration for both The Blue Lotus and Tintin in Tibet, Chang in the book is depicted as a serene figure who was the center of much intrigue.  In their 1934 encounter, thugs sent to silence Herge' & Chang exposing Japanese abuses of the Chinese are silently dealt with by unknown Chinese nationals in a sequence worthy of a Tintin book. Chang's influence on Herge' is the opposite of the bellicose Catholic priest who helped give him his start, emphasizing freedom of spirit and a curiosity about other cultures built on respect instead of parochialism. In their 1981 meeting, the newly freed Chang frees a boyish glee from Remi, after Chang had to jump through a lot of hoops to be allowed out of China. This is during the period where Herge's work started to dip in popularity as he faced charges of racism from his earliest books, even as his interest in other cultures was at its zenith. The authors don't let Remi off the hook for his actions, beliefs or good fortune, but this is the farthest thing from a hatchet job. Indeed, it's a warts-and-all celebration of a cartoonist whose work has had a profound effect on millions over the span of several generations, up to and including the recent Tintin film. While there were many who had a hand in Tintin's success (including writers, colorists and editors), it was Herge' who created a highly influential and beautiful storytelling style (clear-line) and it was Herge' who ultimately did the bulk of the work that has meant so much to so many. It should come as no surprise that the artist couldn't live up to his creation's clarity of purpose and self, given the complex world in which he lived, but it's obvious that he strove to evolve as a person and tried to show that in his later works.  The Adventures of Herge's episodic bent helps prevent the authors from putting too much of a narrative capstone on the events of Herge's life, keeping things loose but connected and allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Juggling Act: Salvatore, Volume 2

If there's one thing I've noticed about the comics of Nicolas De Crecy, it's that he's willing to pursue a tangent as far as it will take him. There are five different plot lines winding through the second english translation of his Salvatore graphic novel, but he's perfectly happy to ignore dangling plot points in favor of a tangent that yields a great series of gags. As the quest of the title character lurches slowly through the book, De Crecy slowly introduces more characters into the mix, each with their own motivations and plotline to call their own. It's a highly successful juggling act that retains all of the elements that made the first volume of this series (the first two volumes, actually, just as this one contains volumes 3 and 4 of the original French albums) such a delightful success. Once again, De Crecy's character design is top notch and drives much of the book's humor. His characters are anthropomorphic animals that frequently retain a surprising amount of their original animal nature. For example, Amondine the pig is usually depicted as nude, and De Crecy takes that in some hilarious directions. Forced to get a job to feed her brood of piglets, she first is fired from her cashier job when a customer buys a suckling pig that she fears might be her lost piglet, Frank. Then she puts on overalls for a manual labor job but is fired for getting stuck inbetween two boxes. Finally, she wears a frilly pair of panties as a topless waitress before she's fired for being too fat. That latter job is the kind of clever sight gag that De Crecy unexpectedly peppers into his narrative.

Of course, the lead narrative is Salvatore (an anthropomorphic dog) and his little friend (a miniature human being) going on a road trip to try to find Salvatore's true love Julie, who happens to be in South America. Of course, Salvatore is driving from France and plans to drive through to Russia, over the Bering Straits, over to Alaska and down to South America from there, which is every bit as crazy as it sounds. He's a deluded blowhard who heaps abuse on his friend until he's separated from him at the end of the book (and has a tearful reunion), but there's an essential kindness to his character, even as he finds himself tempted by a woman he helps out by giving her a ride. Meeting her German shepherd boyfriend is a highlight of the book, as De Crecy draws him as a leering, wolfish fashion photographer who is nonetheless nattily dressed (depicted in exquisite detail by the artist).

The quest to find Frank is the second major narrative in the story, as Almondine hires an inept and vaguely existential private detective to find him. They wind up inadvertently bumping into another of the storylines in the book that puts them achingly close to Frank. He was rescued by a young woman named Lea after a group of Goths were attempting to sacrifice him on a cross (this book goes from whimsical to grim without much warning), who fancies herself his mother. Her father, a devious businessman (there's a great sequence where he claims to be a self-made man because the factory he inherited from his father had only 6,000 employes when he took it over), finds the piglet embarrassing and hires a couple of roughnecks to try to take him out. The rest of Almondine's piglets create a business empire predicated upon scamming unsuspecting consumers with promises of "organic" food, one of many subcultures De Crecy gleefully takes a shot at in this book (Goths come in for a good-natured beating as well.). The colorist Walter adds some weight to De Crecy's scribbly drawings, but it's the surprisingly nuanced body language of his frequently bloated, grotesque and ridiculous-looking characters that carries the narrative. The authority figures look grim and officious, the litter of pigs chitters away like a miniature board of directors, the young and female characters have a curvy sexiness and sophistication, and poor Almondine careens from one disaster to another as a marvelously realized comedic force. I'd say De Crecy's slapstick and use of body language is more potent than his satire, which at times aims at easy targets. Above all else, things are constantly moving in this book, even if, like Salvatore discovers, all that movement wound up plopping him back at the beginning of the journey. De Crecy ensures the reader that the fruitlessness of Salvatore's journey doesn't extend to the entertainment value and sheer delight found in his cartooning.