Around the world in seven new tales

Graphic novels take readers to exotic locales in words, pictures

REVIEWS BY BECKY OHLSEN

If there's a theme that ties together the best of this season's batch of comic books, it's geographic diversity. From London to Cairo to Japan to California to New York and even to ancient Egypt, this round of graphic-novel action happens all over the place.

Despite its intimidating 600-plus pages, Tekkon Kinkreet: Black & White by Taiyo Matsumoto rockets along at breakneck speed; before you know it, the story has ended, and you find yourself flipping back through the book for a lengthier gaze at Matsumoto's explosive, neo-punk artwork. The full-throttle, splash-and-dash illustrations perfectly suit the wild, action-fueled story: A pair of fiendish little street urchins—sharp-as-nails Black and sweet-but-brutal White—defend their hold over the city's violent underworld against a gang of yakuza who want to take control. What could easily have been a work of pure, unmitigated ultraviolence instead has numerous unlikely moments of tenderness and humor, thanks to Matsumoto's nuanced writing and obvious affection for his characters. The book has also been made into a movie available on DVD.


True adventures

Equally exciting, and actually true, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is an illustrated memoir by Ann Marie Fleming about her great-grandfather, who in his day was a famous Chinese magician and vaudeville performer. Fleming, a filmmaker, started looking into Sam's life after her grandmother died; her research led her on nearly as many travels as the magician himself enjoyed, as she tracked down version after version of the truth about her grandfather. The result is not only a documentary film but also this amazingly textured, multilayered book, a lovely pastiche of photographs, documents, stylized mini-comic-book episodes and Fleming's own charmingly simplistic stick-figure drawings.


A whole new world

The antiqued look of the first few pages of Shaun Tan's The Arrival makes it clear you're in for something extraordinary. Following the wordless squares of sketched narrative is like watching a jittery old scrap of film dug up from the bottom of an archive; in appearance and feel, it calls to mind Chris Marker's lovely 1962 short film La Jetée. The plot is a classic—a man sets out to make his way in the big city, where he'll bring his family later—but this time it's infused with magic. The city is guarded by mammoth winged statues and covered in incomprehensible hieroglyphs; cute little alien creatures hide in unlikely corners. The lack of text or dialogue emphasizes the man's sense of alienation, but gradually he makes connections with other refugees and the frighteningly strange world becomes familiar.


Rites of passage

Blending irony-tinged cool and hipster ennui with, like, actual feelings, Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings is a frank, funny and sometimes cringe-inducing look at a Japanese-American guy in his late 20s struggling with his arguably underdeveloped emotions. Ben Tanaka's longtime girlfriend leaves him to move from California to New York, which he takes as an opportunity to explore some of his less admirable fantasies. The stark, unfussy artwork allows plenty of room for exploring the story's complex themes of racial and sexual politics, gender roles, artistic ambition and distance vs. intimacy.


Allure of the pharaohs

On a much lighter note is The Professor's Daughter, written and illustrated by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert. It's actually the first book the now-renowned team worked on together, and it's unique in that Sfar, who usually illustrates their collaborations, did the writing, while Guibert contributed the illustrations. In 19th-century London, the daughter of a famed Egyptologist falls for the mummied prince Imhotep, inexplicably awake after 30 centuries. Their madcap courtship gets them into all kinds of trouble, and eventually jail; the queen is unceremoniously tossed into the Thames; murder and mayhem ensue; and everyone, or almost everyone, lives happily ever after. The retro-style illustrations and lively, absurdist writing make this book as lovely to look at as it is delightful to read.


Also laced with humor, but in a much more serious setting, is Cairo, written by G. Willow Wilson with art by M.K. Perker. With vivid, painterly artwork and a twisty plot that includes everything from demons and genies to drug runners and Israeli soldiers, the book sets its magic-realist tale of adventure and enlightenment in the context of the always volatile Middle East. A teenage Lebanese-American boy finds himself with a genie for a guardian/instructor, which is handy because he's unwittingly stumbled into the middle of a centuries-old battle between good and evil for control of an ancient wooden box and its mysterious contents. The smart, witty but sensitive writing is nuanced enough that the story never upsets the balance between reverence and entertainment.


World of imagination

Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened, edited by Jason Rodriguez, gathers stories by 16 comic book artists and writers inspired by old postcards Rodriguez dug out of bins in antique shops. The cryptic messages scribbled onto the backs of the cards ("I was in town today. Hope you were not in a fight last night") leave their true meaning open to interpretation, and the device makes for some really inventive storytelling. "Tic-Tac-Bang-Bang," by Stuart Moore and Michael Gaydos, is a peek at the dangerous lives of tic-tac-toe hustlers in the early 1900s. "Time," by Tom Beland, follows an old man looking back on a lifelong romance from the cafe where it began. And "Homesick," by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Micah Farritor, is a gorgeous, slightly abstracted view of a dreamlife in Paris gone hollow and drab. Like the rest of the titles reviewed here, Postcards travels far and wide but ends up getting you right where you live.


A cross-section of comics

If you just can't decide where to begin your exploration of the graphic-novel universe, two new books offer a broad survey of the medium.

The Best American Comics 2007, edited by Chris Ware, collects segments of what, in the editor's opinion, are the standout comics of the year. It includes a short piece about going back to New York City by R. and Aline Crumb, as well as a brief episode by their daughter, Sophie Crumb, and an especially poignant excerpt from Alison Bechdel's illustrated memoir Fun Home. There are also great pieces by Lynda Barry, Lauren Weinstein, Jeffrey Brown, Ben Katchor (whose bizarre storyline involves the disruptive powers of a shoehorn), Gilbert Hernandez, Gary Panter, Ivan Brunetti, Seth and several others.


For a more theoretical take on comic books, try Our Gods Wear Spandex by Christopher Knowles with illustrations by Joseph Michael Linsner. Subtitled "The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes," it advances the theory that modern-day super-heroes fulfill the function that religion has served throughout history. It's not a hard case to make, and Knowles does it convincingly, even if his survey of early human history is a tad rushed (he fits it all into the first third of a 256-page book). Things really get going when he starts discussing pulp novels and the direct links between them and modern-day comic books. Writers like Poe, Doyle and Verne, he says, together provided "a fictional backdrop for the superheroes of the 'pulps.'" From there, it was only a short leap to comics. The best parts of the book are Knowles' personality sketches of some of the genre's founders—without whom none of the books here would ever have existed.


Becky Ohlsen has traveled around the world writing for Lonely Planet.

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