The Manara Library Volume 1: Indian Summer (1983) and The Paper Man (1982) (Collection 2011): written by Hugo Pratt (Indian Summer) and Milo Manara; illustrated by Milo Manara; English translation by Kim Thompson: Milo Manara is a wonderful artist though his penchant for erotica has sometimes overshadowed his strengths in the public eye. He's a sensitive and nuanced chronicler of the human form, but he also excels at placing that form within often spectacular visions of landscape or human chaos.
Indian Summer, written by European comics great Hugo Pratt, is a sort of homage by Pratt and Manara to the America of Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. Elements of James Fenimore Cooper slip in with the story's take on the fraught relationship between English settlers and Native Americans, and with an opening rape scene of a puritanical English girl by two Native youths.
But that rape scene doesn't go stereotypically -- Pratt's emphasis, almost grotesquely so, is on the sexual and social hypocrisy that accompanies English claims of morality. It's an often disturbing tale, one in which Manara's loving attention to the female form sometimes seems to blur the line between reader and voyeur.
Manara takes the writing reins on the second story included here, The Paper Man. An often fabulistic story of settlers and Natives out West, The Paper Man accomplishes the tricky feat of being both funny and tragically elegiac.
Again, landscapes and the chaos of human battles are depicted beautifully and horribly when need be. In all, an extremely good volume with solid translation work, and probably the best one-volume introduction to Manara's work. Highly recommended.
The Manara Library Volume 3: Trip to Tulum and Other Stories (Collection 2011): including Trip to Tulum (1990) and The Journey of G. Mastorna (1992), both written by Federico Fellini, and The Ape (1976-1977), written by Silverio Pisu; all stories illustrated by Milo Manara, all other short stories written by Milo Manara: This volume of Dark Horse's [Milo] Manara Library gives us his collaborations with, and homages to, the great Italian film-maker Federico Fellini.
Manara's fine-lined, mostly realistic style actually works beautifully with the dream-visions of Fellini. Everything is rendered in great detail, and everything ultimately seems like a strange dream.
It's all somewhat hard to describe. Full-page illustrations of strange buildings and city-scapes on one page, harpies battling shamans on the next, an underwater landscape dotted with sunken airplanes representing all the film projects Fellini never got made, a lot of female nudity, a brief strip on the death of John Lennon...
And to top it all off, Manara's early collaboration with writer Silverio Pisu, The Ape (aka The Young Ape), a dream-like adaptation/reinterpretation of a Buddhist fable. In all, this is marvelous, weird stuff. Highly recommended.
A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush's America (2005) by Kurt Vonnegut: This is the great American humourist and satirist's last 'new' book, a collection of essays that appeared in the magazine In Our Times during the George W. Bush presidency.
At this late date (Vonnegut would die in 2007, still stuck in the Bush 2 Years), Vonnegut still had the power to amuse and instruct, though no desire to attempt another novel. At least one of the pieces did get reworked into his final 'half-novel' Timequake, half a novel because Vonnegut published it unfinished but filled out with observations about life in America.
Here in The Trump Years, A Man Without A Country reminds one of how lousy the Bush years were -- how criminal, how unsupportably undemocratic, how moronic and ridiculous. Trump is not an anomaly. Trump is a logical extrapolation. Have we forgotten so soon that the 2000 Presidential Election was stolen by disenfranchising minority voters and not just through all the more public post-election shenanigans?
Vonnegut notes at one point that a real horror story would be called 'C-Students from Yale.' Like Bush 2 and so many of his cronies.
If Vonnegut were around today, maybe he'd note that Bush 2 normalized all the crap that Trump has now expanded. Or that Trump is also dangerous because he makes seemingly rational left-wingers nostalgic for the days of Bush and Reagan and Nixon. Hidey-ho! So it goes! Recommended.
Marshall (2017): written by Michael Koskoff and Jacob Koskoff; directed by Reginald Hudlin; starring Chadwick Boseman (Thurgood Marshall), Josh Gad (Sam Friedman), Kate Hudson (Eleanor Strubing), and Sterling K. Brown (Joseph Spell): Marshall plays a bit fast and loose with history in its tale of then-NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall's participation in a rape trial in Connecticut in 1940. The major alteration come with re-imagining veteran Civil Rights lawyer Sam Friedman as a young, inexperienced Josh Gad.
Of course, this is a bit of a 'sauce for the goose' situation. The movie diminishes the contributions and experience of a white character (albeit Jewish and thus also familiar with bigotry) so as to foreground the competence and accomplishments of an African-American character. The movie does hew fairly closely to the facts of the case, so kudos for that.
Chadwick Boseman is riveting as Thurgood Marshall. The NAACP would send Marshall to consult on cases involving Civil Rights matters across America. How this hasn't been the basis for a TV show, I have no idea. Boseman has now played real-life characters Ernie Davis, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and Jackie Robinson. And he's the Black Panther!
Josh Gad is fine in a somewhat simplistic sidekick role. Equalizing the power relationship between Friedman and Marshall might have made for a quieter, better movie. But it's amazing that this film got made at all. And seemingly with the help of a lot of Chinese investors. What is up with that? Reginald Hudlin, whom I still associate with House Party, navigates a period-specific drama with grace and aplomb.
The movie navigates the very, very hazardous territory of a false rape accusation with care and finesse. The reason for such a rarity of a false accusation are made perfectly clear, and the film foregrounds the sympathetic reasons that Kate Hudson's lonely socialite would have done such a thing. Sterling K. Brown is solid as the accused, a chauffeur with a checkered past (but not a rapey past). In all, recommended.
The Divided States of Hysteria (2017): written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin: Legendary comic writer-artist Howard Chaykin stirred up controversy when The Divided States of Hysteria came out in single-issue form in 2017.
Much of the flack came from the Left, an odd turn of events because Chaykin is vocally left-wing and has been for decades. But he's also been an expert at making readers uncomfortable for decades now.
For example, he caused the late Harlan Ellison to have a world-class freak-out with his revisionist Shadow miniseries in the mid-1980's, a book which logically pointed out that the Shadow was a fascist sociopath and then ran with it all the way to awesomeness.
The Divided States of Hysteria is a near-future dystopia in which much of the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government died in a terrorist attack before the book's narrative begins. Rather than offer a bipartisan fantasy of a perfect President within this scenario, as Designated Survivor does, Chaykin instead offers more chaos, horror, incompetence, and a group of "heroes" who make the Dirty Dozen look about as scary as the goddam Goonies.
At the heart of a lot of complaints, I think, is Chaykin's ability to make violence and fascist tendencies look attractive. It's sort of the point -- as some wag once pointed out, a lot of comic-book superheroes are fascistic, anti-government sociopaths. Or would be, if they were real. But isn't fun to watch them solve things with punches and explosions?
At the heart, though, of those complaints is also the inability of many people, left or right, to separate the representation of something from advocacy of that same thing, along with a a pronounced and escalating ability to take offense at anything that isn't pablum. Bland, inoffensive pablum. You're mean, Early! How dare you draw the aftermath of a completely plausible 21st-century American lynching AND PUT IT ON YOUR COVER!
Identity politics also requires that one of the two people closest to being a hero in The Divided States of Hysteria, as a trans woman, SHOULD NOT BE REPRESENTED BY A HETEROSEXUAL WHITE MALE CARTOONIST!!!
But she is a great character. And dead sexy.
At one point, female terrorists detonate dirty bombs they've had implanted in their wombs. This is not a pretty scenario. I imagine Tom Clancy vomiting with rage somewhere. So too someone on the Left. Chaykin has decided to find ways to horrify the reader, and the same old beheadings and IED attacks and marathon bombings have lost the power to shock. They're becoming background noise.
In order to stop America's enemies -- and redeem his own devastated reputation, and avenge the deaths of his mistress and wife and family in a terrorist attack -- a disgraced CIA operative puts together a team of four convicted murderers. They're up against a cadre of terrorist leaders and a Russian operative and the incompetence of their own country's government. The President they're working for, a replacement from the Cabinet's lowest levels, is a compromised hack.
So five misfits.... well, 'misfit' is a bit of a misnomer. Besides our CIA protagonist, our heroes are a trans man who killed three clients in self-defence, a mob hitman with a serial-killing hobby, a criminal accountant who murdered a couple of dozen rich people with poison, and an African-American serial-killing sniper who's a really good shot and loves shooting white civilians in the head.
The Challengers of the Unknown these are not. Challengers of the Unthinkable, maybe.
The violence is horrifying. The art is slick and gorgeous and horrifyingly clinical at atimes. The 'sound-design' from letterer Ken Bruzenak is fascinating enough that it gets its own 4-page explanatory essay at the back of the volume. Over it all hangs a question Chaykin has been asking and answering for a long time in his work -- are these the heroes you want? Because this is what they would really look like.
I mean, there are other questions. And the whole thing, complete with the cynical 'voice' of an omniscient narrator running along with the narrative, is a compelling action narrative, blood-soaked and morally dubious. But it's also a compelling examination of the heroism people love when it's sanitized in everything from James Bond movies to daily news reports of Seal Team 6 and Our Brave Black Ops Boys in Afghanistan.
And I haven't even delved into the sexual and racial politics explored throughout! The Divided States of America delves into an America besotted with sex and violence, sometimes at the same time, sometimes as the same thing.
Along with the narration comes a recurring series of images of death and horror from various American sites. The terrorist groups themselves are a mixed bag too -- an All-Star, Dream Team-up of White Supremacy and Black Power and Islamicism, coordinated by a Russian operative who's also a Hollywood movie producer. It's doom alone that counts, all moving towards a final attack on a telethon for a wounded America, complete with the President, to be destroyed by the same groups who are also the event's public donors.
It's not so much that the satire and the violence both blister. It's that the entire book seems entirely plausible. Chaykin's been examining the puritanical, pornographic nature of American culture for decades. The American love of violence as a solution, and the attendant separation of the world into Good and Evil, Us and Them. Now all accompanied by the eternal chatter of social media.
Bang bang, screw screw, shoot shoot. Highly recommended.
Can't Get No (2006) written and illustrated by Rick Veitch: Manhattan CEO Chad Roe has a bad day when complainants launch lawsuits against his company and its signature product -- a truly indelible marker. Stock prices drop into the Zero range. Angry victims of the truly permanent marker want Roe's head. It's September 9, 2001 in New York.
Can't Get No is a surreal, often grotesque piece of left-wing agit-prop from writer-artist Rick Veitch. It's also brilliant and, in my comic-reading experience, unique. I've never encountered a comic before in which the odd, often vague blocks of text (no word balloons or, for that matter, directly attributed quotations here) interact with the occasionally grotesque but also splendidly, comically rendered art so as to induce a sort of trance state in the reader.
Pages go by, and the text seems to vanish from one's memory before it can be stored. Veitch has conjured up a graphic novel that reflects the mass-culture wasteland of America and its cancerous hold on individuals and on the planet. I'd hate to see what this book would do to someone truly stoned.
This is a quest narrative in which images carry the weight while the text noodles away in the background, strange and elusive. There's a Theme Park one probably won't forget. And there's Chad Roe, whose body is turned into a canvas early on for a couple of artists interested in those permanent markers.
Don't look for epiphanies or life-changing revelations at the end, though. It seems to me that the point of Can't Get No is that some people simply cannot permanently change. They've already drowned in the toxic, memoryless, money-obsessed melting pot that is America, melting. Highly recommended.
