Graphic Novels

Every other Friday, Omnivoracious will turn the spotlight on one or more graphic novels, with future installments also including news and special features. You can let me know who or what you'd like to see featured by commenting on this post. (In October, Graphic Novel Friday will return to its normal weekly schedule.)

If you like crazy Mexican westerns, you'll love the new graphic novel from the always fascinating Soft Skull Press: Dead in Desemboque, written by E. Arellano, illustrated by W. Schaff, R. Schuler, and A. Thibodeau. Some sections use black-and-white art techniques akin to sophisticated woodcuts, albeit woodcuts with the quality of watercolors. Others use a more traditional approach similar to R. Crumb, conjuring up surreal Day of the Dead celebrations and spaghetti Westerns. There's a storyline running through this melange of imagery, and it's often bawdy and surreal. But it's the art I kept going back to.

Arellano is a Hispanic novelist and indie musician, and Dead is apparently in the tradition of pocket-sized comic books called historietas sold in Mexico to readers of all ages. Soft Skull Press calls Dead the first one to be sold north of the border. Whatever you want to call this very cool graphic novel, it's something readers should take a look at--definitely recommended.

The Amazon editors and writers you read on Omni every day aren't the only ones reading hungrily around here. Today one of our book buyers, Alex Carr, sits in to give us a rundown on the recently released comic, The Umbrella Academy:

There’s a Secret Invasion going on in the comics industry, but it has nothing to do with Skrulls or multiple Earths. The once-quiet (and continuity-heavy) superhero genre is now overrun by celebrities. Buffy creator Joss Whedon recently finished a twenty-four issue stint on Astonishing X-Men, The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy’s Alan Heinberg revamped Wonder Woman, and bestselling author Brad Meltzer recast The Justice League of America. With superhero film adaptations filling the seats at the superplex, comics aren’t quite as exclusive (or reclusive) anymore.

Gerard Way, the frontman for My Chemical Romance, is the latest entry in the name-in-lights trend of comic writers, as he’s recently published a six issue mini-series for Dark Horse Comics titled The Umbrella Academy.

(Cue massive eye rolling from comics fans)

However, celebrity be damned, Way does have some legit comic cred.

Comics guru and industry living legend Grant Morrison hailed The Umbrella Academy as “An ultraviolet psychedelic sherbet bomb of wit and ideas. The superheroes of the 21st century are here at last…” And then, of course, there are the covers by Eisner award-winning artist James Jean, whose work on Fables lends a monthly air of sophistication to comic racks. Not to mention that before My Chemical Romance, Way worked as an intern for DC Comics.

Way begins The Umbrella Academy by introducing us to a team of seven oddly super-powered children who battle against a berserk Eiffel Tower manned  by a zombie-robot Gustave Eiffel. And it only gets weirder. Just as Way seems to carve a comfortable niche, the story jumps ahead 20 years, where the children—well, most of them—are now re-introduced as adults and have split apart.

As the narrative flashes between the adventures of the children and their reluctant world-saving adult counterparts, Way’s wit is matched by artwork from Gabriel Ba, whose artwork on the trippy spy thriller Casanova made him an easy choice for this series. Ba manages to make the unbelievable look unbelievably good: angry robots, psychotic orchestras, kid ninjas, chimpanzee butlers, etc. It has the potential for the bombastic, but the tight scripting and clean artwork (love those colors by Dave Stewart) allow for a few quiet beats as well, especially between team leader Spaceboy and The Rumor (who has possibly the coolest power yet: the power of suggestion).

By the collection’s end, Way has barely unraveled even a hint of the threads he has in place, but Dark Horse promises a second series will begin before the end of 2008. Here’s to hoping Gerard Way does quit his day job in favor of more issues for this dynamic new series.

--Alex Carr

Every other Friday (or in this case Thursday, because of the July 4 holiday), Omnivoracious will turn the spotlight on one or more graphic novels, with future installments also including news and special features. You can let me know who or what you'd like to see featured by commenting on this post. (In October, Graphic Novel Friday will return to its normal weekly schedule.)

Some children's books are perfect for kids and adults, even if they don't include that kind of winking irony that can be required for that combined audience. In the case of Susan Schade and Jon Buller's Fog Mound: Travels of Thelonius series, there's another synergy going on as well: between comics/graphic novels and traditional kid's fiction. Each book is a combination of comics-with-words and words-with-drawings, the latter chapters being more like a standard illustrated book. This hybrid works very well, as the word-heavy sections are mostly reserved for conversations and the comics sections reserved mostly for action and the introduction of new settings.

The milieu is a post-apocalytic world in which things are coming back to life and talking animals populate the ruins of deserted human cities. Separated from his home during a flood, Thelonius the talking chipmunk, long enamored of human creations, has various surreal and miraculous adventures. The books, from Simon & Schuster are lovingly constructed and should take pride of place on any collector's shelf. The latest, Volume 3: Simon's Dream, was released in May. Highly recommended.

Jack O'Connell's The Resurrectionist is one of the most original American novels of the year. A quest by a father to save his son, a tale of mad scientists and dream-logic, the story of a band of "freaks" on their own strange journey, and the chronicle of an odd coma clinic, the book defies easy classification. As I wrote in my recent Washington Post Book World review, "I've read The Resurrectionist twice now, and both times it came as something of a revelation. It seems odd we should care so much about the freaks, for example, when we know they're merely characters in a boy's comic book. Nor should the dream-life of a coma patient be so resonant, and yet it is."

The Resurrectionist has been reviewed by the LA Times, BookPage, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. The New York Times Book Review wrote of the book, "“To call Jack O’Connell’s novels imaginative, or even original, doesn’t begin to say it...There’s something both exciting and unnerving about [his] kind of hallucinatory writing.” Ron Hogan at Galleycat also posted a very nice feature. A website for The Resurrectionist exists at Enter Limbo.

The novel comes nine years after O'Connell's last, in part for reasons revealed in the interview below and in part because his previous novel, Word Made Flesh, "was an extremely dark book. By the time it was published, I had two young kids. And I didn’t want to go back in the darkness for a while. So I spent a couple of years writing a satirical road novel. It’s a book I still like but my agent convinced me that it was not what readers expected or wanted from me. And that it might diminish whatever small readership I’d built up over these last 15 years. So I put it in a drawer and launched Sweeney’s story. Which was soon invaded by a troupe of wandering circus freaks." Other novels by O'Connell include the cult classic Box Nine, The Skin Palace, and Wireless, all set in his iconic, uniquely American creation, the rustbelt city of Quinsigamond.

As a long-time fan of O'Connell's unique surreal noir approach to fiction, I was thrilled to have a chance to interview him. When I asked where he was while answering my emailed questions, he replied, "I’m in the lab. The sepulcher. The dreaming vault at the top of the house. Hermetically sealed and insulated with 40 years worth of collected pulp. It’s about 5 a.m. and I’m stupid with jet-lag..."

Amazon.com: Where did your city of Quinsigamond come from? How has it changed over the years?
Jack O'Connell: Quinsigamond is my home-city as refracted through a quarter century of fever dream. I’ve lived my whole life within about three square miles of central Massachusetts. That was not the intention. No kid ever fell so hard for the standard clichés of an imagined writing life. I haunted the corner Rexall store and memorized the bio-blurbs on the rear covers of the paperbacks. Was long convinced that I needed to travel the globe, drive dynamite trucks, pan for gold in the Yukon, and fight fascists in Spain in order to become a writer. Things didn’t work out that way. And so, to paraphrase Thoreau, I have traveled much in my old, rustbelt, native city.

Basically, and over time, Quinsigamond became my supreme noir machine, the eternally dark and unknowable American metropolis. A nefarious, urban, capitalist hive where cycles of mystery, violence, manipulation, degradation, fear, loathing and meaninglessness play out repeatedly. Quinsigamond is the enormous, shadowy, chaotic, violent city that you have seen in so many films: It is Alphaville. It is Chinatown. It is Gotham City, Sin City, the Naked City. It is the Asphalt Jungle, the Nightmare Alley, the Shock Corridor and the Street of No Return.

But it’s also the archetypal real-world urban industrial city of the northeastern United States. So, Quinsigamond is Detroit, Michigan, of 1976. It is Akron, Ohio. It is Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Bangkok Park section of my city is Watts of 1965 or the most ravaged section of the Bronx in New York in 1972 (crossed with the Harlem of a dozen b-budget crime movies). The Canal Zone section of Quinsigamond is Manhattan’s East Village, on a Halloween night when someone slipped a particularly potent brand of acid into your punch. In one sense, Quinsigamond is this stew of my perceptions of what happened to all these once-teaming, once-vibrant metropolises of the American empire; these large urban municipalities that were emblematic of the industrial age. And as we moved into a post-industrial era, these cities were sort of abandoned and left to decay.

From the beginning, I was writing stories set in some version of my hometown. By the time I hit my 20s, it had morphed into Quinsigamond. And to this day, I continue to watch it evolve...or, maybe, devolve. It has grown in ways that amuse and repel and surprise. These days, I’m most interested in the totality of its history, which I’ve been mapping in the notebooks with ever-increasing detail over the last decade or so. I know how Quinsigamond began and how it ends. And I’m discovering with a good bit of excitement what happened in between.

Amazon.com: Your writing often mixes noir, horror, and the grotesque with your own brand of what I'd call American Surrealism. What influences on your work might surprise readers?
Jack O'Connell: Not sure how surprising any of the influences might be. I came of age in the late 60s/early 70s and, like a lot of my peers, I confess to a crazy amount of joy derived from wallowing in the pop of that era. What I get a kick out of is discovering, via the Web, that though we often thought we were the only Secret Martians on the planet grooving on the weird stuff at 1 a.m. in our parents’ paneled rec rooms, we were actually part of a teeming, semi-hidden nation of pulp-devouring geeks. I really dig that shock of recognition when somebody references that ancient ABC Movie of the Week that played with his head for two weeks in 1971. Or that German horror flick that triggered a month of dissociation when it was screened at the downtown grindhouse one weekend in ’72.

But the writers who really knocked me over and shaped me were people like Bradbury and Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison. I always loved stories that seemed rooted in the mundane here and now until about three pages in. Then someone turns down an alley and everything becomes bathed in a growing aura of weirdness. I had the good fortune to spend a day in Phoenix a couple weeks ago with Jim Sallis, and, as always, I couldn’t help but hound him for anecdotes about the New Wave cabal – about Ellison and Delany and Spinrad and Dangerous Visions and New Worlds and such. Those guys hit me at a crucial time. From someone like Ellison, I took this lasting notion that you could mix things up, that you could retain the coolness, the flash, of SF, and merge it with mainstream literary devices and concerns. That you could cross-breed genres. That you could experiment, you could have fun. You could play with new effects, styles, approaches. That you were allowed to use whatever you felt best illuminated the story at hand.

A lot of noir writers that I know acknowledge an adolescent love of mystery stories. But during those crucial years when I was driving around my hometown with my father and soaking up my particular landscape, I was also feasting on different kinds of stories, which, though often housed inside a variety of different mediums, shared tone--a kind of weird, noirish, dystopian-but-still-romantic, individualistic, visionary vibe. Whether in stories and novels, or films, or even in TV shows or record albums, I was hungry for fables about the tensions between rebellion and conformity, the individual and the faceless state, control and freedom, illusion and reality, comfort and liberty. I was always a sucker for neo-Orwellian weirdness. I guess I’m thinking of stuff like The Prisoner, this blatant, strident, anti-totalitarian serial--Mod Kafka for the late night tube. And that trickle of early ’70s SF films about near-future dystopias--movies like A Boy and His Dog, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and Rollerball--which all seemed, even to my hormone-engorged, pubertous brain, incendiary critiques of contemporary culture. You know, I’d even include Springsteen’s “Jungleland,” which was a corner drugstore JD paperback novel set to music, exploded into a Wall of Sound, electrified, supercharged, made epic and operatic, a teenage Iliad staged inside the noir daydreams of my own city.

Amazon.com: What was the hardest part of writing The Resurrectionist?
Jack O'Connell: Everything was difficult throughout the course of this composition. I started out imagining that I was writing one book and ended up realizing, at one point, that I was writing another. I’ve never had a writing experience like this one. Originally, my intention was to write a sleek noir story that could have been sold in a 1959 Detroit bus station. In four or five months, I had completed most of a first draft of that book. In that draft, I had my protagonist repeatedly reading a comic book to his comatose son. Then one day, I asked myself, “What’s the deal with this comic book? What’s the story?” And thus was born the sub-plot about the Goldfaden Circus Freaks and their travails, as detailed in the comic book, Limbo. In short order, the freaks’ story began to expand and grow. And before I knew it, the freaks’ tale was rivaling my little bus station noir. Then it was mirroring the original story. And then it was making moves to merge with the noir thriller. 

Amazon.com: Did you write the "comic book" sections all at one time and then layer them into the novel, or...?
Jack O'Connell: Yes. Once I realized the comic book story was going to be a running secondary narrative throughout the book, I wrote the freaks’ tale beginning to end. In fact, there is a larger, longer version than the one that appears in the book. I sliced and reshaped and rewrote in order to layer it into the primary narrative.

Amazon.com: There's a remarkable scene between the (mad) doctor and his prized newt. What did you want that scene to accomplish? Was it as fun to write as it is to read?
Jack O'Connell: Ha! Glad you liked René! Mostly, I guess, it’s an expository scene, of a sort. And I was hoping to shine some light on Dr. Peck’s character, I suppose. But the fact is, I’m not done with René. René will return. He and his kind have played a significant role in the history of Quinsigamond and will continue to do so. You know, a couple weeks back, I was walking around Portland, Oregon, late at night and I debated getting a tattoo of René the newt on the bottom of my left foot…

Amazon.com: How much revision do you do? And how much of what you wrote in rough draft made it into the published version of The Resurrectionist?
Jack O'Connell: I’m a compulsive reviser. And I wish I were not. And the compulsion seems only to get worse. I go through multiple drafts of a book and the changes from draft to draft are considerable. Then I work with my agent on additional, successive drafts. And then with the book’s editor once it’s sold. I’ll put it this way: I always begin with an outline. Once a book is about 100 pages along, I put the outline in a drawer and give myself the freedom to take some detours and see where they lead. When the book is finished and I’m packing up drafts and notes and the ephemera that surround composition, I’ll often take another look at that original outline. It rarely bears much resemblance to the published novel.

Amazon.com: Who is the biggest "freak" in The Resurrectionist, in your opinion?
Jack O'Connell: My gut says that the biggest freak of all is the guy who dreamed up the story. And I’m more than a little ambivalent regarding that confession…

Amazon.com: Would you ever consider writing an actual Limbo comic book?
Jack O'Connell: Yup. After the book sold, word got around, apparently, about the comic book subplot. There were some casual discussions between my agent and some comics people. One day, I received an envelope in the mail that contained some pencil sketches of some of my Goldfaden freaks. The artist really nailed some of those characters, I thought.

It’s funny--because of the Limbo story, people think I have some background in comics. I wish that were the case. Growing up, comics were a seasonal, passing fancy. I never read the terrific superhero stuff my friends were reading. Late ’60s, I was feasting on the stories of “Chuck White” in Treasure Chest and things like Archie and Sad Sack. It wasn’t until the 1980s that I became aware of some of the amazing work people were doing in comics. My brother turned me on to Dean Motter’s Mr. X. Right now, I’m smitten with Warren Ellis’s Dr. Sleepless. And while I’ve been out on the road, lots of people have raved over and pointed me to Criminal by Brubaker.

Amazon.com: Buzz the motorcycle gang leader is pretty complex, but basically a sociopath, I thought. Would you agree with that assessment? And if so, what does it say about Sweeney that he in a sense weds his fate to Buzz's by novel's end?
Jack O'Connell: I do agree. And I think it says that Sweeney has come down a pretty harrowing road and emerged at its end a fairly altered individual. One who can no longer accept the consensus reality that, in the past, had defined his existence.

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Jack O'Connell: About ten years ago I started writing a novel about a group of surfistas--the kids who try to “surf” atop speeding commuter trains. Back in the early ’90s, someone gave me a photo of these streets kids in Rio who weren’t allowed onto the tourist beaches. And, so, they found their own way to surf--they’d climb up on the roofs of trains and try to surf them as they sped down tracks and around curves. Until recently, I couldn’t find the correct voice for the book. Now I think I’ve got it. Hopefully, I’ll have a draft done in the next year.

Check out my latest Pop Culture Report (#4), in which I look at some great graphic novels, coffee table books, and one huge art book on an iconic dark fantasy figure. This time around, visual reviews of work by Greg Broadmore, Taylor F. Lockwood's Chasing the Rain, Out of Picture 2, Andrew Bolton's Superheroes: Fantasy and Fashion, First Second's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Centipede Press' The Art of Lovecraft, classic reprinted Moomim comics from Drawn & Quarterly, and a Fog Mound children's book featured in this week's upcoming Graphic Novel Fridays. As always, this is a DIY, come-into-my-home-and-look-at-some-books kind of video...

Every Friday, Omnivoracious will turn the spotlight on one or more graphic novels, with future installments also including news and special features. You can let me know who or what you'd like to see featured by commenting on this post.

This time out, I interview Greg Broadmore, author of the sensational Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory (Dark Horse Comics), which I reviewed in a previous installment of this column.

Who is Greg Broadmore, and why should you care? Well, in addition to having illustrated over 30 children's books, he has worked as a designer and sculptor on, among others, Peter Jackson's King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia. He's also a member of the famed Weta Workshop and a responsible for an awful lot of ray gun designs. In short, Broadmore is one of those multi-talented wretches doomed to spiral off ideas from their giant, imagination-stuffed brains on a daily basis. He's also, as this interview shows, a lot of fun...

Amazon.com: What was your childhood like? Do you remember any early "projects"?
Greg Broadmore: My childhood was good. I was smaller than I am now, and was into Star Wars more... Very little trauma, hardly any beatings. Lived in a coastal town called Whakatane in Aotearoa (New Zealand), which was nice. Yeah, I give my childhood a thumbs up. Early projects? I remember drawing lots of tanks, soldiers, dinosaurs, spaceships, robots... Mostly in scenes of destruction. I suppose that's not really a project. At primary school I did this project where I drew lots of German tanks shooting shit. Not sure what the teachers thought of that. I liked it.

Amazon.com: Was there any definitive point at which you realized, "This is what I want to do with my life?"
Broadmore: I've always known that I would draw and create things. I was totally oblivious to any notion of how i would make a living from it, but I knew that I loved drawing things, making models of things, etc. Luckily I never had any pressure from my parents to figure out a real career.

Amazon.com: Do you think imagination can be taught?
Broadmore: That's a hell of a question. I'm not sure... I can't see into people's minds, unfortunately, but I've always assumed that anyone can imagine, can have amazing visions and concepts. It's implementing them that's the trick, and that I believe can totally be taught. People assume that drawing, sculpting, writing whatever are all natural skills, that they couldn't possibly learn them if they don't already have a "gift" in that way. I don't believe that. I think if you have the inclination and dedication you can teach yourself any of these so called "natural" talents. The key is having the desire to do so.

Amazon.com: What gives you the most pleasure out of the whole process of creation?
Broadmore: That's another tricky question.  I love the almost trance like nature of rendering an illustration, the layers of detail and light. You get a flow going and it's great. Seeing the final piece is sometimes great, sometimes difficult. And a little time always changes my perception of the piece.

The big appeal of working on Dr. Grordbort's and a lot of my film work is seeing the final items made real by model makers and craftspeople like David Tremont. Very cool to pick up a design that you drew rendered into a tangible, tactile object. I get to see all sorts of my concepts become reality--like for Dr Grordbort's, we don't only make guns, we're doing all sorts of things now (which I can't exactly mention yet, because we're doing the big reveals at Comic Con next month). And of course it's amazing to know that people are actually buying our work and putting it in their homes. The guns have been out for just over a year and they have practically sold out, so we know we're on to something. It's good to know you're making something that people are actually genuinely into--enough so that they'll pay their hard earned cash for it.

Amazon.com: What role does humor play in your work?
Broadmore: I work on a lot of movies, a lot of Sci-Fi and  Fantasy projects, and most of the time these are played really straight, taking themselves very seriously. But most Sci-Fi, not all but especially movies and TV, are full of ludicrous inconsistancies and breaks in logic. This is easy to see in retrospect, which for me is a big part of the appeal of classic Sci-Fi. If we look at older science fiction we see the grandiose assumptions of the day, and the details that get missed that break the whole illusion. In twenty or more years we'll be able to look back at current Sci-Gi and see the incongruities with better clarity. So Dr. Grordbort's kind of revels in retro Sci-Fi as well as poking fun at it. It's almost always tongue in cheek, playing with the hokey science and backwards cultural assumptions of those bygone eras.

You can meet Greg Broadmore and find out more about his upcoming projects at Comicon in San Diego, July 24-27.

Check out these Broadmore resources:

The King of Fat Boss

More on the Good Doctor

Weta Workshop Profile

Broadmore Galleries

Every Friday, Omnivoracious will turn the spotlight on one or more graphic novels, with future installments also including news and interviews. You can let me know who or what you'd like to see featured by commenting on this post. This time, I give you the skinny on a hybrid...

Mr. Fooster: Traveling on a Whim, written by Tom Corwin and illustrated by Craig Frazier, is a little like Ray Bradbury Lite. In this whimsical, sometimes magical story of Mr. Fooster walking through an anonymous rural landscape, Corwin has crafted the kind of tale that teeters along the fine line between precious and profound. I still haven't made up my mind about where, finally, it falls, but I do know this: the illustrations by Craig Frazier are most definitely magical, in part because they have a solid quality that insulates them against being too breezy. Also, the art is integral to the text, specifically because it does keep the text grounded. (You could even argue that, with another twenty or so images added, the book would be just as effective without words.)

The book has gotten some great pre-press, including this quote from NPR's Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva): "Magical and haunting. Mr. Fooster is a lyrical story that asks questions big and small, with illustrations that compel you to peer into them over and over again."

The press release informs us that "Mr. Fooster seems like your average fellow, albeit one who likes to carry around an old bottle of bubble soap.  One Tuesday morning, however, he takes us into a rich and vivid world unlike any we’ve seen before--a world where questioning your assumptions can set you free.  As he heads out the door with no particular place to go, Mr. Fooster’s boundless curiosity leads him to reflect on questions such as: why is it that you never see baby pigeons? And, who figured out how to eat artichokes?"

This kind of reverie has been codified and made cliched by any number of predecessors. The real strength of the book is in its reminder to all of us that quiet contemplation, that time to think by oneself--a vanishing destination these days, with so many portable devices to distract us--is an important part of life. Inasmuch as Mr. Fooster will hopefully make its readers go take a walk in a natural setting, making us realize the rejuvenating potential of such a simple thing, it's a worthy endeavor. As a beautiful little gift book for the un-cynical amongst you, Mr. Fooster will also serve admirably.

For a sample of the book, check out the website, which has sample chapters with audio.

Every Friday, Omnivoracious will turn the spotlight on one or more graphic novels, with future installments also including news and interviews. You can let me know who or what you'd like to see featured by commenting on this post.

Back after longish vacation, I'm focusing this time on graphica that emphasizes the art over the words. Three recent books provide serious visual satisfaction...

Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory (Dark Horse Comics)

Greg Broadmore has written and illustrated an amazing Steampunk compendium of retro-weapons, along with some stunning visuals of the weapons in action. This might indeed be a Boy's Life dream on the page, but who can resist such insane creations as Ignas Fraunhoffer III Gas Driven Gadabout or Dr. Grordbort's Highly Popular Portable Inertionaut. The concluding section, Lord Cockswain's Marvelous Interplanetary Excursions, is part wacked-out sci-fantasy art, complete with weird aliens, and part send-up of Imperial intent. Yes, there are nice descriptions of the inventions, but the primary joy here is in the intricate detail of the full-color art.

Out of Picture 2 (Villard)

Anyone looking for strong storylines in Out of Picture 2: Art From the Outside Looking In will be as disappointed as I was in Out of Picture 1. But in perusing the gorgeous pages of #2 I've realized I wanted the wrong things out of the first volume. This is, first and foremost, a collection of strange and fully realized art, with narrative not really the point. The series takes its name from a film term used when a character, scene, or shot is cut from a movie--meaning that these books "represent a safe haven for stories a