Category: Graphic Novels

 

By Tom Beland (ait/planet lar)
ISBN: 1-9320-5132-1

Tom Beland is a man in love. At his time of life and looking like he does, he finds that hard enough to believe. That his One True Love lives three thousand miles away, in Puerto Rico, is pretty much incomprehensible to him. And that she’s stuck there without him during the most humungous hurricane he’s ever heard of is not a situation that is going to happen twice.

This second collection of the charming, true, modern romance sees creator and protagonist Beland accept that he and his beloved Lily cannot be apart any more. Matching the comedy and drama of outrageous weather systems with the irresistibly opposing forces of two mature people who are each settled in their own space can only mean that something has to give. Who’s going to move or who’s going to quit?

This One Goes to 11 combines charm, gentleness and real-life trials as old as humanity and wraps them in a warm deceptively subtle cartoon style to tell a story we’ve all featured in and can’t help but empathise with. Well worth seeking out.

© 2005 Tom Beland. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Paul Grist (Dancing Elephant Press)
ISBN: 1-58240-340-6

The first volume of Paul Grist’s quirky cop drama re-introduces the visually compelling and taciturn detective back into the hurly-burly of the New Eden police force, after an absence caused by a scandal. Kane and his partner Dennis Harvey were a perfect team. Right up until the moment Kane tried to arrest Dennis for taking bribes. Their friendship pretty much ended when Kane shot him.

Now Kane’s back and he’s just as effective but a damned sight less popular with his fellow officers.

From these derivative scraps of cop-show folk-lore Grist weaves a spellbinding little masterpiece of unparalleled graphic ingenuity. It sounds like Hill Street Blues. It feels like The New Centurions or The Choirboys. It is in fact a unique voice and major comics stylist simply telling stories in a subtle and irresistible way with sly wit and jovial cynicism, not to mention with an utterly British dash of whimsy that just takes the breath away.

I really don’t want to say anything else about the plot. I want you to get the book and the ones that came after it and discover the magic for yourselves, so you’ll just have to content yourselves with ploughing through some more of my effervescent hyperbole. Or jump to the next review if you want. Or get weaving and get Kane.

Still here? Okay, then.

The stark yet inviting black and white design, refined and honed and pared down to a minimalist approachability has an inescapable feeling of Europe about it. If ever anyone was to create a new Tin Tin adventure, Grist would be the ideal choice to draw it. Not because he draws like Hergé, but because he knows his craft as well as Hergé did.

I love this stuff, and if you buy it, so will you. Collect ’em all, fanboy!

©1993, 2004 Paul Grist. All Rights Reserved.

 

By John Ostrander & Timothy Truman (IDW Publishing)
ISBN 1-9332-3915-8

Grimjack originally appeared during the American comic industry’s last great flourishing in the 1980’s. Created by Ostrander and Truman as a back-up feature for Mike Grell’s Starslayer it ran in issues #10-18 before swiftly winning his own title at First Comics. He almost survived the company’s demise more than a decade later. In a crowded marketplace, and almost irrespective of who was doing the drawing, this hard-boiled fantasy action strip was a watchword for quality entertainment.

John Gaunt, Grimjack, is a combination private eye, ronin and all-around problem solver just scratching out a living in the fantastic pan-dimensional city of Cynosure, a huge metropolis that touches every place in the multiverse at once. A combination of dry wit, dark edged fantasy, spectacular action and a willingness to take narrative risks won him a lot of loyal fans.

In Killer Instinct, Ostrander and Truman take us back to a time immediately preceding Grimjack’s first appearance to flesh out the character for the old lags whilst introducing newcomers to a fresh, vibrant anti-hero struggling against a number of corrupt power-mongers, including insane paramilitaries and expansionist vampire cliques, whilst trying to find his own way. There is action aplenty and tremendous style for fans of genre-crossing.

This volume lead to the publishing those past classics in trade paperback compilations. I hope that will eventually mean new material. Well? I’m waiting…

Contents © & ™ Nightsky Grimjack Rights and Production Vehicle (Four Wheel Drive Model), LLC. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Larry Gonick & Mark Wheelis (Harper Perennial)
ISBN 0-06-273099-1

The educational value of comics is often understated, not to say completely forgotten. Will Eisner produced reams of comic manuals for the US army and other government departments. Japan has a number of text books produced as comic strips, and has even released government reports as comic strips to get around public apathy to reading high volumes of public information. So do we, and so do the Americans. I’ve even produced one or two myself.

None of us, however, can hold a candle to Larry Gonick. Since the 1970s this cartoonist and all around clever chap has been using the strip medium to stuff learning and entertainment in equal amounts into the weary brains of jaded students with such tomes as The Cartoon History of the Universe, The Cartoon History of the United States and The “Cartoon Guide to…” series (Computers, Non-Communication, Physics, Statistics and the Environment) as well as the two under the hammer here.

He often teams up with a recognised expert for these volumes but never lets one goal override the other. Teach and Entertain.

The current edition of “…Genetics”, produced in conjunction with lecturer and author Mark Wheelis, is heavily updated from the one my wife used when a Genetics Student in London in the 1980s, but is still one of the most memorable text books I’ve ever ploughed through, providing a clear, concise, chronological and practical outline of the subject.

On finishing it I was more than ready to start splicing some genes, but I haven’t as yet because I’m still finishing that long letter to Marvel clarifying just what a Mutant actually is.

© 1983, 1991, 2007 Larry Gonick & Mark Wheelis. All Rights Reserved.

 

Larry Gonick & Christine DeVault (Harper Perennial)
ISBN: 0-06-273431-8

Larry Gonick turned his scholar’s pen and pencil to socio-historical purposes with this volume. The Cartoon Guide to Sex, written with author and “family life educator” Christine DeVault, is a cross between a social science text and baseline civics book. With a humorous style that never descends into sleazy innuendo or prurient coyness, this book seems an ideal guide to all those tricky questions that novices to the world of sex, such as children, accidental parents and comic fans are afraid to deal with.

The drawing is as ever subversively funny and starts with the birds and the bees, gradually working its way up the food chain until it gets to us. And beyond.

Not once does the imparting of a fact descend into po-faced scientific euphemisms, and not even the most right-wing religious fundamentalist can point at a picture and say “This work of Satan is corrupting the Morals of our Youth”. Except they probably do, but softly, ‘cos it’s funny, and they don’t want to be laughed at.

Sex is placed both in proper historical and sensible modern contexts, alternate lifestyles are examined with no moral shading, and a great emphasis is placed on health and decent human behaviour.

That’s the plug. All of you reading this know (or at least imagine) that sex is exciting and enticing. Otherwise female crime-fighters wouldn’t show so much skin. This is not one of those comics. You will, however, learn a damned sight more than you will from Wonder Woman; you’ll be able to carry on a grown-up conversation with a normal human being about sex without snickering; and even if you don’t get some, you will have a laugh or two.

© 1999 Larry Gonick & Christine DeVault. All Rights Reserved.