How great is Paige Braddock? Not only did she take the time out of her work day as the licensing supremo at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates to do an interview with us (the evidence is here and here), not only did she send us an early copy (one she ran off at Kinkos herself) of her latest book, Jane’s World Volume 7 (the review is here), which comes out next month, but she also sent us a possible cover image for the next volume of Jane’s World, to run as a guest strip. Sweet! What’s that? It’s not technically speaking a strip, you say? Shut up; it’s still super-cool.

The drawing of Jane and Chelle shows the pair of star-crossed something-or-others thigh deep in a swamp full of gators. Apparently, the two have crash-landed there on their way to a vacation. Things go rapidly (and humorously) downhill from there, Braddock tells us. The book isn’t due out until April or May of next year, however, so don’t blame The Daily Cross Hatch if Braddock tweaks, changes, or even abandons that storyline altogether. We’re just happy to snag such a nifty exclusive from Braddock, especially one that shows our two favorite Jane characters: Jane herself and, of course, Chelle. See the whole image after the jump.

Jane’s World, Volume 7
Paige Braddock
Girl Twirl Comics
Paige Braddock returns early next month with another dose of loveable misfit Jane in a book chock full of “girl-on-girl action, chicks with guns, a vegan menace, vintage Winnebagos, and the transformative energy of the Sedona vortex.” You know, the usual—for stability-challenged Jane, that is.

Jane is, you see, one of those people to whom things just happen. She combines mild-mannered amiability with indecision, a severe lack of style- and nutrition-savvy, and just plain wishy-washiness. It seems she’s also (slightly) irresistible, much to her own bewilderment, since she seems to have only the vaguest of clues about the same sex (she happens to be a lesbian). In short, she’s a magnet for the kind of drama that makes for good comedy.

Whether it’s friends who see her as one of the guys (her roommate Ethan), women who see her as a fixer-upper (vegan surfer Skye), or figures of mystery who find themselves attracted to her in spite of themselves (badass ex-cop Chelle), or just nice, normal women (Jane’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Dorothy), everyone around her finds themselves being sucked into the maelstrom of drama, coincidences, and serious enmeshment issues that surround Jane. The results are funny, sexy, silly, and sometimes dramatic—the last thanks mostly to the flashbacks of Chelle and her current (romantic and otherwise) ex-partner Jill’s days as cops and the resultant side plots that continue to unfold in the storyline’s present day.

Volume 7 is not the best place for new readers to start, as the story picks up where the last book left off. Jane’s in the middle of an awkward dinner with both the women who are pursuing her; Chelle’s ex (and current business partner) Jill is being held for ransom by the mullet-sporting, plaid-wearing women of the Nevada Liberation Militia, who’re not only looking for revenge against the two ex-cops, but who are also coincidentally working for Chelle’s mother’s extra-butch girlfriend, Ted, who also happens to be married to unsuspecting monster truck driver (and ex-coworker of Jane) Bonnie, who thinks Ted’s a man…And that’s just a small part of the backstory.

Braddock stretches her narrative muscles in this book, which represents the series’ first non-serialized graphic novel. Jane started out as an old-fashioned newspaper three- or four-panel comic strip and gradually morphed into a pamphlet-style comic book. Volume 6 was mostly serialized in pamphlet form, except for the last chapter, which only appears in the collected edition. Volume 7 has a much less episodic feel than the collections of pamphlet books. Braddock clearly conceived of this book as one long piece, and she takes her time building the story to single massive climax that resolves all her tangled (snarled, even) plotlines.

She brings it all together in an impressive concatenation of coincidences that make the book part Priscilla Queen of the Desert road story, part farce. Compared to the earliest collection of three- and four-panel strips, it’s less jokey, with fewer punchlines. Compared to the later books, it’s less focused on the angst and drama of Jane and company. Braddock, in her recent interview with The Daily Cross Hatch, said that her goal with Volume 7 was to pull back a bit from the drama and return to the series’ humor roots. “I want to do a combination of the two, where there is kind of this overlay of drama,” said Braddock, “but I really want to keep the humor in the book…[Volume] 7 basically ties up all these drama loose ends in humorous ways, and then it stays funny. That was my goal, to get back to that.”

She succeeds. The strip’s as amusing, entertaining, and engaging as ever. It is, however, a more plot-driven book than regular readers might expect. Braddock needs most of its 152 pages to wrap up all her loose ends, leaving less room than usual for character development and the smaller-scale humor of significant looks and double takes that is one of her strengths. For example, there’s little of the quirky interplay between Ethan and Jane–a staple of the series to this point. In fact, Ethan’s hardly in this book.

That’s not to say it’s all plot: Chelle gets more backstory, for example, and there’s plenty of reliably confrontation-averse Jane’s waffling, too. Her solution to the double-date dinner from hell is first to secretly call her coworker to ask him to call her in to the office on a pretended emergency, and, when Skye and Dorothy wait her out, to hide in the bathroom pretending to be sick. Not surprisingly (for regular readers), her efforts to avoid confrontation only make her situation much more confusing.

Ultimately, Jane’s World succeeds because always Braddock makes it fun to read, regardless of its current form. She’s clearly having a blast experimenting with her creation, and her enthusiasm for her characters is infectious. Whether it’s a drama or a demented road story or a whimsical and intimate strip, she infuses her story with an off-center charm that’s reflected in the sketchy, energetic style of drawing that she’s retained (and honed) since Jane’s World was a comic strip. Fans will find the book a satisfying read, both in and of itself, and as a return to the funny that it represents for the future of the series.

-Sean Carroll

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Howard Chaykin, Mike Mignola, Al Williamson
Dark Horse

It’s rare that a comic book adaptation of anything is worth reading, let alone reviewing, but that’s not the case here. In fact, it’s practically a crime that Chaykin and Mignola’s take on Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser has been out of print for over a decade. This collection does an excellent job of translating science fiction and fantasy master craftsman Fritz Leiber’s most famous creations—and the unique flavor and wit of his stories—into comic form.

Let’s get one thing straight: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are not a Dungeons and Dragons spinoff, as most who saw me reading the book seemed to think. If anything, the reverse is true. In fact, Leiber’s unlikely duo of the huge (and big-hearted) barbarian Fafhrd and the smaller, tricksier thief Mouser helped to create the sword and sorcery (a term Leiber himself coined) genre that eventually spawned the role-playing game industry. The first story about the pair, Two Sought Adventure, came out in the pulp magazine Unknown in 1939, and the last nearly 50 years later, in 1988.

Leiber’s series lasted so long and remains so readable today because he produced what even the most famous of his pulp contempories (Lovecraft, Howard, Smith) mostly didn’t: quirky, clever, urbane, funny, and well written stories. Howard Chaykin does Leiber’s work justice in a skillful adaptation stripped down to the essentials: the pair’s great friendship, recklessness, sense of humor and lust for life (and strong drink, brawling, and dancing girls, obviously—they are pulp heroes, after all).

Chaykin gives the book a good mix of action (battles galore), horror (Mouser and Fafhrd battling ghost wolves in a shared, drug-induced nightmare as the wounds they take appear on their sleeping bodies) and humor (my own favorite throwaway bit: the duo falling out over how to spell Fafhrd’s name). Among the seven stories Chaykin picked are some of Leiber’s best (and most satyrical), including Bazaar of the Bizarre (a parable about the dangers of greed in which the Devourers, “the most accomplished merchants in all the universe—so accomplished, indeed, that they sell only trash” play on the thieving Mouser’s worst failing, and he has to be rescued by Fafhrd) and Lean Times in Lankhmar (in which Fafhrd’s incipient streak of romanticism leads him to find religion and, perhaps, to become the embodiment of a god—until Mouser rescues him, that is).

Not every story in the collection is a classic, however. In order to preserve some semblance of the narrative flow between the best stories in Leiber’s collections, Chaykin inevitably had to pick some that simply weren’t as strong. While these stories don’t impress in the same way as the better ones do, they do help the hold the collection together as a single, relatively coherent narrative.

The other thing that holds the book together is Mike Mignola’s rich, atmospheric, and, at times, quite funny art. Mignola, who according to the afterwards in the book, had really been struggling to find his way as an artist up to this point, clearly began to hit his stride with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. While he hadn’t yet reached the sort of idiosyncratic stylization of his later Hellboy style (which you can see on the cover of the book, which looks to have been drawn much later, for this collection), he’s already drawing in a less realistic, more graphical and sometimes even cartoony style that matches Leiber’s wit admirably.

That’s not to say that there aren’t effective action scenes, or eerie scenes of dark horror, but Mignola gets as much mileage out of the pair’s humorous moments, such as Fafhrd carrying an enraged Mouser under his arm like a child, or the deluded Mouser struggling against Fafhrd’s grip as he attempts to kiss a giant spider he believes is a houri.

Better than the action, however, is the overall look of the book. Chaykin may have had to leave out most of Leiber’s descriptions of “The City of the Seven Score Thousand Smokes,” Lankhmar, to life, but Mignola’s pencils (with inks by Al Williamson) more than make up for the omission. Leiber’s city, according to Chaykin’s introduction, is based on “an only slightly more fantastical Manhattan–or at least the city south of 14^th Street, circa 1935;” Mignola’s take is dark, gloomy, and beautiful—a convincing fantasy metropolis despite the relatively few pages dedicated to it. It’s also full of little tongue-in-cheek jokes like “one way” street signs and, “no pandering,” no soliciting” and even “don’t even think of conjuring here” signs. Mignola delivers admirably in the stories that aren’t set in Lankhmar, too, but, just as these aren’t the best written stories in the collection (or in Leiber’s original series) neither are they the most entertainingly drawn.

It seems clear that Chaykin and Mignola had planned more than the four issues that the series eventually ran; the adaptation ends unsatisfyingly and abruptly in the middle of what corresponds to the third of Leiber’s seven collections of stories about the two friends, leaving them floating in a tiny sailboat in the middle of the ocean. If you know the books, you’ll wish that Chaykin and Mignola had spent more time on the better stories and thrown continuity out the window. There are many, many other excellent stories that could have filled out the book. And even if you don’t know the stories but simply appreciate superior pulp fantasy, you’ll be sad at how the collection peters out. Not to worry; DH Press (Dark Horse’s imprint) is in the process of republishing the original books. Pick them up to see just how well Chaykin and Mignola translated the master fantasist’s works into graphical form.

-Sean Carroll

God Save the Queen
By Mike Carey and John Bolton
Vertigo
Mike Carey and John Bolton’s graphic novel God Save the Queen has nothing to do with Queen Elizabeth (either one)–or even Helen Mirren. The title refers, instead, to both Queen Titania of Fairy and the Sex Pistols track that gives the book its rock-and-roll attitude. This compelling urban fantasy fuses the glamour and horror inherent in both punk rock and fairy tales, and the result is something disturbingly lovely. God Save the Queen isn’t quite a masterpiece (it’s too short, for one thing) but it’s still a solid piece of work from two major talents.

Faithful Vertigo readers will be pleased at Carey’s take on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman treatment of Shakespeare’s rendering of traditional fairie characters like Titania, Mab, and Oberon. Carey’s respectful of and refers to Gaiman’s work, but not to the point that you need to dig through Vertigo’s back catalog to understand what’s going on. If your prior only exposure to the Fairy courts is reading Midsummer Night’s Dream in school, you’ll be fine. If you’ve never read the play, I don’t know what to tell you, other than that you probably should.

The heroine of God Save the Queen is Linda, a teenaged Londoner on the edge—one who doesn’t, however, remain on the edge for long. In the book’s first scene, troubled by a depressed, hard-drinking mother and a mysteriously absent father, she abandons her homework assignment (she’s supposed to be writing an essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course) for an ill-fated night in the London scene.

During that night, Carey shoehorns in his reference to the Sex Pistols’ venerable God Save the Queen as one of Linda’s missing dad’s favorite songs feels a bit clunky and forced-for-the-sake-of-a-cool-title-ish. I would have gotten it without him having to hit me over the head, personally. It pushed me out of the story far enough to consider that, at nearly 50, Carey was Linda’s age when God Save the Queen was new. For me, this put his authority on the subject of modern teen punk girls in question, all for the sake of a medium-cool title. Despite this, however, Carey gets the energy and abandon of the eternally renewed “scene” just right, with its raw energy, alienation and self-destructive urges. Anyone who’s ever been a part of that kind of world has probably heard some variation of the line Linda gives her straight-man friend Jeff as she explains the rules for their night out: “We run fast, we dance like animals, and we say yes to anything.” With that sort of attitude, she unsurprisingly falls off the edge quite quickly, and by the end of the night, she’s been picked up by some (literally) otherworldly fringe-dwellers looking to ride the Red Horse; that is, shoot up a mix of heroin and blood—Linda’s blood—which we’re told is a rare treat for fairies.

Linda’s friends not only have perverse (and dangerous) tastes, of course; they’re also of the Fair Folk, a people no longer quite so fair, given that evil Queen Mab has recently overthrown Queen Titania and instituted a reign of unseelie terror. The story cuts between Linda’s scenes, told in the first person via her hand-written journals and scenes from Fairy that fill the reader in on some (but not all) of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Giving away much more of the plot would probably be a disservice to those willing to shell out 20 bucks for this slim (at a mere 96 pages) hardcover. Suffice it to say that shooting up smack (and blood) isn’t without consequence (though, disturbingly, there’s not even a mention of HIV in the book); Titania doesn’t take the coup lying down; Mab plays dirty; and there’s a reason why, of all London’s messed-up kids, Linda’s the chosen to be a Red Horse “drip.” The story’s solid and competently told, if not particularly groundbreaking to urban-fantasy habitués. Anyone who’s ever read Charles de Lint’s Newford novels or stories will pretty quickly guess more or less where God Save the Queen is going. Still, Carey’s juxtaposition of archetypal fantasy bits and junkie culture gives the story a fresh feel all its own.

Visually, the book is exquisite. Bolton’s in rare form in God Save the Queen, and the combination of his photorealistic painting style and some truly nightmarish imagery makes for a visually arresting book. Bolton’s known as much for his horror illustrations as he is for his comic-book art, and his love of horror is amply evident here. From the opening panels of Mab’s hideous bat-winged-ferret drawn chariot soaring through the skies of Fairy, it’s clear this is the kind of book Bolton was born to paint. He’s equally at home, however, with the more wholesome pixies and sprites as he is with the Rawhead and Bloodybones types. Bolton’s Fairy is a mix of the appealing and the repugnant; he understands that each emphasizes and serves as contrast to the other.

Best of all Bolton gives Linda’s “real” world the same sort of terrible appeal as Fairy. Linda herself is most definitely not a shadowy, pierced and eyelinered goth; she’s a peaches-and-cream beauty along the lines of Anne Hathaway or Natalie Portman; it’s the world around her that’s grim and dark. The first time we see the glowingly healthy Linda shooting up, her bowed head half in the shadow, half in the light as she watches the needle drawing out blood to cook with the Red Horse, one shiny new Doc Marten in the foreground, it’s an image that is lovely, twisted, and heartbreaking–and typical of the book as a whole.

The main problem with this book is that it’s too damned short. Carey and Bolton squeeze a surprising amount of storytelling into the pages they have, but in places the plot feels sketchy and the pacing rushed. Worse, few supporting characters get any development, so you don’t really care much what happens to them. Overall, the book feels like a novel-length story told in a novella worth of pages. It’s not that the result isn’t satisfying, it’s just that you’re left feeling that it could have been something more, bigger, and richer.

Still, even though the book doesn’t live up to its potential, it’s still a good read. Between them Carey and Bolton have cooked up a tale that manages by turns to be both disturbing and beautiful. Anyone who appreciates the urban fantasy genre will not only appreciate God Save the Queen, but also probably return to it many times.

—Sean Carroll

Gilbert Hernandez is one of the biggest names in alternative comics. With his brother, Jaime, Beto (as he’s known) helped bring non-superhero books into, if not the mainstream, then awfully close. A new Gilbert Hernandez book gets thoughful reviews in a press that never would have treated comics so seriously before the brothers’ flagship book, Love and Rockets, and the revolution in comics that it helped to create.

Beto’s enormous Palomar work is now being reissued for a remarkable third time, in series of new collections designed to make an easy entry point for new readers, and a handier reading copy for those that already have the complete Love and Rockets collections (which include lots of other material) or the massive Palomar coffee table book, which is beautiful, if a bit unwieldy to carry on the subway.

Hernandez took the time to talk to us recently; in part one of the interview, he talked about his New Tales of Old Palomar title and the end of serialized Palomar storyline (in fact, all his serialized storylines) in Love and Rockets. In part two, he talks about Sloth, his recent graphic novel from Vertigo, a standalone tale of mystery, comas, urban legends and body-switching with no ties to Palomar or any of his other works; Julio’s Day, a generations-spanning standalone Latin-themed story that has been running in Love and Rockets for several years; and Chance in Hell, the novelization of one of Palomar regular Fritz’ B-movies. The commong thread here? All of three were conceived of as graphic novels, unlike his Palomar work serialized in Love and Rockets.

Let’s talk a little bit about the whole graphic novel thing you’re doing now. Sloth was the first one, right?

Yeah, you could consider that the first one.

What inspired that?

I just hadn’t done a graphic novel. I hadn’t done a self-contained, easy-read story for a different—a partly different—audience, you know?

You knew Sloth was going to be a certain length from the outset. Did you yourself saying, “My god, I have 120 pages to fill,” or “My god, I only have 120 pages for all this story.”

Well, the former…yeah, I ran into that, because I hadn’t done it before and I usually don’t have a complete story worked out as I get into it. I’ll have a good chunk of it, like a beginning, middle, and end, but not the rest of it, and I’ll work that out as I’m developing the story. I’ll emphasize things I need to make the story more clear, or deemphasizing things to not confuse the story, that kind of thing. So Sloth was a pretty difficult challenge to complete, because it went through so many changes, so many different routes, that I’m not 100% on it. It turned out okay.

It’s a great book, but it does feel like a new territory for you, for sure.

Yeah, and even for me it feels like, okay, this is a baby step. This is really the first one, not the last one. You’re supposed to go out there with every major project like this is going to be the last one, and you’re going to get hit by a truck the next day. But, well, I don’t think that any more. [laughs] I think about how this is a beginning, and how we’re going to unfold things and look to the future now.

Was this also a kind of a way to renew your craft after a couple decades of Love and Rocket?

Mmm-hmm. Yeah. I just wanted to do–similar to the New Tales of Old Palomar–I wanted to do stories and visuals that sort of opened up; pace it a certain way, you know, and emphasize fewer characters than the usual 56. [Laughs]. Yeah, it was basically challenging myself. What you have to do is trick yourself sometimes, you know; you have to trick your brain because it gets into ruts, gets into familiar patterns. You have to shock your talent by doing something different.

So story-wise it’s pretty different, how about technique-wise?

It wasn’t too different, because it’s pretty much a simpler version of my Palomar work. So it’s basically what I call my everyday style. You know, I wake up in the morning draw the characters, didn’t have to stylize too much.

Okay, but how about comparing the art in Julio’s Day versus Sloth, they’re both clearly your style, but they’re also quite different. Is it the level of polish you put on them that’s different?

Yeah, it might be that when I’m dealing with a small, Latin theme, I’ll make it a little more scruffy.

Is that on purpose?

Yeah, Sloth is a little more slick.

It’s a little more urban, too.

Yeah, so maybe I unconsciously work it out that way.

Without meaning this at all as a negative, Julio’s Day is the rough-and-readiest feeling stuff I can remember seeing from you.

Well, here’s what happened. I conceived Julio’s Day many years ago, and that was supposed to be my first graphic novel, but in serialized form. I was going to do it in ten page chapters in Love and Rockets for the first ten issues. Well, as I was working on it, it just had too much of the Palomar feel in it, and I really wanted to do something different. So I started shortening the chapters. Pretty soon I would end up with just one page in each issue. I thought, this is supposed to be a graphic novel, and this is not working. I started working on other things, and pretty much just tried to keep it going in there, knowing that it was a mistake to make it a serialized graphic novel.

It ends up feeling like little pieces of sudden fiction, almost.

And since they are little pieces of a graphic novel, there’s not a lot going on–probably the least going on of any of my work in those little chapters.

It is sort of tantalizing, yeah.

When it’s read as a graphic novel, it’ll make more sense. It’s written like a serious story where very little happens, like in a lot of the books we had to read for school, you know what I mean? [Laugh]. So serializing it in Love and Rockets taught me the lesson that I can’t spend six years serializing a hundred page story, it’s just ridiculous. So I’m just not doing that any more. So Julio’s Day began as a graphic novel, and will end up–I don’t know what it’ll be when it’s done, just a small, little book that took six, seven years to do. [Laughs.]

Are you planning to add back in some of the stuff you cut out?

Yeah, just because I wanted to end it, I didn’t want to continue anything in Love and Rockets. As far as continuity goes, I just said okay that it’s it, I’m going to cut it out so I can end it quicker.

You want to talk a little bit about your new book, Chance in Hell?

Chance in Hell: it’s funny, because that’s getting a lot of interest, even though it’s probably my lightest work I’m going to be doing. Originally, when I was doing the Fritz stories, and I made her a B-movie actress, I got inspired to show little bits of these little B-movies, you know? And then it got a little more ambitious to where I’d dedicate whole issues to these little stories. Pretty soon it started growing like, why don’t I just do a whole graphic novel based one of these little films? But I didn’t want to use this character in Love and Rockets any more…for the time being. And that was at the time the whole graphic novel thing happened. You know, Blankets did well, and different books, and there was just a feeding frenzy for graphic novels. This is what three, four years ago? So I thought, well, I better start doing graphic novels—that’s more what I want to do anyway.

So Chance in Hell is kind of a story within a story? A kind of meta-graphic novel?

Yeah, yeah! I just sort of thought, well, I’ve got these characters and these ideas! So I just sort of threw them together to see what might work. It worked out. It just turned out that it started writing itself, and Chance in Hell became sort of this little graphic novel or movie adaptation, whatever the reader wants. The reader doesn’t have to care about the [Palomar] characters, because it’s a self-contained little story.

Will the long-time fan recognize Fritz in it?

[Laughs] She’s uh…she’s easy to recognize. And she fits in it just right. Thing is, I don’t know, somehow it just worked out. Everything just came together, and it just worked out. She’s an odd choice for that, I know, because she’s not like my main character, like the early Palomar characters, but just for some reason…

Not to argue with you about your own work, but when I was prepping for this interview, I pretty much reread everything you’ve published…Fritz has become a really big character.

[Hesitates] Yeah. The trouble with her, is that…like, say, a character like Luba wears her anger on her sleeve…we don’t know anything about Luba, but we know to get out of her way.

Whereas with Fritz you kind of know everything about her?

Everything, but she doesn’t show it. Her face has such a fixed look. That was always a problem, all the things going on in her life happen around her and inside her, but you don’t see it on her face. That’s difficult for a cartoon character, for readers to accept that, so that’s why she’s a little problematic for me. And doing this movie thing actually works because she can be…she doesn’t have to be herself. She can be whatever her part requires. She can become that character, and I think it’ll make a lot of sense for long-time readers.

[Continued in Part Three]

—Sean Carroll

When I interviewed Gilbert Hernandez, he told me that his spunky comic-book loving child-heroine Venus was going to be making her official exit from Love and Rockets in issue 20. Venus has been a favorite character of mine since the Letters from Venus serial in New Love back in the 90s, so I was understandably devastated.

I managed to manfully hold back my tears, however, until Beto explained that while Venus was going to be visiting all the remaining Love and Rockets characters as his way of saying farewell to the entire Palomar cast, those characters wouldn’t disappear entirely. Instead of serializing their exploits in the venerable L&R, he plans to continue their stories in graphic novels.

When Hernandez later agreed to do a guest strip for us, we were excited, but when it turned out that the page he generously sent us showed a now-teenaged Venus talking to her mother’s ex-boyfriend Hector, well…again, with the barely restrained tears. Hernandez tells us that this page is “self rejected” from the very same L&R issue 20 he told me about in the interview ; it might show up later when the story is collected, he says, but until then it’s a rarity The Daily Cross Hatch is proud to host. Click the link below to see the whole page.

–Sean Carroll

Paige Braddock has been doing Jane’s World forever. Well, since 1998–which is about the same the thing for a strip that began life on the Internet. Jane made the jump to pamphlet-style books a few years ago. She’s now also made the jump to manga-sized collections that are beginning to pop up in all kinds of bookstores that had never previously carried a Jane book.

Part one of this interview was all the serious stuff about writing and drawing Jane; Part two is a pretty free-ranging, chatty interview–Braddock riffing on her influences. We could have pared it down to the bare comic-related essentials, but it seemed a shame to cut out the feel of a chat with the lively Braddock. We talked about Jane’s prospects for the big and small screens, Braddock’s favorite TV shows, and the comics she reads and the artists that inspire her; we even got the low-down on her new comic collaboration.

It’s not just alternative comics, but also lesbian alternative books, like Ariel Schrag’s Potential that are being made into movies. Do you ever think about taking Jane to the big or small screen?

I would really like to, and I’ve had some interest from people. When I was in Greece at a comic convention recently I had a writer who was interested. I have to admit, I feel like kind of a newbie in that arena, and I don’t really know what to do next. I’m kind of just sorting through it all now. I would love to do an animated thing.

Like the 15-minute Adult Swim toons?

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, too. But I don’t know, I don’t know what the best thing to do is, I don’t know if live action is better, or if it’s better to try and do one of the cable networks, or just TV, just do a whole big old movie? I guess I’m leaning more towards series. I think I watched way too many sitcoms as a kid. You know, I still enjoy ’em.

What do you watch now?

Well, my favorite show right now is Battlestar Galactica. I’m one of millions, huh? (laughs). Love that show. I’ll tell you a really funny story: I was at a little comic convention in Austin, and one of my readers came up to me and he said, “you know, I just to tell you, Buffy’s over, you know, you need to move on.” I was a huge Buffy fan, and I love Joss Whedon, loved Serenity, Firefly, love all his stuff. Just love his sense of humor. So I said to this guy, “Dude, have a heart! What else is there? Tell me something that’s good to watch, and I’ll watch it.” He says: “Battlestar Galactica.” Okay! So I get home, rent the first season, and now I’m totally hooked!

Did you watch it all in one weekend?

Oh my god, yes! And I was so stressed out, because it’s so intense! And the pilot, the miniseries is just great. So I’ve got friends of mine who don’t even like scifi totally hooked on it now. I download episodes to my laptop, and I have to make a visit to my grandmother, and I think that’s what I’m going to take with me.

You mentioned Ariel Schrag; she also wrote a couple episodes of The L Word, which is a cable show…do you know it?

Yes, but I’m way behind.

Her show was good, I thought, but not as good as the one that Angela Robinson wrote and directed. You’ll know it when you get there, because she does this…she has a tendency to do these really fast-paced shows with a lot of split screens, with like people all simultaneously talking on the phone and cutting into phone calls. You’ll recognize it right away. It’s the funniest episode. The humor kind of came back into this season. Last season was really just kind of heavy, I thought.

A lot of people turned on that show last year; I heard a lot of: “I’m only watching because feel like I have to, to support it.”

Exactly. Whoever the writing group was, they sort of lost their way last year.

You talked about your readers; I’m also curious who you read. I noticed in one part of the three-volume Jane’s World…Compendium?

(Laughs) Omnibus collection. But I call it the Jane Brick.

There’s a meta moment poking fun at the look of women in comics: A supposed guest cartoonist makes everyone much more, hmm, enormously endowed…

(Laughs) Yes.

Jane says there are already enough D-Cups out there, and she mentions Terry Moore, and Gilbert Hernandez’ character Fritz Martinez…

Yeah, I like his work a lot. I like both those guys. The stuff that I read, though, that I look for in comic shops…I love Darwyn Cooke, and I like Bruce Timm—I’ve actually been buying back issues of stuff they’ve done. I love when they do Harley Quinn breakouts and make it really comical. I just bought a used copy of one of those really old collections of a bunch of that stuff.

Very cartoony.

It is, very cartoony. Darwyn Cooke’s stuff, when he did The New Frontier stuff, I love that. And, what else? Oh, I read Y: The Last Man religiously. Oh, and yeah, I read Terry’s book [Strangers in Paradise], which he’s about to finish, you know. He’s at the end.

I’ll be sad to see it go.

I know, but I have a feeling he’s going to do something after that’ll be good, so I’m excited.

You have to respect someone who knows when…

When this story’s done and I’m ready to move on? Yeah. You know what else I just picked up is Jeff Smith’s take on Shazam, which is great.

What about these authors’ work inspires you?

They remind me to change perspective in panels, and to improve my design work. Stylistically we’re really different, but. I think some of those guys are really good at, for want of a better way to say it, design.

I’m actually working on…Jane’s World is so, such a personal work, you know, one woman’s take on the world kind of thing? I really wanted to branch out and use some of what I’ve learned in Jane to do something else. The problem with starting a title and keeping it running–which I’m sure Terry Moore would tell you, too–you have to stay in whatever style you start with. If say, halfway through you say “Wow I really wish I’d done this with a brush instead of a pen, you’re kind of stuck.

So I’ve really been wanting to do something that will look totally different and can be drawn in a totally different style, and so I’m working with this writer friend of mine, he lives in San Francisco, and we’re doing a science fiction comedy that’s going to be out at the end of the year. It doesn’t look anything like Jane. I mean, it looks like I drew it, in that some of the facial expressions and the way people interact in conversation are probably going to feel similar, but it’s drawn with a brush instead of a pen, so it’s going to feel a lot more graphic, a little bit more real realistic.

Is his name…uh…a secret?

Oh yeah. (laughs) No, his name is Jason McNamara. He’s done a few books for AiT/PlanetLar. First Moon is the one he just did, which is about werewolves. There’s another book he did about a girl who, every time she wakes up, she’s in a different life, and I’m drawing a blank on the title. [I’m partial to our book, though, because I feel like he really nailed it. [Ed.’s note: it’s Continuity Paige was thinking of, also from AiT/PlanetLar. Also, Braddock adds that both these books are admirably illustrated by Tony Talbert.]

That was the other thing: I sort of felt like I needed guy’s sensibility, so he sort of brings me a little more to the masculine, and I bring him a little more to the feminine, and we meet somewhere in the middle. And I think it’s good, it’s a really good mix. The book is called The Martian Confederacy. We’re going to publish it under Girl Twirl, even though it’s not…I mean, technically, Jason is a guy. But it’s still a humor book, and it still has really strong female characters. Actually, it has a trio of characters, one of which is female, one’s male, and one’s a bear. It’s sort of like…I’ve been jokingly saying that it’s Serenity meets The Dukes of Hazard.

You mentioned Joss Whedon again…have you picked up his new Buffy book?

Would I know what was happening?

It takes place about 100 issues since Season 7 ended. Xander’s her watcher, and he’s got an eyepatch. That didn’t happen in the show, did it?

That didn’t happen in the show; trust me, I know that show. That’s my visual radio, when I’m inking I have the old episodes of Buffy on in the background, because it’s just funny to listen to. But I couldn’t write and listen to it, though.

Anyone else you’ve discovered lately?

I do sort of pride myself about find people in Artist Alley who two years later are all popular. Like for example, I never know how to pronounce his last name, but Doug…TenNapel? His most recent book’s Gear,with, you know, the cats, and the robots.

I know who you mean. We recently reviewed Gear, and I have no idea how to say his name.

Oh good, is it on the site? I’ll look for it, because I just picked it up. I bought it just because it’s description on the Diamond site was just so hilarious. And since I work for Peanuts, I’m also paying attention to licensed characters, and I’m in McDonalds a few weeks ago, getting a coffee, and I look up and there’s this character called Catch Scratch. And I’m thinking, why does this look so familiar? …do you know about this already?

No.

He has a character that he’s licensed to McDonald’s. So imagine when you’re look at this Gear magazine, a more cleaned up version of the cats that are in that story are now in Nickelodeon Magazine, and on Nickelodeon, although I haven’t seen the animated version of it, called Catch Scratch.

I haven’t watched Nickelodeon since Ren and Stimpy went off the air.

I haven’t either. I actually started subscribing to the Nickelodeon magazine because I was feeling a little bit out of touch. So, yeah, I’m excited for him, because I like his work, and here’s somebody who I think was sort of an indie now who now crossed over into the mainstream. But his artwork even on this McDonald’s promotional stuff looks very cool.
Fricking McDonald’s Happy Meals, for crying out loud!

Thanks so much for your time.

I probably just went on and on.

Sometimes it’s good to get past the serious stuff and get to the…

The juicy stuff!

–Sean Carroll

If you haven’t heard of Love and Rockets, you don’t know much about alternative comics. But that’s O.K., because this ground-breaking book by Gilbert Hernandez and his brother Jaime (with occasional participation from brother Mario) recently celebrated its 25^th anniversary with the release of new softcover editions of Gilbert and Jaime’s best-known storylines.

If you’ve never read Gilbert’s stuff, pick up Heartbreak Soup, the recently released first volume of Gilbert’s famous Palomar series; you’ll be struck by its intricacy, depth, and above all, compelling female characters. Beto (as he’s known by his fans) has something up his sleeve for long-time fans, tool: brand-new stories set in the early days of the series, in New Tales of Old Palomar.

In the first part of our interview, we spoke to Gilbert about revisiting the work that made him famous, the differences between the Palomar stories of today and those of a quarter century ago, and his upcoming farewell to serial-form comics. There’s plenty more of the interview to come, and an exclusive guest strip later this week, so stay tuned.

Since you wrapped up Luba in America, you’ve published a lot of pages, but not much Palomar stuff until New Tales and The High Soft Lisp and the recent Fritz & Mark stuff in L&R. Were you burned out on the Palomar and post-Palomar storylines? I’d heard rumors you were pretty much finished that storyline.

Officially I intended to end the Palomar stuff with Love and Rockets #50–that was volume 1 of Love and Rockets—and just give it a rest for a while, and just use characters I had stories for. That would be the Luba in America stuff. Well, it turns out that I had so many characters, that the Luba in America stuff just kept getting longer and longer. And I didn’t really want it to get that long. So I finally cut it off after so many years. Then I got the opportunity to do New Tales of Old Palomar, basically filling in a slot for the new Ignatz Press.

They came to you and asked you to it?

They asked me if I was open to doing a new series of self contained stuff? I said, yeah, I could do that. And I asked, “what are you looking for?”

“Palomar.”

And I said, “ok.”

Is it hard to come back to Palomar again, 25 years later?

No…Well, it’s finding new stories for old characters—that’s the hard part. It’s not that I’m bored, it’s not that I don’t want to do it again–it’s not that. Like you mentioned in your review, I have a thousand pages on each character already. So finding new stories for them is difficult. So that’s why the first New Tales of Old Palomar is sort of a streamlined, simpler version.

How would you describe what’s different this time?

I was looking for a more reader-friendly book, because my stuff had gotten so dense, halfway down the run. I mean, yeah, sure, it was rewarding for the readers who were really following it, but if you just tried to jump on board in the middle, you’d have a hell of a time. And that’s not good for sales. You have to balance all that all at the same time, and even though I want to be true to myself, I have to be…you know.

Sales aside, it’s probably also nice to have more than one entry point for readers.

Yeah. So I took the traditional Palomar characters and story and just made a simplified, almost a young-people’s version of it. You know, like an Easy Reader version (laughs), and started out that way. As things progress, though, it’ll get a little more complex, a little darker, a little more original.

There are three New Tales coming out?

I’m hoping to do at least three, but it might be four, depending on what the publishers want.

Are these stories you’ve always wanted to tell? Tonantzin, whose origin story gets told in issue #1, is a character you’ve said is close to your heart, and here you’ve filled in a gap in her story.

Right. And then the third issue of New Tales will actually be a story of her adolescence, which I’ve never shown. They all follow different time lines. In the second issue, which will come out in May, I jump back about ten years. It’s a time I’ve never really shown in Palomar. I’m looking to do the same characters, but what you haven’t seen, that I haven’t done before. And to keep it reader friendly, for a mass audience, a general audience.

Do you see these as the next big Palomar arc? Is this a story that’s going to keep growing organically the way the original ones did, or maybe the Luba in America did?

If there’s an interest in it.

It’s hard to imagine your fans not being interested in it, but then I’m not on the publishing side.

Yeah, yeah, I always go back to that. The publishers, you know, are they willing to continue? Because this is a kind of a prestige project, you know? They’re putting a lot of money into it, The original Love and Rockets was really cheaply made, and we were able to get away with that for a long time. But now we have a more expensive package, a more expensive book. It depends on what the returns are and what the publishers feel is worth pursuing. If it works out in a positive sense, then, you know, sure.

Even you, one of the more successful names in alternative comics, have to think about projects that way.

Yeah. It’s the kind of comics that I do, and that my brother does; nobody else really does them. It’s a type of alternative comic that only my brother and I do, for the most part. Everybody else is going over to Pantheon because they’ve got a tragic biography to tell. I’m fine with that, but I’m just trying to do just stories with imagination—just old fashioned stories, you know?

Your early works get compared a lot to 100 Years of Solitude, people talk a lot about Márquez-like magical realism, but once Luba and her family and the other characters leave Palomar, there’s more focus on the realism, less on the magic. With the return to Palomar, you returned to that more magical feeling story. Is that a function of the time and place? Is that something you wanted to go back to with the New Tales?

Actually, yes. I looked at what made Palomar successful for me and the readers, and what made it what it was. And, like you said, a lot of that stuff got put in the back seat with the Luba story. Looking back at the Palomar work and thinking of new stories, it seemed like, well, this is what made it what it was. I’m a big supporter of basic imagination in stories: You know, tall tales, but tall tales that intermingle with the character’s real lives. That was one of the strengths of the strip. Also, the ensemble cast, and not necessarily in the Luba way. The way Palomar was, all the characters, the main characters, had equal weight. And they all looked different. So there was that, too. I was letting go of a lot when I did the Luba stuff. I was pretty much focusing on a family, and a lot of the characters looked alike, whereas in Palomar they all looked different. And I thought a lot about that, because comics is a visual medium, and it’s important to have it look like something.

Your new Palomar does look different. The drawings are a maybe a bit simpler but much more cinematic.

Well, what I’m trying to do with that, I’ve basically got the opportunity to just open up the stories visually. In the early Palomar stuff, I was just cramming in so many small panels. That was restricting, but I did my best. Basically I was trying to write a novel in each issue of Love and Rockets, and I had 15 pages! (Laughs) This time I had 32, and it was all open, and I could tell one story, about one thing happening, and just expand the visuals in a sweeping sense, you know. So basically it was an opportunity to expand and stretch.

Are you happy to be doing what looks like a happier storyline? I mean the Mark and Fritz stuff that’s in Love and Rockets now is incredibly sad, and seems to be getting sadder.

(Laughs) It’s pretty grim.

I read that your brother said he envies your ability to formulate and hold a whole 700 page story in your head, but I’ve also read that you have no idea where your stories are going. Which is it?

Probably a little bit of both. Things like that, like the Mark and Fritz story, I do think of that as a collection as I’m doing those stories. With that one, I just decided I wanted to do the story of a motivational speaker, and then threw the other elements in. It always helps to start a story off when I’m using a familiar character. Because the characters are projections of different parts of me, so it’s easier to get started that way. If I’m making up characters cold turkey, it takes me a longer time to develop them. Usually I’ll stick a familiar character into a new setting, and that’ll get me started. But what I’ll do is sometimes I’ll start it that way, and then I’ll change the character that was originally a character that had already been around. This time I stuck with it with Fritz, because I just knew what I wanted to say about her life. And so I just kept that going. But as I was moving along I thought, well, after 120 pages of this, this’ll be a nice book. So I focused on that, as it progressed, on having a story arc, and then an ending…

Where does Mark Herera come from?

Like I said, I use a lot of old characters in new settings. He was actually a character in Birdland. The porn comic, right? And, when I did Birdland, he was a type of character I’d never done before, basically you know a good-looking businessman. I just never had done that before. He became interesting to me. I just decided to hold onto him and use him as a real character.

Is Birdland the first place you introduced Fritz and Petra? I’m a little fuzzy on the relative chronology there, since it wasn’t printed in L&R. You’ve done so many different titles, the only way to figure it out is to go back and look at the publication dates.

(Laughs) This is how it works. Petra was made up at the last minute, because you have to do the covers a long time before you get started on the work, for solicitation. The cover for Birdland was supposed to be Fritz, but it didn’t look like her. So I decided “I’ll give her a sister.” Simple as that just, instantly, I’ll give her a sister.

Did you know when you were writing Birdland that they were Luba’s family?

Yeah, because Fritz had been around…she was actually the first character I made up, back when I was in my early twenties, or actually my late teens. She was the protagonist of a science fiction series I was going to do. But I lost interest in that, and at the time there were no alternative comics, really, and there was no place for it. I just lost interest in it, but I kept the character around. She pops up in the first issue of Love and Rockets, in a small cameo. She pops up in Love and Rockets here and there. But I never really had a place for her. So when I came to Birdland, I thought, well, there she is, I don’t have to make up characters, I’ve already got plenty I haven’t used yet.

Is that why in her later career she’s a science-fiction cult actress, because of that earlier story?

Yeah, yeah, I would just pull in ideas I had from the old days. But I thought, well, I can’t really stick science fiction into Palomar stories. So I just came up with this thing where she makes the films.

There is a precedent for science fiction in Love and Rockets.

In the early issues there’s plenty of that stuff, but when reader interest was more focused on the characterization, that was where we went.

Birdland has aliens in it, and the early stories have S/F in them. Did the stories like Birdland actually happen? Are they canon?

That’s just another (bursts out laughing) excuse me, but that’s kind of another dimension. It’s comics, so you can do whatever you want. But I don’t want to spoil the relative purity of the Palomar work, you know.

So you published it under a different label, different name.

Yeah, this is the character and then again it’s not. Did it happen, did it not, is it part of continuity? (laughs) Luba started out in the first issue of Love and Rockets in a complete science fiction story.

What about other characters, like Venus and Petra and Luba? Are they going to be coming back at some point?

They’re saying goodbye to Love and Rockets in issue 20, which I’m working on right now. It’s an official “we’ll see you guys later, bye-bye.” Venus is a teenager, and she visits what’s left of the cast, and that’s it. But they’re just saying goodbye to Love and Rockets in the serialized format. The serialized format is just killing me. It’s just killing comics. Because, you know, Love and Rockets and books like that, they just take a long time to come out and you just can’t have continued stories any more. The market has changed completely, with graphic novels things like that. The mainstream can do that because the comic books come out monthly, and they change artists every three months, and writers every three issues. But for alternative comics it just doesn’t work work that way.

Your fans will lose their minds if that’s the end of these characters.

Oh it’s not the end, it’s just the end of the format, really. I am going to continue their stories, but they’re going to be in self-contained short graphic novels, where I can have complete stories in one place, not serialized. That’s the best way to go now. Love and Rockets will have self-contained stories, not serialized, and not so much character driven.

Like the Roy stuff you’ve been doing lately?

Yes, because I actually have a large audience for that kind of stuff, and I hardly ever do it.

Like Fear of Comics, and books like that.

Right. That’s the kind of stuff I’m going to emphasize for now.

Where does Roy come from?

(Laughs) I just wanted to do a friendly fat-boy idiot.

Julio’s Day is ending, Me for the Future ended, Mark and Fritz just ended, and it seems like you just killed Roy again. I couldn’t help wondering as I was reading, is there something going on with Gilbert that we don’t know about?

(Laughs) No, don’t worry; Roy dies every few issues. No, for now, I’m just going to deemphasize the continuity, at least in certain areas. For the next several issues of Love and Rockets, I want to do whatever I wake up in the morning and feel like doing.

–Sean Carroll

Army@Love
By Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine
Vertigo
Depending on how susceptible they are to Fox News, readers will doubtless either be shouting “Too soon, too soon!” or “Not soon enough, not soon enough!” when they’re assaulted by the premier issue of Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine’s sharp new black-humor comic from Vertigo, Army@Love. Veitch rubbishes the idea of maintaining dignified front on “something as catastrophic as a misconceived war,” and turns a viciously satiric pen on the “Afbaghistan” conflict, imagining just how absurd it’ll be five years from now.

The formula for satire–as Veitch quotes Lenny Bruce, in the afterward to the first issue–used to be “tragedy plus time.” Not any more: There’s no more waiting twenty years for a M*A*S*H that uses one war (The Korean War) to comment on the absurdity of another (The Vietnam War). In the era of the Internet and epidemic ADD, this war is already so old most Americans (including those who started it, apparently) are already hazy as to why we even invaded. So Veitch uses this war to comment on itself.

Five years in the future, the Afbaghistan conflict is pushing the end of its first decade, and the army has had to come up with some creative troop-retention and recruitment techniques, courtesy of MoMo, the Office of Motivation and Morale. Crazed Grunts Gone Wild style “retreats” (complete with motivational guest speakers like Jenna Jameson) are a key part of MoMo’s strategy. The result is a serious attitude change, with troops treating the war more like a cross between a PS3 game and an extreme vacation, complete with a Hot Zone Club (a Mile High type club where the pointy end of the spear…makes use of the pointy ends of their spears. So to speak).

We’re only one issue into the story here, but it looks like a key factor of the ongoing series is going to be MoMo’s attempts to keep the more fun parts of the war secret from a public that “just wouldn’t understand,” and the conflict between spouses misbehaving at home and soldiers misbehaving on the front line–and the inevitable collision of these two stories.

There’s a flipflop of expectations in the first issue…the main soldier character, Switzer, is a gung-ho female national guard sharpshooter (and incidentally, the inventor of the Hot Zone Club), and it’s her husband Loman who’s stuck back in the World having an affair with Allie, the wife of MoMo official Healy; Allie is supposed to spying on Loman for Healy to see if he (Loman) knows Switzer’s cheating on him. If it all sounds a little Desperate Housewives, that’s exactly what Veitch is going for. That in itself might be a nasty little commentary that might reflect on the audience as much as on the future of the war, since it’s dollars to donuts that it’s the book’s sexy covers (and contents) that’ll sell the book to many readers—not the whole, you know, absurdity of war thing.

The real challenge for writer-penciller Veitch (and Erskine, who supplies the inks) is going to be to satirize the actual war itself. It’s unclear so far how Veitch is going to top such classic scandals as the naked Pyramid of Iraqis, the naked pictures of Lynndie England, or the naked desperation of an Army that has to double the amount of bottom-of-the-barrel dropouts, criminals, and just plain not-so-bright people it takes in, just to make its recruitment goals. What we’ve seen so far in Army@Love doesn’t seem that far-fetched a version of what the real-world war might look like in five years. In fact, except for the Desperate Housewives soapyness, it seems less ridiculous than a lot of what’s already happened. It’s unclear just what Veitch can do with a war that seems intent on lampooning itself.

Still, we’re only one 32-page book into the store so far, and Veitch is an old hand at stories that just keep building, as anyone who read his run of Swamp Thing can tell you. I’m reasonably confident he’ll get there. In the meanwhile, Veitch and Erskine’s the story and art are sharp and paced to move–fast. The first issue is mostly action, but Veitch squeezes in a good bit of exposition without being too obvious about it; I’m confident that the main plot will start unfolding (or should that be unraveling?) pretty quickly in issue two. This is definitely a series I’m going to follow.

If you like Veitch’s work and get frustrated waiting for the next issue of Army@Love to ship, you might also take a look at the long-awaited, self-published reprint of Veitch’s classic early 80s graphic novel Abraxas and the Earthman, which was serialized in Marvel’s Epic Illustrated magazine. This psychedelic take on Moby Dick is available now, and Comicon.com has a preview.

–Sean Carroll

Journey into Mohawk Country
By Messrs Van den Bogaert & O’Connor
First Second Books

Lots of comics are collaborations between artists and writers who never actually meet face to face, communicating instead via e-mail and telephone. Probably not many artists get as few notes to work with, however, as George O’Connor did on his collaboration with writer Harmen Meyndertsz Van den Bogaert, since Journey into Mohawk Country is, you see, the graphic novelization of the Dutchman’s actual journal, written in 1634-35. It seems unlikely he left O’Connor any rough layouts or character sketches.

Journey was clearly a labor of love for O’Connor, who dedicates the book to his father, “who loves the Mohawk.” It’s also a testament to First Second Books’ sticking to its mission of putting out quality books for readers of all ages and tastes. The question is, however, exactly who is Journey’s target reader? After all, it’s not often you hear someone in a comic-book store shout, “Sweet! A comic-book adaptation of an unabridged seventeenth-century travelogue! I’ve got to have this.”
Well, okay, I did–but then I’ve got a whole wall full of shelves crammed with seventeenth-century histories, diaries, and travelogues. I suspect that makes me slightly unusual. How many other comic readers are there out there like me?

O’Connor’s subject is ambitious–the diary of a young surgeon-barber’s trip from the Dutch colony at Fort Orange (which would later become the city of Albany), into the wilds of Iroquois county. His mission: to discover why the fur trade was failing, amid rumors of Mohawk treaty with the hated French. He sets out in the middle of the winter with just two companions, a small load of trade goods (awls, scissors and so on), and a few pistols. Modern readers will probably guess this leads to an adventure story along the lines of, say, Last of the Mohicans: skirmishes with the French, scalpings, forbidden love–You know, the usual. They’d be wrong.

Journey is, instead, a chunk of real period history. There’s plenty of hardship, but it mostly has to do with hiking through deep snow for days on end, fording freezing rivers on foot, getting sick, falling into campfires, and being caught outside at night. Apart from travel hazards, there’s little action. The only time the Van den Bogaert and his friends fire their guns is to entertain their hosts. Still, there are plenty of unusual occurrences (Bogaert witnesses two elaborate rituals that are bound to be as fascinating to modern readers as they were to him), and there are some hairy moments as the travelers reach new villages, unsure of the reception they’ll get.

Mostly, however, his journal is a typical, extremely dry 17^th century narrative. While it’s sometimes detailed, it leaves out most of the emotions, reactions, and drama a modern reader wants. When Van den Bogaert is trapped outside alone at night and unable to make a fire, for instance, he simply tells us that he had to keep walking all night to stay warm and leaves it at that. Anyone who’s ever been to upstate New York in early January knows that spending a winter night there in forest there with no shelter is a terrifying proposition. But what about those who haven’t?

That’s where O’Connor comes in. He’s got a real talent for putting the juices of life back into this bone-dry narrative. The two sentences Van den Bogaert gives us about being his overnight adventure translate into seven of the best pages of the book—none of which have any narration or dialog. In fact, there’s virtually no other speaker in the book except for Van den Bogaert’s journal. I think there’s one word balloon in the whole book.

For the most part, however, O’Connor tells his story quickly and efficiently, matching the pace of the journal–which often covers whole days with a few sentences –with a multitude of quick, little panels that do a lot to fill in the story between the lines. There are entire bits, gags and storylines that O’Connor has cleverly extrapolated and interpolated with the original text, adding meat to the story without upstaging or cheapening it. One of the characters, for example, seems to acquires a Mohawk bride during the course of the story—she’s never mentioned in the text, but it’s this sort of believable addition to the story that O’Connor uses to make the story live.

My problem with the book, however, is the style O’Connor chose to tell it. While he clearly did a lot research for the book, his more realistic, detailed early sketches (shown on his First Second blog page), gave way to a very cartoony style that kind of makes me think of Asterix, the Smurfs, and similar European comic/animation art. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; O’Connor’s execution is fine, and this style probably makes the book more accessible to kids.

I’m afraid, however, that while school libraries will probably be eager to acquire the book, which sounds like it’s the perfect way to get young readers interested in history, the cartoony art may not be enough to sell Van den Bogaert’s spare story to young readers who don’t already have an unusual interest in history. Adult readers, on the other hand, may wish O’Connor had stuck to his more naturalistic, detailed sketches; it’s clear that he did a lot of research for the book, it seems a shame that a lot of it gets lost in the style he chose, which is so cartoony as to sometimes lose its sense of authority.

Still, while Journey into Mohawk Country, isn’t without problems, it’s an admirable accomplishment for O’Connor—an original and unusual comic that provides a couple hours of reading, packed into a manga-sized book. Finally, if Journey is an indication of the sort of eclectic stuff we can expect from First Second’s future catalog, the new company is well worth watching.

-Sean Carroll