Bubbles & Gondola is one of those graphic novels that fakes you out right from its cover, and never lets up in that sense until the book is over. Between the title and the glimpse of art, this looks to be an adorable (possibly children’s) book about a [...]]]> By Renaud Dillies
80 pages, color
Published by NBM

Bubbles & Gondola is one of those graphic novels that fakes you out right from its cover, and never lets up in that sense until the book is over. Between the title and the glimpse of art, this looks to be an adorable (possibly children’s) book about a little mouse, perhaps named Bubbles or Gondola, and his exciting adventures. Readers might be a little startled, then, to instead find a graphic novel about a mouse named Charlie suffering from loneliness and depression while working as writer. Fortunately, once you get past the surprise, it’s a rather nice book.

There’s all sorts of imagery packed into Bubbles & Gondola, from the bird named Solitude that only Charlie the Mouse can see, to a climax at a masked-parade à la Carnival. Renaud Dillies, though, never lets up or stops impressing you as a reader. Some of the illustrations, like Charlie zooming on a little boat across the moon, are jaw-droppingly beautiful, and the masked-parade is full of great shapes and designs that you can stare at for hours. While Charlie himself comes off a bit of a sad sack early on, I found that by the midpoint of Bubbles & Gondola I’d genuinely come to care about him and his plight. This is a book that’s as much a treatise on what it’s like to be an artist (of any medium) as it is about the sapping nature of depression, and I think Dillies manages to get his points across strongly on both subjects. This was an unexpected little surprise; it’s not what you might think, but it turns out to be much better.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books

Stargazing Dog is the kind of book that will either grab you instantly with its cover, or make you run screaming. For me, there’s something instantly attractive about an image of a cute dog in a field of sunflowers that made me want to read this [...]]]> By Takashi Murakami
128 pages, black and white
Published by NBM

Stargazing Dog is the kind of book that will either grab you instantly with its cover, or make you run screaming. For me, there’s something instantly attractive about an image of a cute dog in a field of sunflowers that made me want to read this comic that was a runaway success in its native Japan. What I found inside, though, was a strange duo of stories about the relationship between men and dogs. It’s bittersweet, but I appreciated that it didn’t take the easy way out.

The first half of Stargazing Dog is the titular story, where a family adopts a puppy named Happie, but over time the father finds his wife and daughter drifting away from him, until it is just him and Happie on the road, trying to make ends meet. Takashi Murakami takes a slightly peculiar approach to the narrative here, starting off by making the father extremely standoffish and not terribly good on a personal level with anyone. It makes him hard to get excited about when the book’s cast contracts to just him and the dog, as a result. You can see this being a story of (somewhat) redemption for the father, but none the less it’s a bit of a speed bump for those earlier chapters.

Then again, even once it’s just the two of them, he’s not the most dashing of protagonists. He makes some ridiculous mistakes along the way, and there are some hiccups that are hard to believe (why is all of his money in cash?) that seem to exist solely to push the pair of them into ruin. But if you ignore the plot and just focus on the story of Happie, it’s a sad if touching story about devotion and unconditional love that will do its best to tug at heartstrings. That’s something that is echoed in "Sunflowers," an epilogue starring a different character who comes to investigate the aftermath of "Stargazing Dog." It’s another piece about the love that a dog gives its owner, and while the story itself seems slightly unnecessary, I appreciated that this protagonist was a bit more admirable and interesting. Once again, Murakami deliberately avoids a simple, pat, happy ending, and it makes me wonder if this is a hallmark of all of his fiction or if he was trying to stay in the same vein as "Stargazing Dog."

Murakami’s art in Stargazing Dog is a blocky but attractive style. I love how he draws Happie, with his perpetually eager and joyous canine face. A lot of the emotion of the story comes not from the script but from the visuals of the piece; it’s hard to keep from finding yourself entranced by Happie as he goes from good to bad situation but still has that upbeat canine spirit. He brings a lot of detail to the book, too; the fields of vegetation are drawn in a thick but interesting manner, letting you feel like you’re really seeing an area that’s choked by weeds and flowers. Looking at the old houses and cars, or the masses of sunflowers helps sell this story as being about a real place.

Stargazing Dog is a good book, and it’s easy to see why it became such a smash hit in Japan. It’s probably little too saccharine in places for some readers, but there’s enough bleakness here too that I ultimately found that it worked far better than I’d expected. I do wish the story had a little more meat on its bones in places, but as it’s much more of an emotional than plot-oriented piece that’s understandable. I’ll definitely take a look at future comics from Murakami. If nothing else, I’d like to see what he can do without placing dogs in harm’s way to still stir up emotion. For now, though, I’m satisfied with Stargazing Dog.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books

Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim’s sprawling series Dungeon has always been all over the map, especially with all of its different sub-series (The Early Years exploring the past, Zenith the present, and Twilight the future, plus Parade set [...]]]> Written by Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim
Art by Carlos Nine and Patrice Killoffer
96 pages, color
Published by NBM

Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim’s sprawling series Dungeon has always been all over the map, especially with all of its different sub-series (The Early Years exploring the past, Zenith the present, and Twilight the future, plus Parade set in the early days of Zenith), but the easiest one to jump into in many ways is probably Monstres. That’s because each story just focuses on a different monster or beast, telling their particular story whenever it might take place. This new collection of two of the Monstres volumes from France is all over the place, not only in setting but art style and writing to boot.

The first half, Heartbreaker, is set during The Early Years timeframe, taking supporting character Alexandra and showing us just how this beautiful assassin’s mind truly functions. It’s a slightly unpleasant story, with her continued captures and tortures not being a light or happy tale by any stretch of the imagination. It’s drawn by Carlos Nine, and I wish that he’d had the time to paint the interior like he did the book’s stunning cover. The interiors aren’t bad, but his loose lines and sketchy character designs just can’t compare to the cover and all of its beauty. Nine drawing Heartbreaker is an inspired choice, though; Alexandra spends much of the comic drugged by her enemies, and this slightly blurry, loose style is a great match. Readers of The Early Years definitely shouldn’t skip this volume, though; it ties closely into the main narrative, and Sfar and Trondheim provide a big surprise for readers of that series at Heartbreaker‘s conclusion.

The second half, The Depths, is drawn by Patrice Killoffer, whose precise and smooth ink line is a dramatic contrast to Nine’s work. And while the first half was grim in a hazy sort of way, there’s no escaping the sheer nastiness of this story when Killoffer draws its events. This is easily the most (deliberately) vile and horrible story in the Dungeon milieu to date, as the poor underwater creature Drowny goes through all sorts of nasty situations in order to survive when the Great Khan’s armies invade. There’s a huge amount of detail packed into every single panel, but be warned that you might not want to look too closely. This story is designed to repulse its reader, and at that it succeeds mightily. Dungeon Monstres Vol. 3: Heartbreaker seems to see just how low it can go, and while I applaud it for succeeding, it’s the one Dungeon book I can’t see myself wanting to ever re-read.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books

There’s no way around it: A Home for Mr. Easter is one of the strangest comics I’ve seen all year. It’s a book that starts about a girl who’s picked on by her classmates at school as well as her mother, and then transforms into [...]]]> By Brooke A. Allen
200 pages, black and white
Published by NBM

There’s no way around it: A Home for Mr. Easter is one of the strangest comics I’ve seen all year. It’s a book that starts about a girl who’s picked on by her classmates at school as well as her mother, and then transforms into a bizarre chase through the woods involving environmental activists, a lying pet store owner, a failed magician, and the police. And the whole time, it just gets odder and odder as the tone of the book shifts and twists around. For that reason alone, it’s hard to ignore A Home for Mr. Easter.

In the early chapters of A Home for Mr. Easter, Brooke A. Allen plays her cards in a coy manner, not telling us for certain on if Tesana really has found a rabbit that lays multi-colored eggs or if she is hallucinating/imagining the more fantastical parts of her experience. This is after all a loner that’s picked on by almost everyone around her, and the book almost immediately leaps to a nine-page fantasy sequence involving Tesana standing up for herself and then escaping on a unicorn before the world snaps back into reality around her. It’s easy to see Tesana’s imagination running wild again when she first sees a rabbit lay an easter egg, doubly so when it then starts talking to her. It’s not until more characters start seeing the fantastical elements in A Home for Mr. Easter that you start to realize that yes, this is all happening. The book has quietly transformed from a story about a pathetic person unable to handle the real world, into one about a genuine hero trying to help a rabbit that everyone’s trying to get their hands upon. It’s an odd shift, one that might take the reader a little while to fully wrap their head around.

Once you know that all of this is happening, though, it’s actually fun to stop reading the book at that point and start over with that additional knowledge. It comes across as a fun adventure with strange characters and crazy ideas. This is, after all, a graphic novel with a talking rabbit that lays easter eggs that grant wishes. The best thing about A Home for Mr. Easter‘s story, though, isn’t the crazy ideas and the madcap pace that everything unrolls as the book progresses. Rather, it’s Tesana and her relationship with Mr. Easter. Her love for the little talking rabbit will pull at the toughest of heartstrings, quite frankly; Allen absolutely lays on the sweetness with Tesana and her caring for the rabbit, and you start to realize that aside from her mother, Mr. Easter is the first time she’s cared about someone else. If their relationship wasn’t so strongly delivered, I don’t think this book would work nearly as well as it does.

Allen’s art is consistently strong the whole way through the book, and even people who might not like the whimsy and flights of fancy of A Home for Mr. Easter will be hard to ignore Allen’s work here. Allen draws Tesana as a large girl, one who is mocked and teased by the other students at school. What I like, though, is how Allen is able to use that to Tesana’s advantage as the book progresses. Tesana comes across as someone who doesn’t know her own strength, and Allen draws her barreling through crowds and obstacles in a way that feels believable. She’s always got a sweet expression on her face, though, and it keeps Tesana from looking like a brute. Then again, the whole book is a lot of fun visually; Allen’s art feels like a strange cross between Paul Pope and Jim Mahfood, coming across both loose and blocky at the same time, if that makes any sense. It’s a beautiful art style that is able to handle everything from huge chases across the woods to Tesana thanking a horse in a cute way, and I’m entranced.

A Home for Mr. Easter is a strange, shifting book that switches up its tone and potentially tricks its reader at first. It’s a bit of a rambling story, but by the time I was done I had a big smile on my face. Allen’s story has heart, and her art is fantastic. As a first graphic novel, A Home for Mr. Easter is an impressive debut. I definitely look forward to seeing what she has up her sleeves next.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books

Little Nothings is, quite frankly, one of the best titles for a diary comic that I’ve ever come across. After all, at the end of the day, the vast majority of diary comics are full of little, inconsequential nothings. They may be important (or not!) to the person [...]]]> By Lewis Trondheim
128 pages, color
Published by NBM

Little Nothings is, quite frankly, one of the best titles for a diary comic that I’ve ever come across. After all, at the end of the day, the vast majority of diary comics are full of little, inconsequential nothings. They may be important (or not!) to the person they happened to, but to anyone else they’re a vague amusement at best. That said, I also think that Lewis Trondheim’s Little Nothings not only has one of the best titles of a diary comic, but that it’s one of my favorite diary comics. The book might be full of little nothings, but there’s something about Trondheim’s charm in his comics that makes it engrossing reading.

Trondheim’s comics in Little Nothings: Uneasy Happiness are rarely deep, or even particularly meaningful. They’re often about his travels, or the moments of mundanity like trying to capture or remove a mouse in his home. What he does bring to his stories, though, is a level of honesty and openness that’s coupled with a strange sort of innocence. So you get to feel his wonder as he sees a huge waterfall on Reunion Island, or his sheepishness as his wife points out that his plan to smoke out a hiding mouse would also set fire to the bookshelves. Trondheim lays out his fears and neuroses for the reader to see; I suspect he understands that it will at any given moment be a mixture of readers laughing at him, and readers laughing with him. There’s a little bit of Trondheim in all of us.

Even better, though, is Trondheim’s lush art. For quick one-page diary comics, there’s a lot of effort put into these pages. I absolutely adore the watercolors that he lays down on a lot of the pages, letting us see clouds wander across a blue sky, or shades of green and brown among the wilderness. If I found myself crazily wealthy, I’d give serious thought to trying to convince Trondheim to travel around the world for me and create a series of art books about each location. Forget about the stunning art detailing Fiji or skiing in the mountains, who knew that old residential balconies overlooking Placa Santa Maria Del Mar could be so enticing? Even a cold wintry sky comes to life under Trondheim’s pen, and makes me wistful for a type of weather that just a month ago I was loudly cursing to everyone within earshot.

Reading any volume of Little Nothings is the comics equivalent of comfort food. Settling down with it can’t help but relax you, make you feel at home, and somehow deeply happy. Seeing this third volume of Little Nothings not only tickled me immensely, it made me dig out the first two volumes to re-read as soon as I was done. It’s nice to see that Trondheim hasn’t lost his charm when it comes to autobiography.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books

Ted Rall is probably best known for his political cartoons, and his travel journalism in books like Silk Road to Ruin. When I think of Rall, though, one of the works that always jumps to my mind is his autobiographical My War With [...]]]> Written by Ted Rall
Art by Pablo G. Callejo
128 pages, color
Published by NBM

Ted Rall is probably best known for his political cartoons, and his travel journalism in books like Silk Road to Ruin. When I think of Rall, though, one of the works that always jumps to my mind is his autobiographical My War With Brian. That’s probably why I was intrigued when NBM first announced Rall’s autobiographical The Year of Loving Dangerously; Rall wasn’t afraid to lay out his past in an unflattering way based on My War With Brian, and Rall’s new book promised to do just that. What I found, though, was a book that gets oddly defensive in places that you’d have expected otherwise.

The Year of Loving Dangerously explains what happened to Rall when, due to a medical situation, he ended up getting expelled from Columbia University’s engineering department after his junior year. Suddenly without a place to live or an income, he finds himself homeless, and that’s when he discovers a whole new way to "couch surf." Thus begins Rall’s pattern of hooking up with numerous women, in part so he can stay at their home overnight and have a bed to sleep in. It’s a premise that makes you wonder why film directors haven’t already co-opted it (Rall should contact Seth Rogen right now), although to be fair The Year of Loving Dangerously really isn’t a comedy. Instead it’s a story about someone struggling to survive in a bad situation the best he can.

One thing you pick up very quickly is that The Year of Loving Dangerously is in some ways less a straight forward story, and more a series of justifications for past actions. Some of them make perfect sense; when you have no money and nowhere to stay, you’re willing to lower your standards and do what you have to. Selling signs that were slated to be thrown out by MTA? Perfectly understandable. Stealing electric typewriters from Columbia? That’s where things start to get hazier; it’s certainly not a "good" thing to do, although many people can look back into their youth and find similar, full-of-rage moments that seemed like a good idea at the time. What gets odd, though, is when Rall tells the story of a trip into Massachusetts where he and his friend Chris are taking unauthorized side trips while delivering a car. After getting pulled over while driving without lights on at night, and smoking a bong in the car, they briefly end up in jail and fleeced of their money. Rall ends the story with the comment, "The arrest wasn’t my fault." It’s a perplexing comment, because you look at the sequence of events and one thing is abundantly clear: it was his fault.

From that point on, reading The Year of Loving Dangerously is a very different experience. When Rall-as-narrator speaks, you understand that what he’s saying versus what really happened might not be in perfect alignment. His perspective on the series of events puts him alternately as martyr and hero, with remarkably little blame ever landing at his own feet. (Only in hurling water balloons at passing cars from his dorm window does he truly admit guilt.) So while watching Rall’s struggles and dubious decisions continues to be interesting, it’s hard to not see the buck getting forever passed to other characters in the story. I’m actually all in favor of a story told using the literary device of the "unreliable narrator," but one gets the impression with The Year of Loving Dangerously that it wasn’t Rall’s intention.

Pablo G. Callejo’s art in The Year of Loving Dangerously is a treat from start to finish; he draws his characters with an innocent look, thanks to rounded faces and clean lines. Callejo draws the young Rall in a way that makes him both recognizably the cartoonist (for those who have seen or met him), but without feeling stiff, posed, or light boxed off of existing photographs. I think it’s Callejo’s art style that actually makes the book slightly more likable; Rall’s narration may not ever come across as warm, but his alter-ego on the page does in places.

The Year of Loving Dangerously is the sort of book that’s fun on the surface; the unapologetic nature of the story telling, the juggling of "relationships" that Rall holds down, the mishaps that he has with his friend Chris. It’s only when you start to think about the book that it takes on a different and slightly off-putting air. I think it’s a good story, but perhaps not the story that Rall entirely planned on telling. This is the kind of glimpse into someone’s life that readers rarely get.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books

Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim’s Dungeon series is certainly one of the more ambitious ones out there; Dungeon Zenith takes place during the height of the construction’s time, Dungeon Twilight takes place in its apocalyptic future, Dungeon Early Years as a [...]]]> Written by Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim
Art by Christophe Blain
96 pages, color
Published by NBM

Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim’s Dungeon series is certainly one of the more ambitious ones out there; Dungeon Zenith takes place during the height of the construction’s time, Dungeon Twilight takes place in its apocalyptic future, Dungeon Early Years as a prequel series, and Dungeon Parade and Dungeon Monstres as adjunct one-off stories that are all over the place. That said? I like that with the vast majority of the graphic novels, you can just pick one up and jump right into the story. It’d been a while since I’d read Dungeon, but this new-to-English installment was a pleasant trip back to Sfar and Trondheim’s creation. Pleasant might not be quite the best word, though; Dungeon The Early Years is shaping up to be an awfully grim series.

The Early Years stories primarily follow Hyacinthe, who by the time of Zenith will be known as the Dungeon Keeper. Before then, though, he was best known as the "Night Shirt," a Zorro-meets-Batman avenger of the night that hunts the streets of Antipolis. I remember enjoying the first The Early Years volume, and how it showed a different, lighter side to Hyacinthe. Here, though, you start to see things change for Hyacinthe, and it’s an interesting shift in tone. Here we’re seeing characters lose their faith in everything they hold dear, loved ones dying before their time, and wholesale destruction left and right. If you’ve only ever read the light-hearted Dungeon Parade books, this might come as a bit of a surprise.

It’s odd, though, because Sfar and Trondheim still keep some of the lighter elements that were already introduced, like Hyacinthe’s numerous magical tobaccos. They’re actually an odd fit at this point, a reminder that there is a joking, silly version of this setting out there. Hyacinthe accidentally using a tobacco that lets him see through people’s clothes instead of something to face his attackers, for instance, feels like a joke misplaced from one of the other Dungeon series. Fortunately, those are moments which go away more with time. Other ideas, like a flying machine, are ones that probably would have been a joke in another series but are taken seriously in The Early Years. Sfar and Trondheim take their mission to show the origin of the Dungeon and its Keeper’s life seriously, with each new event shaping Hyacinthe in a way that drains the youth out of him. He’s truly become an adult by the end of this The Early Years volume; it’s no small coincidence that it’s subtitled Innocence Lost.

If you’re going to have a grim and dark Dungeon series, I must say that having Christophe Blain illustrate it is an excellent decision. His style is extremely versatile; some pages will be crisp and clean, others using a dark, moody art style that has shadow clinging onto every character and object. As The Early Years grows darker, so does Blain’s art, culminating in a cataclysmic event at the end of the book that is jaw-dropping in how creepy Blain’s depiction turns out. Even Blain’s colors fit in perfectly to this progression within the art; there’s a moment in the second half where a bunch of characters are killed in fast succession, and the deep red hue that Blain puts around the wavy, Edvard Munch’s Scream styled panels is eerie. Blain can pack a punch in a short space, and I was sad to hear that this is the last of his The Early Years contributions for now.

Dungeon is more than an ambitious series, it’s addicting. Sfar and Trondheim have fun snapping all the pieces together, but I’ve found myself regularly surprised at how much I come to character about the characters from all of the different time periods. Dungeon The Early Years Vol. 2: Innocence Lost might a tiny bit too grim for some readers, but there’s always some Dungeon Parade waiting as an antidote. For those who don’t mind seeing a character lose his innocence (proverbial and otherwise), definitely check out The Early Years books.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books

I’ve been looking forward to The Big Kahn ever since Neil Kleid first announced it. The basic concept is one that might have been done before, but to me it sounded so original and smart that it was an instant, "I can’t [...]]]> Written by Neil Kleid
Art by Nicolas Cinquegrani
176 pages, black and white
Published by NBM

I’ve been looking forward to The Big Kahn ever since Neil Kleid first announced it. The basic concept is one that might have been done before, but to me it sounded so original and smart that it was an instant, "I can’t wait" moment. After all, con men stories are a dime a dozen. Con men stories involving not only religious institutions but a member of your own family? Well, as it turned out, The Big Kahn really was worth the wait.

When Rabbi David Kahn dies, his family expects it to be a normal Jewish funeral. The thing is, it’s at the funeral that the truth really comes out. Their beloved husband and father wasn’t really David Kahn. He wasn’t even Jewish. His real name was Donnie Dobbs and he was a con man who fell in love with one of his marks and never gave up his fake persona of a rabbi. Now, this lie threatens to crumble the foundation that all of their lives were based on. Can any of the Kahns really move on from a 40-year lie?

Of all the religions for a story like The Big Kahn to be based around, Judiasm seems like the smartest bet to me. Kleid is able to quickly and effortlessly make the Kahn family’s relationship with their religion seem understandable and reasonable. Oldest son Avi is a Rabbi as well, set to take over where his father left off. They live in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, where Rabbi David Kahn served the entire congregation. This isn’t just a matter of, "I lied about my middle name," but rather something that was at the absolute core of their family. And from there, Kleid hits the ground running and the story never lets up. I was impressed with Kleid’s ability to juggle all four remaining family members (mother Rachel, son Avi, daughter Lea, son Eli) and show how each of them take the news and what it does to them. No one reacts exactly the same, which is exactly how it should be, and I appreciated how some of their paths intersected along the way.

The main star of The Big Kahn is, easily, Avi. After all, he’s a Rabbi who is suddenly without a congregation, and so much of what he learned about Judiasm was from his father. His crisis of faith is the most compelling to me, in no small part because Kleid really gets inside Avi’s head and helps us understand the turmoil he’s going through. Every action ultimately feels right, even if it isn’t necessarily the choice that the reader might make. All the way up until the ending, Kleid writes Avi in a way that makes him compelling. You want him to succeed, and even when things begin to go in a different path than expected as he starts talking with his uncle the con man, Kleid makes the situation one where you can nod and say, "If that’s what he thinks is right, I’m behind him." The rest of the characters get their own time as well, although of the three of them I think it was Rachel whose story grabbed me the most. With her, Kleid uses the little things to make the reader interested, like running into other ladies at the supermarket who try and subtly check to see if she’s still keeping kosher. Through her and Avi, Kleid takes his reader into a world that they might not have experienced otherwise.

I’m not familiar with artist Nicolas Cinquegrani, but his art is strong. I like that the Kahn family all look clearly related to each other, without being carbon copies of the same character. He’s got a straight forward style to his pages, which is good in terms of storytelling; he draws Kleid’s script in a cinematic way, with tight focuses on the most important element in a scene, but not afraid to pull back to show the entire area. Cinquegrani has a soft, gentle line in his art, and he uses his gray tones to help provide a bit of extra depth and heft to his drawings. The Big Kahn is the sort of comic that I can see drawing in non-comic-readers, and I appreciate that Cinquegrani’s art will be a good way to ease into this particular art form.

The Big Kahn is easily Kleid’s best work to date as a writer; it’s clever and gripping, and there are a couple of turns in the story as it heads towards the conclusion that genuinely surprised me even as they still made sense. This feels in many ways like a turning point in Kleid’s career, and I know I’m not the only one who is eager to see whatever Kleid’s next project is based off of the strength of this graphic novel. It’s a strong slice-of-life story that makes you think, and I’m happy with that. Highly recommended.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books

Assembling a book of short stories—be it by a single creator or an anthology—is a delicate undertaking. You can’t front load the book with the best material because if the weaker pieces are all at the end, you run the risk of [...]]]> By Byun Byung-Jun
240 pages, black and white with some color pages
Published by NBM

Assembling a book of short stories—be it by a single creator or an anthology—is a delicate undertaking. You can’t front load the book with the best material because if the weaker pieces are all at the end, you run the risk of the final impression for the reader being disappointment. On the other hand, saving the best pieces for the end has its own problems, where the early entries aren’t strong enough to have someone continue to read the book. All of this came to mind for me when reading Byun Byung-Jun’s Mijeong, a collection of the author’s short pieces. At the end of the day, I can’t help but think that whomever decided the order of this book could have done a slightly better job.

The title story of Mijeong is also its lead, about an observer trying to adjust to this new world he’s entered. "Mijeong" has the most beautiful art in the book; with delicate thin lines placed together that sometimes seem to give the impression of form more than actual concrete images, if that makes sense. It’s gorgeous to look at, but is also saddled with one of the most pretentious narrations I’ve read in a long time. "I’m always alone, melancholic," the protagonist thinks. "Nobody understands my sadness." The writing is so juvenile and in love with itself that I almost put Mijeong down after this opening piece, and it was less than 20 pages long. It’s a horrible opening to Mijeong, and I wonder if there was any reason other than it being the titular story that it got that spot of honor. Frustratingly, the second piece ("Yeon-du, seventeen years old") has both the weakest art and the second-weakest story in the book as well, and at 60 pages in length I can understand if anyone gave up on the book by this point in time. Byun’s certainly not making a good first or even second impression with this one-two punch of underwhelming stories.

Thankfully, the book takes a turn for the better at this point. "Utility" (written by Yun In-wan) reminded me a lot of short stories by writer and director Etgar Keret, with its quirky characters and situations. There’s something oddly compelling about its lead character who keeps trying to use a sink-or-swim technique (or should it be fall-or-fly?) on baby chickens to jumpstart their knowledge of flying. It’s an odd but effective introduction to the character, and from there things get stranger as an attempt to preserve the family honor of a friend leads to a particularly macabre debate. It’s a sharp and memorable vignette, and while it might not be a story for the ages, it’s strong enough to restore the faith enough to continue reading Mijeong.

The remaining stories are all enjoyable, little tales of wish fulfillment, searching, and even a love triangle where one of the members is a cat. None of them particularly blew me away, but I found myself becoming more appreciative of Byun’s storytelling. Some of these later pieces should have appeared earlier, if only to help assure a casual reader that Byun had some good stories up his sleeve. I feel bad that they’re buried in the back, because there’s a good chance that the reader will miss them. Most of Byun’s art looks good here, too. It’s not as strong as that initial opener, but his textured surfaces have a strange, almost tubular look to them and it’s an attractive final product. The one color story in the center of the volume is particularly attractive; if I had to guess I’d say he used watercolors over rough pencils, and what Byun gives up in fine details he more than makes up for with rich, deep hues.

I’m glad I read Mijeong, but I really wish someone along the chain of publication had swapped some of these stories around. It’s such a weak opening that I think it’s a logical assumption to make that Byun’s work isn’t quite your cup of tea. The reality, though, is that while Mijeong takes a while to get going, there are some very nice surprises waiting for the reader.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books

What happens when art meets erotica? In the case of First Time, that seems to be exactly what the book is trying to find out. Writer Sibylline and [...]]]> Written by Sibylline
Art by Alfred, Virginie Augustin, Dominique Bertail, Capucine, Jérôme d’Aviau, Dave McKean, Cyril Pedrosa, Rica, Olivier Vatine, and Vince
112 pages, black and white
Published by NBM

What happens when art meets erotica? In the case of First Time, that seems to be exactly what the book is trying to find out. Writer Sibylline and ten different comic artists team up for a wide variety of "first time" stories, each with the artist’s own signature style. The end result, though? Despite one writer on each of these ten stories, the book’s contents are wildly variable in terms of tone and quality.

The book opens with one of the strongest pieces, "First Time" as drawn by Why I Killed Peter‘s Alfred. A woman tells her lover about her very first time she has sex, and the result is touching and sweet. From her plans on bringing the guy over, to how he (and she) reacts afterwards, it’s a heartfelt story with a nice ending moment. Alfred’s art is in fine form here, too; there’s a panel where she’s lying on her current partner’s chest and idly scratches it that just feels very familiar and comfortable, and the panel where her arm and hand holding a wine glass is overlaid six times does a great job of showing nervousness and speed and quantity all at once.

"Fantasy" drawn by Jérôme d’Aviau is certainly the steamiest of the stories here—in fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s the only actual steamy story in the entire book. This helps in part because of d’Aviau’s crisp, clean art; I love how he draws both of the main characters here, in an attractive manner (both physically and also just general art style). For a story about dominance and fantasies playing out, Sibylline hits the pacing just right, slowly amping up the tension and bringing the climax of the story (no, not that kind) at just the right moment.

There are some other pieces in the book that have really nice art, too. Virginie Augustin’s art in "1 + 1" is a beautiful, loose style that reminds me a lot of Ronnie del Carmen’s illustrations, with a relaxed, gorgeous sensibility to the entire story. Olivier Vatine’s "Club" art as well is attractive is good too, reminding me a lot of Cully Hamner’s art with its strong jaws and heavy ink lines. And of course, anyone who read Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows will know that his art in "Possession" is strong and attractive. The stories themselves, though, grow tiresome as the book progresses; none of those stories themselves are terribly interesting, the book itself falling into a bad pattern that lack a lot of the inventiveness of the opening pieces. Only "Nobody" (narrated by an inflatable doll) has any real cleverness in the latter half of the book, but once you get past the initial idea, it too falls flat. People who pick up First Time for Dave McKean’s contribution will probably be a little disappointed; it doesn’t feel like it plays to either of the creators’s strengths. Wordless and muddled-looking with lots of shades of brown, it makes me wonder if McKean knew this was going to be in black and white, because pages are often look like a big smear of dirt.

First Time is a good idea (Alternative Comics published two volumes of a similar book titled True Porn), but the book seems to really lose a lot of its originality and drive after the first half. Still, the art is mostly nice, and it’s certainly a mostly "classy" erotic book to have on one’s coffee table. (Or hidden away, if you so choose.) I wish the second half of the book lived up to the first half’s promise, but at least my first time with First Time wasn’t so bad, right?

Purchase Link: Amazon.com