Comics with a twist

REVIEWS BY BECKY OHLSEN

New graphic novels are anything but predictable

The theme for this season's batch of graphic novels, if you were to give it a theme, would be something like "traditional with a twist." Among other things, superheroes act like villains, a beloved Israeli author goes graphic, a regular comic book suddenly becomes a how-to manual, and manga (the Japanese version of graphic novels) turns socially progressive.

Most of us would probably agree that making Superman angry is not the best career move. But in Bill Willingham's Day of Vengeance, that's exactly how the vengeful spirit Eclipso forces his wicked way into the mind and body of the Man of Steel in order to take over the world. (All supervillains want to take over the world. Why? What will they do with it then?) In this cross-pollinated book, part of the excellent series Countdown to Infinite Crisis, the gorgeous color artwork complements a scary storyline and appearances by many in the vast pantheon of superheroes, including even the wizard Shazam. The Infinite Crisis story arc, which also includes the excellent The OMAC Project, deals with the fragility of identity, so all the main good guys end up doing evil deeds, and not always because they've been possessed by demons.


Not your average comic book

Israeli author Etgar Keret is known and loved, especially among younger readers, for his short, potent stories. So Jetlag, which pairs five of his tales with five different illustrators, seems a natural fit. It's clear just five pages in that this is not your average comic book. The first story, "Hatrick," has a magician retiring in despair after his innocent pulling-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat finale yields increasingly horrific results. Keret's deadpan tone and the restrained Picasso-esque illustrations by Batia Kolton are a perfect foil for the brutal story. Things get progressively weirder from there: "X" is about a girl who lives in a village near the gates of Hell and falls in love with a vacationing corpse. There's also a zanily drawn, surreal plane-crash saga, a simple tale of a boy and his piggy bank and a story about a man who falls for a tightrope walker but ends up with her pet monkey. Highly recommended.


Another mold-breaking new graphic novel is La Perdida, by Jessica Abel, who publishes the zine Artbabe. La Perdida follows Carla, a young Mexican-American woman who sets out with vague motives to explore her heritage. She goes to Mexico City to crash with an ex-flame, a blue-blooded writer called Harry, but before long they fight and she dives into the city on her own. Things go from interesting to exciting to terrifying pretty rapidly, and the consequences for Carla, Harry and many of the locals she befriends are dire. Abel's black-and-white drawings are both loose and bold, a combination of strong lines, evocative gestures and very basic facial features. The dialogue is in both Spanish and English, which enhances the tension that automatically exists between curious visitor and struggling native. Alienated in the huge city, Carla finds it hard to decide who her friends are, so she assumes she has none—which proves to be the biggest mistake she makes.


Going behind the scenes

In The Making of a Graphic Novel, author-illustrator Prentis Rollins' science-fiction graphic novel The Resonator doubles as a how-to book about writing and illustrating comics. The original novel is about an industrialized future in which humans have worked themselves into a sleepless society, and one man figures out a way to break free of it. Its black-and-white pages are hyper-detailed, full of mechano-organic forms and dreamy spacescapes. At the end of the story, you flip the book over and learn how the author created it. If you've ever wondered how comic-book letterers get all those words to fit into speech bubbles, or what the heck a rapidograph or liquid frisket is, this is your book.


From Japan, with love

Award-winning author and artist Naoki Urasawa, a manga star in Japan, has a new series out called Monster. Geared toward a mature audience, this book is a gripping hospital thriller, featuring the kind-hearted and extremely talented young Japanese surgeon Dr. Tenma. Defying orders from a corrupt hospital administrator, Tenma saves a young boy who has been shot in the head, sacrificing his bright future and his expensive fiancée in the process. It's only nine years later, after working his way back up from being punished for his noble beliefs, that the young doctor finds out that doing the right thing might have been the wrong move. The writing is smart, the sympathetic characters are well-developed and the story is exciting enough to enthrall adult readers at least as much as teens.


Another adult-themed manga, Wild Rock, puts sort of a "Brokeback Mountain" spin on the genre. Emba and Yuuen are two young warrior boys each destined to become chieftain of their feuding clans. When they meet and fall in love, are they doomed to heartbreak, or can they own up to their feelings? The story's quite simple, but the delicate artwork by Kazusa Takashima makes it a gorgeous book.


One of the cooler manga books to come out in a while is Smuggler, by Shohei Manabe (creator of the much-praised Dead End). It's the noirish tale of an actor down on his luck who gets sucked into a dark underworld full of loan sharks, Yakuza and assorted lowlifes who force the actor into a body-smuggling scheme. The dark, sketchy artwork, all cigarettes and shadows, is a perfect match for such a gritty story.


If you're looking to bone up on your knowledge of all things manga, you can't do better than Helen McCarthy's new book, 500 Manga Heroes & Villains. McCarthy is an acknowledged expert on this Japanese comic-book art form, and her sure-footed descriptions of the genre's personalities—from Astro Boy to Yu-Gi-Oh—ring with authority and well-supported opinion. This is a reference book that's almost as much fun to read as its subject.


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