Buddha 1 & 2 by Osamu Tezuka

A friend who wanted to get me into manga master Tezuka’s work gave the first two volumes of the Buddha biography to me as a birthday gift. I read each thick volume in one or two sittings.

Tezuka uses two styles to tell the Buddha’s story—a finely detailed, naturalistic style to show the lush Indian backgrounds, architectural edifices and certain animals and a big-eyed cartoon-y style for the characters in the story. It was the latter that distracted me from the story. The character treatment, while it works in the action sequences that are shoehorned in to fill out the Buddha’s world, distanced me from the characters. I felt little investment in their fates. Also, the female characters look very much alike. Tezuka depicts many of the characters topless for much of the time. Strangely, he only draws nipples for them part of the time. I can’t explain why this bugged me so much, but it did.

The dialogue is childish and stilted, which may because of the translation, but seems to be a result of trying to put modern idioms in the mouths of centuries-old characters. The relationships between the characters, especially the romantic ones are equally superficial and don’t really create any tension.

While I enjoyed the books as a way to pass time on the train and waiting in waiting rooms, I didn’t feel the urge to go out and buy the rest of the volumes. Partly this is a reaction to the price of each, even the Strand’s discount didn’t bring them under ten dollars. Ultimately, though, it was a matter of Tezuka’s lackluster character design and writing.

Tezuka is considered a master of the form and I respect that. I guess I’ll just have to see more of his work before I can decide what I think of his stuff.

Sundays 2 by various artists

Sundays 2 was made (mostly) by the men of Center for Cartoon Studies (now alums). I was very excited for this anthology and the beautiful cover only intensified the feeling. (It includes a tea cup, an easy way to my heart). The work, however, ending up being not all that exciting. Nothing was terrible, but none of the pieces stuck in my mind.

The best stuff: Joseph Lambert’s pages open and close the book and contain cute kids working out the book’s title and then getting into moose-based shenanigans. Alex Kim’s “Eagle Flight Squad 2030 A.D.” pages are great looking action adventure with a so-so story. Sean Ford’s "Waiting for Your Bro” is neat ghost story that’s only art is two yakky,cartoony ghosts. It has a surprise, sweet ending that I really liked.

Instructor JP Coovert’s “Nok tak Nok!” is a valentine to the CCSers—a nice way to end the book, but perhaps a little insidery to appeal to all readers.

I know that all these guys are working out their styles and growing as artists while we watch, and that sometimes a cartoonist just has to get work out in order to move onto the next thing. I enjoy watching the process and reading Sundays 2 is a part of that.

Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape by Sarah Manguso

This is the book that has alienated me from the library. I’ve kept it so long that I am sure there is a note in my file that, even after it is safely returned and the massive fine paid, will prohibit me from ever borrowing books of which there are only one copy in the system ever again.

It is this type of thinking that Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape inspires, and while normally I avoid catastrophizing, in order to remain a few steps away from a pit of despair, Manguso makes it almost enjoyable.

This small book of flash fiction, or prose poetry or fractured semi-autobiographical memoir, or whatever is filled with reflections on a short life lived unwell. By allowing the stories to be titled by numbers only, she creates a feeling of order, a purposeful autopsy of past events. The stories settings’ jump around in time from nursery school to college to a woodsy, cold cabin at a writer’s retreat, and Manguso set these scenes, as if by magic, in only a few words. The narrator’s voice is fully realized in its singularity and ability to find ugliness everywhere, especially inside her. Here’s a taste:

From “1”: “I want to keep myself alive so I can commit further injustices against myself, the self who has already committed such injustices against me.”

From “28”: “I find myself among unhappy people.”

From “33:” “I’m disturbed by my friends anger but more disturbed that the rules have changed, and that the change somehow escaped my notice.”

From “9,” after seeing a nursery schoolmate spill milk on herself and then getting scolded for laughing: “I study my feelings, but they are unsatisfyingly vague. I think it is a fine start, at least, to understanding what it is to be bad.”

You get the feeling that you wouldn’t want to spend time with this person, ever, so why would I recommend spending the short time it takes to read this book? Because Manguso spins these like nightmare-inducing bedtime tales and we all need to be reminded sometimes of the toll anger, fear and over-introspection can take.

The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman

After reading The King’s Last Song, (review forthcoming), I decided to see what else Geoff Ryman had to offer, especially in the SF realm. I found The Child Garden at the Strand and settled on it though copies of a few of his other books were available.

The book is set in a future, somewhat socialist, London. As I remember it, children are taken to what is basically an organic supercomputer consciousness and wiped, clean of “infection,” ostensibly, but in reality, of certain socially unacceptable aspects of their personality framed as a type of original sin. If they have any talents, the rough edges (and genius) of them are donated to the consciousness to benefit society as a whole, and the person is assigned a role in society. Children are then moved into community living situations based on their role. The main character, Milena, is an actor.

Also inhabiting the world are a handful of descendents of failed genetic modification experiments and inexplicably old full- humans who are sour and crazy with age.

The plot hinges on a somewhat dissonant aspect of Ryman’s future—homosexuality is considered one of the infections mentioned above, and is all but eradicated by the wiping process. Milena, however, has never been wiped and falls for an alcoholic, musically gifted, massively built polar girl. They have a short, tortured romance than changes everyone’s life, blah, blah, blah, space trip, blah, blah blah, and humankind’s destiny is changed!

While I liked the details of the setting, the whole love story aspect felt aggressively shoehorned in. It was distractingly bad, especially when Milena describes the physical repulsiveness of her polar girl love, which makes the whole desperateness of the attraction seem like an incredibly weak plot point. Women do require some sex appeal to be attracted, something Ryman conveniently forgets to move his story along.

A Journey Around My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy

This illness memoir was a delightful surprise from New York Review of Books. I was intrigued by the synopsis- 1930s Hungarian writer gets brain tumor and survives to write about it. The intro by Oliver Sacks is lively and shows a deep connection with Karinthy’s text, both as an observer of mental weirdness and as a writer. The translation seems a bit aggressively British sometimes, (too many see heres and old chaps), but seems to catch the voice of the author overall.

Chapter one, “The Invisible Train,” all six pages of it, is fun reading. With a teasing tone, Karinthy describes a day in the life of a working writer, while also telling the story of his first experience with the symptoms of a brain tumor. “And at that moment the trains started. Punctually to the minute, at ten past seven, I heard the first one.”

Karinthy structures the story of his illness in long anecdotes that often end with a wry take on unpleasant situations. These sections, which comprise the first two-thirds of the book, remind me of Mark Twain’s stories. You know that you’re being set up for something during the long descriptive passages and meandering asides and I find that fact to be charmingly old-timey. Less musty are Karinthy’s descriptions of his friends and family. I especially like how he talks about his son Cini (aka writer Ferenc Karinthy) and describes using the child for feedback on his newest pet theories like “a scientist experimenting with a test rabbit,” Cini in Vienna for the first time “manfully” concealing his excitement and “[hunting] about like a puppy in one of Jack London’s novels, and remembered the events of his father’s lifetime as well as his own.” When Karinthy writes about his second wife, a psychiatrist living in Vienna while he stayed in Pest, with fondness, some of the creativeness of this memoir becomes apparent; in actuality their marriage wasn’t very happy (well, according to wikipedia anyway).

This book made me reflect on the influence early psychiatry had on art and medicine in the years before this book was written and our continuing helplessness when it comes to many brain malfunctions. In the chapter “A Meeting by a Death-bed,” Karinthy describes the condition of a patient in the asylum where his wife works. It is pretty bleak, since at the time all the professionals could do for him was keep him sort of comfortable. When Karinthy shows interest in his case, his wife says, “ ‘Now, look here, how many times have I told you to not to show you’re sorry for the patient? It isn’t done. You might be causing him no end of harm.’ ” Chilling!

Late in the book he describes getting his head cut open and his brains mucked about, “these fumblings and creakings, gratings and clicks”—no small feat no matter how observant one is. “More terrifying than any pain was the fact that my position seemed impossible.” And it is the exploration of that impossibility that really made me pull through the final few chapters, as ellipses-filled as they were, to get to that final train ride and thank yous and waves goodbye.

Dori Stories by Dori Seda and others

I went in search of Dori’s work about one second after seeing this picture on Mary Fleener’s convention blog. When I saw her gap-toothed smile and wild eyes, I just had to know more. From the gushing remembrances of her by friends and colleagues that fill this book, I gather that she tended to have that effect on people.

This is more than a collection of Seda’s comics, it is a memorial to the woman she was and a patch for the giant hole she left in her friends’ lives when she died. The essays, personal photos and memorial comics dedicated to her, bring so much background and depth to Seda’s story that when you finally get to her comics there is a weight and sadness that she never intended.

Like her much more famous male antecedents in the alternative comics world, Seda’s comics are sex n drugs-filled, a bit cartoony and portray a world long-gone where making comics could actually allow a hedonist to scrape by. Her art is lush, heavy on the blacks and quite detailed. Her auto bio comics are filled with filthy living, sloppy sex and being poor. Persona and personality are almost inextricable here, but in her stories about her dog Tona, Seda’s capacity for love and affection (mentioned in some of her friends’ writing about her) shines through all the fishnets and leather. Her fictional work is sex-filled as well, with a bit of horror thrown in. Also included are a few picture stories from Weirdo magazine where Dori plays vixen with other cartoon greats in “Foto Funnies” stories such as “Slaves of the Comic Book Factory” and “Girls Turned Into Vibrator Zombies”; everyone really looks like they are having fun, especially Dori, despite all we learn about Seda’s health problems and wild self-disregard. Was her look being exploited? Yes. Did she seem to care? Not really.

The final comic in the book is by Leslie Sternbergh and chronicles a meeting with Seda’s willfully hindering mother to sort out Dori’s legacy. Sternbergh’s detailed drawing blurs a bit gray in this sad and frustrating story. The haze is appropriate—the only things that become clear in this comic is how Seda got her famous smile and where she picked up smoking. Sigh, parents. “Dori was ours,” said Olga. “Dori was Dori’s,” said Leslie (and the reader). Dori’s perspective on her family’s attitude towards her life, told with a light, tongue-in-cheek touch, can be found in the story “How My Family Encouraged me to Become an Artist.” You get the feeling that her mother’s refusal to allow her work to be printed after her death would almost have been enough to force Seda to burst from the grave and freak everybody out all over again.

Dori’s work simply left me wanting more. I wonder what her place would have been in the comics-drenched world of today. That’s the thing about early death; it robs the world of a proper ending. This book is “the Complete Dori Seda,” and it's just not enough.

Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner

Turns out I really wanted to read My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist . Whoops.

The first time I read this book, I was a young teenager. My mom got it for me at a thrift store. Occasionally she would do something like this, and the books always ended up being crazy and making an impression. (Another example: Neuromancer). All the sex, drugs and brand names in Et Tu, Babe, along with the fantastically narcissistic protagonist totally blew my mind when I was 13 or whatever, but upon rereading it just seemed like breakneck speed mediocrity.

For a quick reread however, it was a fun, if ultimately disappointing, blast from the past.

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand

Though it's from Small Beer Press, Generation Loss is not a fantasy novel even by SBP’s loose (and wonderful) standards. Instead, it is a meditation on artists, specifically artists who go to extremes to complete their vision.

The main character, Cass, is an NYC throwback to punk nights passing out, shooting up and night clubbing—kind of a Nan Goldin type, except more lone wolf. Her photography, while respected is merely a footnote and with her stank walk-up and graying hairs, her career is that of a never-was. “But for the rest of your life you’re fucked, because you blew it. Maybe no one else knows it, but you do. In my case, it was no secret. Some people can make do in a situation like that. Me, I’ve never been good at making do.”

So, yeah, it’s in first person, and Cass’s voice can occasionally grates (mostly when Hand uses some tough-guy attitude to couch exposition). Mostly though, Hand’s characterizations are quite thorough. Her exploration of two types of outsiders—artists and the people in their worlds (unhappy children and partners, crazies, hangers on), and Mainers (ex-hippies, trapped kids and xenophobic natives) is what, even more than the tense mystery, drove the novel for me. Hand juxtaposes the setting’s natural beauty with the ruin that humans bring so deftly it becomes almost another character.

As for the mystery, which takes us from a boring present-day NYC to a remote community in Maine, its pretty good. Presented as a chance for Cass to make some money (and maybe a stab at a piece of art-celebrity) by nabbing an interview a reclusive photographer, her trip to Maine and the search for the artist in question becomes increasingly sinister. As Cass gets drawn into the mystery of Aphrodite Kamestos’ hermitude and disintegration, a different unpleasantness rocks the local community—the disappearance of a girl. The two are linked, of course, but the connection unfolds very delicately until the big reveal, which doesn’t disappoint.

If you are looking for a atmospheric mystery, and a window into a weird part of America, get Generation Loss now.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Yum. Fingersmith is the perfect book for a rainy night or a long train ride. In fact, I was facing a somber, book-less and long train ride with no book when I bought Fingersmith from a depressingly unpopulated (by people or good books) store in D.C.’s Union Station. Just buying it relaxed me enough to cause a ride-long slumber.

When I finally picked it up a few weeks later, I took it on a trip to Philly. All I knew about Sarah Waters was that she wrote historical mysteries with lesbians and that she was sufficiently creative to have her books shelved in the regular fiction section. Upon diving in what is essentially the story of a long con played out by multiple characters, I was worried that the instances of dialect (i.e. old-timey British) would become annoying, but Waters managed to stay on the enriching side of that fine line most of the time. Best word: “fuckster.”

Oh my, you may thinking, that doesn’t sound old-timey to me. Well, Waters’ tale is not only set in seething dens of poverty and vice, but it is filled with crossing and double-crossing, greed and secrets. There are plenty of fucksters about in Fingersmith; in fact, the very structure of the novel underlines that. The two young, female, main characters are both the authors and victims of their own destruction and each tells her story in a well-controlled first person. Though the story she weaves is twisted, somehow Waters’ manages to keep it fast-paced and realistic enough to keep the tension running high.

Even when things get bleak, and they do, this book is incredibly fun.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Mathematicians as monks, monasteries as think tanks, an unsophisticated and somewhat hostile outside world and an unknown menace. Who do you think will save the day?

If you don’t already like Neal Stephenson’s sprawling novels, Anathem will not endear you to his style. It is crazy long, full of asides and borderline-annoying lingo and the main character suffers from the same two conditions of many of Stephenson’s protagonists—everymanism and right-place-right-timeitis. And while it does get a little irksome to read follow the actions of a character ruled by other people’s actions and beset by “quirky” supporting characters. There is a bit of superficial commentary on government, race and religion but where Stephenson’s dedication to research really shines is his masterful transformation of geometry theory into a workable religious concept. The time travel element in the book was a nice surprise and an important addition to stories on the topic.

I was worried that it wouldn’t come together, but I was really pleased at the result of the author’s creative sweating. You can really tell that he is having fun with his writing and the joy that comes through in his books goes a long way to ameliorate his in-your-face zeal for nerdy intricacies. There are footnotes, my friends.

The only times I start to get exasperated with his style is when he insists on adding love story plotlines. They are awful, and the ground he gained with writing believable female characters in the Baroque Cycle seems to have been reclaimed by the dark side of geekdom. He practically trips over himself to show that the ladies are powerful, tough and in control, especially in romance. It’s condescending and annoying. Whenever characters start making eyes at each other I start to skim and there are two major instances of this in Anathem. Luckily in a book this long there are plenty of other things to focus on.

Freddie & Me: A Coming of Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody by Mike Dawson

Being a mid-level Queen fan and a lover of autobio comics, Freddie & Me seemed like a can’t-miss book. And Dawson’s wonderful black and white art certainly supports the theory that this book is worth having. His masterful control over the aging of the characters is up there with the Hernadezes, and cartoonists looking for a lesson in realistically following a character through years would do well to check out this book. Dawson’s depiction of his art’s maturation is also very well done. Lastly, Queen and Freddy Mercury look as cool and alien as they were and life just pours from the page when they, or Mike impersonating Freddy, are in frame. (The Wham! guys, in a delightful fictional aside, also come across as really real, pop bouffants and all).

The problem is in the story itself. Dawson’s instances of Queen-worship and adjustment to growing up and moving to America lack tension and never coalesce into a real narrative. Sadly, how the two elements inform each other is never fully established emotionally for the reader. Queen’s music is so dramatic that the tedium of Dawson’s telling of his story is unfortunately highlighted in bright red and underlined in glitter pen.

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

The first few chapters of this book were delicious. There, the book is the story of two boy cousins, whose lives after a terrible prank caused unfortunate adulthoods, deciding to renovate a castle full of mysteries, and it really works. Throughout the book’s chapters it was this story thread that I looked forward to. Egan’s ghost story (I am using this term loosely) had tantalizing details and a sense of trickery about it, but all along I had a gnawing feeling that the end would not be satisfying and the enchantment would fall apart. Too bad I was right!

A few chapters in a we get a prison writing class, a group of cons, a sweet teacher named Holly and the question “‘Which one of these clowns is you?’” which felt like a giant ham thrown onto a delicately laid plate of sushi. Egan dances around unreliable narration and perspective, but because the result was a bit clumsy, I felt no compulsion to watch her steps. The character of Ray, the prisoner, writer, and first-person narrator, is a bit too introspective to be believable, even though he is supposed to be an outsider to prison, a man who did a single catastrophic thing. I was able ignore most of the characterization slipups in the face the work done on his interior world and Egan’s exploration of the heavily regulated realm of prison through him. Ray’s story works ok until the inevitable escape plan, and the addition of a Magical Negro character named Davis makes an already cliched plot twist even more grating.

The third part of the book adds an additional perspective that it didn’t need. Once again the tables are turned and we see the prison narrative from the view of Holly (the aforementioned teacher and victim of POV burnout)—what she thinks of Ray, the effect of his actions on her, perceptions turned on their heads and all that. I think Holly’s story would have worked well as a related novella because Egan gives her such a great back story but here it feels tacked-on for extra credit.

The Keep is ambitious and I like that. I don't regret the $1.85 and the few hours I spent. I just wish that all of the elements had been equally compelling and that an nice, but strict, editor had shown Egan the business end of her red pen.

Edited to add: Wanna know where I got such a deal? Here, where I also got this.

The Seas by Samantha Hunt

An unreview brought to you by waiting too long:

I don’t remember much of The Seas except the feeling of being set adrift in a story where sometimes detail was lost in favor of atmosphere. Damp, gauzy and shifting are my memories of reading this--enjoyable, but not enough to reread for this review.

Once I don’t feel so Tesla-ed out, I will pick up her newer book, The Invention of Everything.

Lone Racer by Nicholas Mahler

I got this at a bookswap last year. This little tale of love and loss and car racing from Top Shelf charmed quite a few critics, but not me. Maybe it was the lack of humanity imparted by the character design or the fact that I couldn't force myself to care about the sad sack main character's plight that kept me from enjoying it. Maybe plot-light mid-life crisis stories just don't do it for me right now.

Maybe I shouldn't write anymore about it!

The Brief History of the Dead: a novel by Kevin Brockmeier

This handsomely jacketed book was an enjoyable romp through the world’s last days, but falls just short of a truly memorable experience because of a few missteps. The book opens with this quote from James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me:
“Many African societies divide humans in to three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, whi can call them to mind, create their likenesses in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, the ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead…. Many… can be recalled by name. But they are not the living dead. There is a difference.”
What follows is an exploration of that idea, but one that holds very, very closely with what is described in the quote. Maybe that’s why even with the great writing and inventive plotting that goes into Brockmeier’s story of a dying world and its effect on the afterworld, I couldn’t do more than like it.

Despite not falling in love, I think that there are two things make The Brief History worthwhile: Brockmeier’s take on the afterlife and some element of apocalypse. The afterlife reminds me of a less depressing version of the post-suicide world of Pizzeria Kamikaze. Life after death has similar routines and obligations as being alive and where a dead soul ends up is more of a transition place before oblivion or another unknowable state. My favorite about The Brief History’s afterlife is that there is a newspaper run by a man who can’t stop investigating, even after he loses his readers (and his life).

The apocalypse is experienced by two worlds in this book, which spruces up a somewhat clichéd cause of annihilation. What I like even more is that the dead and the living are kept from the true circumstances of their situation by unimaginable events, a great premise that in this instance needed a bit more tension to have maximum impact on the reader. Because of the opening quote the only real tension is supplied by wondering how long it will take for the characters to figure out what the reader already knows—a risky gambit that didn’t work in the book’s favor.

Akin to the lack of plot tension, the book is also missing a sense of challenging this reality to enhance the one the author created. This apocalypse goes down a bit too easy.

Now, whose copy of this did I borrow? Amy Ambulette’s maybe? You can have it back now. (Yeah right! Amy doesn't read blogs anymore!)

No One Tells Everything by Rae Meadows

A tragic past, a series of quirks and a drinking problem does not a character make. Ok? Ok.

While this book was not terrible, it was nowhere near the deep, psychological novel that the author seemed to be going for. The workings of the plot were transparent, the setting barely a sketch and, as above, the characters, especially the main one and her bartender BFF were barely there.

This was from a group of books for review I got in 2008 that I finished, but couldn’t find enough to say about to really review. I’m not sure why I put this one on tryharder’s list, but there you go.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Oh man, I really liked this book. I bought it on a stressful day of medical tests, where I knew that waiting room stretches would require more distraction than staring at all the fellow waiters and trying to figure out what they were in for.

Though fairies and magic are not my usual things, there are many aspects of Clarke’s giant novel that are. First of all it is huge. When I decide to immerse myself in another world, I like that feeling to last for a long time. Secondly, it contains many, many references to and quotes from equally realized books that are as much of an invention as the main story. I love excerpts from fake books as a device to deepen and expand a story. Thirdly, it is not exactly a fantasy story; it is more like an alternate history where magic and fairies influenced important battles, as well as having a long and lost history of their own.

The story concerns the state of magic in England, which in 1806 where the book opens, is quite dismal. “Gentleman-magicians” had clubs where they discussed the history and minutia of magic, but never, never practiced it. Street magicians performed conjuring tricks and were looked down upon by all serious (i.e. non-practicing) magicians. With the discovery of a magician who both practices and has nice clothes, England goes magic crazy.

Surprisingly the two main characters, Norrell and Strange, magicians, are not very interesting. The effects of their relationship on the secondary characters is much more compelling, as are those characters. You’d think that this would unbalance the narrative but it doesn’t. In fact, this characteristic is familiar from gigantor 19th century novels I’ve read and since Clarke uses the language and conventions of such book, it feels right, though it may cause you to skim a few parts.

I love the fairies as Clarke presents them. They are arrogant, beautiful and basically psychopaths. No sense of right and wrong, only what feels good. They have fractious, warring families, they think nothing of sweeping humans into their world for an evening (or hundreds of years) and they love parties. I was also intrigued by Faerie, the realm. It is a parallel world, reached through established means (such as long-disused faerie roads) or, more frighteningly for humans, by accident or the whim of a fairy. Often a visitor can’t tell that they have crossed into Faerie until something unusual happens, and sometimes not even then. I like this notion, as I often feel adrift in other realms during different parts of my day. Right now I am in Needs To Take A Shower. It stinks here!

There are a few stumbles in the many pages of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, mostly from not-quite-successful attempts at humor. These missteps are very few and far between though and don’t detract from the book overall.

My copy included illustrations by Portia Rosenberg that are simply awful. That, paired with the shoddy binding and Bible-thin pages made this not the best buy in terms of book longevity, but the many hours I spent with it have more than made up for that.

pistolwhip by Matt Kindt and Jason Hall

Radio, murder and noirish temporal shenanigans await you in pistolwhip. Dames, detectives and a mysterious violinist populate this mystery—the sort of characters I can get into on a foggy day—but for some reason I just couldn’t engage with this story. Usually I am up for a spot of metafiction-y mindfuck, (here the seemingly straight forward drawn story is interspersed with a radio scripts that become increasingly to seem that they are driving the action), so I don’t think it was the structure of the story that threw me out of the book. As much as I don’t want to say it, the distracting factor in pistolwhip is the art.

Matt Kindt’s long strokes, while adding fluid movement to his work, end up making my eye do more work than it wants to. His cartoony characters can look quite different from panel to panel and that made it really hard for me to instantly be able to place the action in the story from page to page. Often just a single characteristic like a hat or hairstyle differentiates lets you know who’s who from page to page. This was a huge problem for me in 2 Sisters, which I couldn’t even finish. In pistolwhip the characters are a lot more distinct but didn’t seem to fit with the dark and dirty feel of the story.

I’ll probably try to read it some other time, but this is not a book for when you’re easily distracted.

I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason

I picked this up in the bookstore on 30th St. Station on a trip back up from Philadelphia. I was surprised at the availability of good comics there, but not so much by the 15-year-old screecher that rung me up. “Hitler?!?!? Yo that shit is fucked up!?!?” You are right, my boy, Hitler is indeed fucked up, but in this book, he is not really any more twisted as the hit man-hiring folks of Jason’s world.

In this case the world in an alternate present Berlin where people pay to bump off others for the slightest social misstep. It begins with the most delightfully nasty two pages, a reminder that though Jason’s characters are cat and dog people, they are imbued with the singular human perversity. The main character is one of this society’s contract killers and he’s good at his job. In a surprising and subtle emotional moment for this surreal noir, the unnamed killer goes to a bar for a beer and is approached by a former client, a rather downtrodden dogman. After he introduces himself as a man who had his wife killed by our killer four years before, he launches into this:
“As for me, I got married to this other woman I’d been seeing. We’re very happy. Well, we were happy… Lately, it’s more like… We get up, we have breakfast, and I see this look in her eyes. I know what it means. I’ve seen it before.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I am telling you this. You just wanted to have your beer. I’m sorry.”

“I guess I’d better just go home, get it over with. Wish me luck.”

When our killer gets a contract to kill Hitler, he barely blinks. Then he gets into a time machine that looks like an old timey dive helmet and gets prepared to whack the Furher. After a failed attempt, things get temporally wacky. Jason handles this aspect of the story very well by giving a constriction to the time travel—the machine takes 50 years to charge. Hitler appears as an opportunistic scoundrel, not evil but merely there at the right time and place. The search for him frames what turns out to be a really sober, but intriguing story about the relationship between the killer and his bobbed ladyfriend from the first WTF pages, as well as a meditation on time. I am not usually all that keen to read such things, but Jason is that good. I should also mention that Kim Thompson’s translation is perfectly seamless and creates a mood that seems to be exactly what was intended.

Jason’s art is precise and evocative as usual, despite his characters only having empty spaces for eyes. I really enjoyed Hubert’s coloring; the matte, solid colors give the story a faded-slideshow effect that I loved.

The one flaw: it’s too short. Actually its not, but I tend to feel this way about all Jason’s book. Though all the novelettes I’ve read of his are perfectly edited, maintain perfect tension and fulfill their plots, there are always little avenues that I wish could be expanded to satisfy my curiosity. In this book, it’s the back-story of the time machine inventor and the details of the alternate Berlin pre- and post-Hitler’s murder. I hope that one day Jason lets one of his stories sprawl beyond its borders. I’d like to see what emerges from the sloppy edges.

House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O'Brien

A million years ago I read Lust by Edna O’Brien and really liked it. I picked it randomly off of a mezzanine shelf at the main library in Philadelphia because of her first name and the one-word title. Twas quite romantic, but I used to be that kind of gal.

At a bookswap last year I picked up House of Splendid Isolation and stuck it on a shelf for later. When I finally got around to it boy was I disappointed. Whatever feeling of luscious language and tension I associated with O’Brien has disappeared with reading House of Splendid Isolation. It’s not that the book was horrible or anything, it just didn’t add anything to the elements it presented: growing older, being a woman in old age, the IRA, betrayal by politics and revolution.

Flat.