Southwestern; South Western

Essex County: The Collected Edition (containing Tales from the Farm, Ghost Stories, The Country Nurse, and additional material): written and illustrated by Jeff Lemire (2008-2009): This mutiple-award-winning graphic novel both in Canada and the U.S. (or perhaps more accurately, a graphic short-story cycle in the tradition of Alice Munro and Stephen Leacock) really is a lovely piece of work in terms of writing and cartooning.

Lemire's moved on to more mainstream, big-company books (he currently writes for DC and DC/Vertigo), but I hope he returns to his more personal, independent roots at some point. I like his work on DC's Animal Man and Frankenstein, but his work here really sings.

Essex County, set in Southwestern Ontario's Essex County (on the Ontario/Michigan border near Detroit, if you're wondering) tells the story of four generations of interlocking lives and families over about a century in a partially non-linear fashion -- the earliest chronological flashback here is the last extended flashback in the book.

There's a lot of grief, family discord, and hockey. There's an eleven-year-old orphan who wears a superhero cape and mask all the time while he grieves for his mother and tries to acclimate to living with his bachelor uncle. There's a gas-station owner with a secret who played one game (and scored one goal) in the National Hockey League. There's the nurse who checks up on the isolated, elderly members of this diffuse community. And there's a crow who seems to watch everything.

Lemire manages the difficult feat of juggling humour and pathos without slipping into sentimentality and bathos. His writing is spare and realistic, and he lets his cartooning carry a lot of the narrative and thematic weight -- there are as many full-page spreads here as in a Jack Kirby superhero comic, and lots of big panels with a lot of space for sky and field. Lemire's not a slick cartoonist, which fits the material. He's rough in a suitable, evocative way; his faces, especially, are his strength.

The art reminds me favourably of William Messner-Loeb's art on Journey. Messner-Loebs is on the American side of that Ontario/Michigan border: is there an Ontario/Michigan Border Cartooning Style? Probably not, but they're both fine writers and cartoonists. While there are elements of setting, plot, and location that recall Ontario small-town chroniclers Alice Munro and Stephen Leacock, the closest Canadian analogy to Lemire I can think of in the non-graphic-novel arena is Paul Quarrington, whose novels including King Leary and Whale Music have a similar mix of family drama, humour, tragedy, and hockey. Highly recommended.

Cowboys and Aliens: created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg written by Fred Van Lente; illustrated by Dennis Calero and others (2006): I'm pretty sure Scott Rosenberg came up with the concept of Cowboys and Aliens and then farmed out the writing and drawing to others with an eye to selling the concept to Hollywood. Certainly I've never seen the first installment of a comic book in which the creator doesn't write or draw anything.

The ploy worked. A movie was made, and that movie contains almost no plot points or characters or even character names in common with this short graphic novel. But it does have the same title! The comic is marginally better than the movie, bland but not as dumb as Hollywood's take on the material. And at least some of the advanced aliens here wear clothing. Not recommended.

Don't Stop Believing

Comics:

Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire Volume 2 by William Messner-Loebs and Nadine Messner-Loebs: Journey, published first by Aardvark-Vanaheim and then by Fantagraphics, is one of the ten or twenty great comic books of the 1980's. It followed the adventures of hunter/trapper/postman/gun-for-hire Joshua "Wolverine" MacAlistaire in the wilds, the settlements and the forts of Michigan and environs in the early 19th century. It's a funny and character-driven book, the humour and character observation making themselves felt through both the writing and the delightful cartooning. The comparison most often made in reviews at the time was that the writing and art reminded one of Will Eisner. It's an apt comparison, though I also see a lot of Harvey Kurtzman in Messner-Loebs' art.

William Messner-Loebs wrote and drew the approximately 40 issues that make up the entire saga, now collected by IDW in two fat B&W volumes. The story structure is guided by MacAlistaire's wanderings -- while moving from place to place, he also attempts to deliver a mysterious package -- with a number of side-stories spinning off from the main narrative, as the book turns its attentions to the various settlers, soldiers, natives, Sasquatches, squirrels and comic grotesques whom MacAlistaire comes across.

Probably the most memorable character -- other than stubborn, clever MacAlistaire himself -- is writer/poet Elmer Alwyn Craft, an East Coast naif pretty much way out of his element in the wilderness. Craft begins as a parody of/homage to the writings and personal lives of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, but he soon becomes a distinct (and often distinctly annoying) character of his own. Craft also allows for some fairly sophisticated, understated play with the nature of history and stories -- his tendency to look for a narrative in events is repeatedly undercut by MacAlistaire's observations that life doesn't operate that way.

Various seismic shifts in the independent comics business would cause Messner-Loebs to end Journey perhaps before its time (though it does have an ending and an epilogue), and he would move on to work on mainstream characters that included the Flash and Wonder Woman. The two volumes of Journey stand as a great and idiosyncratic achievement, however, and also work wonderfully as Comics For People Who Don't Like Comics. My only real quibble with the reprint volumes is that they don't reproduce the covers of the original single issues. Hopefully, if sales are good, this could be rectified in a subsequent edition. Highest recommendation.


Justice League of America: Another Nail by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer: Writer/artist Davis's second exploration of a world where Superman didn't 'become' Superman until nearly a decade after his first 'real' comic-book appearance continues in high-epic, anything-goes mode. Raised by Amish parents, Superman finds the modern world confusing and difficult; the modern world, meanwhile, suspicious of super-heroes for decades in a Superman-less world, rushes to embrace the new hero. Meanwhile, some giant thingamabob is about to destroy the universe. Uh oh! Fun, breezy superhero stuff. It's too bad Davis didn't come from around these parts so that we could have gotten a few Super-Mennonite jokes, but so it goes. Recommended.