Comics

Although clumsy to the tongue, the recently published Moresukine has a nearly unpronounceable title that manages to tell the story of the book itself.  “Moresukine,” according to author and artist Dirk Schwieger, is how the Japanese pronounce “Moleskine,” the famous line of travel notebooks and journals.  And using a Moleskine as his travel log, the expat author illustrated his experiences living in Japan from January to July 2006.  The kicker is that Schwieger invited readers from all over the world to visit his blog and submit weekly “missions” for him, and these adventures throughout Japan are now collected here.

“All of the missions had to be completed, in the order of their arrival and irrespective of their individual appeal to me,” the author notes in his introduction.  In a clever turn, the publisher produced his efforts in a Moleskine-esque notebook, complete with ribbon bookmark, black binding, and banded cover.

Thankfully, Schwieger is an accomplished artist: his characters have a cartoony feel, but the details in birds, mushrooms, buildings, and forestry are all the more impressive for appearing in a deceptively simple journal.  Schwieger does not cut corners and creates unique panel structures—one mission, to explore gender roles in Japan, folds out into a four-page spread, front and back.  For every “wasabi” mission, there is one that calls for Dirk to visit a swordsmith, and the spirituality discovered in the task comes through in the artwork and storytelling.  And the missions are filled with tiny tidbits.  Japanese swordsmiths, for example, are allowed to forge only 24 swords per year and must complete “countless” bureaucratic forms for each piece, “…because the Yakuza uses these weapons.”

My favorite entries called for Schwieger to research Japanese slang (“A ‘beauty with eight faces’ refers to somebody who tries to please everyone…”), travel Mount Takao, and, in the journal’s final entry, try the potentially fatal cuisine known as “fugu!”  Schwieger uses the anxiety of possibly consuming neurotoxins to end on a high note, reflecting on each mission in a series of flickering panels.

As a bonus, Schwieger contacted fellow artists from around the world and asked them to contribute to a shared mission of a Japanese experience.   James Kochalka (American Elf) turns in a brief and humorous piece, and the rest are mixed but compelling.  Moresukine has the feel of a true DIY comic, and it charms beyond such humble classifications.

Today, Stan Lee, quite possibly the biggest name in comics, was awarded the National Medal of Arts.  In the 1960s, Lee built the success of Marvel Comics on the backs of his famous characters: Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men, among many others who are still followed today by millions of fans.  Rather than mimic his contemporaries with stalwart, righteous super-heroes, Stan Lee created flawed characters who instantly tapped into the growing pains of his readership.

Known for his enthusiastic approach to narration, Lee was his usual chatty, sarcastic self about the award in an interview with the Washington Post:

"I wonder what took so long," said Lee, 85, in an interview Sunday. "Say 'He said it with a laugh' or I'll shoot you."

The award is selected by the National Endowment for the Arts and was presented to Lee by President Bush.  According to the NEA website, “The National Medal of Arts is the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the United States Government.”  ‘Nuff said!

More on Stan Lee’s contributions to the medium can be found in the thorough Marvel Visionaries: Stan Lee retrospective.  Congratulations, Stan.

2008 saw the graphic novel medium continue its rise in popularity, aided by high profile films like The Dark Knight , Iron Man, and the feverish buzz for the 2009 adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen.  Yet, the critical favorites had an indie feel—real roots in “comix” comics—as reflected in our picks for 2008.

Topping our list is Dark Horse’s The Umbrella Academy Volume 1, winner of the 2008 Eisner Awards for Best Limited Series, and featuring covers by the 2008 Best Cover Artist, James Jean, and Best Coloring by Dave Stewart.  Omni readers will remember we turned the spotlight on this title back in July, and Volume 2 begins this month in single issues and will be collected later in 2009.

If a theme exists throughout the entries it is a fearlessness, from Lynda Barry’s artistically explorative What It Is (also featured in an earlier Omni post), Dash Shaw’s 700+ page, hallucinogenic family drama Bottomless Belly Button, to Scott McCloud’s retrospective collection Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991.  McCloud, after all, did write the book on Understanding Comics as well as several follow-up studies of the medium.  There are growing pains in Harper’s mammoth collection, but McCloud’s annotations and shrugged-off self-consciousness only add to the experience.

Surprisingly, the biggest risk taken in the list may have come from publishing juggernaut Marvel Comics, who let genre-bending, superstar author Jonathan Lethem have free reign in his maxi-series Omega: The Unknown, with art by alt. comics artist, Farel Dalrymple (Pop Gun War).

Lethem based Omega on a childhood-favorite comic of his by the same name.  Created in the mid 70s by Steve Gerber (who also created Howard the Duck), the classic Omega centered around a mute, superhero alien who developed a strange link with an intelligent and introverted boy on Earth.  Sound like the premise for a 10-issue revival by one of the Big Two in comics?  Kudos to Marvel for taking such a chance.  Sadly, Steve Gerber passed away in 2008, before he could see Lethem’s re-imagining come to a close, and he left the business without giving the project his full blessing.  Adding to the storied drama, Gerber’s artistic partner on the original series, Jim Mooney, also passed away in 2008.

Omega: The Unknown is philosophical, satiric, and, in true tribute to its source material, very weird.  It’s a shame that Gerber and Mooney not only passed away, but that they did before seeing their character realized in this curious salute.  It’s an altogether tragic read without any easy answers, and its final chapter is told in total silence, perhaps in observation of the aforementioned.

Plenty remains to be said about these picks and more in our Best of 2008 Store.  Happy reading, True Believers.

Editors' Top Ten Picks in Comics & Graphic Novels

1. The Umbrella Academy Volume 1
2. What It Is
3. An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories: Volume 2
4. Bottomless Belly Button
5. The Alcoholic
6. Omega: The Unknown
7. Too Cool To Be Forgotten
8. Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert
9. Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
10. The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard

Customers' Top Ten Picks in Comics & Graphic Novels

1. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
2. In Odd We Trust 
3. No Future For You (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 2)
4. The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle
5. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores
6. Fables Vol. 10: The Good Prince
7. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
8. What It Is
9. The Crass Menagerie: A Pearls Before Swine Treasury
10. Angel: After The Fall Volume 1

Ladies and Gentlemen, the pinnacle of the year and the moment we’ve all been waiting for has arrived -- Stephen Colbert has made an address to Amazon.com customers. It's no surprise that in his address, Mr. Colbert pitches his upcoming DVD, A Colbert Christmas – The Greatest Gift of All, releasing November 25th and now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. Described as “America’s favorite Christmas tradition” A Colbert Christmas will certainly be entertaining with guests like Feist, Toby Keith, John Legend, Willie Nelson, and Jon Stewart.  Not only will it make a great gift for any Stephen Colbert fan, a portion of the proceeds go to benefit the charity, Feeding America. Seems like his message is pretty well timed, considering that some of his DVDs and other Comedy Central hits are on sale until December 2nd -- Mike

By now, you’ve had enough of Halloween candy.  Maybe you’ve had enough of all things Halloween - especially the repetitive costumes.  Did anyone happen to catch a sighting of The Joker last weekend?  Like Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow before him, the late Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker in The Dark Knight saturated the social consciousness this Halloween and seeped onto the streets, into house parties, onto Facebook photos, and celebrity blogs.  After years of idolizing Batman, everybody now wants to be The Joker.

Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger’s separate cinematic portrayals of The Clown Prince of Gotham City could not be more dissimilar, and while this may have initially stumped the casual fan, it came as no shock to longtime DC Comics readers.  After all, every few years, comics writers find a way to reinvent Batman’s nemesis.  This year, DC Comics wisely capitalized on the success of the new, tall, dark, and Halloween-friendly Joker by releasing one of the most shocking re-imaginings yet, simply titled The Joker.

Writer Brian Azzarello is no stranger to Gotham’s streets, having left his quiet mark in Batman: Broken City with longtime collaborator Eduardo Risso.  Azzarello’s most famous comics work to date, however, is his Eisner Award-winning crime series 100 Bullets (now in its 13th installment from DC’s Vertigo imprint).  And in The Joker, Azzarello plays to his strengths by taking the “super” out of the supervillain and placing what remains in a very grounded and threatening criminal reality.

Complementing Azzarello is the artwork from Lee Bermejo, who recently provided an exclusive Amazon cover for Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home.  If his latest cover isn’t enough of an indication, The Joker is strictly for mature readers only and is one gruesome affair.  Bermejo’s artwork gives Gotham an oily look and its characters a jagged, seen-it-all cynicism.  The Joker doesn’t wish to take over the world, he simply wants to own his corner of Gotham—and all its inhabitants.

Freshly sprung from Arkham Asylum, Azzarello’s Joker could very well be stepping straight out of director Chris Nolan’s recent film.  His smile is vicious and cruelly scarred; his clothes ragged and his hair is unkempt.  Things have changed since The Joker went away, and he isn’t laughing about what’s happened in his absence.  Familiar characters like The Riddler, Killer Croc, Two-Face, The Penguin, and even Harley Quinn make appearances.

This is an Original Graphic Novel, meaning it does not collect any previously published material, unlike most superhero trades that are compromised of five or six 22-page issues.  As a result, the fresh storyline has a true sense of urgency.  It races to its manic and brutal finish.

Once readers take a breath, there are plenty more Joker stories to read. Newbies will want to start with the humbly titled The Joker: Greatest Stories Ever Told.  For the fearless, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean take readers on one of the most successfully mind-bending Joker tales in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth.  Atop the mountain, however, Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke will surprise even the most jaded reader, although Moore has since said it’s not his favorite work.  Still, an Alan Moore comic is an Alan Moore comic, and DC recently released The Killing Joke in a gussied-up gift edition.

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we talk about people talking about the living and the undead.

MTV.com posted a story late last week on (fictional) girls who love vampires, featuring: Bella, Buffy, Sookie of the Sookie Stackhouse novels (the basis for Alan Ball's series, True Blood), and Samantha from FEARnet's Dark Path Chronicles*.

Steve Niles, one of the writers for 30 Days of Night says of the phenomenon, and vampires:

"It's a direct confrontation with death," Niles said. "And they're metaphors for fear of invasion and disease and more. Vampires have the potential to be really scary. How can they be scary if cheerleaders are dating them?"

(*Dark Path Chronicles is an online music video series that starts tomorrow, or today, November 6th. Lambert, who directed music videos for Madonna, Motley Crue, and lots of other people, talks about the series on the FEARnet blog. Or you can watch this trailer...after a short game ad.)

He needs to be cute *and* scary...
The New York Times chimes in with their own Twilight comparisons in "Love and Pain and the Teenage Vampire Thing":

"...until “Twilight,” even vampires of the devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful variety did manage, between tragic embraces, to be kind of scary. Angel, the hunky, centuries-old love object of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, would occasionally get a wrinkly, from-hell look on his face, bare his fangs and give vent to the darker side of his nature. At those moments the viewer would fully understand why he was a candidate for what Buffy and her gang referred to as “slayage.” In “Twilight,” slayage isn’t a possibility: the only serious question for Bella and her breathless readers is whether she’ll dare to Do It with her bad-boy lover."

Buffy's new book...
FEARnet interviewed George Jeanty, artist for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Dark Horse comic series. Volume 3 of book-form season 8, Wolves at the Gate, comes out next week. (found on Whedonesque)

...and Bella's old one.
And The Book Bench witnessed some Twilight love:

“Damn,” said a girl travelling with the young man. “You make me wanna catch up.” She ruffled through her bag and pulled out a copy of the same book: Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight.” The stranger smiled as the two began to read, face to face, their copies touching top to top. A book never seemed so sweet.

Quick links...
Susan Beth Pfeffer announces that John Green's reviews of her book the dead and the gone and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games will appear in this week's Sunday New York Times Book Review.

"The Anxiety of Influence": Paper Cuts excerpts from Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's Influence.

Wamego High School students talk about reading and books, including their collective least favorite, The Hobbit and a favorite, The Abundance of Katherines. (ALAN LitCast Episode #1)

Galley Cat offers encouragement for nanowrimo participants: Carrie Ryan was a practicing lawyer when she cranked out the first 20,000 words of The Forest of Hands and Teeth during nanowrimo. Now it's due out from Delacorte in March 2009.

This video trailer for The Forest of Hands and Teeth was a finalist in the Kirkus Reviews Teen Book Video Awards, a nationwide contest for young filmmakers. (Thanks, yabooknerd, for the tip.)

--Heidi

We're only two days from Election Day, and it's hard to pull away from the news coverage.  One recent sort-of-diversion for me was