The Manara Library 1 and 3: Cowboys and Incest

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.

Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (2005) by Seth

Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (2005) by Seth: Canadian cartoonist/graphic novelist Seth (his pen-name, natch) spends a lot of space criticizing his own work here in both the Introduction and the Acknowledgements. It almost seems like a Mea Culpa for not sticking to serious and semi-comic explorations of his own life. I find it interesting because Wimbledon Green is the most engaging thing I've ever read from Seth!

Begun as a sort of time-wasting finger exercise, Wimbledon Green came to somewhat obsess Seth. It's a graphic novel told in semi-independent short pieces from a wide variety of points-of-view. All centre upon the mysterious Ontario comic-book collector Wimbledon Green and his shenangans (most of them oriented around finding and acquiring rare comic books) over the last half of the 20th century.

Seth simplifies his style here, pleasingly so. It suits the material, which spices up the weird world of comic-book collectors with intrigue, deadly rivalries, collectors with private train cars, and Wimbledon Green's own autogyro. Along the way, Ontario residents will notice some now-gone landmarks -- the late Golden Pheasant Motor Inn in London, Ontario, for one.

In a way, this is a tale that applies to all obsessive collectors. The rivalries just involve deadly battles. Or nearly deadly battles, anyway. Through it all runs the question of just who Wimbledon Green is. A fake name? A real man? What real man? That questions weaves in and out of various sub-plots involving the acquisition of legendary comic collections, comeuppance for legendary thieves from the collections of others, and various internecine struggles within the comic collecting community.

It's all great fun, with satiric stretches also devoted to (fictional) comic books and comic-book creators, and to the strange obsessions of Wimbledon Green himself. Things can get a little microscopic at times in this compact and handsome volume -- it really would be swell on much larger pages. 

Nonetheless, while Seth mocks the collectors, he also shows a great affection for them, and for comics in general. Most of the characters are fictional, though a few real comic shop owners do show up to share their stories of Wimbledon Green. Recommended.

Jungles and Gangsters

Tarzan of the Apes: adapted by Robert Hodes from the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs; illustrated by Burne Hogarth; introduction by Maurice Horn (1972): Burne Hogarth took over the syndicated Tarzan strip when Canadian-born Hal Foster left in 1937 to create Prince Valiant. For roughly ten years, Hogarth honed his comics skills on the strip before leaving to do other work. This volume, illustrated by Hogarth in the late 1960's, is an unusually early American graphic novel. 

It's now available, together with its sequel, from Dark Horse. This volume is the 1972 version. It's an adaptation of roughly the first third of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel that introduced Tarzan to the world. The illustrations are beautiful, the African settings lush, the panel composition charged with energy. Well-worth picking up from Dark Horse for any Tarzan fans, or fans of human anatomy in motion. Highly recommended.

In the Days of the Mob: written and illustrated by Jack Kirby with Mike Royer, Vince Colletta, Frank Giacoia, John Costanza, Steve Sherman, and Mark Evanier; introduction by John Morrow (1971/Collected 2013): Fun collection of stories written and drawn by the great Jack Kirby for an adult-oriented, magazine-sized crime comic entitled In the Days of the Mob that released but one issue in 1971.


The introduction details DC's complete incompetence at creating a B&W comics line. And this Comics Journal review details the production problems that persist in this volume. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating and enjoyable volume of stories that aren't much like any other Kirby stories. Recommended.

Blackhawk Up

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There Is Strength In A Union

On the Ropes: written by James Vance; illustrated by Dan Burr (2014): The late-1980's graphic novel Kings in Disguise was also written by James Vance and illustrated by Dan Burr. It was an unapologetically Steinbeckian work set during the Great Depression in the United States. Realism and melodrama combined in that graphic novel to make for one of the lesser-known great graphic novels ever produced in the medium. 

It took about a quarter of a century, but Vance and Burr return here to the Great Depression, and to the youthful protagonist of Kings in Disguise, the now-17-year-old Fred Bloch. And it's great to have them all back.

The main narrative takes place in 1937, though Bloch narrates the events from an undisclosed but seemingly distant future time and there are also copious flashbacks. Fred Bloch now travels through the American Midwest with a carnival funded by FDR's federal Work Projects Administration to provide both work and entertainment in Depression-era America. 

Across the country, workers are unionizing. And across the country, businesses are hiring people to break up strikes, unions, and attempts to unionize, often by any means necessary up to and including murder. That last part isn't melodrama -- violence and even murder was often a tool used by businesses and the State against unions in 19th- and early 20th-century America. The Pinkerton Agency, for example, was at least as well-known during that time for its union-busting activities as it was for anything remotely resembling detective work.

Fred works for an escape artist with a tragic past, romances a fellow young carnival worker, gets a WPA-funded reporter interested in labour's battles with Big Business, and covertly helps organized labour by acting as a 're-transmitter' of union communications through the post. Mail was often intercepted if it were believed to be union-related (yes, this is also historical fact and not melodrama), so Fred's help is invaluable so long as he remains the unknown link in a chain of communication. Unfortunately, two murderous thugs hired by a steel company are on his trail. And one of them has a history with Fred's escape artist.

Vance's writing is solid, involving, and certainly heartfelt. If the climax of the story strikes me as being melodramatic -- well, it is sometimes nice to see a battle between good and evil in a graphic novel that doesn't involve bright costumes or muscular hyper-competence. Fred, navigating now more intellectually between the problems of the mundane world and the communal aspirations of socialism, remains a finely drawn and sympathetic character. 

Burr's art suits the material perfectly -- it's nicely rendered, skilfully laid out, and refreshingly normative in its depiction of the Depression era and all its characters, good or bad or humanly in the middle. Like Kings in Disguise, On the Ropes is work of admirable and quietly beautiful craftsmanship. Highly recommended.

T. Sex

Paying for It: written and illustrated by Chester Brown (2011): This autobiographical comic from Toronto's own Chester Brown (Yummy Fur, Ed the Clown, Louis Riel) details more than a decade of Brown paying for 'it' -- 'it' being sex. Paying for It is  certainly not salacious: Brown strips his style down to near-minimalism, limiting the eroticism. We observe meetings with more than 25 prostitutes over the years. Worried about 'outing' any of the women, Brown neither shows faces nor, as he notes in the introduction, gets too specific with the details of what they talked about. The conversations with the assorted prostitutes are therefore more of a representative amalgamation of more general observations and opinions offered in different encounters.

The book is really more of a philosophical exploration of Brown's libertarian-based views on prostitution, offered to the reader through both Brown's internal monologues and his conversations with friends that include fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth and former Bob's Your Uncle frontwoman and Muchmusic VJ Sook-Yin Lee, Brown's girlfriend at the beginning of the book, which starts in 1997.

As noted, the graphics are minimalist, and represent some of Brown's cleanest linework. They're also quite funny at times. As Robert Crumb notes in his introduction, Chester Brown the cartoon character has a face that never changes expression regardless of the situation. Over the course of the book this becomes quite droll even as it offers a commentary on Brown's own apparent emotional reserve. 

Complete with lengthy notes and an appendix, Paying for It offers a pretty convincing argument for decriminalizing prostitution in Canada without legalizing it (which is to say, without the government regulating it). Brown's sweeping generalizations can become exhausting every once in awhile (he really, really hates romantic love) as certain elements, especially his arguments against romantic love, get stated and re-stated over the course of 300 pages. 

The strongest element of Paying for It remains Brown's depictions of the encounters with the prostitutes, all of which have the absolute and minutely observed status of engaging and rewarding verisimilitude regardless of the edits and conflations and omissions Brown chose to make to protect the identity of the women. Highly recommended.

Heartburst

Heartburst and Other Pleasures: written by Rick Veitch with Alan Moore; illustrated by Rick Veitch with Steve Bissette (collected 2008): This selection of Veitch's early 1980's graphic 'novel' Heartburst and a number of other short pieces from two decades is a pleasure to read.

Heartburst (really only 48 pages long and called a 'novel' when first published when, as Veitch notes in his introduction, the derived-from-the-French 'graphic album' would have made more sense) presents an Earth colony that has based its entire culture on the early American TV broadcasts that are just arriving on that world thanks to the pesky speed of light.

That Earth colony, a sort of quasi-Roman Catholic fascist tyranny, is also in the process of exterminating the intelligent natives of that planet for, among other things, being too sexually liberated.

Veitch does a nice job of playing in a very satiric, 1950's science-fictional universe, but with more sex and a little more nudity, and the quantum-spiritualism elements of the text are really quite charming. The whole thing would only be more enjoyable at two or three times the length, where certain elements (such as the travelling circus) might end up feeling more organic and a bit less forced.

The short pieces and sketches give brief snapshots of Veitch throughout his career. He's remained remarkably consistent, and as a bonus, the colours in this collection really 'pop': it looks terrific. Recommended.