Category: Mature Reading

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Red Mother with Child (Louvre Collection)


By Christian Lax translated by Montana Kane (NBM/Musée du Louvre Éditions)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-257-1(HB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-258-8

In 2005 one of the greatest museums in the world began an intriguing ongoing project with the upstart art form of comics; inviting some of the world’s most accomplished masters of graphic narrative to create new works in response to the centuries of acquired treasures residing within the grand repository of arts, history and culture.

The tales are produced in close collaboration with the forward-looking authorities of the Louvre, dedicated to pushing the envelope of what can be accomplished by master craftsman inspired by their creative antecedents and forebears. These are no thinly-concealed catalogues of exhibition contents gift-wrapped in cartoon terms to gull potential visitors off their couches and into a stuffy edifice of public culture, but vibrant and challenging comics events calculated to make you think again about what creativity and history mean…

Since then, many of our medium’s greatest exponents have crafted 11 astounding and compelling graphic novels and the twelfth may well be the most potent and rewarding thus far.

Courtesy of those fine folks at NBM, that latest beguiling bande dessinée is now available in English, highlighting Christian Lax’s inestimable artistic gifts and his dedication to and fascination with contemporary crises. Red Mother With Child shockingly combines reportage with drama and suspense with art appreciation to look beyond simplistic media hot button reports and governmental sideshow talking points to truly focus on one of the world’s most tragic human crises via the lens of immortal transcendent art and history…

Originally released in 2019 as Une Maternité rouge, this is a timely and powerful commentary on the value of art as well as a telling riposte to modern society’s callous ineptitude to the ongoing crisis of enforced global displacement. A beautifully robust oversized (234 x 305 mm) hardback graphic narrative – also available in digital formats – the tome follows the journey of one dedicated migrant as he strives to save a work of art from fanatics determined to destroy it in the name of misguided religion…

Multi award-winning author/artist Christian Lacroix AKA Christian Lax (Hector le castor, La marquise des Lumières, Azrayen) was born in Lyon on January 2nd 1949 and, after graduating from the École des beau-arts de Saint Étienne in 1975, began working in advertising whilst breaking into comics such as Metal Hurlant. After collaborating on a number of relatively straightforward adventure strips, in 1993 he began to carefully mine modern events for material, beginning with Romania-set political thriller La fille aux ibis. Since then has sought in all his works (which range from thrillers and historical journalism to sports strips such as Tour de France strip L’Aigle sans orteils) to show how social history impresses and shapes each generation…

Here, in muted lyrical hues, the tale begins in the Federation of Mali. It’s 1960 and the French are leaving the country days before it gains independence. With them they are taking every piece of native art and trinket of note…

One young boy determines that they won’t have everything and steals one statue: a small red figurine of a mother holding a baby…

In Spring 2015, officials and technicians of the Louvre discuss their jobs and the ethical ramifications of curating/safeguarding the cultural treasures of many lands and civilisations, even as, a scant distance away, a small band of refugees huddles under a café by the Seine. They all have stories of horrific past hardships and struggles to reach France and now endure daily kindness from some and cruel abuse from others. However, for one, his ultimate goal and mission is to breach the walls of the Louvre, itself…

Alou was a young honey hunter, at home with his simple world until he encountered Islamists throwing their weight around. After destroying the impious, heretical carving on Alou’s walking stick, the invaders blew up the ancient Baobab tree he was climbing. Secure in their power, the militants drove away unaware that their prank had unearthed a red figurine lost since Mali’s colonial days: a piece of art that grips the boy in a protective frenzy and makes him determined to save it from destruction at the hands of the anti-art fundamentalists…

With the aid of an old teacher/shaman with a secret interest, Alou sets out to place the Red Mother beyond their reach in the fabled Louvre. The boy must join the thousands abandoning their lives and homes and head for the relative paradise of Europe…

Lax has a unique talent for bringing history to vibrant life and a sublime ability to build rounded characters in a minimum of time and space. Packed with powerful detail, Alou’s journey throws a harsh spotlight on the plight of migrants and the causes of mass population displacement, but the artist narrator never loses sight of the fact that this is a tale of people. His contemporary epic shines with small acts of empathy and wickedness from a host of authentic characters peppering the voyage, turning a simple hero’s quest into a mighty pictorial paean to human endurance and testament to the force art exerts upon the soul.

Supplementing the narrative is a photo-packed essay detailing the history of the 14th century statue that inspired this tale and The Pavillon des Sessions’ that houses it. ‘

This is another astounding and ferociously strident comics experience no art lover or devotee of the visual narrative medium can afford to miss…
© Futuropolis – Musée du Louvre Éditions 2019. © NBM 2020 for the English translation.
Most NBM books are also available in digital formats. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/

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The Emotional Load and Other Invisible Stuff


By Emma, translated by Una Dimitrijevic (Seven Stories Press)
ISBN: 978-1-60980-956-0 (TPB) eISBN: 978-160980-957-7

It’s never been a fair world, although that’s a concept we all apparently aspire to create. In recent years, many people have sought to address imbalances between the roles and burdens of men and women in a civil cohesive society, but the first problem they all hit was simply how to state the problems in terms all sides could understand. We have a lot more names and concepts to utilise now in discourse, but the difficulties don’t seem to have diminished…

In 2018, software engineer, cartoonist and columnist Emma crafted a book of strips reflecting upon social issues affecting women: dissecting The Mental Load – all the unacknowledged, unpaid invisible crap that makes up and comes with most modern relationships and revealing how almost all of that overwhelming, burdensome life-tonnage inescapably settled on one side of the bed in most households…

The book – and the strips as seen in The Guardian – caused something of a commotion and as much trollish kickback as you’d expect from all the wrong places, so she’s back with further explanations and revelations in brilliant follow-up The Emotional Load and Other Invisible Stuff.

Because a large proportion of humans who won the genital lottery don’t really give a damn about other people’s woes – especially if the food keeps coming and the appropriate drawers magically refill with clean clothes and groceries – I fear there’s a segment of truly needy folk who won’t benefit from this selection of treatises, anecdotes, statistics and life-changing stories, but since many guys are genuinely clueless and baffled but willing to adapt, maybe enough of us will give change and thought a chance.

Best of all, most women reading this will realise that it’s not just them feeling the way they do and may even risk starting a conversation with their significant others, or at the very least, start talking to other women and organising together…

Working in the manner of the very best observational stand-up comedy, Emma forensically identifies an issue and dissects it, whilst offering advice, suggestions and a humorous perspective. Here that’s subdivided into a series of comical chapters beginning with the autobiographical ‘It’s Not Right, But…’

This explores the concept of consent for women and reveals how, at age 8, she first learned that it was regarded as perfectly normal for men to bother girls…

The debate over sexual independence and autonomy in established relationships is then expanded in ‘A Role to Play’…

Seemingly diverging off topic (but don’t be fooled) ‘The Story of a Guardian of the Peace’ then traces the life of honest cop Eric and how he fared over years trying to treat suspects and villains as fellow human beings in a system expressly created to suppress all forms of dissent and disagreement, after which the oppressive demarcation of family duties and necessary efforts are dissected into Productive and Reproductive Labor roles via the salutary example of Wife and Mother ‘Michelle’…

‘The Power of Love’ explores how women are expected to police the emotional wellbeing of all those around them and the crushing affect it has on mental wellbeing before the irrelevant “not all men” defence shabbily resurfaces – and is powerfully sent packing – in ‘Consequences’, with a frankly chilling reckoning of the so-different mental preparations needed for men and women to go about their daily, ordinary lives…

As stated above The Mental Load caused a few ructions when it first gained mass popular attention. ‘It’s All in Your Head’ deftly summarises the reactions, repercussions, defanging, belittlement, dismissal and ultimate sidelining of those revelations – particularly in relation to sexual choice and autonomy – with a barrage of damning quotes from France’s political, industrial elites, after which ‘Sunday Evenings’ traces the history of work by oppressed underclasses – like women – and the gaslighting headgames employed to keep all toilers off-balance, miserable and guilt-crushed…

The hopefully life-altering cartoon lectures conclude with an expose of the most insidious form of social oppression as ‘Just Being Nice’ outlines the tactics and effects of sneakily debilitating Benevolent Sexism (and yes, old gits from my generation thought it was okay to do it if we called it “chivalry” or “gallantry”)…

Backed up by a copious ‘Bibliography’ for further research (and probably fuelling some carping niggles from unrepentant buttheads) and packed with telling examples from sociological and anthropological studies as well as buckets of irrefutable statistics, this is a smart, subversively clever look at the roles women have been grudgingly awarded or allowed by a still largely male-centric society, but amidst the many moments that will have any decent human weeping in empathy or raging in impotent fury, there are decisive points where a little knowledge and a smattering of honest willingness to listen and change could work bloody miracles…

Buy this book, learn some stuff. Be better, and please accept my earnest apologies on behalf of myself and my entire gender.
© 2018, 2020 by Emma. English translation © 2020 by Una Dimitrijevic. All rights reserved.

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The Adventures of Tintin – Breaking Free


By J. Daniels (Attack International/Freedom Press)
ISBN: 0-9514261-0-9; 978-0-9514261-0-4; 978-1-90449-117-0 (Freedom Press)

“Freedom of the Press is only guaranteed to those who own one” – Abbott Joseph Liebling.

Politics is always composed of and used by firebrands and coldly calculating grandees, but that’s the only guiding maxim you should trust. Most ordinary people don’t give a toss until it affects them in the pocket or it’s their families under judicial scrutiny. No matter to what end of the political spectrum one pledges allegiance, the greatest enemy of the impassioned ideologue is apathy. This forces activists and visionaries to ever-more devious and imaginative stunts and tactics…

Crafted by the enigmatically anonymous J. Daniels, concocted and released by the anarchist faction Attack Internationalin 1988, The Adventures of Tintin – Breaking Free is a perfect exercise in the use of Détournement (“turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself”), utilising mimicry, mockery, parody and satire to counter the seductive subversion of the Monied Interests policing the status quo.

It also reads rather particularly well – even today – as social documentary and human drama, for all its earnest worthiness and fiercely dogmatic posturing…

The gimmick is this: the comforting cosy style and iconic images of Hergé’s immortal adventurers are transferred into our pedestrian oppressive, corrupt world and co-opted to incite a revolution in thinking and action…

In Chapter 1, ‘We’ve Had Enough!’ sees unemployed hothead, disenfranchised youthful dole-queue outcast and petty thief Tintin visit his uncle on the run-down-and-dying council estate (remember those?) where the once-vital, fulfilled salt-of-the Earth good bloke and his wife Mary now strive on the breadline. The lad needs cash, so The Captain suggests a labouring job beside him on the new building site.

It’s not an easy option: although there’s work to be had, tensions are high on site: dangerous working conditions, shoddy management practices and subsistence wages for the desperate men crafting luxury flats for more of the rich and gentrified types steadily pushing real people out of the community…

Another alienated faction joins the swell of discontent as squatters break in to the flat next door and the Captain helps them sort out the utilities and other necessities. Everybody knows the council is letting the estate die of neglect so that corrupt councillors can sell it off, so these lesbian activists are welcomed as fellow fighters against the powers that be.

Tensions mount as the National Front (and whatever happened to them, hmm?) recruit in broad daylight, skinheads carry out racist attacks and trendy wine bars push out good old-fashioned workingmen’s pubs. Soon Tintin is striking back whenever he can: vandalising posh cars and pickpocketing rich poseurs. Of course, all proper men need are jobs, beer, football and a decent life, but the boy soon has his eyes opened – if not his opinions changed – when he is made painfully aware of how even those lower-class paragons treat their own women…

Events come to a head when a worker dies on the building site and the supervisor is clearly more concerned about lost time. He even suggests poor Joe Hill was drunk and not the victim of negligent, non-existent safety procedures…

‘One Out, All Out!’ finds a wildcat strike seeking compensation for Joe’s widow escalating into a national furore after trade union officials strike a shady deal with the calculating property developers forcing the incensed workers to reject their useless official action in favour of measures that will actually work.

Soon bosses and unions are conspiring together to break the unsanctioned, unofficial action as ordinary people of the community rally around the strikers, providing food, money and – most important of all – encouragement.

The authorities quickly resort to their tried and true dirty tricks: picket-breaking riot squads, undercover agent provocateurs, intelligence-led targeted arrests of “ringleaders” and brutal intimidation.

Scab labour is harshly dealt with in ‘Let’s Get Organised’, as the hard-working, underappreciated women increasingly take up the challenge. The movement is growing in strength and national support. Soon other cities are in revolt too, with The Captain an unwilling and unlikely figurehead. Tintin, ever impatient, finds like-minded hotheads and secretly begins a campaign of literally explosive sabotage…

It all culminates in ‘Getting Serious’ as events kick into overdrive after the Captain endures a punishment beating from unidentified thugs and his family are similarly threatened. Scared but undeterred, the old salt carries on planning for a national march. With reports coming in of similar movements in Poland, Yugoslavia and other Warsaw Pact countries (the Soviet Empire was still very much in existence back then and continually crushing workers’ freedoms: at least nowadays Russia never interferes in the social or political affairs of other nations…), local groundswell becomes a national expression of solidarity and the underclass consolidates under a mass rallying call to arms…

When the riot squads are again deployed, it all turns ugly on a global scale, but in the aftermath The Captain has been “disappeared” or, as the authorities would have it, been “arrested for conspiracy”.

With half a million people on the streets of the city, the powers-that-be move to full military response, but it’s too late…

The later edition, published by Freedom Press in 2011, also includes the infamous early adventures of this extremely alternative Tintin (as first seen in polemical pamphlet The Scum in 1986) from the scallywag’s days sorting out Rupert Murdoch from the picket line at Wapping, during the infamous and now-legendary Printer’s Strike…

Passionate and fiercely idealistic, the initial release of Breaking Free unsurprisingly unleashed a storm of howling protest from the establishment, Tory Press and tabloid papers (especially News International) and by all accounts even Prime Minister Thatcher was “utterly revolted”.

That only meant the little guys had won: achieving a degree of publicity and notoriety such puny, powerless underdogs could only have dreamed of but never afforded by any traditional means of disseminating their message…

I’d call that “job done”…

More a deliciously enticing dream than a serious clarion call to end social injustice, this is a wickedly barbed, superbly well-intentioned piece, lovingly capturing the sublime Ligne Claire style and deftly redirecting its immense facility to inform and beguile…

First released in April 1988 by Attack International. This book proudly proclaims that no copyright has been invoked unless capitalists want to poach it…

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The Strange Tale of Panorama Island


By Edogawa Rompo, adapted and illustrated by Suehiro Maruo, translated by Ryan Sands & Kyoko Nitta (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-777-8 (HB)

Edogawa Rompo is revered as the Godfather of Japanese detective fiction – his output as author and critic defining the crime thriller from 1923 to his death in 1965. Born Tarō Hirai, he worked under a nom-de-plume based on his own great inspiration, Edgar Allen Poe, penning such well-loved classics as The Two-Sen Copper Coin, The Stalker in the Attic, The Black Lizard and The Monster with 20 Faces as well as many tales of his signature hero detective Kogoro Akechi, notional leader of the stalwart young band Shōnen tantei dan (the Boy Detective’s Gang).

He did much to popularise the concept of the rationalist observer and deductive mystery-solver. In 1946, he sponsored the detective magazine Hōseki (Jewels) and a year later founded the Detective Author’s Club, which survives today as the Mystery Writers of Japan association.

Although his latter years were taken up with promoting the genre, producing criticism, translation of western fiction and penning crime books for younger audiences, much of his earlier output (Rampo wrote 20 novels and lots of short stories) were dark, sinister concoctions based on the trappings and themes of ero guro nansensu (“eroticism, grotesquerie, and the nonsensical”) playing into the then-contemporary Japanese concept of hentai seiyoku or “abnormal sexuality”.

From that time comes this particular adaptation, originally serialised in Enterbrain’s monthly magazine Comic Beam from July 2007-January 2008.

Panorama-tō Kidan or The Strange Tale of Paradise Island was a prose vignette released in 1926, adapted here with astounding flair and finesses by uncompromising illustrator and adult manga master Suehiro Maruo.

A frequent contributor to the infamous Japanese underground magazine Garo, Maruo is the crafter of such memorable and influential sagas as Ribon no Kishi (Knight of the Ribbon), Rose Coloured Monster, Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, The Laughing Vampire, Ultra-Gash Inferno, How to Rake Leaves and many others.

This is a lovely book. A perfect physical artefact of the themes involved, this weighty oversized (262x187mm) monochrome hardback has glossy full-colour inserts, creator biographies and just feels like something extra special, whilst it compellingly chronicles an intriguingly baroque tale of greed, lust, deception and duplicity which begins when starving would-be author Hitomi Hirosuke reads of the death of the Taisho Emperor. Sadly, it still hasn’t made it into digital formats yet…

On December 26th 1926, Japan suffered a social catastrophe. The shock of losing the revered ruler reverberated through the entire nation. The trauma forced one failing writer to reassess his life. He finds himself wanting…

At another fruitless meeting with his editor Ugestu, Hitomi learns that an old friend, Genzaburo Komoda, has passed away. At college the boys were implausibly inseparable: the poor but ambitious kid and the heir to one of the greatest industrial fortunes in Japan. Perhaps it was because they looked and sounded exactly alike: doppelgangers nobody could tell apart…

The presumed cause of death was the asthma which had plagued the wealthy scion all his life and Hitomi, fuelled by self-loathing and inspired by Poe’s tale “The Premature Burial”, hatches a crazy scheme…

Faking his own suicide the writer leaves his effects to Ugestu before travelling to Kishu and immediately beginning his insane plot. Starving himself the entire time, Hitomi locates his pal’s grave, disposes of the already mouldering body and dons the garments and jewellery of Komoda. He even smashes out a front tooth and replaces it with the false one from the corpse…

His ghastly tasks accomplished, the starving charlatan simply collapses in a road where he can be found…

The news spreads like wildfire and soon all Komoda’s closest business associates have visited the miraculous survivor of catalepsy. The intimate knowledge Hitomi possesses combined with the “shock and confusion” of his miraculous escape is enough to fool even aged family retainer Tsunoda, and the fates are with him in that the widow Chiyoko has gone to Osaka to get over her loss. Of course she will rush back as soon as she hears the news…

However with gifts and good wishes flooding in, even Chiyoko is seemingly fooled and the fraudster begins to settle in his new skin. Just to be safe, however, he keeps the wife at a respectful and platonic distance. Comfortably entrenched, he begins to move around the Komoda fortune.

Hitomi the starving writer’s great unfinished work was The Tale of RA, a speculative fantasy in which a young man inherits a vast fortune and uses it to create an incredible, futuristic pleasure place of licentious delight. Now the impostor starts to make that sybaritic dream a reality, repurposing the family wealth into buying an island, relocating its inhabitants and building something never before conceived by mind of man…

Fobbing off all questions with the lie that he is constructing an amusement park that will be his eternal legacy, he populates the marvel of Arcadian engineering, landscaping, and optical science with a circus of wanton performers, living statues of erotic excess and a manufactured mythological bestiary.

He even claims that the colossal expenditure will begun healing the local economic malaise, but for every obstacle overcome another seems to occur. Moreover he cannot shift the uneasy feeling that Chiyoko suspects the truth about him…

Eventually however the great dream of plutocratic grandeur, lotus-eating luxury and hedonistic sexual excess is all but finished and “Komoda” escorts his wife on a grand tour of the wondrous celebration of debauched perversity that is his personal empire of the senses.

Once ensconced there he ends his worries of Chiyoka exposing him, but all too soon his Panorama Island receives an unwanted visitor.

Kogoro Akechi has come at the behest of the wife’s family and he has a few questions about, of all things, a book.

It seems that an editor, bereaved by the loss of one of his protégés, posthumously published that tragic young man’s magnum opus to celebrate his wasted life: a story entitled The Tale of RA…

This dark compelling morality play is realised in a truly breathtaking display of artistic virtuosity from Maruo, who combines clinical detail of intoxicating decadence with vast graphic vistas in a torrent of utterly enchanting images, whilst never allowing the visuals to overwhelm the underlying narrative and rise and fall of a boldly wicked protagonist…

Stark, stunning, classically clever and utterly adult The Strange Tale of Paradise Island is one of the best-looking, most absorbing crime thrillers I’ve seen this century, and no mystery loving connoisseur of comics, cinema or prose should miss it.
© 2008, 2013 HIRAI Rutaro, MARUO Suehiro. All rights reserved. English translation © 2013 Last Gasp.

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The Sanctuary


By Nate Neal (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-388-0 (TPB)

Nowadays there’s a wonderful abundance of impressive and talented cartoonists crafting superbly thought-provoking comics all over the world. Moreover, they are all blessed with perfect timing, in that they’re more or less able to support themselves by their efforts, thanks to modern technology and markets. Formerly in America, the imaginative likes of Kirby, Ditko and even R. Crumb had to filter themselves through a system of editors, publishers and distributors to get their work to readers, surrendering control and rights in the process. Other countries also monetised talent and imagination in similar ways, always to the detriment of the creative force at the centre.

In our freshly liberated modern crucible, ideas can take you anywhere and religious ideologues, self-righteous pressure groups, blinkered editors and fear of lost sales have only negligible effect: indeed, assorted squeals of outrage or timid support for unconventional thoughts and images can actually help potentially contentious or uncommercial graphic material reach the audiences it was actually intended for.

Which is a very roundabout and longwinded way to introduce today’s golden oldie. Not that Nate Neal’s first graphic novel was ever particularly contentious or outrageous. Even though there is nudity, fornication, wanton violence and gleeful irreverence, what mostly comes through in The Sanctuary is the arduous effort and intelligent philosophical questioning in this primordial tale of a band of cave-dwellers living and dying at the nativity of our greatest inventions… language and art.

Neal (Spongebob Comics) is Michigan born and Brooklyn dwelling: one of the creative crew that launched splendid indie comics anthology Hoax with Eleanor Davis, Dash Shaw & Hans Rickheit. He has crafted a string of impressive colour and monochrome pieces such as ‘Delia’s Love’, ‘Mindforkin” and ‘Fruition’ in Fantagraphics’ stunning and much-missed arts periodical Mome. His high-profile commercial gigs include Truckhead for Nickelodeon Magazine and Mad‘s perennial favourite Spy Vs. Spy (originally created by Antonio Prohias and since covered by such diverse lights as Dave Manak and Peter Kuper).

Like kitsch movie masterpieces When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and 1,000,000 Years B.C. , this primeval parable is produced with a unique and supremely limited intrinsic language (which, if you pay attention, you will readily decipher) serving to focus the reader on the meat of the tale: how art and graphic narrative became a fundamental aspect of human cognition.

Please don’t be put off by my jokey references to classic bubblegum cinema; The Sanctuary has far more in common with the antediluvian aspects of Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire than with any “big lizard meets busty cave-babe” flick (although if you’re a fan of Quest for Fire, that film’s gritty, grey and darkly sardonic ethos does eerily resonate here…)

Largely silent and broadly pantomimic, the snapshot episodes in this bleak black-&-white generational saga describe a small clan – or more properly “pack” – of brutal hominids eking out a squalid and desperate existence about thirty-two thousand years ago. The tribal equilibrium is forever altered when a young female is traded to them, affording the lowest-ranked male in the group a crumb of physical comfort. Prior to this, he was practically outcast, having to steal food from the alpha males – and females – who have been and continue to struggle for control of the group.

This omega-male has a gift and a passion. He obsessively commemorates the tribe’s hunts through art, but after the girl arrives, he discovers a new use and purpose for his propensities. However, life is hard and hunger and danger go hand in hand. The cold war between young and old, fit and maimed, male and female is inevitably boiling over…

This is a powerful tale about creativity, morality, verity and above all, responsibility which demands that the reader work for his reward. As an exploration of imagination, it is subtly enticing, but as an examination of Mankind’s unchanging primal nature The Sanctuary is pitilessly honest. Abstract, symbolic, metaphorical yet gloriously approachable, this devastatingly clever saga is a “must-see” for any serious fan of comics and every student of the human condition.
© 2010 Nate Neal. All rights reserved.

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Velveteen & Mandala


By Jiro Matsumoto (Vertical)
ISBN: 978-1-935654-30-8 (Tankōbon PB)

Things have been a bit too much sweetness and light around here lately. Here’s a change of pace and taste then then needs a bit of an advisory warning. This book revels in gratuitous violence, barely-closeted misogyny and sexualised imagery. So why, then, is it so very good?

Civilisation has radically changed. What we knew is no longer right or true, but disturbing remnants remain to baffle and terrify, as High School girl Velveteen and her decidedly off-key classmate and companion/enemy Mandala eke out an extreme existence on the banks of a river in post-Zombie-Apocalypse Tokyo.

Here (with straight-faced nods to Tank Girl), using an abandoned battle-wagon as their crash-pad, the girls while away the days and nights casually slaughtering roaming hordes of zombies – at least whenever they can stop squabbling with each other…

From the very outset of this grim, sexy, gratuitous splatter-punk horror-show there is something decidedly “off” going on: a gory mystery beyond the usual “how did the world end this time?”

On the surface, Velveteen & Mandala (Becchin To Mandara in its original 14-chapter run between 2007-2009 in the periodical Manga Erotics F) is a monster-killing yarn which owes plenty to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but there’s more than meets the eye or ballistic charge happening here.

We begin at ‘The Riverside’ with the pair awaking from dreams to realise and remember the hell they now inhabit. Cunning catch-up concluded, ‘Smoke on the Riverside’ then reveals a few of the nastier ground-rules of their current lifestyle, and especially Velveteen’s propensity for arson and appetite for destruction…

‘Sukiyaki’ finds the girls on edge as food becomes an issue, whilst the introduction of ‘The Super’ who monitors their rate of zombie dispatch leads to more information (but not necessarily any answers) in this enigmatic world, after which ‘The Cellar’ amps up the uncertainty as Velveteen steals into her new boss’s ghastly man-cave inner sanctum…

In a medium where extreme violence is commonplace, Matsumoto increasingly uses unglamourised nudity and brusque vulgarity to unsettle and shock the reader, but the flashback events of … ‘School Arcade, Underground Shelter’ – if true and not delusion – indicate that a society this debased might not be worth saving from the undead…

In ‘Omen’ and ‘Good Omen (Whisper)’ the obfuscating mysteries begins to clear as B52 bombers dumps thousands more corpses by the Riverside, adding to the “to do” roster of walking dead the girls must deal with once darkness falls…

Throughout the story Matsumoto liberally injects cool artefacts of fashion, genre and pop-culture seemingly at random, but as the oppressive horrors get ever closer to ending our heroines in ‘Genocide’ and ‘Deep in the Dark’, a certain sense can be imagined, so that once the Super is removed and Velveteen promoted to his position in ‘Parting’, the drama spirals into a hallucinogenic – possibly untrustworthy – climax for ‘Mandala’s Big Farewell Party’ and ‘Nirvana’ before the further revelations of ‘Flight’…

Deliberately misleading and untrustworthy – and strictly aimed at over-18s – this dark, nasty, scatologically excessive tale graphically celebrates the differences between grotesque, flesh-eating dead-things and the constantly biologically mis-functioning Still-Living (although the zombie “Deadizens” are still capable of cognition, speech and rape…); all wrapped up in the culturally acceptable and traditional manner of one blowing the stuffings out of the other…

Confirmed confrontationalist Jiro Matsumoto (Uncivilized Planet, Avant-Pop Mars, A Revolutionist in the Afternoon, Tropical Citron) is probably best known for dystopian speculative sci-fi revenge thriller Freesia, but here his controversial yet sublime narrative gifts are turned to a much more psychologically complex – almost meta-fictional – layering of meaning upon revelation upon contention, indicating that if you have a strong enough stomach the very best is still to come…

First seen in English as a monochrome paperback in 2011, this stand-alone saga will be available in digital formats later this year.
© 2009 Jiro Matsumoto. All right reserved. Translation © 2011 Vertical, Inc.

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Sumo


By Thien Pham (First Second)
ISBN: 978-1-59643-581-0 (PB)

This book is about looking.

The magically multi and cross-cultural nature of pictures mixed with words continually generates a wealth of absolutely fantastic and improbable gems for readers with eyes and minds wide open. Back in 2012, this deliciously absorbing visual poem instantly became one of my favourite tomes: an elegiac and gently enthralling visual experiences of a kind I’ve seldom encountered in many a year, and one I often return to.

It’s all about pasts and futures…

The tale begins in a Japanese Dojo as another rikishi in training greets the dawn. He carries out his assigned chores and exercises with the other jonokuchi in the heya training stable. Despite his superior strength, size and speed, he is again knocked out. The supervising oyakata is in despair and doubts the spirit and determination of his latest find…

Scott once thought he was a big man in every sense of the term, but the glory days of High School Football never turned into the glittering, lucrative Pro career he dreamed of. Somehow, he ended up in his small town of Campbell with his best buddies, drinking beer and wasting his days.

When adored girlfriend Gwen dumped him, even that shallow, pointless life needed to end. They had been together since grade school…

Years ago, a visiting Japanese Sumo trainer had watched the boy play and never forgotten the warrior spirit he saw displayed in that sports arena. When the venerable gentleman offered a chance for fame and glory, Scott thought long and hard…

With nothing to lose, Scott accepted a bizarre offer: move to Japan and try out as a junior wrestler in the decidedly un-All-American enterprise known as Sumo…

This is a hard look at expectations and second chances…

The transition hasn’t been what he expected or hoped for. They dyed his hair and changed his name since all Sumo have professional shikona stage-names and looks. Only now “Hakugei” is failing again. If it wasn’t for the trainer’s daughter Asami and the idyllic occasional break spent fishing, this new life would be as intolerable as his old one…

This story is about striving…

With time fast running out, Hakugei must decide what he really wants and has to do it before the last match of the mae-zumo tournament. He has to win at least one bout or be sent home in disgrace …and he’s just lost the fourth one in a row…

It’s all about the build-up towards tension’s inevitable release…

This surprisingly contemplative and lyrical exploration of love, hope, honour and gigantic nearly-naked men bitch-slapping each other in truly explosive manner effortlessly blends and intercuts flashbacks and real time to craft a sublimely skilful and colourfully emotive experience. Cartoonist and teacher Thien Pham (Level Up) hypnotically and enthrallingly marries two wildly disparate worlds to produce an enchanting and thoughtful story that will delight and astound. This is a graphic novel you too will read over and over again.
© 2012 Thien Pham. All rights reserved.

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Maybe… Maybe Not and Maybe… Maybe Not Again!


By Ralf König, translated by Jeff Krell (Northwest Press)
No ISBNs:

I’d like to think that most of the social problems humanity suffers from can be fixed by a little honesty and a lot of communication – especially when it comes to relationships. Being able to laugh together probably helps too. In regard to sexual politics and freedom it’s an attitude Germany adopted decades ago. As a result, the country has an admirable record of acceptance of the LGBTQ community and a broad penetration (yes, I’m awful! And Not Funny!) of gay comics into the general population.

Undisputed king of home-grown graphic novels is Ralf König, a multi-award-winning cartoonist, filmmaker and advocate with almost fifty titles (such as Suck My Duck, Santa Claus Junior, Stehaufmännchen, and Kondom des Grauens – released in Britain as The Killer Condom) under his belt.

He was born in August 1960 and came out in 1979, crafting an unceasing parade of incisive and hilarious strips and sagas set in and around the nation’s ever-evolving gay scene. Much to his own surprise, he discovered that his work had vaulted the divide from niche market to become a staple of popular mass market book sales. The two collections covered here – curated, “Foreworded” and translated by American cartoonist Jeff Krell (creator of gay domestic sitcom strip Jayson) and available as eBooks from Northwest Press even inspired the largest grossing film in German history…

Originally published as Der Bewegte Mann in 1987 (and appearing in a UK paperback from Ignite! Entertainment in 2005 if you can find it), Maybe… Maybe Not introduces a cool and comfortable group of gay men enjoying their glamourous, gossipy days and nights in Dusseldorf. However, after ambiguous – and curious – hetero hunk Axel enters their lives, Walter Ruhmann AKA Waltrina and Norbert find composure increasingly rocked and jarred out of kilter…

After failing to trick his girlfriend Doro into taking him back via a fake suicide attempt, Axel rudely returns to the Men’s Support Group where Waltrina acts as the expert voice on homosexuality and related issues as a representative of the Dusseldorf Gay Alliance.

Waltrina cannot take his eyes off Axel, and astonishingly, über-macho Axel seemingly responds. Maybe he’s not totally ‘On the Straight and Narrow’…

The confusion mounts in ‘Clothes Make the Man’ as Axel agrees to go to a party with Walter and Norbert also falls under his brawny spell…

An ever-escalating comedy of errors and sexual impolitics launches as Axel adjusts surprisingly well to the alternative lifestyle and scene of those turbulent times, before grudgingly revealing a few secrets from his own past. Before long, he’s couch-surfing with his new pals, but everything comes to a hedonistic head after ‘Attack of the Killer Penis’ exposes the clearly-confused and conflicted brute to the pros and cons of Gay culture, proving he is still ‘Deep in the Closet’ one way or another…

Doro, meanwhile, is having second thoughts about the useless lump she thought she was well rid of. She’s been to the doctor and has some news…

The hilarious and still-outrageous volume ends with a happy event in ‘Epilogue: Two Months Later’ when Axel’s two worlds collide and have to play nice at the church…


Sequel volume Maybe… Maybe Not Again! opens scant months later with ‘Trouble in Paradise’ and Axel still undecided on whether he’s Gay or Straight (modern shades of gender and sexuality being largely unestablished way back in 1988), but definitely less than enamoured of his impending membership in a traditional nuclear family. He’s also blithely unaware of the fallout he’s left in the now-acrimonious friendship circle inhabited by Watrina and new rival Norbert.

A new disruptive element arrives when ‘Muscle Queens’ introduces spitefully provocative bitch Frank Hilsmann – who thrives on infidelity and innuendo. He targets poor Norbert even as Axel’s manic old flame ‘Elke Schmitt’ resurfaces and tempts the undecided oaf with yet another bad choice… hot, commitment-free hetero infidelity while Doro is at her most shouty and unattractive…

Of course he succumbs, and of course he drags in his still-smitten Norbert to provide cover and a comfortable liaison space. And of course, such ‘Commitment’ to friendship and fidelity only makes things worse for poor Norbert as he finds himself overwhelmed by the cost of everyone else’s ‘Primal Urges’. Thankfully the chaos is derailed when Doro turns up on her way to the delivery room…

Simultaneously wry and witty and coarsely hysterical, these books manage to bawdily entertain whilst asking questions that still vex many of us to this day. Maybe… Maybe Not and Maybe… Maybe Not Again! certainly won’t appeal to everybody, but if you love a big raucous belly laugh about how daft we can all be about one of the most basic drives we’re afflicted with, these might well become some of your favourite reads.
© 1987, 1988 by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany. All rights reserved.

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A Quick & Easy Guide to Queer and Trans Identities


By Mady G & J.R. Zuckerberg (Limerance Press/Oni Press)
ISBN: 978-1-62010-586-3 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-62010-587-0

Here’s a handy rule of thumb for getting along. People get to decide what to call themselves. You get to accept and agree with them, as long as no one is being actually harmed. That assessment is to be made by Law, not personal belief or some higher calling. If you can’t accept their definitions of themselves, you have the right to leave people alone and never interact with them.

Okay?

We are the naming primate. If we encounter something unknown and/or scary, we give it a description, definition and title and accept it into our ever-expanding understanding of Reality. It’s what enabled us to take over this world. Naming things is generally a good thing and allows us to navigate our universe.

Some people, however, use the power of naming to isolate, ostracise and wound. They are not doing it right. People like us have plenty of really fitting names for people like them when they abuse our gift…

Seriously though, it seems like every time we make a move towards greater inclusivity, some faction of retrograde, regressive backwards-looking churl and biological luddite manufactures a reason why we can’t all get along.

I personally favour retaliation, but the only way to truly counter them is with understanding, so here’s a book that offers plenty of names and definitions we should all be adding to our lexicons…

I’ve frequently argued that comic strips are a matchless tool for education: rendering the most complex topics easily accessible and displaying a potent facility to inform, affect and alter behaviour. Here’s a splendid example of the art form using its great powers for good…

The Quick & Easy Guide series has an admirable record of confronting uncomfortable issues with taste, sensitivity and breezy forthrightness: offering solutions as well as awareness or solidarity.

Here, coast-to-coast cartoonists Mady G. and J. R. Zuckerberg collaborate on a bright and breezy primer covering the irrefutable basics on establishing one’s own sexual and gender identity (including the difference between those terms), safely navigating all manner of relationship and exploring the spectrum of experiences available to consenting adults.

A major aspect of us People Primates is that we spend a lot of our lives trying to work out who we are. It takes varying amounts of time for every individual and lots of honesty.

It’s like most work. It can be unwelcome, laborious, painful and even dangerous and nobody should attempt it too soon or alone.

Moreover, all too often, assistance and advice offered can be unwelcome and stemming from somebody else’s agenda. In my own limited experience for example, any sexual guidance offered by anybody with a religious background is immediately suspect and a waste of breath. Perhaps your experience is different. That’s pretty much the point here. In the end, you have make up your own mind and be your own judge…

Unlike me, A Quick & Easy Guide to Queer and Trans Identities takes no sides and offers no bias as it runs through the fundamentals, but only after a Foreword from cartoonist and author Roz Chast and an Intro by Mady lay out the rules of engagement on the attaching and utilisation of the labels and roles gradually becoming common modern parlance…

The micro lectures are set during a wilderness trek where an agglomeration of troubled humans have a group teaching encounter under the supervision of a “Queer Educator” endeavouring to define for them the nature of ‘Queerness’…

The useful commentary, educational asides and plentiful laughs are generated by a colony of snails avidly observing proceedings like a raucous and bewildered Greek Chorus. Such gastropods, as I’m sure you recall from school, are either male, female, hermaphroditic or something else entirely, depending on what time it is. Now that’s perspective…

Subjects covered with forthright verve, clarity and – crucially – wry wit begin with ‘What is Queer?’, proffering terms for defining Sexuality and Gender as subdivided into Bisexuality, Asexuality, Pansexuality amongst other permutations. These and later lessons are illustrated with examples starring primarily neutral vegetable critters dubbed The Sproutlingswho are conveniently pliable and malleable…

‘What is Gender Identity?’ digs deeper, discussing Gender vs Sex via a little biology tutorial before ‘Now… What’s Gender Expression?’ expands the debate, determining modern manners and ways of signalling the world what one has decided is a person’s (current, but not necessarily permanent) status. The lecture comes with carefully curated real-world examples…

This is all fine in an ideal world, but contentious, often life changing problems that can occur are tackled head-on in ‘What Does Dysphoria Mean?’, detailing examples of the traumas accompanying the realisation of not being how you believe you ought to be. Divided into Physical, Social and non-binary Dysphoria, the examination includes ways of combatting the problems and more case histories courtesy of the human wilderness students…

In swift succession ‘So, what is Asexuality?’ and ‘What does it mean to Come Out?’ offer further practical thoughts and prospective coping tactics before vital life lessons are covered in ‘Here are some Relationship Basics’.

Also included here are an “Outro” by Zuckerberg and a section of activities including ‘Design a Pair of Friendship Jackets’, ‘Create Your Own Sprout-sona!’ and ‘How to make a Mini Zine!!’ as well as information on ‘More Resources!’and Creator Biographies.

I hail from a fabulous far-distant era where we happily ravaged the planet without a qualm but believed emotional understanding led to universal acceptance. We’re apparently smarter about the planet now, and it’s wonderful to see that the quest to destroy intolerance and ignorance still continues. This witty, welcoming treatise offers superb strategies for fixing a pernicious issue that really should have been done and dusted decades ago.

Hopefully, when we all share appropriate, non-evocative and un-charged terms for discussing human sexuality and gender – such as seen here – we can all make decisions and assessments that will build a fairer, gentler world for everybody…
A Quick & Easy Guide to Queer and Trans Identities ™ & © 2019 Mady G & J.R. Zuckerberg. All rights reserved.

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Y the Last Man Book Three


By Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Goran Sudžuka & various (DC/Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-2578-0 (HB) 978-1-4012-5880-1 (TPB)

Back in 2002, an old, venerable and cherished science fiction concept got a smart and satirical updating in Vertigo comic book series Y: The Last Man. These days it’s more relevant than ever as the premise explores the aftermath and consequences of a virulent global plague.

When a mystery contagion killed every male on Earth, only amateur stage magician, escapologist and all-round slacker goof-ball Yorick Brown and his pet monkey Ampersand survived in a world suddenly and utterly all girl.

Since his politician mother is high in America’s new government, Yorick is a highly prized and top-secret commodity. After a number of potential catastrophic incidents, he is condemned to covertly travel with conflicted secret agent 355 and maverick geneticist Dr. Allison Mann across the devastated American continent to her state-of-the-art laboratory. Mann believes she somehow caused the patriarchal apocalypse by self-inseminating and giving birth to the world’s first parthenogenetic human clone, but all young Yorick can think of is re-uniting with his girlfriend/fiancée Beth, cut off and trapped in Australia ever since the world was abruptly unmanned. As far as Brown is concerned, the geneticist’s Californian retreat is about halfway to his most cherished goal…

The trek is slow, arduous and fraught with peril and revelation: one none of the voyagers initially realise is dogged with stealthy intrigue and hostile surveillance from the start. Hard on their heels is a cult of crazed women determined to erase every vestige of male influence and achievement: modern “Daughters of the Amazon” determined to eradicate the accursed Y chromosome entirely from planet Earth. They are racing against a team of Israeli commandos whose commander is determined that the Promised Land will have sons again, no matter what the cost. Tragically, they are not the only or worst of the special interests hunting Yorick…

This third compilation – available in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook formats – collects issues #24-36, spanning September 2004-October 2005 and opens with a 2-parter by originators and co-creators Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. In case you were wondering, the entire book is inked by José Marzán Jr, coloured by Zylonol and lettered by Clem Robbins.

In ‘Tongues of Flame’ events move into higher gear as Dr. Mann and the formerly-fanatical secret agent who has been thanklessly bodyguarding Yorick both reach turning points in their own particular journeys. Suddenly on his own, Yorick finds reaffirmation in a climactic and far from spiritual meeting with faux nun Beth, who is solitarily expiating her own sins in a commandeered catholic church. Sadly, their moment in paradise is ruined by marauding Amazons. The reputed last man alive then uses all his conjuring tricks to return the disfavour…

Meanwhile in the Australian Outback, a couple of lost Americans make an unpleasant discovery and run into a spot of bother…

‘Hero’s Journey’ switches focus to Yorick’s previously deranged sister. Hero Brown has been stalking the expedition across the ravaged and now generally dis-United States, plagued by memories of her own childhood and difficult adolescence. The reverie also encompasses the night all the men died and how the traumatised paramedic swiftly fell under the sway of psychotic chief Amazon Victoria.

Hero’s long walk takes her to the plains of Kansas and a secret government facility, where twin American biologists and former Russian agent Natalya Zamyatin are guarding the planet’s greatest secret and penultimate hope for humanity…

For the entire saga thus far, Yorick has been carrying a wedding band for his Beth. ‘Ring of Truth’ finally reveals the history of the piece and the strange provenance it carries in a flashback to a chance encounter in a magic shop.

In the present, the trekkers have reunited in San Francisco. After Agent 355 has a lethal confrontation with her ex-comrades (and rival covert organisation the Setauket Ring), Dr. Mann actually discovers the secret of the last man’s immunity to the disease that killed all those guys. Sadly, it coincides with Yorick being overcome with a mystery ailment that seems to present like the haemorrhagic bug which wiped out all the other men…

Remember the monkey? As all the crises converge, and Hero appears to save the day, Ampersand is stolen by one of the aforementioned sinister forces following them and expeditiously shipped abroad. Once Yorick recovers, it becomes absolutely imperative that the team rescue him from captivity. That means a frantic trip to Japan but all Yorick can think of is how he’s getting ever closer to Beth in Australia…

Goran Sudžuka steps in for issues #32-35 as ‘Girl on Girl’ finds the wanderers in warm pursuit on repurposed cruise liner/cargo boat The Whale. When every male creature on Earth expired, Yorick’s true love was on an anthropology field trip in the Australian Outback, and all his previous adventures have been geared to eventually reuniting with her, despite the collapse of civilisation, and the mass extinction event that is gradually eliminating all higher life on Earth.

Sailing, for the Port of Yokogata – a destination that has particular significance for Dr. Mann – Yorick and his retinue are now painfully aware that Ampersand has been ape-napped by a mysterious ninja because he apparently holds the secret to the mystery of the plague which removed all us mouth-breathing, unsanitary louts.

Whilst aboard ship, Yorick’s drag disguise yet again fails and his concomitant and somewhat unwilling liaison with the lusty ship’s Captain is only thwarted by a torpedo fired by the Australian Navy. It seems that the commander has a few secrets of her own – and a highly illegal sideline…

After a brutal battle and more pointless bloodshed it seems the lad is fated to go to Oz after all, despite the depredations of pirates, drug runners, ninja-assassins and the imminent return of old foe General Alter Tse’elon and her renegade cadre of Israeli commandos…

Yorick isn’t absolutely sure Beth Deville is actually still alive, but we are, after the last chapter tells her life story and hints that when her man comes for her, she might not actually be there anymore…

Guerra returns for ‘Boy Loses Girl’ #36 (the entire script for which bolsters the back of this already-bountiful feast of adult fun and frolic) detailing how a typical student love story becomes a life-altering hallucinogenic spiritual walkabout for Beth and how her decision inadvertently derails every plan the Last Man ever laid…

By honing to the spirit of this admittedly overused premise but by carefully building strong, credible characters and situations, Vaughan & Guerra have crafted an intellectually seductive fantasy soap-opera of remarkable power: one every mature comics fan should enjoy.
© 2004, 2005, 2015 Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra. All Rights Reserved.