Title: Thor: Son of Asgard Ultimate Collection
Writer: Akira Yoshida
Artist: Greg Tocchini
Publisher: Marvel
Published: 2010

Review by Derek Halliday

What is it About?

In the distant past, a young Thor struggles with being an Asgardian teenager, living in the shadow of his powerful Father, Odin, and his legacy. Along with his friends, the tomboyish Sif, and the cunning and brave Balder, Thor sets out on a journey to learn how to what it means to be ‘worthy.’

Why is it Good?

Son of Asgard was done during Marvel’s first big push to create a line of Young Adult books back around 2006 or so, and was probably one of the more successful… in concept and execution, if not in sales. With solid art and solid writing, Son of Asgard is, in execution, pretty close to the Shonen Manga paradigm (probably due to the influence of its Japanese writer). It features a young, unsure, protagonist who sets on the Hero’s Journey. Each issues features the small cast of characters working together to overcome a trial, and learning a lesson in the doing, while progressing the overall arc, which sees them apply what they’ve learned to a larger crisis, growing as characters and heroes as they do. The two story arcs contained in this collection encompass the entirety of the run, and ties the narrative up neatly with Thor growing to become the hero we know from Marvel proper. Greg Tocchini’s art is lively, loose, and expressive, with lush, detailed, backgrounds that help set the grand, epic, scale of the mythological world in which the story takes place. Unlike a some artists, he’s quite skilled at drawing believable teenagers, who are fit, young, and attractive looking, rather than muscular midgets, something that’s always bothered me a lot in comics featuring teenage protagonists. Akira Yoshida’s writing is tightly scripted, clever, and engaging, and more character than plot driven. Young Thor goes through growing pains, struggling with the expectations placed upon him; young and cocky, with a youthful swagger, he rushes recklessly into action, while Balder and Sif preach restraint and thinking before he acts. Young Thor and Sif slowly develop an awkward relationship as they move from being friends and sparring partners to potential love interests… a particularly favorite issue of mine involves Thor falling under the spell of a young Enchantress, which forces Sif to confront her own feelings towards Thor, and how he might feel towards her.

Thor: Son of Asgard was a sadly overlooked, and in my mind, successful, attempt at doing a Young Adult book using a mainstream Marvel character, that has broad appeal to both new readers and older fans of the character. I’m glad that it was put back in print in this full sized format (it was originally collected in two digest sized trades), and in its entirety.

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You can find Thor: Son of Asgard in store at The Beguiling, or you can buy it online at beguiling.com.

Title: Atomic Robo Volume 4: Atomic Robo and Other Strangeness
Writer:  Brian Clevinger
Artist:  Scott Wegener
Publisher: Red 5 Comics
Published: 2010

Review by John Anderson

What is it About?

Atomic Robo and the Action Scientists meet vampires from another dimension, the crazy Dr. Dinosaur, a Japanese biotech monster, and the ghost of Thomas Edison, all in one week.

Why is it Good?

“I trust you’re familiar with the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics. Well, Tesla and I found one back in the ’30s, and it’s filled with vampires. Here, take a gun.”

If you’re tired of story arcs that lead into more story arcs until you have to read a year’s worth of books just to understand the book you’re reading now, then Atomic Robo is for you. Even if you haven’t read the previous 3 volumes, it doesn’t matter. All you need to know about this series can be summed up by “atomic powered robot scientist fights monsters.” Each story stands by itself with no explanation needed or given. And it’s wonderful. After all, do we really need to see every detail of how characters get from one set piece to another? Do the heroes really need long backstories and lengthy internal monologues? Do we really need a long history of the latest crazy villain when all we need to know can be told in a few panels? All that matters is the crazy fun adventure that’s happening right now.

And volume 4 is just as crazy and fun as the previous 3 volumes. It tells one week in the life of Atomic Robo and the Action Scientists, from the day Dr. Bernard Fischer is unexpectedly hired to combat an outbreak of vampires, to the day when Edison returns from the dead as a flaming skeleton in a suit. In between, Atomic Robo goes to Japan and meets Science Team Super Five, and goes to French Polynesia and meets Dr. Dinosaur, a dinosaur who claims to have traveled in time using crystals. This story, definitely the high point of the book, includes the story that was first published for Free Comic Book Day 2009 – and incorporates it into an adventure that had me laughing out loud at Dr. Dinosaur’s absurd pronouncements and Atomic Robo’s dry comebacks.

That’s my favourite thing about the book (besides the lack of exposition): the dry dialogue. Atomic Robo is just a regular guy trying to do a job – aside from being atomically powered and indestructible, anyway – and he always has a comeback to point out just how silly his villains are.

The art is simple and to the point, just like the story. I love how Robo’s emotions are conveyed solely though the metal lids of his headlight eyes – and how Dr. Dinosaur’s bulging eyes get crazier with every hilarious thing he says.

Atomic Robo is one of the funniest, craziest books I’ve ever read. Check out volume 4, and you’ll want to read the other three volumes too.

You can find Atomic Robo Volume 4 in store at The Beguiling, or you can buy it online at beguiling.com.

Title: The Playwright
Writer: Daren White
Artist: Eddie Campbell
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Published: 2010

Review by Jason Azzopardi

I have a real soft spot for the oddballs in this world, and the beautiful way social cues just pass them by, or how they struggle to fit their ever-so-rounded thoughts into the harsh angular lines of modern society.  This suits me fine because the world is too angular as it is.

But what if you’re an oddball from the most rigid of societies, where, at every turn, there is royalty, tea and crumpets and fencing?  How do you account for being lonely in all that staunch propriety, or having dirty thoughts, or needing to defecate, or even just being filled with self-loathing?

Daren White and Eddie Campbell’s deliciously uncomfortable (and very British) graphic novel, The Playwright, chronicles the physical and emotional minutia of a Dennis Potterish author’s middle age.  Finding financial and artistic success early in his career, the title character has also wedged himself into a sadly hermitic life by poaching emotional conflict from those closest to him, all for the sake of his art.  The Playwright, we discover, may be a keen observer of the human condition (and all its foibles), but he’s not a particularly astute practitioner of it.  He has a concrete set of ideas of what his identity and gender role are supposed be as an upper-middle class heterosexual male, but after a series of tragedies forces him to actually interact with the people passing through his existence, he finds that the foundation he has built this identity on is not as solid as he once thought.  Life simply happens whether you partake in it or not.

The Playwright’s authors delight in poking fun at the British stiff-upper-lip and class hierarchies, and they relish in showing the consequences of a frightened, closed mind.  Daren White writes from a delicate, intimate distance.  He lulls us into laughing at our unnamed protagonist’s quirks and neurotic obsessions in the opening chapters, but it’s an uncomfortable, fidgety laughter escaping from our lips.  By the book’s genuinely touching end, we begin to root for The Playwright’s happiness because we recognize ourselves in his behavior.  He begins as an aging caricature and evolves into living tissue.

Eddie Campbell paints with nervous, evocative gesture lines and a gasping, slightly garish polyester palette, suggesting, as he does in From Hell, that all the British cherrios and tally-hos are merely set dressing; that the prim and proper traditions are really just ridiculous façades for the elite to cushion themselves against the harsh blows of a confusing world.  But buried beneath their privileged layers are the same receding hairlines, wrinkles, social anxieties, terminal illnesses and sagging flesh that make us all human.

The Playwright is a story for grown-ups.  It worms his way into your own notions of aging and loneliness until you realize that this oddball of a book is not just a graphic novel, but also a mirror – a mirror that laughs and cries and needs to feel loved, and also one that shits and fucks, just like the rest of us.

Title: Casanova Volume 1: Luxuria
Writer: Matt Fraction
Artist: Gabriel Bá
Published: 2011
Publisher: Marvel

Review by John Anderson

What is it about?

Super-cool super-thief Casanova Quinn fights and steals his way across multiple universes in “globetrotting espionage sex adventures of violent intrigue.”

Why is it good?

What, the proceeding paragraph wasn’t enough for you? Alright: Casanova works for E.M.P.I.R.E., a task force maintaining order across the globe, headed by his father, Cornelius. Like any rebellious child, Casanova is having fun messing up his father’s plans – but when the criminal mastermind Newman Xeno kidnaps the Casanova from another timeline to replace the Casanova that died in this timeline, then recruits this Casanova as a double agent, things start to get weird.

How weird? For example, Casanova defeats the three-faced monster monk Fabula Berzerko and steals his body. E.M.P.I.R.E. installs the brain of sexbot Ruby Seychelle into the body, and now Ruby Berzerko, sporting a wig and lipstick, works for E.M.P.I.R.E. as a strategist.

Other missions include liberating sexbots in a town powered by orgone, kidnapping God, and stopping a Japanese nuclear-powered robot. The plots are complicated, with the competing organizations having their own agendas and Casanova trying to subvert them all. For every mission E.M.P.I.R.E. gives Casanova, Newman Xeno gives him a counter-mission. Plus, Casanova’s amoral sister Zephyr also works for Xeno, and the two often go on missions together, but with different aims.

In case it wasn’t obvious, the name of Casanova’s father gives the game away: Casanova owes a huge debt to Jerry Cornelius, the dimension-hopping agent of chaos created by Michael Moorcock in the late sixties for novels such as The Final Programme and The Condition of Muzak. If you enjoy the Jerry Cornelius books you will love Casanova: it has the same rapidly moving narrative, and a sense that the characters, and the narrative itself, are in flux. Casanova’s antagonistic relationship with his father and sister, and his need to protect his mother from his father, can also be seen as nods to Jerry Cornelius’s messed up family.

This new edition of Casanova: Luxuria has been completely recoloured and relettered. The first edition was printed in only two colours – black and green – to make it look like “a comic from another time,” as Bá says in the afterword. This new version uses a limited palette of just 45 colours in order to preserve that feeling. The recolouring is very well done. Green is still the prominent colour, with yellow and red used to good effect. On the other hand, the new lettering is smaller and some speech bubbles have been moved around. I’m not sure why it needed to be relettered at all. But it doesn’t detract from the story.

The action is fast-paced, the characters are sexy, the dialogue is witty, the stakes are high: Casanova is for YOU.

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You can find Casanova in store at The Beguiling, or you can buy it online at beguiling.com.

Comics of Dread: 

and

Review by Jason Azzopardi

We all have a genre that we know isn’t good for us. One that our friends keep telling us to leave, but one we continually make excuses for. One that takes our trust and our love, and then stays out all night without even so much as a courtesy call. Romance. Science fiction. Superheroes. All occasionally wonderful, but mostly fucking appalling. For me, that genre is horror. It is woven into my DNA, and it forces me to sit through reeking dung heaps of film, television, books and comics just to find one diamond in the rough(age) that still manages to elicit a sense of dread from my jaded bones.

Defined as “having a great fear or apprehension of something in the future”, I would argue that works of true dread, at least in terms of popular entertainment, are able to strike that dissonant chord despite their audience’s anticipation of the inevitable outcome. And even though modern audiences are so familiar with genre convention that they could probably draw a roadmap to that ending, blindfolded, every so often a work pops out of nowhere that connects on a personal or an archetypal level. Two recent graphic novels achieve the rare feat of doing both for me.

These are haunted house stories.

Ball Peen Hammer, by novelist/playwright/filmmaker/Renaissance man Adam Rapp and artist George O’Connor is, at once, a complex character study, a dystopian/end-of-the-world horror show, a wrenching loss of innocence fable and a tragic love story. It all takes place within two locations, and it is absolutely riveting. An ominous sense of doom builds to excruciating levels as four characters struggle with choices that will either allow them to survive or perish holding on to their humanity. It is only one or the other. O’Connor’s jagged art is filled with nervous energy, perfectly complementing the foreboding atmosphere. Rapp never explores or explains the world outside the claustrophobic safe houses that the characters inhabit – we know only that things are very, very bad and they are only getting worse – but it is in this ambiguity that much of the book’s dread stems. We are attached to these people because we get to know them as people. We don’t want bad things to happen to them, and yet we know deep down that it can’t possibly end well.

And while House, by cartoonist Josh Simmons, is an even simpler story, it somehow manages to be even more oppressive. Three young people explore an abandoned mansion. Things go badly. The entire comic is done in pantomime; not a word of dialogue; not a single sound effect. And yet the deafening silences are claustrophobic and the encroaching shadows, suffocating. Reading Simmons’ story is a palpable assault on the senses because of its hushed thick hush. We smell the rot, taste the mildew, feel the flesh scraping on stone and hear the bones cracking. We suffer through every ounce of pain and every second of anguish until, like the characters, we welcome madness and death.

Ball Peen Hammer and House are works that refuse to be tied up into digestible little packages. They challenge and they haunt. They are messy and uncomfortable. And like the best works of dread, it is not so much their endings that matter, but the journey getting there. That, and the vain hope that maybe things won’t end like we know they will.

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You can find Ball Peen Hammer and House in store at The Beguiling, or you can buy them online at beguiling.com.

Title: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec Part 1: Pterror Over Paris and Part 2: The Eiffel Tower Demon
Writer and artist: Jacques Tardi
Published: 2010
Publisher: Fantagraphics

Review by John Anderson


What is it about?
In turn-of-the-century Paris, Adèle Blanc-Sec finds herself caught up in bizarre adventures featuring a murderous pterodactyl and a Babylonian death cult.

Why is it good?
Tardi is one of France’s most famous creators, and Adele Blanc-Sec, the cynical author turned adventurer, is his most famous creation. I first read her adventures when they were serialized in Cheval Noir, then again when the first story (called Adèle and the Beast) was published by NBM. I am very happy to see that Fantagraphics has decided to republish the first two stories in a beautiful hardcover book, with another book to follow next year.

When a pterodactyl egg in Paris’s Museum of Natural History inexplicably hatches, Paris is subjected to a reign of pterror! Adèle, who is in the city on mysterious business of her own, quickly becomes entangled in a web of shady characters and double-crossings, all centring on the one or more pterodactyls that are terrorizing Paris. In the second story, Adèle investigates the theft of a Babylonian idol and mysterious disappearances on the Pont-Neuf, leading to her confronting a weird cult and uncovering a conspiracy.

The adventures are by turns funny, weird, and surprising. They are reminiscent of Tintin, if Tintin was a cynical Frenchwoman instead of an idealistic boy. What I like about Adèle is her practicality. Initially she is trying to accomplish her own goal, but she gets drawn into the adventure when she realizes that people have been using her – so she decides to get even.

The art is also reminiscent of Hergé. It perfectly captures the idea of turn-of-the-century Paris (to me, anyway), with its detailed architecture and muted colours. A prehistoric monster flying over this skyline is not at all out of place.

Originally it was the idea of monsters in turn-of-the-century Paris that attracted me to these stories, but reading them again, I find the story to be focused rather on the web of intrigue and double-crossings. Tardi seems to love introducing one mysterious character after another, characters who turn on each other, characters in silly disguises, characters who die just when you think they’re going to be important. There is a humorous scene towards the end of the book that suggests that all these minor characters are involved in their own adventures and conspiracies, and we only encounter them when their story intersects with the main plot. The plot itself is very complicated, and in fact at one point a character says, “Not even fodder for a penny dreadful… Too complicated! No one would understand a word.” However, by the end of this volume most loose ends are neatly tied up. The plot gets even more complicated in later stories, so it will help to read these stories in order from the beginning.

This new publication uses a new translation, which is better than the old translation some ways and worse in others. There are times when I find this new translation not as idiomatic and a bit more stilted than the old version. There is one scene in particular where some of the humour is lost. But the old version sometimes left speech bubbles empty, a mistake this new translation doesn’t make.

Luc Besson, director of The Fifth Element, adapted Adèle’s adventures into a movie, which was released in the spring of 2010. Here’s hoping it will see a North American release soon. And here’s hoping for many more volumes of Adèle’s adventures from Fantagraphics.

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You can find The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec in store at The Beguiling, or you can buy it online at beguiling.com.

Title: Mary Perkins, On Stage
Writer and artist: Leonard Starr
Published: 2006
Publisher: Classic Comics Press

Review by Jason Azzopardi

Over the years, my good “pals” at The Beguiling have bestowed upon me the distinct and, in my humble opinion, the rather passive-aggressive nickname, “The Hater”. This reputation, at least as far as I can tell, seems to stem from my choosing not to feel threatened by things that are different, by wholly embracing variety in my lifestyle, and by holding mediocre comics in contempt. But, I graciously accept this misnomer because I have a kind and forgiving nature. What the Beguilingers can’t seem to comprehend, however, is that for one to have such a capacity for “hating”, as it were, one must also have an equal capacity for loving.

As a comic book reader, you either love the daily “story” strip, admiring how its rhythms constantly reframes the story while advancing the narrative, or you find it dated and impenetrable. I am a lover of this particular form, and perhaps most of all, I love my Mary Perkins. She is the Bailey Quarters of comic books, and for those who know who Bailey Quarters is, you surely have some understanding of the depth of my feelings.

On Stage began its daily newspaper life in 1957, chronicling the trials and tribulations of a plucky young mid-western actress as she attempts to break into the New York stage scene and, eventually, motion pictures and television. Originally intended by writer/artist Leonard Starr as a soap opera for the newspaper’s female readership, the strip begins earnestly and competently enough with auditions and rejections aplenty for Mary Perkins, along with the accompanying backstage melodrama and relationship hardship. But all this conflict must have sparked true artistic inspiration in Mr. Starr, because On Stage almost immediately evolves from a well-crafted singular genre piece into something much richer.

As Mary’s career rises, and her relationship with her photojournalist boyfriend (and eventual husband), Pete Fletcher, deepens, so, too, does the jeopardy in the strip. Gangsters, wolves on the prowl and flimflam artists begin to appear alongside the unethical producers, agents and co-stars as antagonists. They are quickly followed by mysterious hermits, disfigured phantoms and international spies. Just go with it. It’s all a beautiful blast, simultaneously embracing and poking fun at romance and adventure genre hallmarks, but always with a wink and a smile from Starr’s lush line work and composition, pitch-perfect sense of story structure and pacing, and self-deprecating sense of humour.

Where Leonard Starr truly shines, however, is as a writer. At times, his insights into media and celebrity obsession are frighteningly prophetic, especially when taking into consideration that most of these insights occurred right around the beginnings of electronic and mass media, without the benefit of a half-century of hindsight to view the cultural impact.

But the true heart of On Stage lies in watching Mary develop as an individual. She does not structure her life around trapping a man for marriage, as most fictional female soap opera characters of the time do. With her intelligence and wit she is reliant upon and beholden to no one. It is only after she develops self-awareness and a sense of professional and personal confidence that Starr allows her to find someone to share her life with.

Mary and Pete may actually be the first “adult” couple to appear in comics. Their relationship is exciting, honest and flawed, and like the best literature, shockingly familiar at times. There, of course, is bliss and humour in their attempts to balance co-dependence with individuality, but also the daily irritations and pettiness that occasionally surface in any relationship. It is so lovely to watch them evolve from rich character archetypes into real people with distinct personalities and genuine emotional problems.

Mary Perkins, On Stage is entrancing. The indomitable Classic Comics Press is now roughly halfway through its complete run of the strip. If you are at all interested an extinct era of comics history, value diversity and intelligence in your reading material, or, unlike my pals at The Beguiling, have an open mind and, more importantly, an attention span, it is well worth taking a chance on the first volume of this charming series. You may just discover a forgotten masterpiece.

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You can find Mary Perkins, On Stage in store at The Beguiling, or you can buy it online at beguiling.com.