Growing, Inch by Inch
SHORTCOMINGS by Adrian Tomine.
DRAWN & QUARTERLY, 2007. HARDCOVER, $19.95. A NEW YORK TIMES
NOTABLE BOOK OF 2007.
Adrian Tomine’s stories about ordinary,
flawed, lovely, insecure people are intimate
and familiar, full of heartbreaks, what-ifs
and should-haves, all rendered in rounded,
elegant black and white. Shortcomings, a
hardcover that collects three issues of
Tomine’s Optic Nerve series, is an arresting
image of a relationship caught in the act of
dissolving amid disagreements about ideas
and identity and how people define them-
selves, together or apart.
Ben Tanaka’s girl-
friend Miko has been
getting more interested
in her Japanese heritage,
to Ben’s disinterest; in
the face of his dismissal
of what matters to her,
Miko accuses Ben of
having a thing for white
girls (“It’s like you’re
obsessed with the typical
Western media ideal, but
you’re settling for me,”
panel discussion
THE BEST GRAPHIC NOVELS OF 2007 by Aaron Ragan-Fore
P
erhaps it’s the modern inheritance of an art form originally designed to be
bundled up with yesterday’s newspaper and tossed to the curb at the end
of the week, but comic books are always in such a gosh-darn hurry. The
growing mainstream acceptance of graphic novels as legitimate cultural commen-
tary has led to an explosion of quality material, and the taste of the current trend is
rarely out of the mouths of the nerderati bloggers, convention attendees and guys
who dress up as Stormtroopers before they want to sample next month’s flavor. So
here’s a little garden of roses the comics fan on your holiday shopping list might
want to stop and smell: 2007’s best graphic novels.
Alt-comix mainstay James Kochalka
has been grinding out single-panel autobio
strips, a sort of realistic Family Circus with
more swearing, for nearly a decade.
American Elf Volume 2 (Top Shelf
Productions, $19.95) collects cartoons
based on two years of Kochalka’s daily life,
as he flirts with his wife, coddles his toddler
and drinks with his pals. Reading some
average shlub’s visual diary may sound
excruciating, but Kochalka’s deft lampoon
of his own life produces a heartwarming,
weirdly self-effacing narcissism. Even
Kochalka’s style of real-life characters
depicted as cutesy-pie animals endears itself to the reader after a couple weeks’
worth of strips as the style offsets the honesty of the artist’s human interaction.
Another comic using animals as human stand-ins is the the mono-monikered
cartoonist Jason’s I Killed Adolf Hitler (Fantagraphics Books, $12.95), a surre-
al time-travel story of a 21st century professional hitman hired to, well, kill Adolf
Hitler. The usual spate of time travel paradoxes ensues, including the requisite
Führer-in-modern-times shenanigans. But all the sci-fi and history business is real-
ly just a scaffolding upon which Jason constructs a poignant morality play detailing
his assassin’s relationship woes, in which time travel serves as a metaphor for mem-
ory and change. The WWII setting and anthropomorphic actors make it difficult to
resist comparison to Art Spiegelman’s earnest Maus, but Jason keeps his tongue
planted firmly in cheek.
White Rapids (Drawn & Quarterly, $27.95), Pascal Blanchet’s lush sophomore
effort, also uses history as a template for an intimate story, the abbreviated life cycle
the rest of the best
THE ESCAPISTS by Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and
Jason Shawn Alexander, Eduardo Barreto, Philip Bond
& Steve Rolston (artists). DARK HORSE COMICS, 2007. HARDCOVER, $19.95.
Comic book writers writing about comic book writ-
ers may sound boring, but then, most comic book writ-
ers don’t foil crimes in their spare time. The fictional
world created in Michael Chabon’s fantastic novel The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is brought
lovingly to life by Vaughan and company.
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLE-
MEN: BLACK DOSSIER by Alan Moore (writer) and
Kevin O’Neill (artist). DC/WILDSTORM COMICS, 2007. HARDCOVER, $29.99.
You might need a scorecard to keep all the charac-
ters straight, but it’s worth it. The third volume of
Moore’s instant classic continues as a super-team
she says, heartbreakingly,
when she confronts him
about his porn collection).
Ben vents about Miko —
and everything else — to his
friend Alice, a Korean les-
bian whose pointed obser-
vations and willingness to
accept her friends’ choices
about how they define
themselves make her a
gentle, if sassy, counter to
Ben, whose stubborn
refusal to consider race as
of a Québécois company town. Each page is composed like
a stylishly snappy 1950s travel ad, probably making this the
most visually stunning graphic novel of the year. Blanchet’s
strictly structured artistic toolbox only serves to underscore
the creative skill he employs in advancing the narrative. The
book’s formalism compares favorably with Chris Ware’s
Jimmy Corrigan, but while Ware focuses on the foibles of
humans, here it is the town of Rapide Blanc itself that takes
center stage.
It’s no accident that Eddie Campbell’s The Black Diamond Detective
Agency (First Second, $16.95) reads like a movie treatment. The graphic novel is
adapted from an unfilmed screenplay, and Campbell brings to vivid, snarling life this
Victorian tale of gang warfare and Old West-style retribution in the streets of 1899
Chicago. A must-read for history-minded fans of nonfiction author Erik Larson’s The
Devil in the White City or of cinematic fare such as Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
Sticking with the retribution theme, 2007 featured a new compendium of the
work of the eccentric, abusive and mostly forgotten 1930s cartoonist Fletcher
Hanks, titled I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (Fantagraphics Books,
$19.95) after a line of particularly purple dialogue uttered by one of the book’s vil-
lains. Most of the stories in this volume feature revenge at the hands of two of
Hanks’ bizarre, Dali-esque do-gooders: Stardust, an outer space “Super Wizard,”
and Fantomah, the skull-faced jungle goddess. These are comic books in their
unfiltered, prewar form, a superheroic fever dream, the sort of deliciously salacious
stories that made Mom chuck all the comics out when Junior left for college. In
Hanks’ cosmology, bad guys aren’t sent packing to prison; they’re changed into
melting icicles or eaten by gargantuan spiders. Sure, it’s garbage, but it’s madcap,
wish-fulfillment silliness garbage.
In every way Hanks’ superheroes are ridiculous, the
Eisner Award-winning first volume of All-Star Superman
(DC Comics, $19.99) by dream team creators Grant
Morrison and Frank Quitely is sublime. Superfans turned off
by the darker turn of recent superhero comics or by the
moody, emo posturing of Superman Returns can take sol-
ace in this heartfelt, off-kilter little book that practically
demands its reader recognize why the character has not
only endured but thrived as the quintessential American
icon through seven decades and countless reinterpreta-
tions. The titular Boy Scout is here presented as dynamic,
decisive and passionate, a truly Super Man, the sort of friend you wish you had in
real life. This is fun Superman, Ur-Superman, the Saturday morning Superman you
wish you could have carried with you out of the Superfriends cartoon and into adult-
hood. Plus, what can beat Jimmy Olsen running around in goofy disguises?
composed of fictional characters from across British
literature defends the Crown against threats both mun-
dane and magical.
THE PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP: THE TRIAL
OF COLONEL SWEETO AND OTHER STORIES
by Nicholas Gurewitch. DARK HORSE COMICS, 2007. HARDCOVER, $14.95 .
If David Lynch wrote The Far Side, it’d probably look
a little something like this. Not for the kiddies, unless
your kiddies are really, really twisted.
PHONOGRAM: RUE BRITTANIA by Kieron Gillen
(writer) and Jamie McKelvie (artist). IMAGE COMICS, 2007. PAPERBACK, $14.99.
Trendy urban wizards waging ancient wars on the
dance floors of U.K. raves? Sold.
SCALPED, VOL. 1: INDIAN COUNTRY by Jason
Aaron (writer) and R.M. Guéra (artist). DC/VERTIGO COMICS, 2007.
PAPERBACK, $9.99.
a central part of a person’s identity is tested
again and again.
Neither Miko nor Ben is blameless in the
dissolution of their relationship; neither is
truly right about the other, either. With crisp,
biting, funny dialogue and spare, evocative
art, Tomine charts their bumpy course to a
relatively settled point, though not exactly a
happy one. Shortcomings is less statement
than suggestion, as Tomine widens his
scope from the small moments between
people to the larger questions — be they
about race, relationships, fallacies or futures
— that shape them. —Molly Templeton
A new “Native American noir” entry in Vertigo’s
near-monopoly of thinking-people’s comics follows an
undercover FBI agent infiltrating the corrupt tribal
police of a South Dakota reservation.
SOCK MONKEY: THE INCHES INCIDENT by
Tony Millionaire. DARK HORSE COMICS, 2007. PAPERBACK, $9.95.
Gadzooks! Victorian stuffed animals fight a pesky
swarm of ants for control of their home. Charming in
a macabre, Edward Gorey sort of way, and perfect for
all ages.
Y: THE LAST MAN, VOL. 9: MOTHERLAND by
Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and Pia Guerra & Goran
Sudzuka (artists). DC/VERTIGO COMICS, 2007. PAPERBACK, $14.99.
Wunderkind creator Vaughan’s taut, post-apocalyptic
sci-fi espionage series continues as hapless last man on
earth Yorick Brown finally learns what killed all his fellow
bearers of the Y-chromosome. — Aaron Ragan-Fore
DECEMBER 13, 2007
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