Britten and Brülightly
by Hannah Berry
Metropolitan Books

Britten and Brülightly is so good it’s hard to believe it’s Hannah Berry’s first book. Suspenseful, engrossing, beautifully painted, and extremely sad, it seems a book that should at least be Berry’s sophomore effort. Then again, she’s only 25.

Although it got some press, Britten and Brülightly, which was published in April by Metropolitan Books, seems to have sort of slipped under the radar in the U.S. Probably because it is the debut work by a little-known, 25-year-old woman who lives across the ocean in Brighton, England. But it did garner much attention and praise in the U.K., and having read it, I can safely say it deserves all of that commendation. This is undoubtedly one of the best graphic novels I’ve read in a while.

The book tells a classic noir story, following private detective Fernández Britten (who prefers the term “researcher”) as he investigates a suicide case. He has been hired by the fiancé of the deceased man, who is convinced her husband-to-be didn’t kill himself. As Britten unravels the details of the case, the situation becomes increasingly dangerous, violent, and confusing. In the end, the true story involves all the juicy bits of a good noir: blackmail, illegitimate children, more deaths, and a sad, sad truth.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Fart Party Volume 2
By Julia Wertz
Atomic Books

When I first discovered The Fart Party almost two years ago, I was exhilarated: This comic has the best title ever! And it’s about a short funny girl who likes cheese (like me)! And she isn’t afraid to talk about farting (like me)! I picked up the first volume of collected Fart Party comics—many of which originally appeared online, and have since late 2005—read it voraciously, and fell in love.

Unfortunately, this created two problems for me when reading the second volume, published this summer by Atomic Books. The first is that my expectations were too high. The Fart Party: Volume 2 is still incredibly amusing and a lot of fun, but sometimes it just feels like more of the same. Wertz tackles the everyday in a way that is often hilarious, occasionally profound, and always honest and weird. She can turn working a shitty waitressing job or sharing a high-five with a hobo into an engaging comic strip, a talent much more difficult and rare than some people might realize. And yet at times, the punch lines here feel slightly stale, or perhaps repetitious. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had read them before in the first Fart Party. I wanted the book to have an infusion of something new and different.

In fact, the plot is different—markedly so, as Wertz and her boyfriend Oliver go long distance at the end of the first volume and break up in this one. So she becomes single, and then she travels around the country and decides to move to Portland. At the very last minute Portland becomes Brooklyn, and that is where we’re left at the end of the book: saying goodbye to San Francisco and nervously anticipating Brooklyn.

Read the rest of this entry »

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
By Josh Neufeld
Pantheon

Every so often books come along that people in the literary establishment deem important. With a few notable exceptions, those books are usually not comic books (or graphic novels—whatever you want to call them). Those of us who love comics have been arguing for years that perhaps more of them should be. Most recently, our point has been reiterated by Josh Neufeld, whose latest work, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, was just released by Pantheon. (The book was originally published as a web comic at the website of Smith magazine, albeit in shorter, slightly different form.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Far Arden
By Kevin Cannon
Top Shelf

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. It’s a phrase that kept running through my head while I was reading Kevin Cannon’s new graphic novel, Far Arden. Perhaps because the book, which takes as its subject the “crusty old sea dog” and Arctic pirate Army Shanks and a host of other characters—including two semi-obnoxious college students, a jilted lover, an angry orphan, and mad scientist—on their quest for the paradise island of Far Arden, vaguely follows that setup. Starting off madcap, slapdash, and more than a little ridiculous, somehow, over the course of roughly 375 pages, it transforms into a sad, thoughtful, even stirring book. And while the transition may leave readers the slightest bit confused (not to spoil too much, but you might very well have a “Wait, she actually died?!” moment, as I did), it also avoids feeling forced and inconsistent. For some readers, like myself, it may even feel welcome.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Mess of Everything
By Miss Lasko-Gross
Fantagraphics

As the comics medium has flourished over the past decades, autobiographical (and semi-autobiographical) comics seem overdone—or are at least well on their way to being so. How many first-person stories about growing up do we really need? How different can they all really be? It’s hard to ignore such questions when picking up Miss Lasko-Gross’s second graphic novel, A Mess of Everything. The book, which is also number two in her semi-autobiographical trilogy, tells the tale of  Melissa, as she goes through high school. Admittedly, I wasn’t hugely excited by this prospect. I’ve read plenty of these types of books.

But A Mess of Everything surprised me. It turned out to be quite worthy: funny, insightful, and at times, moving. It’s not a revolutionary book—it doesn’t stretch or redefine the bounds of its genre—but Lasko-Gross reminded me that the beauty of her chosen genre is that everyone’s story is, in fact, different and unique. If the author is a skilled storyteller, it’s as good as a reason as any to read yet another graphic novel about growing up, even if you’ve already read many.

Let’s start with the title: It is perfect. When you’re a teenager, you pretty much always feel like you’ve made a mess of everything—or, even if it’s not your doing, like everything is a complete mess. Lasko-Gross hits the nail on the head with her title, which captures perfectly the angst that fills Melissa’s journey.

Read the rest of this entry »

I Saw You…Missed Connection Comics
Edited by Julia Wertz
Three Rivers Press

Missed connections ads are a mixed bag of emotions: they’re at once funny, sad, creepy, and inspiring. So perhaps it’s only natural that we should turn to them for inspiration and for the creation of great and strange stories. Still, it’s an idea I would never have thought of. Luckily, Julia Wertz did.

Wertz, the creator of the hilarious autobiographical comic The Fart Party, started to find herself obsessed with reading missed connections ads a few years ago, and was struck by the idea of creating comics based on them. She put a call out to fellow cartoonists and received an overwhelming number of submissions, which led to the creation of a mini-comic, which led to a book, appropriately (if unexcitingly) titled I Saw You…, published by Three Rivers Press. As with pages of missed connections ads in newspapers or on Craigslist, I Saw You… is eclectic in terms of the length of the pieces, their tone, and their approach to the assignment. It is also great. The diversity of the content, as well as the overall talent of the contributors, make it an extremely enjoyable read.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quietly Sure-Like the Keeper of a Great Secret
By Jo Dery
Little Otsu

Artist Jo Dery’s first book is a simple and charming endeavor—even if it’s a bit touchy-feely. The slim, 88-page volume is a collection of brief, intertwined stories about the relationship between humans and nature. It follows four characters, “seekers and guides,” as the book’s publisher, Little Otsu, calls them, on their journeys in a natural landscape.

The story lines are a bit vague and far from literal: a spider follows a boy’s shadow (soul?) into his body, rendering him temporarily blind; a different boy, whose hair looks like a mini mountain range, talks to the moon, which then melts into a pond for him; and more of that sort of thing. Generally it reads like Dery either spends way too much time outdoors or perhaps too much time smoking peyote. But in a way, she has endeavored to create her own myths and folk tales, and in that sense, her efforts are not ill-conceived. There’s always the possibility that I’m just too much of a jaded urbanite to appreciate them—although I do think that good story-telling is much more complex than we judge it to be, and getting a 21st-century audience to think about its relationship to nature can be done far more effectively than it is in Quietly Sure.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend, while the rest of New York’s geek community were off getting their Star Wars and video game fixes at Comic Con, I ventured into the hippest of all indie territories—Williamsburg, Brooklyn—to check out a show that was closing at Cinders Gallery called “Adolescent Rage.”

The exhibition was the effort of Closed Caption Comics, a Baltimore-based collective of all-around creative folks who produce zines, comics, and art, as well as play in bands, run a music label—Lost Ghost Records—and organize an all-female performance festival, Puss Fust. Not bad.

Read the rest of this entry »

Forecast: Nozone X
Ed. by Nicholas Blechman
Princeton Architectural Press

As humans, we have a collective obsession with predicting the future. From utopian and dystopian novels to doomsday movies to TV programs where families drive space ships instead of cars, our concerns about the government, technology, and the unknown territory of outer space have forever driven us to guess, predict, and resolve our way into the next century. But these days, as we expedite global warming with our bad habits and the planet increasingly goes to shit, it seems like an especially pertinent time to look into the future and try to predict what’s coming—for the sake of showing people that we must try to stop (or at the very least, delay) it.

Enter Forecast: Nozone X, the 10th and latest installment of Nozone, a graphic design and comics zine launched in 1998 by Nicholas Blechman. Blechman is an illustrator-designer and the art director of the New York Times Book Review, so Forecast is inevitably more design- than comics-focused. It also looks much more like a book than a magazine, or whatever you might expect from something called a “zine,” a word which conjures up images of DIY, stapled booklets in this writer’s mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

In The Country Nurse, the final installment of Jeff Lemire’s Essex County trilogy, the artist is obsessed with images—the image of the open farmland of Essex County, the image of a crow flying in front of the moon, the image of a boy growing up and learning the truth about who he is. He uses these composite images to complete a larger picture, started in the first two books in the series, of Essex County, a fictionalized version of his hometown.

In a real sense, then, Essex County is the protagonist of the three books. Whereas so often in series based on locations—consider any TV show set in a particular locale, for starters—the plots of the characters’ lives become the focus of the story, here the reverse is true: The tales of these characters are woven into the larger fabric of the story of Essex County, and the stories are important not so much for what happens in them as for how they represent life in the county. The lives of the people in Essex County become emblematic of the place, rather than subsuming it with their own drama.

Read the rest of this entry »