Salon.com > Douglas Wolk http://www.salon.com Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:25:54 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Archie Comics’ gay turn: An explainer http://www.salon.com/2010/04/24/archie_comic_book/ http://www.salon.com/2010/04/24/archie_comic_book/#comments Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/04/24/archie_comic_book The reaction to Thursday's announcement that Archie Comics' Riverdale High would now include a gay student was as predictable as, well, an Archie Comics plot: hand-wringing and high-fiving, raised eyebrows and rolled eyes. Veronica No. 202 (cover caption: "Meet the Hot New Guy!"), written and drawn by veteran Archie artist Dan Parent, will introduce slender, blond Kevin Keller. From the few pages of the story released so far, it appears Parent is treating Kevin's orientation as a surprise but not a shock: The hot new guy is being pursued by Veronica but has no interest in her, Jughead advises him that she's pretty persistent, and Kevin declares that "it's nothing against her! I'm gay!" To which Jughead's immediate reaction is deciding to to wait and let Veronica figure it out for herself, and the plot goes on.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/04/24/archie_comic_book/feed/ 82 Cats behaving badly http://www.salon.com/2008/10/03/onstad/ http://www.salon.com/2008/10/03/onstad/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:32:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/10/03/onstad The funniest comic strip currently running doesn't appear in any newspapers. Until very recently, Chris Onstad's 7-year-old "Achewood" -- a warped fantasia about a bunch of anthropomorphic animals getting into trouble -- was almost entirely an online phenomenon. Onstad has self-published nine collections of the strip, but "The Great Outdoor Fight," a hardcover edition of a story line from 2006, is the first "Achewood" book to be widely distributed, and it suggests that the native format of the American daily strip is shifting, very quickly, from newspapers to the Internet.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/10/03/onstad/feed/ 11 A thousand and one knights http://www.salon.com/2008/07/19/batman_comics/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/19/batman_comics/#comments Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:38:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2008/07/19/batman_comics There's no such thing as a "definitive version" of Batman in comics, movies or anywhere else. He's a corporate property and a cash cow, so there are a few things that are set in stone about him: the cape, the urban setting, the millionaire-playboy alter ego. Beyond those premises, there are as many interpretations of Batman as there have been creators who've worked on his stories -- which makes the question of whether Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" is "faithful" to its source beside the point. Still, Nolan has dropped the ball on one of the most compelling ideas comic books have established about Gotham City's most famous resident: that his heroism doesn't come from his batarangs and right hook, but from his magnificent, brooding mind.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/19/batman_comics/feed/ 51 The end of men http://www.salon.com/2008/07/14/last_man/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/14/last_man/#comments Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:51:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/07/14/last_man The wittiest, most entertaining story about gender in recent memory has just reached its conclusion. This month, writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra released "Whys and Wherefores," the 10th and final volume collecting their surprise-hit comic book series "Y: The Last Man." On its surface, "Y" is a science-fiction epic and a coming-of-age story, with a touch of romance thrown in; read it a little more deeply, though, and it becomes a dead-on satire about the screwed-up gender issues of the world we know.

As "Unmanned," the first volume of "Y," begins, almost every man, boy and other male mammal on the planet has abruptly dropped dead in a single instant. Only two beings with Y chromosomes have been spared, for reasons unknown: Yorick Brown, a 22-year-old amateur escape artist, and his pet Capuchin monkey, Ampersand. At the moment of the disaster, Yorick is in Brooklyn, talking on the phone to his girlfriend Beth in the Australian outback, and they're cut off just as he proposes marriage to her; the rest of the series is Yorick's adventures as he travels the post-catastrophe world for the next five years, trying to find her again.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/14/last_man/feed/ 47 How to be a comic book hero http://www.salon.com/2008/06/19/cartooning/ http://www.salon.com/2008/06/19/cartooning/#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/06/19/cartooning It's hard to imagine two worthwhile books on the same subject more different than Jessica Abel and Matt Madden's "Drawing Words and Writing Pictures" and Lynda Barry's "What It Is," both of which are nominally about how to make marks that turn into stories. (One of them is in comics form, and the other one is focused on how to make comics.) The process of making art is mysterious, though, and it's a mystery that deserves multiple explanations -- even contradictory explanations.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/06/19/cartooning/feed/ 2 “The Rabbi’s Cat” http://www.salon.com/2008/05/07/sfar/ http://www.salon.com/2008/05/07/sfar/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 10:53:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/05/07/sfar In the Algiers of the '30s, a nameless, scrawny gray cat belonging to a cheerful old rabbi, Abraham Sfar, eats the rabbi's parrot and discovers that he can talk. The cat loves the rabbi's daughter, Zlabya, and the rabbi is uncomfortable with the talking cat hanging around her: he'd better study the Torah and the Talmud, lest he give her bad ideas.

That's the premise that begins the French cartoonist Joann Sfar's graphic novel series "Le chat du rabbin." (The first three volumes were collected in English in 2005 as "The Rabbi's Cat"; the fourth and fifth have just appeared as "The Rabbi's Cat 2.") The joy of the series, though, is that it hasn't quite stuck with that setup. Instead, it has become a loose, playful exploration of a lost moment in Jewish culture, riffing on the Sfar family's history and drifting freely between precise historical details, enthusiastic tall tales and meditations on what it means to live as a person of faith in a world that doesn't share it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/05/07/sfar/feed/ 5 Comic relief http://www.salon.com/2008/05/02/free_comics_2008/ http://www.salon.com/2008/05/02/free_comics_2008/#comments Fri, 02 May 2008 10:26:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/05/02/free_comics_2008 This Saturday, May 3, is the seventh Free Comic Book Day -- an annual tradition in which comic book stores around the country give away free stuff, host creator signings, put things on sale, and generally encourage merrymaking. (To find a store near you that's participating in FCBD, see this site.) As usual, both major and independent comics publishers are publishing special issues that will be given away in stores -- 41 different titles in all, although not all participating stores carry all of them, and most stores have a limit of a few freebies per customer.

This is a big week for American comics in general -- it's no accident that Free Comic Book Day falls on the day after the "Iron Man" movie's opening, and superhero buffs may also want to snag a copy of "DC Universe Zero," a 50-cent special that came out this Wednesday. For that matter, a few independent publishers have arranged to distribute giveaways this weekend outside of the FCBD system: Keep an eye out for "Diamond Comics" and "Nerd Burglar."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/05/02/free_comics_2008/feed/ 6 War goes graphic http://www.salon.com/2008/02/21/shanower/ http://www.salon.com/2008/02/21/shanower/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:57:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/02/21/shanower When you first glance at writer/artist Eric Shanower's graphic novel series "Age of Bronze," it's hard to guess when it was drawn. It's actually a current work in progress, but Shanower's a classicist, in several senses. His meticulous, fine-lined pen-and-ink work owes a lot to the nearly photo-realist cartooning of the 1940s and '50s, and to the minutely rendered textures and details of early-20th-century book illustration. The subject of "Age of Bronze," though, is literally classical: It's an enormous, all-inclusive history of the Trojan War, the decade-long conflict between the Achaeans and the residents of Troy that's inspired countless artworks over the last few thousand years.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/02/21/shanower/feed/ 28 Graphic appeal http://www.salon.com/2007/12/17/graphic_novels/ http://www.salon.com/2007/12/17/graphic_novels/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/awards/2007/12/17/graphic_novels It has been a banner year for graphic novels, and although Salon reviewed some of the highlights (the conclusion of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's serial thriller "Death Note," Brian Chippendale's overwhelming experimental book "Ninja," Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's long-awaited "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier"), there were plenty of other excellent new volumes of comics. This year also saw a mountain of fancy collections of vintage cartooning -- following the success of the Seth-designed "Peanuts" reprints and art-object books like "Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!" the earliest years of strips from "Dick Tracy" to "Mutt & Jeff" are turning up as deluxe hardcovers. Here are a dozen notable books that would look just fine under an appropriate tree.

"The Salon" by Nick Bertozzi (St. Martin's Griffin)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/12/17/graphic_novels/feed/ 14 Who are those unmasked men? http://www.salon.com/2007/11/24/alan_moore/ http://www.salon.com/2007/11/24/alan_moore/#comments Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:36:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/11/24/alan_moore Years before its publication, Alan Moore described "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier" as "not my best comic ever, not the best comic ever, but the best thing ever. Better than the Roman civilisation, penicillin ... and the human nervous system. Better than creation. Better than the big bang. It's quite good."

The third volume in his "League" series with artist Kevin O'Neill is indeed not Moore's best comic ever -- it doesn't have the emotional force or formal coherence of "Watchmen" or "Lost Girls" or "V for Vendetta," and it doesn't pretend to. But there's a certain kind of hyper-referential cleverness at which nobody else is even in Moore's, well, league -- a knitting together of other people's creations into a Grand Unified Theory of the cultural imagination -- and "Black Dossier" is the apotheosis of fan-fiction, a dumbfounding mash-up of pop culture and pulp entertainment.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/11/24/alan_moore/feed/ 8 Death strip http://www.salon.com/2007/07/26/death_note/ http://www.salon.com/2007/07/26/death_note/#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2007 11:34:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/07/26/death_note Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's graphic novel series "Death Note" (whose 12th and final volume has just been published in the U.S.) is an existential horror story about the capriciousness of death. It's also fantastically addictive summer beach reading: a rocket-paced, cheerfully convoluted thriller about a psychotic, nearly omnipotent teenage serial killer -- who's the good guy, more or less -- and his nemesis, the world's greatest detective, who's also a teenage boy, and spends a good chunk of the story handcuffed to him. The series is a bestseller in Japan, where it has spawned a hit two-part live-action movie adaptation and an animated series, and it has been building up a cult following in America, too. (Meanwhile, Beijing has banned the "Death Note" books as "illegal terrifying publications.")

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/07/26/death_note/feed/ 12 Comics fans, grow up! http://www.salon.com/2007/06/23/reading_comics/ http://www.salon.com/2007/06/23/reading_comics/#comments Sat, 23 Jun 2007 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/06/23/reading_comics It's frustrating to love comics, because there's so much cultural baggage that goes along with loving them. The blessing and curse of comics as a medium is that there is such a thing as "comics culture." The core audience of comics is really into them: we know that Wednesdays are the day when new issues appear in the stores, we populate endless Web sites and message boards, we preserve our comics with some degree of care even if we think of ourselves as "readers" rather than "collectors." A few times a year, we congregate at conventions of one kind or another. (The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival -- which is happening this weekend in New York City -- is one of our Sundances, where small-press and independent publishers display their wares; Wizard World Chicago is where the superhero buffs go; Comic-Con International, held in San Diego at the end of July, is where everybody goes.) We gravitate to our kind.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/06/23/reading_comics/feed/ 61 Opus day! http://www.salon.com/2007/06/03/breathed_3/ http://www.salon.com/2007/06/03/breathed_3/#comments Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/06/03/breathed It's been almost 18 years since "Bloom County" ended, but Berkeley Breathed is still cartooning full speed ahead. He made his name with that Pulitzer Prize-winning 1980-89 daily comic strip; since then, he's left and returned to the comics page twice (first with "Outland," more recently with "Opus"), sticking to full-color Sunday strips that give his artwork more room to stretch. Breathed has also branched out into other media -- especially children's books, beginning with "A Wish for Wings That Work" in 1991. His latest book for kids, "Mars Needs Moms!" unveils his new all-digital art style. It's the story of young Milo, who shares his name not only with a "Bloom County" character but with Breathed's own son. Milo doesn't see what's so special about his tyrannical, vegetable-obsessed mother until she's kidnapped by Martians; he follows them to Mars, where he discovers not only how useful a mother can be, but that his own mom is willing to sacrifice more for him than he'd ever realized.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/06/03/breathed_3/feed/ 55 Steal this comic http://www.salon.com/2007/05/05/free_comics/ http://www.salon.com/2007/05/05/free_comics/#comments Sat, 05 May 2007 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/05/05/free_comics Five years ago, the weekend that the first Spider-Man movie came out, the American comics industry launched an experiment: Free Comic Book Day, in which thousands of comic book specialty stores around the country gave away comics to readers young and old. It worked out well enough that it's become an annual tradition, and this Saturday, May 5, is the sixth Free Comic Book Day. Almost every major comics publisher in the country has at least one free title this year, as well as plenty of smaller publishers; the mainstream and indie presses don't always see eye-to-eye, but they've all found that giving away samples is good for business.

This year's FCBD coincides with National Cartoonists' Day and the opening of "Spider-Man 3," and lots of stores are also planning signings and other events. The crop of handouts includes 43 different comics, although most stores will only let you pick out a few of them; some of the free comics are particularly kid-friendly, others aren't kid-friendly at all, and some are a lot better than others. (This page is a useful resource to find the nearest store that's participating in the giveaway.) Here's a quick overview of what's available this year, sorted by category.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/05/05/free_comics/feed/ 8 “Ninja” http://www.salon.com/2007/02/14/chippendale/ http://www.salon.com/2007/02/14/chippendale/#comments Wed, 14 Feb 2007 12:33:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/02/14/chippendale When Brian Chippendale was in sixth grade, he drew a bunch of little one- and two-page comic strips about a ninja doing ninja things -- clobbering bad guys with his massive ninja skills, running and hiding, collecting treasures from his exploits and bringing them back to his secret headquarters. ("And that's the end of another mission," most of them conclude.) The strips had a whole lot of panels on each page, but he drew all the characters at tiny scale, with basically no backgrounds. Then, in the middle of the 12th one, he lost interest, and left the rest of the final page blank.

Eighteen years later, Chippendale had become a professional artist, semi-famous as the drummer/vocalist of the unbelievably loud and spazzy rock duo Lightning Bolt, and one of the leading lights of Fort Thunder, an artistic collective and artists' space in Providence, R.I., that was torn down in 2001 and replaced by a grocery store's parking lot. Over the course of five years, he went back to his old ninja comics and "finished" them -- building the physically huge 120-page graphic novel "Ninja" around his sixth-grade project. (The original strips appear near the beginning of the book, with some new pages interleaved to flesh them out.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/02/14/chippendale/feed/ 2 “I Yam What I Yam!” http://www.salon.com/2006/12/09/popeye/ http://www.salon.com/2006/12/09/popeye/#comments Sat, 09 Dec 2006 16:05:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/12/09/popeye It's a very good time for aficionados of classic newspaper comics -- the great strips that have spent decades out of print, or have never been collected in the first place, are finally being reprinted in nicely designed editions. Fantagraphics' exquisite chronological volumes of Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" and George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" led the pack, but the last couple of years have also seen sharp hardcover reprints of the early years of Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland," Frank King's "Gasoline Alley," Hank Ketcham's "Dennis the Menace," Tove Jansson's "Moomin" and Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy." (Somebody still needs to publish definitive editions of Milton Caniff's "Terry and the Pirates" and Walt Kelly's "Pogo," though.) Now, another top-tier strip is getting the top-tier treatment, with E.C. Segar's "Popeye, Volume 1: 'I Yam What I Yam!'"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/12/09/popeye/feed/ 24 “Curses” http://www.salon.com/2006/11/08/huizenga/ http://www.salon.com/2006/11/08/huizenga/#comments Wed, 08 Nov 2006 12:28:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/11/08/Huizenga In "Lost and Found," one of the central stories of Kevin Huizenga's marvelous debut book "Curses" (Drawn & Quarterly), his character Glenn Ganges flips through the mail, imagining the missing-child and last-seen-with images on "have you seen me?" postcards as panels in "an accidental graphic novel whose story is mostly hidden, though sprawling landscapes are implied and tragic scenes are hinted at." In Huizenga's comics, everything has an intrinsically interesting story of its own -- even junk-mail ads and suburban sprawl and annoying bird noises, things that most people do their best not to perceive at all, become crucial parts of a grand and gradual narrative.

Huizenga's been a cult hero in the art-comics world since the late '90s, initially for his self-published "Supermonster" minicomics, and more recently for a series called "Or Else" and a separate "Ganges" project. (He also wrote and drew the Center for Cartoon Studies' promotional booklet, a splendidly bizarre little comic book in its own right.) The nine stories in "Curses" mostly appeared separately in various anthologies over the past few years; all but one of them feature Glenn Ganges, Huizenga's default protagonist, a quiet, literate sort living in the Midwest, usually with a woman named Wendy who's his girlfriend in some stories, his wife in others.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/11/08/huizenga/feed/ 0 “Making Comics” http://www.salon.com/2006/10/10/mccloud/ http://www.salon.com/2006/10/10/mccloud/#comments Tue, 10 Oct 2006 11:27:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/10/10/mccloud When Scott McCloud's book "Understanding Comics" appeared in 1993, it seemed like a gift from the blue -- a brilliantly thought-out analysis of how the comic-book medium works, presented in comics form itself, that doubled as an astute and engaging explanation of the way people relate to images in general. (Anyone who gives PowerPoint presentations, for instance, really ought to read it.) It became the standard reference work for comics theory, supplanting McCloud hero Will Eisner's "Comics and Sequential Art." And it inspired both cartoonists and readers, by making explicit the formal mechanisms that everyone had mostly been left to intuit before then.

What it wasn't, really, was a how-to book -- a guide for aspiring cartoonists. That's where McCloud's new book, "Making Comics," comes in. It's not quite a how-to-draw book, and it's definitely not a how-to-break-into-the-business book. (The polite answer a brief chapter on "The Comics Professional" offers to the latter question is, effectively, "get really, really good.") Instead, it's a guide to the way cartoonists apply their skills to turn a story into a reproducible page, a sort of "Understanding How Comics Are Made." And it's the productive argument starter McCloud's earlier attempt at a follow-up, 2000's "Reinventing Comics," didn't quite manage to be. (In one panel of the new volume, McCloud draws himself at a party, where someone's telling him, "Hey, loved the first book! I'm still, uh ... working on that second one.")

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/10/10/mccloud/feed/ 3 “Maus” it’s not http://www.salon.com/2006/09/08/jacobson/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/08/jacobson/#comments Fri, 08 Sep 2006 11:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/08/jacobson Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón's "graphic adaptation" of the 9/11 Report has the best of intentions. As their preface explains, the idea is "to tell the [National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States'] truly calamitous story so that every person who reads this book will understand what happened and realize all the frightening implications." They note that the commission's original report is rather tough going, and that they hoped to make it easier to follow by turning it into comics.

Sadly, they've failed on that account, producing a garbled mess of a book that leaps frantically and incoherently from factoid to factoid, peppered with made-up scenes that undermine the credibility of the entire affair. It's so poorly put together that the book suggests its creators fundamentally misunderstand how comics communicate information and ideas, and where the line between fact and fancy lies.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/09/08/jacobson/feed/ 4 “Lost Girls” http://www.salon.com/2006/08/30/moore_26/ http://www.salon.com/2006/08/30/moore_26/#comments Wed, 30 Aug 2006 11:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/30/moore "Tell me a story," a young girl asks at the beginning of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's dizzying graphic novel "Lost Girls." We can't see her; all we can see, for the entire first chapter, is a mirror with an ornate carved frame, and whatever happens to be reflected in it. On the first page, that's a wealthy woman's bedroom in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1913. "Oh, I don't know any stories," the older woman says. "Your little white breasts, they're so lovely. They'll never be as beautiful once you're grown. Will you touch them for me?" All we can see of the woman is her leg, stretched out as she masturbates.

To put it bluntly, the scene is totally creepy; naturally, it's also more complicated than it looks. As it turns out, the woman is Lady Alice Fairchild, a drug-befogged upper-class Englishwoman in her 60s, and she's just talking to herself. The girl is her reflection in the mirror -- or, rather, the lost self Alice imagines on the other side of the mirror. Alice has extensive experience with imagination and mirrors; you've probably already encountered her younger self, the protagonist of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass."

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