Archives for posts with tag: rolling stone archives

Great Teacher Onizuka: A Review

January 22, 2012 //
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This was originally published in Rolling Stone India, November 2009. Dusted and put up here because I plan to do a mega-reread of the series in the next few days.

Writer/Artist: Tohru Fujisawa
Publisher: Tokyopop
Rating: Four and a half stars

Meet Eikichi Onizuka, a bottom-rung university graduate (barely), whose primary interests are peering up girls’ skirts at local malls and getting into trouble – not mutually exclusive activities, those two. But fate has different plans in store for virginity-challenged young Eikichi – circumstance makes him leave his delinquence behind him and opt for a new career, that of an educator. Eikichi Onizuka, 22 years old, sets out to become Great Teacher Onizuka, the greatest sensei in Japan. His mission: to make school fun again. His secondary mission – getting to fourth base with someone. Anyone.

That is the premise behind this beloved shonen manga series, that traces Onizuka’s explosive – and often ludicrous – adventures in teaching. At first glance, it seems humanly impossible for a man of his calibre to really do much with his career choice. He cheated his way through his own academic career, seemingly has an IQ of 50, and the only legitimate qualification on his misspelled resume is that he has secured a second dan black belt in karate. He is perverted, being more than a little obsessed with young girls and their underwear. And he lets his fists do the talking most of the time. The first arc of the series establishes how Onizuka, beating all these odds, manages to get through a teacher training course at a public school and becomes a temporary teacher in the Holy Forest Academy, a prestigious private institute. He is put in charge of Class 3-4, whose students have terrorized the previous three home-room teachers into ending their careers – one committed suicide, another developed an eating disorder. It would take a very foolhardy, or a very determined educator to take up the responsibility of cleaning the school’s Augean stables.

But determination is what Onizuka has in spades. “You are a cockroach”, one of his students shrieks at him with disgust, right after the would-be teacher pops up where he wasn’t really supposed to. This analogy echoes throughout the series. Like a cockroach, Onizuka wiggles himself into his students’ lives even as they hurl expletives at him and threaten (and often perpetrate) violence against his self. Just as a cockroach skitters away from all attempts to stomp it out, our hero manages to best all the traps his devilish students cook up – from publishing morphed porno pictures of Onizuka to having him framed for embezzling money from student funds. And slowly, one by one, our hero wins them over using a combination of his perversely inappropriate world-view and his incredible physical prowess.

All long-running series by single creators run into similar teething issues – an initial rush of heady ideas that slowly slides into a predictable graph of highs and lows, where the creator struggles not only to find the voice, but to etch out a character’s life-story in a way that builds on its premise, instead of stagnating into repetitive cliche. Maintaining the momentum of a series, without over-stretching a story-line is a tough call. It would have been very easy for writer/artist Tohru Fujisawa to stumble. The second arc, that of the students being set straight by the teacher, resolutely avoids falling into the trap. Sure, it is long, but there are two aspects in which Fujisawa scores top of the manga-ka class (if you will pardon the school-based metaphor) – the delineation of the individual characters that make up the Onizukaverse. Every student in the class has a unique personality, a standalone voice which makes the reader identify with them. Partly because they are there in every classroom in any school in the world – the quiet, shy video-game-playing geek who is bullied at every turn; the computer whiz who knows more than he lets on; the headstrong yet confused loud-mouth who takes offence at minor quips; a girl whose parents are influential bureaucrats, a fact that she uses to her advantage; another with a dark secret involving a previous teacher. Sure, they are all genre archetypes, but it is Fujisawa’s genius that breathes new, fresh life into them.

The second thing that elevates the series to greatness is the sheer unpredictability of the central character. Eikichi Onizuka is a man of hidden surprises, whose heart of gold is matched only by his complete irreverence and lack of respect for authority. Early on in his career, Onizuka figures out that he really loves teaching, and he takes it on himself to be the kind of teacher that his generation did not have. At the crux of every decision Onizuka makes, however frivolous and played-for-laughs it seems to be, there is an important life-lesson that he imparts to his students. But Onizuka being the way he is, any attempt to take him seriously usually backfires, with hilarious results.

In addition to changing the way his students feel towards school, Onizuka also takes on the strict authoritarians that make up the faculty of Holy Forest Academy. His primary whipping-dog being the perennially grumpy Vice-Principal Uchiyamada – a running gag involves the Vice-Principal’s Toyota Cresta. The third arc of the series, in particular, involves a final stand against a new Principal who ousts the support of Chairman Sakurai, whose tacit approval had made a large part of Onizuka’s brushes with authority seem minor in the past.

Great Teacher Onizuka made me laugh, it had me gasping with incredulity, it made me come up with excuses to avoid work just so I could tear through the twenty-five volumes as soon as I could. It is not without its faults – a great deal of fan-service persists throughout the story, and let’s face it – if you have seen To Sir With Love and Munnabhai MBBS, you realize that the premise of GTO is hardly original. But even with all its over-the-top antics, it’s not just a fine comedy series, but also a drama that’s an indictment of the pettiness that afflicts today’s education system. It’s a scathing denouncement of self-serving, vainglorious modern-day teachers for whom teaching is nothing more than a way to make money, rather than the life-altering position it is meant to be. Hey, it made me want to go back to school, and that’s quite something!

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Categories Comics, Manga, Reviews

Adrian Tomine – Summer Blonde

October 6, 2011 //
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(Originally published in the July 2009 issue of Rolling Stone India)

Summer Blonde

Adrian Tomine (pronounced Toh-mee-nay, not Toe-mine, as many people think) wears a lot of hats. Metaphorically speaking, of course. His current assignments include illustration gigs with the New Yorker and Esquire, designing indie DVD covers, and editing/overseeing arthouse manga for the publishing house Drawn and Quarterly. But Tomine is not known for these interesting career forks as much as he is revered for the series of mini-comics, called Optic Nerve, which he began at the age of 17.

Summer Blonde, the third collection of the creator’s Optic Nerve series, has four stories. ‘Alter Ego’ is about Martin Courtney, a moderately successful writer experiencing writer’s block under the pressure of meeting and surpassing his debut effort. As he puts it, “They say everyone has one great book in them. Maybe I had a mediocre one and that’s it.” Things take a strange turn when he gets a postcard from an old schoolmate he had a crush on, and begins dating her younger sister, who’s still in high school. ‘Summer Blonde,’ the second story has twenty-something Neil, single, obsessed with a girl who sits behind the counter at a greeting card shop who he buys a card from every other day but cannot muster up the courage to ask her out. When she begins dating his neighbor Carlo, a man who knows his way around women, Neil becomes an unwitting stalker of the girl he cares for. Hillary Chan, the protagonist of ‘Hawaiian Getaway’ calls random strangers passing by the phonebooth next to her apartment, desperate to strike up a conversation with anyone at all, after being fired from her job and abandoned by her roommate. ‘Bomb Scare’ is set in a high school, where a boy – a member of the geek clique in the class – strikes up a friendship with popular Cammie, who has just had a traumatic experience at a party.

All these synopses make it sound like the stories go somewhere, but they don’t – think of them more as stray reels of unfinished films. Every story ends, rather, is interrupted, at a point where, in a “normal” plot, there would be a major emotional turning point for the characters involved. Be warned, if you seek happy endings in your stories, or some form of closure for the protagonists, you won’t get that from Tomine’s work. Neil, the protagonist of the second story, meets the girl inadvertently in a crowded subway train, and as they’re pressed against each other, he stumbles to find the right words. “I am sure…you really hate me,” his voice trails off. Pause. “Yeah, but no more than anyone else,” she replies, still looking away from him. End of story.

A striking aspect of Tomine’s comics is the hallucinatory nature of what he writes and draws – the kind that leaves you slightly off-kilter once you’re done imbibing them. It’s the kind of buzz you get from a Michel Gondry film, or a Bjork video, or a Weezer song. All in all, these are more experiences than actual stories. His characters are real, flawed, everyday individuals, riddled with insecurities, bearing the weight of misguided intentions, the kind that one wouldn’t notice in a crowd. They are also fucking creepy, just so you know.

Part of what keeps you engaged throughout are the interesting and varied storytelling techniques. Flashback panels, narrative captions and thought balloons, often avoided by modern comic writers, are employed by Tomine to evoke a unique emotional effect. Observe the way he manipulates silence to optimum effect. Silent panels take the story forward, let us into the mental turmoil of the characters, mark the passing of time, even freeze a few moments into an eternity. This is a comic book auteur who knows the tricks of the trade, and uses them to splendid effect.

In many ways, Tomine’s work is a natural progression of the underground comix movement of the seventies, started by the likes of Robert Crumb, nurtured by stalwarts like Pulitzer winner Art Spiegelman and Charles Burns, and given shape and form in the last part of the century by talents such as Dan Clowes, the Hernandez brothers, and Chris Ware. The creator has openly acknowledged the influence of Clowes and the Hernandez brothers in his work –the clean-lined style of his character drawings, in particular, and the deceptively simple backgrounds owe a lot to Clowes’ Ghost World and David Boring. Also, among the hardest things to do when you’re drawing comics is to create people whose faces, body structure and mannerisms do not meld into one or two oft-used templates with hair color or a costume being the only distinguishable way to identify a character. Tomine’s artwork leaves no doubt in your mind about his complete proficiency in this area – every single character is singularly drawn, each just as ugly or plain or pretty as the story demands.

Among the allegations made by his detractors is his inability to stray from his comfort zone, making all his work suspiciously similar. But there is no taking away the power in Tomine’s work to echo the human condition. The stories are about Americans, yet they resonate with every individual in any society who has ever felt alienated, lonely or loveless. Isn’t that what art is all about?

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Categories Comics, Reviews

10 Notable Graphic Novels of the Last Decade

August 18, 2011 //
10

(Originally published in Rolling Stone India, January 2010)

I remember feeling panicky doing this list. Too many titles to consider, and 10 is too less a number. I asked my editor if she would let me make multiple lists, for superhero, romance, manga, sci-fi and so on, but space was a constraint. So I took a deep breath, and chopped down my choices to these 10. Sure, I excluded a lot, but I stand by this list. How many of them have you read?

1. Scott Pilgrim

Writer/Artist: Bryan Lee O’Malley
The hardest thing about praising Scott Pilgrim is this – instead of yapping on about how good it is and why one should read it, you could do nothing better than just thrust a copy of the series into someone’s hands. One of the breakaway successes of the decade, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s series is about an everyday rock-band guitarist from Toronto, his dimension-hopping girlfriend and her seven evil ex-boyfriends, and a bunch of the awesomest supporting characters ever. A postmodern cartoon series featuring more pop-culture references than you can shake a stick at, Scott Pilgrim speaks perfect Twentyfirstcenturyese – a truly enduring series of this generation.

 

 

 

2. Y The Last Man

Writer: Brian K Vaughn; Artist: Pia Guerra

It sounds like the perfect male fantasy – a young man named Yorick Brown and his pet monkey are the only survivors of a planet-wide holocaust that kills every male creature on this planet. But being the last man on earth comes with its disadvantages, as Yorick, accompanied by a scientist and a secret agent, embarks on a journey across the world to find his estranged fiancée and finds himself the target of everyone from male-hating cultists to military strategists. Writer Brian Vaughn brings together a number of themes and plot-lines seamlessly towards a bittersweet ending, and this series remains a high-point of the mainstream sequential storytelling of the decade.

 

 

 

3. Ultimates

Writer: Mark Millar; Artist: Bryan Hitch

Simple recipe: Take a serving of Silver-age superheroes, remove the tint of nostalgia from the wrapping, add a dash of the current socio-political climate and serve with a healthy dose of cynicism. Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s Bush era reimagining of Marvel’s Avengers not only ramped up the action all the way to eleven, but also ended up making the comic a testament to the way the world went insane in the double-noughts.

 

 

 

 

 

4. Blankets

Writer/Artist: Craig Thompson

Craig Thompson’s graphic novel is not just a love story. It’s a memoir of a boy’s coming of age, of religion and family and the choices that we make on the way to adulthood. Set in Wisconsin, Blankets follows Thompson’s early life in a fundamentalist Christian family and society, the near-obliteration of his love for art by a din of scorn and piousness, and his first love, Raina, who changes his outlook towards life. In a way, the black-and-white art accentuates the timelessness of the themes addressed by Thompson, making this book one of those rare gateway volumes for casual readers.

 

 

 

5. The Goon

Writer/Artist: Eric Powell

It’s ironic – from winning awards for the best humour publication, The Goon has gone on to win accolades such as Best Continuing Series and Best Multimedia Artist, and even an International Horror Guild award. That’s because Eric Powell’s labour of love effortlessly straddles multiple worlds – at one moment, it features toilet humour and slapstick situations that cater to the lowest common denominator, and in the next it becomes an emotional saga of friendship, loyalty, love and revenge. Add to it the Powell’s completely unique painterly style which has evolved over the years to something that leaps off the printed page and you have a series that just gets better with every chapter.

 

 

 

 

6. All Star Superman

Writer: Grant Morrison; Artist: Frank Quitely

Before Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely began writing their twelve-chapter story of the world’s most familiar superhero, Superman, as a character, was at his nadir – fans complained of the lack of present-day relevance, writers bemoaned the lack of storytelling engines for the characters, others just did not care. But in course of those twelve issues, the writer-artist team not only made Superman resume his rightful place in the comic-book pantheon, but they also crafted a perfect saga of heroism that spanned time, dimensions and universes, with an epic, note-perfect ending. Never before has the Big Blue Guy epitomised truth, justice and humanity so effortlessly as in this Eisner Award winning series.

 

 

 

 

7. Fables

Writer: Bill Willingham; Artist: Mark Buckingham

What if fairy tales do not end happily-ever-after? Bill Willingham tries to address that notion in his ongoing series, one in which characters from folklore and fairy tales co-exist among normal people in the present-day, the bulk of them in exile in a neighbourhood in New York City. These characters exist in avatars you had never envisaged. Imagine Snow White as a hard-as-nails politician, Cinderella as an Emma Peele-esque super-spy, and the Big Bad Wolf a bad-ass sheriff. From murder mysteries to swashbuckling adventure to all-out war against a common enemy (who might be the last person you could imagine as a war-mongering Adversary), Fables makes a habit of turning genre conventions on their head.

 

 

 

 

8. Planetary

Writer: Warren Ellis; Artist: John Cassaday

In Planetary, Warren Ellis examines the very mechanisms of what makes genre fiction tick. He weaves archetypes from pulp fiction of the early 20th century – comics, schlocky horror movies, science fiction – into a series that parallels the works of Philip Jose Farmer; a shared universe seen through the eyes of three “archaeologists of the impossible”. While the later half of the series flagged a little because of erratic production schedules, Ellis’s writing and Cassaday’s magnificent artwork made fans across the world gasp when the last issue came out a few months ago, concluding a decade-long series.

 

 

 

 

 

9. The Walking Dead

Writer: Robert Kirkman; Artist: Charlie Adlard

Before zombies took over popular culture this decade, no one could have predicted that a black-and-white indie comic book series where would become the most perfect survival horror tale ever written. Walking Dead is like a George Romero film that does not end. What makes the series so groundbreaking is the way writer Robert Kirkman keeps his characters so vulnerable – there is no guarantee that a cast member would make it through the next chapter, and absolutely no warning about what lies ahead for the protagonists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

10. Promethea

Writer: Alan Moore; Artist: JH Williams III

Promethea, on one hand, has the heart-stoppingly beautiful art of JH Williams III, a man whose immaculate visual design makes every page-turn evoke gasps of wonder. On the other, it features the Grand Guru of the graphic novel, Alan Moore, at his psychedelic best, writing a treatise on magic, feminism and mythology. A complicated series that left many readers polarised about the creators’ intent, Promethea remains one of those rare examples of virtuoso artistic expression that stands the test of time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final thoughts:

1. Of course order does not matter. Are you kidding me?

2. Obviously, all series are to be considered in their entirety. With the exception of Fables, which is valid only from issues 1-75, and the two one-shots 1001 Nights of Snowfall and The Last Castle, and Ultimates, where I’ve considered Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s two-volume run as canon.

3. The list is very mainstream, glad you noticed. The keyword is “notable”.

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Categories Comics

Rolling Stone India: The Graphic Novel Column Archives 2

June 8, 2009 //
6

(Originally published in Rolling Stone India, April 2008)

Absolute Sandman Volume 1
Writer: Neil Gaiman
Artist: Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones et al.
Publisher: DC/Vertigo

“I will show your fear in a handful of dust.”
In 1987, when DC advertised a new horror series with this tagline, accompanied by an image of a pale, gaunt man with dark eyes and wild hair, not many readers recognized the source of the words (TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, in case you didn’t either) and no one really thought the series, a re-imagining of a lesser-known Silver Age DC character would go on to become the flagship title of Vertigo comics and one of the cornerstones of graphic literature. Two decades later, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is being republished as a set of four over-sized ‘remastered’ hardcover books – referred to as the Absolute Editions. The first volume covers the first twenty issues of this seventy-five part series, which introduce us to the world of the Sandman and some of its cast of characters.

The story of Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, the anthropomorphic manifestation of dreams begins in tragedy, when members of a cult, in 1916, capture the dream lord and ensnare him in a magical barrier for the better part of the twentieth century. His subsequent escape seventy years later is not the end of his troubles, because without his tools – a helmet, a bag of sand and a ruby, all of which were taken away by his captors – he cannot regain control of the Dreaming. The first seven episodes of the story then takes the form of a fairly straightforward quest, in which Morpheus interacts with the various beings in the DC Universe, including the mage John Constantine and the Justice League of America, and visits Lucifer in Hell – all to reclaim his rightful powers.

In the eighth episode, Gaiman produced a quiet, introspective story that introduces Dream’s sister, Death, re-imagined as a kind, perky sixteen-year old girl, contrary to genre conventions. The positive reactions to that story made Gaiman bolder – like Alan Moore, his spiritual guru in comics, he began to experiment with different techniques, weaving an intricate tale of 22-page chapters that hop across centuries and include an immense cast of characters, taking his own sweet time to create a world that built upon the previous history of the character. The Sandman began as a horror title, and believe me, there are moments of creeping terror in the early arcs – like in the Dr Destiny sequence ’24 hours’ or the Cereal convention subplot in The Doll’s House, but as it progressed, the series slowly morphed into something that was a combination of literary wit, high fantasy, mythology, and solid storytelling. Greek myth, Shakespeare, superheroes, Biblical characters and African legends rub shoulders in these early stories, notable ones being ‘Calliope’, in which Gaiman tries to answer the perennial question faced by writers – “where do you get your ideas from?” and the heartbreaking ‘Dream of A Thousand Cats’, in which, and this is all I can say without spoiling your first-time experience, the origin of the world is explained.

The refurbished collection, encased in a faux-leather cover is a bibliophile’s (dare I say it?) dream come true. The volume has series colorist Daniel Vozzo redoing the murky colors on the first eighteen issues, originally the result of primitive printing techniques. One of the mainstays of the Sandman series is the use of rotating artistic teams for the different storylines, each artist interpreting the characters in their own style. The art nouveau influences of Charles Vess and Michael Zulli are used in period pieces set in medieval times, the dark, sooty ink-work of Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg bring out the malevolent nature of the early storylines, and Dave McKean’s abstract imagery graced all the 75 covers. The high-quality paper and the larger size of the Absolute Edition make the artwork leap off the page with spectacular clarity. Adding to the joy is 70 pages of extra material at the end of the book, which includes Gaiman’s original proposal for the series, concept sketches by various artists, and to top it all off, the original script and art breakdowns to Sandman #19, the only comic to win a World Fantasy Award. What more could you ask? Buy this book before it goes out of print, your bookshelf will thank you for it.

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The Complete Don Martin
Writers: Don Martin, various
Artists: Don Martin
Publisher: Running Press

Mad Magazine treads into coffee-table territory with a series of hardbound collections called Mad’s Greatest Artists. The first such offering, The Complete Don Martin is a gorgeous behemoth of a book, collecting the entire oeuvre of the great creator in a two-volume slip-cased edition. Printed on high-quality paper with flawless reproduction are all of Don Martin’s strips, the all-too-rare TV and movie adaptations, cover paintings, posters, postcards, and even pencil prelims. A neat bonus is the inclusion of occasional essays by Martin’s colleagues (‘the usual gang of idiots’, to use Madspeak), with names like Sergio Aragones, Dick DeBartolo and Al Jaffee relating anecdotes and opinions about the great artist’s work.

Martin, often billed as ‘the maddest Mad artist’, started his career with the venerable magazine in 1956. As you leaf through the early reprints, you realize that the first years suffer from the malaise common to most long-running strips – that of the creator trying to find his groove – and floundering in parts. These early strips, while funny in their own right, have Martin experimenting with verbal gags, a little unsure with his figure structures and trying his hand at extremely dark humour. While these are far from unfunny, they are nowhere as bizarre and laugh-out-loud as what his later work would be, and one feels the urge to skip these parts as quickly as possible.

From the sixties, the change in his style becomes apparent, the figures attaining their trademark extended shape, the strips hitting their stride, and the trademark sound effects – exploding flowers (SKLISHK!), dead fish ricocheting off a face (GLUP! SHPLIPPLE! FLADDUP!) and my personal favorite, two frogs catching each other with tongues. (ZAP GING GING TWONG SPLAT!). By the time we are into the second volume (which covers 1975-1988), Don Martin has become the Don Martin we all know and love.

Highly recommended!

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The Art of Sin City
Writer & Artist: Frank Miller
Publisher: Dark Horse.

In case you’ve not read Frank Miller’s Sin City yet, do yourself a favour. Stop reading this right now and go buy the series. Miller’s chiaroscuro masterpiece is not only a ripping good yarn; it’s also got the most eye-catching artwork in comics today. And after you’ve read all nine of the trades and are tempted to pick up The Art of Sin City, my advice would be to save the trouble, and buy something else.

Art books based on comics aren’t uncommon –Alex Ross’s Mythology and Mike Mignola’s Art of Hellboy comes to mind as two of the recent good publications that raised the bar for creators and publishers. But unlike these two, and all the other art books that actually give an insight into a creator’s mind and a deeper understanding of his craft and his process, The Art of Sin City concentrates on reprinting key panels from the actual series, blown to full size, with an odd preliminary pencil drawing or two thrown in. This, truth be told, is not entirely a bad thing if you are looking to admire the minimalist style that goes into the making of Sin City. Also, some of the images are from trading cards, alternate covers and advertising artwork, most of which are hard to find, making this the only book in which you will get to see them.

But staring at 150-odd pages of poster-quality artwork of naked women and men with guns with gets tedious, especially when apart from the preface, there’s no text to be seen anywhere. Miller’s conceit seems to be that his drawings alone have the clout to justify a price tag of 39.95$ (roughly Rs. 1350). Strictly for completists and hard-core Sin City fans.

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Categories Comics

Rolling Stone India: The Graphic Novels column archives

May 4, 2009 //
1

(This was published in the first issue of Rolling Stone India, cover dated March 2008)

Black Dossier

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Kevin O’Neill
Publisher: DC/Wildstorm

What if the protagonists of the numerous novels of the nineteenth century co-existed in a fictional world? Writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill led this idea forward through two volumes of comics called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, each spanning six issues, in which Mina Murray from Stoker’s Dracula, the rugged hero Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo from Verne’s stories, Mr Hyde (with Dr Jekyll in tow) and Wells’s Invisible Man fought Oriental villains and Martians. At the end of the second volume, the League was disbanded, its members at odds with each other. The third installment, called The Black Dossier was released recently, and it differs from the previous volumes in three respects – one, it is a standalone volume; two, it is no longer confined to the setting and characters of the Victorian Era; three – and the most important difference of all, it’s not really a comic book.

The year is 1958, and a remarkably youthful Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain are in London after a file called The Black Dossier, which contains confidential information about all the previous incarnations of the League that were formed throughout history to carry out covert operations for England. They have to escape a posse of MI5 espionage agents led by a spy referred to as “Jimmy”, Emma Night and Hugo Drummond, and if you cannot identify two out of these three, you probably wouldn’t enjoy this book – and make their way to the fourth dimension. In the middle of the pursuit, they read sections of the dossier, and this brings out the real meat of the book, as Moore and O’Neill narrate the history of this fictional world in the form of letters, segments of literary works, maps, schematics, excerpts of autobiographies and comic book sections, including an example of Tijuana Bibles.

In every section, Moore writes in a style corresponding to the genre and content. For instance, Faerie’s Fortunes Founded claims to be a lost play by William Shakespeare written in the style of the Bard himself, The Crazy Wide Forever is a stream of consciousness ‘beat’ novel supposedly by Sal Paradise, the narrator of Kerouac’s On The Road, and the most hilarious pastiche of them all (and my personal favourite), What Ho, Gods of the Abyss by Bertie Wooster is a look at the Lovecraft canon in a Wodehousian vein.  Kevin O’Neill’s artwork shines in all these sections – he is equally at home drawing dynamic action sequences , cartoony meta-comics and detailed ink etchings echoing early twentieth-century illustration plates. At the end of the book, when the duo reaches the Fourth Dimension, the sequence is represented as a 3-D sequence (yes, you have to wear cardboard glasses that come with the book) and even there, Moore and O’Neill make use of the technology to come up with stunning effects – a Lovecraftian elder god speaks in illegible runes, close your right eye, you see the English words form behind the gibberish.

The book is more of a framing device and less of a story, an ambitious attempt to map all of known literary fiction into a single coherent world, with the story leading in to the actual third volume due next year. Nearly every page of the main graphic novel contains references to fictional characters from British literature, TV series, comics and popular culture.  And as is normal in a work of such ambition, the question here is this.

Would you enjoy it?

If you are a fan of comic books and comics alone, probably not – which explains the lukewarm response the book got from those who embraced the boy’s adventure spirit of the earlier two volumes. The Black Dossier is a different beast altogether, it requires you to come to the reading table with an awareness – if not in-depth knowledge – of pop culture, an ability to context-switch between different time-periods, storytelling devices and above all, with time on your hands. There is just too much going on in the book to take it all in at one sitting, and there is a high chance that the volume of content and information proves to be overwhelming. It took me nearly two weeks to get through all the segments, in case you’re wondering.  That said, it truly is a tremendous piece of work, quite unlike any comic book that has come before. Not quite ‘the best thing since sliced bread’, as Moore mentions in his pre-release interviews, but definitely one of the best graphic novels of 2007.

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Essential X-Men vol 1

Essential X-Men vol 1

Essential X-Men Volume 1
Writer: Chris Claremont
Artists: Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin
Publisher: Marvel comics.

If you like the X-men movies and want to get into the comics without treading into confusing continuity, check out this particular reprint edition, that presents Giant-size X-men #1 and the subsequent issues 94-119, the 70’s stories that resurrected the classic X-Men team from a comic on the brink of cancellation to a best-selling title. Chris Claremont’s scripts laid equal emphasis on multicultural elements of our favorite mutants, space opera, inter-team friction and individual character development, while artists Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin brought in realism with their dynamic line-work. The first appearances of Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler, the death and subsequent rebirth of Jean Grey into Phoenix, arch-villain Magneto’s triumphant return, and Professor Charles Xavier’s romance with intergalactic Empress Lilandra – these are the stories that laid the groundwork for (arguably) the greatest Marvel story ever – the Dark Phoenix Saga. And who would have thought that a B-grade character called Wolverine would be catapulted to superstardom – becoming the poster-boy of the grim and gritty comics of the eighties – by virtue of being included in this title?

Reading this volume brings back a warm feeling of nostalgia at how straightforward comics were back then – villains indulge in bombastic monologues outlining their plans in detail, every fight sequence has characters talking nineteen to the dozen, and in different dialects too! But make no mistake about it, these stories are groundbreaking and classic – modern Marvel writers (as well as the scriptwriters of the X-men movies) are still borrowing the mythic elements Claremont and Byrne put in place in these initial issues.  Consider your money well-spent.

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Lucky Luke: Jesse James

Lucky Luke: Jesse James

Lucky Luke: Jesse James.
Writer: Goscinny
Artist: Morris
Publisher: Tara Press, India.

All you Tintin and Asterix lovers, time to rejoice! The classic series Lucky Luke, written by Rene Goscinny and illustrated by Morris is now available in India. Lucky Luke is a madcap adventure series about a fearless, resourceful and slightly loco cowboy his equally loony horse, Jolly Jumper as they travel through the Wild West, helping those in distress. In the first volume, ‘Jesse James’, the villain tries to be a modern-day Robin Hood – he robs a rich man, gives the money to a homeless vagrant, and when he finds out that his gift has made the latter wealthy, proceeds to rob him. He finally decides to keep the money for himself, to avoid any such moral quandaries in the future.  With his Shakespeare-quoting elder brother Frank, and a witless associate named Cole Younger, Jesse James strikes terror in the West with his bank and railroad heists. Until one fine day, two Pinkerton detectives employ Lucky Luke to capture the James gang before they rob the bank in Nothing Gulch, Texas.

The book is, in one word, fun! Unlike other European cowboy comics like Blueberry and Tex Willer, Lucky Luke eschews realism in favor of humor, substitutes spaghetti violence with cartoon lunacy and is appealing both to kids and adults. I laughed aloud throughout the book, and look forward to reading the remaining four volumes as soon as I can.  Thanks are due to Tara Press for bringing this classic series back into print, with a brilliant translation and an album-sized release.

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Categories Comics