Flight Blues

Bluesman book one by Rob Vollmar & Pablo G. Callejo has a lot to recommend it. In art that reminds me somehow of woodcuts it tells a tale of two traveling blues musicians in the early 20th Century. It's a compelling story with interesting characters, a very real situation (grounded in research that is highlighted in the text: something that would be well worth discussing), and an intriguing structure ("a twelve bar graphic narrative in the key of life and death") also worth exploring. Its one significant drawback is that it's in three books (I think only two out so far). I should ask NBM if there is a plan for a collected edition. Otherwise it's buying three books for one text, or else trying to do something with an incomplete work, which students and I both hate.

Flight Volume 3 was everything I've come to expect, and I can readily make use of any of the Flight anthologies in almost any class. Especially in Comics as Lit, one of the Flight volumes is a great way to bring a lot of creators in for a relatively low cost. And these books continue to highlight the range of possibilities in comics. I notice that Volume 3, to some extent, moves from more conventional to more challenging stories, so when I use it, I should consider finding a break point somewhere in the middle so that we have a separate day to consider the more difficult stuff. Otherwise students may be tempted to focus solely on the more straightforward narratives.

Making Comics and more!

I've really fallen behind, here. But I have been reading:

Jeffrey Brown's Every Girl Is the End of the World for Me is an interesting little autobiographical piece. There's a lot to study for such a small book, especially in how it's drawn and laid out. Like a lot of contemporary stuff, and especially contemporary autobiographical stuff, it doesn't have much in terms of plot arc, and while it comes in as relatively cheap ($8.00), it may not add enough to justify raising the bookstore bill. But when I get to my shopping spree next month (I hope), I should pick up at least one of Brown's books to have on hand as an example, and I can still think about slipping it in.

McCloud's Making Comics deserves more than I'll have time to give it here. It's not on the list for the course--I'll use Understanding Comics at least for the first few semesters, but MC is more designed for a course in comics-creation than comics-reading. Still, there's useful stuff there, and I suspect that this volume will always be the other thing besides UC that McCloud is recognized for. (Reinventing Comics will always be the forgotten member of that trilogy, as McCloud seems to recognize.) I enjoyed reading it a lot. It's very "McCloud" in all kinds of ways, and packed with good stuff.

Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese has sprung right up to the "must use" list. If I don't put it on the syllabus in comics, I'll use it in one of my other classes. It's interesting structurally in the way three disparate stories are revealed to all be one story, it's very interesting to look at, and thematically it's timely and important. I've just got to figure out where I want to use it.

Sometime soon I should do a post in which I think through some of the "obvious choices" like Maus and Persepolis to see where I stand on them. There's only so much time in the semester, and more important, only so high I can drive the bookstore bill.

Some quick comments

Re-scanned Ancient Joe: el bizarron by C. Scott Morse. I love the mythic feel, the bold but simple lines, and the light touch. I find this book fascinating, and it's certainly a different kind of thing, but I wonder if students would be too perplexed. It's apparently intended to be a series, so there isn't complete closure, no answer to the questions posed in this first volume.

It's probably not a contender, but I read Gotham Central: Unresolved Targets (Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka, et al). It's just ironic to me that as good as the Gotham Central books are, they're still in second place in the "police procedural comics set in worlds with super-heroes" category (behind Powers). Guess it's a little like playing in the AL Central division.

The Left Bank Gang by Jason is just...something completely different. Real-world writers (Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald, etc.) in Paris in the 20s are made into anthropomorphized animal versions of themselves who make comics instead of books. They can't make a living this way, so Hemingway suggests they stage a robbery, and the book turns into a plot-twisty thriller. I don't know if I could do something with this or not, but it's a different take on comics and literature, for sure. It might be a good thing to bring into class on a day when we talk about comics re-interperetations of lit, like Kuper's doing The Jungle.

With Alex by Mark Kalesniko, the question is weighing the strong thematic content, excellent craftsmanship, and rich source of discussable stuff against the offense that some students will take. That's not much on the latter side of the scale, but I do need to remember that this is a book with a lot of authentically crude language and behavior, and a protagonist who's very, very hard to like. Part of the issue is that while I admire the skill behind this book, I just don't personally like it very much. Too bleak for my taste, and coming from a worldview that doesn't fit with mine very well.

Don't have any specific comments on Ghost of Hoppers (Jaime Hernandez) except to jot a note reminding me that I have to decide what to do about the brothers Hernandez. Is Love & Rockets 1 still available? If not, can I throw people into the middle of that soap opera somewhere and have them get it? It's not like I can just rattle off the backstory all off the top of my head.

I need to read more

I've got a couple to jot notes about, but I need to get moving. Not completely sure why I've gotten stalled--I've got lots of books I'm interested in just lying around, but I haven't been turning the pages lately. I hope for more progress this week.

Kid Eternity is written by Grant Morrison and drawn (perhaps painted?) by Duncan...um...Fegredd, if I'm reading my scrawled note correctly. The artwork is rich and creepy, but the story, like many of Morrison's, isn't very satisfying to me. He avoids ending up in postmodern limbo and at least takes the story to a conclusion, which is something. But it's supposed to be a horror story, and horror stories kind of need the lines between good and bad to be clear. But here they seemed really arbitrary, and pretty suspicious: order is bad, chaos is good. Don't we need some of each? And shouldn't the good guys be the ones who don't kill people? Not sure if this is worth a mention on a bib or not. It's got a couple of interesting bits and good art, but so do a lot of other things.

Stassen's Deogratias: a Tale of Rwanda is clearly a short-list contender. The non-linear story will challenge some readers, but the pieces all fit together to show us just how bad it was, and to illustrate how some people who set out to do right end up giving in to the pressure and becoming part of the problem. This is an important book.