The Infinite Wait and Other Stories (2012) by Julia Wertz: Three pieces make up this comics collection from Julia Wertz.
The first, entitled "Industry," chronicles the jobs she's had over two decades and two coasts, from a lot of waitressing and bartending jobs to her later days as a professional cartoonist who doesn't have to hold down another job.
The second, the eponymous "The Infinite Wait," covers Wertz's move to San Francisco from Napa in 2002 and her subsequent diagnosis of having the auto-immune disease Lupus. The third, "A Strange and Curious Place," is, in Wertz's own words, "basically just a love letter to my hometown library and everything it taught me."
"Industry" probably has the most laughs per panel, even as Wertz starts to lose jobs because of her incessant drinking. The publishing success of her first two books, Fart Party I and II, moves "Industry" to an often hilarious evaluation of how Hollywood tries to adapt work, and specifically autobiographical work.
"The Infinite Wait," Wertz informs the reader, was a title chosen for its pretension and "seriousness" as a joke related to the decidedly unpretentious tale of Wertz vs. Lupus. This is certainly one of the funniest comics stories ever created about an incurable auto-immune disease. Well, any disease, any sickness. It may catch at the heart, but the story never stops presenting situations of high wit and low comedy.
Then there's "A Strange and Curious Place," the shortest piece in the book. It is indeed a paean to Wertz's hometown library, and to the joys of reading for a child. The depiction of Julia and her brother's excitement at the annual library book sale is a gem of humourous, pithily observed sentiment. The book, too, is a gem of autobiographical self-evaluation and often raunchy, sometimes obscene brilliance. Highly recommended.
Drinking At the Movies (2010/ This edition 2015): written and illustrated by Julia Wertz: Julia Wertz is one of a handful or so of the funniest cartoonists currently working, and has been since she began her career on the Internet back in the mid-oughts. Mid-oughts? Whatever.
It's a trick to make autobiography funny without avoiding the horrors of being alive. Wertz has got that trick. Her autobiographical works deal with her alcoholism, her brother's drug problems, and her life with lupus after being diagnosed with same at the age of 20 (in 2002).
This volume was Wertz's first full-length 'graphic novel,' coming in at a dialogue-dense 200 pages or so. Drinking At the Movies covers Wertz's first year in New York City in the late oughts after a move from San Francisco. Her comics career has begun to take off. That doesn't save her from dead-end jobs and squalid apartments. Wertz is a comic commentator on urban life at the edge of poverty, all of it alcohol-soaked in this volume. Sobriety would come later.
Wertz is a deceptively simple cartoonist. She can draw complex representations of the real when she wants to, as her renditions of the various apartments and streets of Brooklyn shows throughout Drinking At the Movies. The characters are much simpler, in the tradition of comic strips, with a simple six panels per page for much of the volume. It all works beautifully. Also, there's something really funny about the way Wertz draws arms when people are sitting at a table with arms bent.
Through four apartments and seven apartments, Wertz drinks a lot, comments a lot, and worries over family problems back on the West Coast (one brother is a drug addict). She gets shingles, manages her Lupus, discovers that being a bike courier sucks, teaches comics to kids at a library in the Bronx... well, many things happen.
Moments of self-evaluation and sorrow burst forth throughout. But Wertz is a fabulous entertainer at heart with the critical eye of the jester. I don't recall when I've laughed so much at a volume of anything, comics or writing or whatever. Highly recommended.
BPRD: Hell on Earth Volume 2: Gods and Monsters (2011-2012/ Collected 2012): written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; illustrated by Guy Davis and Tyler Crook: Another day in the battle between the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense and the unleashed forces of Hell. Good times! Some stuff happens. We see the effects of the ongoing invasion of Earth. A new character is introduced. An old character meets a shocking, though perhaps not final, fate. Some cool-looking monsters rampage around. It's all part of a larger story, and would work best read in sequence with that story. Lightly recommended.
Lobster Johnson 1: The Iron Prometheus (2007-2008/ Collected 2008): written by Mike Mignola; illustrated by Jason Armstrong: Set in the 1930's of writer-artist Mike Mignola's sprawling Hellboy Universe (Earth-Hellboy?), the Lobster Johnson series is an homage to the American pulp magazine heroes of the 1930's. It's part of Hellboy continuity, which means the reader knows Johnson's fate. So it goes. Johnson possesses traits of pulp heroes The Spider, The Shadow, and Doc Savage, while wearing a costume that's part standard superhero, part-Green Hornet.
The Iron Prometheus was the first of the Lobster Johnson miniseries. It's pulpy fun, with the mysterious, masked Lobster Johnson battling Nazis and monsters and an ancient evil to secure a super-weapon with magical properties. Mignola's tendency to underwrite was well underway here -- for a five-issue story, The Iron Prometheus is awfully thin at times. As written, it's 40 pages of story spread out over more than a hundred. We get characterization for a supporting character, but none really for Johnson's associates, much less Johnson himself. And one of the late sequences is almost completely opaque when it comes to clearly portraying what happened. It's fun, but almost too minimalist to be successfully pulpy. Lightly recommended.
Doc Savage: The Silver Pyramid (1987-88/ Collected 2009): written by Dennis O'Neil; illustrated by Andy and Adam Kubert: DC Comics' late 1980's revival of the Doc Savage pulp hero series as a comic book was intermittently successful -- indeed, successful enough that, while short-lived, it's probably no worse than the second-best comic-book Doc Savage, just after Marvel's 8-issue B&W Doc Savage comics magazine of the 1970's.
Writer Denny O'Neil scripted DC's beloved Shadow comics revival of the 1970's. He's tapped here as well, to uneven but mostly successful effect. There's a lot of stuff to get in -- the story spans 40 years -- and O'Neil keeps things moving along while also supplying a fairly dense plot, as the Savage novels often did. There's super-science, lost civilizations, Nazis, and new members of Doc's rollicking band of associates. It was successful enough to launch an ongoing series that lasted 20 issues -- not bad for a Doc Savage revival series. Actually, that's the longest lived Doc Savage comic series since the 1940's!
The Kubert Brothers -- artistic sons of legendary DC artist and mentor Joe Kubert -- are very young here. It shows sometimes as they have trouble maintaining consistent faces for some characters. And they're still too similar to their great father. But overall, the art works. They've already got fair command of action and of opening up the pages to one- and two-page compositions. Their interpretations of Doc's two most popular aides, Monk and Ham, are dreadful, but I don't think they designed them on their own. But they are terrible. Oh, well. Recommended.
Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade: written by Neil Gaiman, Toby Litt, Jamie Delano, Alisa Kwitney, and Rachel Pollack; illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Peter Snejberg, Peter Gross, Mike Barreiro, Al Davison, and others (1993-94/2015/Collected 2015): DC's adult-oriented fantasy comics line Vertigo tried its first line-wide crossover in the early 1990's. As Neil Gaiman notes in his introduction to this volume, no one really knew how to do such a thing. The result was a special event with a beginning and an end but a confusing and disjointed middle.
In this volume, Gaiman and company work to give Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade a workable middle and a partially rewritten end so that everything holds together. I think they succeed, thus giving a 'lost' Gaiman comics story a new life in a collected edition.
The original structure of Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade saw beginning and ending chapters published in two extra-length Free Country comic books, while the middle of the story appeared in several of Vertigo's ongoing comics that included Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Black Orchid. Gaiman's Dead Boy Detectives (boy ghosts who elected not to go to the afterlife), who first appeared in Gaiman's A Season of Mists story arc in The Sandman, drive the plot as they accept a job to find a young girl's missing brother. He went missing along with everyone else in his English village. Why? Well, therein lies the story.
And really, what an enjoyably dense and epic story it is. Writers Neil Gaiman, Toby Litt, Jamie Delano, Alisa Kwitney, and Rachel Pollack mesh together quite wonderfully -- their individual voices remain distinctive without being jarringly discordant.
The art duties are primarily handled by pencillers Chris Bachalo, Peter Snejberg, and Peter Gross. They work well together, as all are able cartoonists who can lightly depict the realistic while also doing fine work with the more fantastical artistic elements. And all of them do one sinister talking rabbit!
The story weaves together the history of the real Children's Crusade with mythology, folklore, and the particular fictional mythologies of the various comics involved in the crossover. The Dead Boy Detectives, on what I believe is their first real case, are a humourous, sympathetic pair. The looming menace to all the Earth's children gives a horrific tone to some of the comic, as does the truly disturbing section devoted to that real Children's Crusade. It's a fine thing that Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade has been restored and refurbished for contemporary consumption. Highly recommended.
Attack on Titan: [tankobon] Volume 1-3: written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama and others (2009): Violent, lightning-paced, and deeply weird. Attack on Titan, the Japanese manga smash that became internationally successful as well, is great and weird post-apocalyptic horror-action. One sort of blisters through it, wondering what the Hell is going on at points while one waits for the history of this strange, distorted Earth (well, I'm pretty sure it's Earth) to be unpacked by writer/creator Hajime Isayama and his crew.
In order to spoil as little as possible, I'll note that Attack on Titan takes a very common trope (humanity huddled together in its last refuge, beset by some terrible force) and refreshes it by making our collective nemesis... person-eating giants. Lots of them. Ranging from 12 feet to 50 feet in height. They can be hurt, but they regenerate faster than Wolverine: the only reliable kill-shot comes by targeting a small spot at the back of the neck.
The art depicts the giants as fantastic grotesques with idiotic expressions on their faces (mostly) and figures somewhat distorted from the human norm, enough so and varied enough that different monsters always seem to bring with them a horrific shock of the new. They're truly disturbing visual creations -- they create that frisson of un-ease that one seeks in horror but rarely finds. That they're beautifully integrated into vertiginous, sweeping battle sequences is also a triumph, a thrilling combination of horror and action.
Where did they come from? What are they? Why do they eat only humans? Why, having eaten pretty much everyone on the planet a century earlier, are they still alive and apparently non-starved? Where on Earth is the Last Redoubt of humanity (thanks, William Hope Hodgson!)? What secrets does one of our young protagonists have because of his vanished father's scientific enquiries into the origins of the Titans, secrets somehow hidden in his memory but unavailable to him?
Well, read the series. It's a blast. There are many adult characters, but the main protagonists are all in their late teens, new to the job of giant-killing. The writing is sharp, the characterization somewhat stereotypical. But when it comes to the giants and the battle sequences, Attack on Titan is terrific, horrific fun. And as it will clock in at about 4000 pages whenever it finishes, there's a lot more where these volumes came from. Highly recommended.
