The Listener – graphic novel review

The Listener by David Lester

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hitler’s rise to power is one aspect of the Holocaust that I was pretty ignorant of. The Listener illuminates this part of the story while still putting characters – a present-day sculptor from Vancouver, a couple who lived in Germany during the ’30s – first. Although I found the theme of the role of the artist to be a bit unnecessary – and to get in the way at times – overall The Listener is a fascinating read. I liked Lester’s art, too – though his angled figures and the ink washes take some getting used to, he finds very creative ways to tell his story. Bonus for Vancouverites: there’s a brief sequence where the protagonist describes East Van.

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Canadian Music Comics # 2: The Sugar Shoppe

The Sugar Shoppe 1967-1970, by Shawn Conner.

Click on image for full, almost readable, size. Thanks!

Stompin’ Tom Connors – A Proud Canadian

My first completed Canadian music comic strip!

Click on image to see full size.

Review – The Dark Knight Rises

Terrible tragedy in Colorado last night. Obviously there’ll be a lot of media coverage and I don’t want to add to the noise.

However, I do feel compelled to link to my review of the movie itself.

http://thetyee.ca/ArtsAndCulture/2012/07/20/Dark-Knight-Rises/

Catwoman Dark Knight Rises statue – do I want this?

 

God help me, yes. I do.

Why I hated The Amazing Spider-Man

They’re teenagers. No, really.

It’s two days after the advance screening of The Amazing Spider-Man, and I’m still angry.

I went in actually expecting it to be good, or at least decent. What I got was over two hours of flaccid storytelling, cynical casting, and video-game action scenes.

I know, I know, it’s my own fault for thinking it would be anything other than a sticky-fingered ploy to dip into our wallets. The odds were against it from the beginning – Sony Pictures decided to tell the same old boring story about how Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man, so already your brain is halfway out the door before the movie even begins.

But there is just something so stupid about casting Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone as teenagers – why not make the story interesting, and have them play characters closer to their own ages (29 and 24, respectively) who have to deal with all the spider-nonsense?

The Amazing Spider-Man doesn’t even really begin as a movie until an hour into it, but director Marc Webb and whatever lawyers made all the decisions fumble the ball in the last half, too.

In the comics, The Lizard is a well-meaning scientist who injects himself with a serum and, well, turns into a lizard-man. He’s human-sized, though, and in a nice if ridiculous touch wears a lab coat.

One of the first early issues of Spider-Man I ever bought!

Now, I can understand how modern movie audiences might snicker at a lizard-man wearing a lab coat, which is fine. But instead of a human-size bad guy, The Amazing Spider-Man‘s lizard is this huge CGI monster, as big as the Hulk but without the personality (and that’s saying something). This gives the action sequences about as much heft as a video game fight. (I would post an image of the movie Lizard but can’t find a good one.)

It all wraps up in an epic battle atop a very tall building; it’s the same phallic denouement as The Avengers, actually, down to the rippling-sky effects. But one thing The Avengers accomplished that The Amazing Spider-Man doesn’t; at the end of the screening I saw of that movie, people actually applauded. At the end of The Amazing Spider-Man, we breathed a collective sigh of relief that it was over.

Well, there’s one more epic superhero blockbuster to come this summer (and many, many more in summers to come, if The Avengers‘ box-office take has any influence on Hollywood decision-making): The Dark Knight Rises. I’m one of the few who actually doesn’t think that much of Christopher Nolan‘s Batman movies (as with Tim Burton, the vision is much better than the story), but The Amazing Spider-Man lowers the bar considerably. Dark Knight Rises can’t be worse, even if it ends in an epic fight atop a big building.

(I wrote about the movie some more on The Snipe News, in a post that envisions a perhaps-fictional meeting of studio executives planning The Amazing Spider-Man reboot)

Graphic novel – Fever Moon by Karen Marie Moning

Mackayla Lane, the main female character in Karen Marie Monig’s Fever series, is addicted to sex with demons, if I understand correctly.

Fever Moon by Karen Marie Moning, adapted by David Lawrence, illustrated by Al Rio and Cliff Richards (Del Rey Books, hardcover, 2012, $29.95Cdn)

Fever Moon takes place sometime in the future, I think, but definitely in Dublin. Why Dublin instead of New York, or San Francisco, or even Vancouver? This is just one of the questions inspired by this thought-provoking new graphic novel.

Fever Moon is set in a universe created by writer Karen Marie Moning in a series of five books. They are titled Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, and Shadowfever. To my knowledge there are no other books in the series planned, but the possibilities seem endless: Nightfever, Brainfever, Bonerfever.

Moning, the book’s jacket tells us no fewer than three times, is a “#1 New York Times bestselling author” whose other books include The Highlander Series, a time travel/paranormal romance series.

In ”Behind the Scenes of the Fever Series”, an afterword in Fever Moon, Moning writes that “The entire [Fever] series shunted into my brain like a squirt on a Dan Simmons’s [sic] flatline.”

What shunted into her brain was a universe of demons, shape-shifters, demon rape, sex addiction, a bar where humans and demons mingle, an inter-dimensional worm-hole and much more that is largely incomprehensible to me even after going back to reread the sections of Fever Moon in which the main character tells us exactly what has happened.

Presumably, something else that shunted into Moning’s brain like a squirt in the flatline of a much better author were the names “Jericho Barrons” (I’m not making this up) and “MacKayla Lane” (again, not making this up). These are the two main protagonists of Fever Moon and, I’m guessing, the whole Fever series.

Some background: MacKayla Lane has a bone to pick with the Fae, who are demons or demon princes (it’s complicated). Anyway, a bunch of them raped her and now she’s addicted to sex with them (insert Charlie Sheen joke here). We are told that this condition  makes her “pri-ya”, not to be confused with Priya Thomas, who is a real person and makes music in Toronto.

Fortunately however Jericho Barrons, who is a stud as well as a shape-shifter, has cured MayKayla Lane of her demon-sex addiction. “No human had ever recovered after sex with Fae royalty,” MacKayla Lane tells us. “Though Barrons brought me back…the cure was endless sex – with him.”

Now the two trade barbs (“Actually, Barrons, sex with you seems to have cured me of desire forever.”) and fight the Fae, which are demons, kind of, I think.

She can do this because our impossibly stacked heroine is also a “sidhe-seer”, which means she has special powers, including the ability “to freeze fae with a touch – and sense their magical objects of power”. She also gets to carry around a Spear of Destiny, about which no double entendres are made, at least in this graphic novel.

There is a plot. A tall creature in a top hat is stealing parts of people’s faces. Much of Fever Moon follows our intrepid heroes MacKayla Lane and Jericho Barrons as they try to find the serial face-stealer because, if they don’t, several people, including MacKayla Lane’s fellow sidhe-seer friend Dani, will die.

This forces Mackayla Lane to use her investigative powers of deduction, which take her to the bar where humans and demons mingle so she can ask if anyone’s seen a guy going around stealing people’s noses.

Bizarrely, despite two visits to this bar and her keen understanding of human nature, MacKayla Lane still can not find much about the top-hatted guy until she summons a demon or fae prince who is naked and hands her a scroll. Fortunately, as MacKayla Lane’s Sumerian-reading librarian friend tells her, this scroll is written in a language that is “close to ancient Sumerian”.

As it turns out, the scroll tells the story of this creature, “the Fear Dorcha”. The Fear Dorcha has been around for centuries. It seems the scroll also describes the pattern and order of his intended victims. These are described in a language that is not only written in a language that is “close to ancient Sumerian”, but in a rhyme that is very literal.

This is a good thing, because it means MacKayla Lane doesn’t have to tax her powers of deduction. When the rhyme informs her that the Fear Dorcha’s next victim will be “the temperate judge”, MayKayla makes one of those intuitive leaps that once again reminds us why she, and not a doorknob, is the hero of this story:

“The temperate judge! I know who it is! My father! He’s an attorney. And he’s been a judge!”

The dialogue fairly leaps off the page.

I don’t want to say any more – I have probably already provided a few too many spoilers, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for ruining any more of this amazing graphic novel for you.

And just think, once finished, five more books in the series await.

I reviewed this: The Moon Moth

Got sent a package of graphic novels for review last week. Vancouver’s own Raincoast Books distributes a number of publishers, so once in awhile I’ll get lucky with a shipment of nice new books.

Among the latest batch was this curiosity – a thin, wonderfully coloured (by Hilary Sycamore) and drawn (by Humayoun Ibrahim) graphic adaptation of a short story by Golden Age science fiction author Jack Vance. I was unfamiliar with Vance’s work but after reading this little beauty I’ll be seeking out more, for sure.

I thought this adaptation, along with a reprinted (from the New York Times Magazine) profile of Jack Vance by Carlo Rotella, was an ideal intro to the work of this almost-forgotten (though not by Michael Chabon, to name one well-known fan) author. Highly recommended; you can read more of my thoughts on this book in my The Moon Moth graphic novel review on The Snipe News.

Have you read any Jack Vance? Which novels or short stories would you recommend?

Graphic novel review: Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City

Interior art from Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem (Drawn & Quarterly, 2012).

Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem, recently published by Drawn & Quarterly, was one of those books (well, graphic novels) that I enjoyed while reading but had to force myself to pick up. I think this might have been due to the almost unvarying tone of deadpan humour and observation. There is no real story here, just vignettes of Delisle encountering the oddities and absurdities of life as an outsider in this conflicted city. I do feel I know more about Jerusalem than I did before I read the over 300 pages of Delisle’s book, and the art is terrific – considerably better than in Delisle’s previous books like Pyongyang – but I didn’t feel much of anything upon reading the last page.

However, one page I really liked, and that came as a complete surprise, is where Delisle sits down to watch the French-Canadian horror flick Martyrs. It’s the only movie mentioned in the whole book – and there’s a great little panel with a word balloon in red denoting a scream (otherwise there’s very little colour in the book) coming from the speaker as Delisle watches on his computer. Anyway, love that (somewhat obscure) film.

Full review is here.

I reviewed this- The Manara Library Volume Two

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to receive, in a box from Dark Horse Comics, a copy of Volume Two of their Manara Library editions. The publisher is collecting most if not all of the Italian comics artist’s works in nine books; the second (above) came out earlier this year, and the first in the fall of 2011. Volume Three, featuring Milo Manara‘s collaborations with filmmaker Federico Fellini, will be published in August.

Manara is best known for drawing naked girls, to put it bluntly. (He’s also crossed over into the North American mainstream with a Sandman story that appeared in an anthology and an X-Men comic (featuring the women of the X-Men) for Marvel.) But, while Volume Two‘s first story “El Gaucho” certainly features some typically gorgeous Manara females in lewd dishabille, it’s also a ripping good historical tale (written by cartoonist Hugo Pratt) about the early 1800s British invasion of Argentina. And the second half of the book isn’t dirty at all; it’s a series of eight brief stories that attempts to look at both sides of cases against historical figures such as Helen of Troy, Attila the Hun and Robert Oppenheimer. Though a little on the didactic side, these “Trial by Jury” stories are surprisingly readable and informative. And, of course, impeccably drawn by the master, even though they’re from early in his career.

My full review is on The Snipe News: http://www.thesnipenews.com/books-comics/manara-library-volume-two-review/