J. H. Williams III's Eisner Winning Covers

Williams won two Eisners this year for his work on Detective Comics. I haven't read any of his stories yet but from what I've seen it does look beautiful. All of his covers were great; I honestly could have picked any of them out.

James Jean's Eisner Winning Covers in 2009

Jean's last year of winning Eisners coincides with the end of my project so I'll be getting back to normal soon. And for that last year it was all Fables for Jean which brings us back full circle.

James Jean's Eisner Winning Covers in 2008

I'm still running behind as I work like crazy here's a few more covers from James Jean. That year he added The Umbrella Academy (I may have hated the series but he did make some striking covers for it), Process Recess, and Superior Showcase to his artwork.

2010 Eisner Award Winners

I'm taking fifteen minutes out of my phenomenally busy schedule at the moment (that's not sarcasm, by the way, finding fifteen minutes has been really hard this week and will probably be really hard next week) because the 2010 Eisner winners have been announced!

Best Short Story - "Urgent Request" by Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim in The Eternal Smile
Best Single Issue (or One-Shot) - Captain America #601: "Red, White, and Blue-Blood" by Ed Brubaker and Gene Colan
Best Continuing Series - The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman and Charles Adlard
Best Limited Series - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young
Best New Series - Chew by John Layman and Rob Guillory
Best Publication for Kids - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young
Best Publication for Teens - Beasts of Burden by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson
Best Humor Publication - Scott Pilgrm vs. the Universe by Brian Lee O'Malley
Best Anthology - Popgun Volume 3; edited by Mark Andrew Smith, D. J. Kirkbride, and Joe Keatinge
Best Digital Comic - Sin Titulo; by Cameron Stewart
Best Adaptation from Another Work - Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke
Best Reality-Based Work - A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Best Graphic Album: New - Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
Best Graphic Album: Reprint - Absolute Justice by Alex Ross
Best Archival Collection/Project: Comic Strips - Bloom County: The Complete Library by Berkeley Breathed
Best Archival Collection/Project: Comic Books - The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures by Dave Stevens
Best U.S. Edition of International Material - The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemerier
Best U.S. Edition of International Material: Asia - A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Best Writer - Ed Brubaker; Captain America, Daredevil, Marvels Project, Criminal, Incognito
Best Writer/Artist - David Mazzucchelli; Asterios Polyp
Best Writer/Artist: Non-Fiction - Joe Sacco; Footnotes in Gaza
Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team - J. H. Williams III; Detective Comics
Best Painter or Multimedia Artist - Jill Thompson; Beasts of Burden, Magic Trixie and the Dragon
Best Cover Artist - J. H. Williams III; Detective Comics
Best Coloring - Dave Stewart; Abe Sapien, BPRD, The Goon, Hellboy, Solomon Kane, Umbrella Academy, Zero Killer, Detective Comics, Luna Park
Best Lettering - David Mazzucchelli; Asterios Polyp
Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism - The Comics Reporter; produced by Tom Spurgeon
Best Comics-Related Book - The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics; by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle
Best Publication Design - Absolute Justice; designed by Curtis King and Josh Beatman

It's an interesting mix. There's stuff I have and love, stuff that I have wanted to read (I keep hearing that A Drifting Life is terrific), a couple of books that ordered this morning before the awards were announced (Asterois Polyp has been on my list to get for a long time), and a book that I hated so much that I gave it away (Scott Pilgrim).

James Jean's Eisner Winning Covers in 2007

I'm catching up to the present just in time for James Jean to miss out on his seventh consecutive Eisner for best cover artist. He isn't even nominated this year. But back to three years ago when Jean was still on his winning streak and provided cover art for two issues of Runaways along with the Fables spin-offs Jack of Fables and 1001 Nights of Snowfall.

This was also the toughest time to pick just five covers. While the Runaways covers aren't the best examples of Jean's work I wanted to include one of them. 1001 Nights of Snowfall had to be included so that was two down. And then everything else is terrific. What do I slight by picking out something else? I chose the two Fables covers because they're a matched set and consequently have an extra punch to them but I could have gone with anything from that year's worth of Fables or Jack of Fables covers.

Review - The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck
by Don Rosa
1995 Eisner Winner for Best Serialized Story

There's a term that comic fans use for a story that exists to to cover old plot points, smooth over the rough edges, and look back at old material: continuity porn. At its worst this can be a page filler that tries to explain plot points that no one cares about any more though more often its just about digging into that well of nostalgia. This is not a formula for a good story. And that is why it's so surprising that The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is so terrific.

The real story (as opposed to the plot) of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck starts fifty years before the comic was published. Carl Barks was writing and drawing Donald Duck comics and in one story he introduced Donald's miserly Uncle Scrooge. It turned out that Uncle Scrooge was popular. Very popular. Popular enough that he got his own comic which outsold any of the other Disney themed comics and was a world wide sensation. Scrooge made his three cubic acres of cash by "being tougher than toughies and smarter than the smarties" and had globe trotting adventures. Barks often dropped references to the tough road that Scrooge had to making his fortune.

Fifty years later and Don Rosa attempted to assemble as many of those references to tell the story of the rise of Scrooge McDuck. Starting from his ancestral home in Scotland, Scrooge makes one American dime for his first day's labor. From that tiny seed a fortune grows as he takes the dime as an omen that he should go to America to find his fortune. Each issue takes the reader through one complete adventure that he had in the late nineteenth century. He captains a riverboat, drives cattle, and hunts for gold all over the world before finally striking it rich. Scrooge's life made him hard, though, and upon making his fortune he drives his family away.

Obviously Rosa has created his story as a massive tribute to Barks. The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is peppered with references to old stories, characters that haven't been used in decades, and the flotsom that accumulates when a comic creator is just trying to make good stories about cartoon ducks each month without worrying about how it all fits together. What Rosa does with it is tell other stories using those same elements. Barks told the story about a lender who claimed Scrooge owed him fifty years of interest on a loan at 100% compounded monthly. Rosa takes that story and tells the story of why Scrooge got the loan from him and how it was originally repaid even though the loan shark made it difficult.

Occasionally Rosa does dip into the obscure. Scrooge hiding some stocks in a bottle embedded in a wall is a plot point for an old story but here it's just confusing why we need to see that at all. However in most of these instances it's coupled with a new joke or bit of storytelling that allows it to be enjoyed by anyone. And such direct references outside of the context of Rosa's story tend to be rare.

The story works because at its heart it is a very traditional narrative. This is a rags to riches tale where the protagonist learns a lot of hard lessons before he succeeds through his own hard work. And the changes that he undergoes as a result leave him marked. It gives the story an emotional edge that is surprisingly effective given how anyone familiar with the characters at all know exactly how it will end up.

The best way to describe Rosa's art is animated. The characters have their roots in Disney animation so this is natural and Rosa gets that sense of motion right. He packs the panels with detail that you don't usually find in such a cartoony style and his sight gags are all sharp. This was a good book to look at as well as read.

Rosa has always lived in Barks's shadow. Carl Barks was the man who made these comics an international sensation (they're still huge in Europe) and Rosa is the modern cartoonist who has to live up to that. Doing a year long story as an homage to Barks is part of that. But it is a very good story, one would have fit in nicely with the best that Barks himself did. Now if only someone would reprint The Carl Barks Library so I could have Rosa and Barks side by side on my shelf.

Review - Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
by Frank Miller
1995 Eisner Winner for Best Limited Series

I'm going to be coming back to Sin City frequently for now since it won eight Eisners across five completely different stories and I recently purchased a full set of the stories. The last time I read them was when the books were new and my younger self found the stories to be totally awesome. Today I still find them infused with a kind of pulp chic but with fifteen years of hindsight I am also filtering them through the perspective of Miller's downward spiral and his fetishes. A reader not familiar with its context wouldn't notice anything odd about A Dame to Kill For; I wound up saying to myself, "More ninjas, prostitutes, and ninja prostitutes?"

Dwight is a photographer who ruined his life with drink. He's been working to improve his life but he still fears losing control. Dwight's been reduced to photographing philandering husbands to make the rent. Ava was his lover but left Dwight for a rich man. She contacts Dwight and tells him that she fears her husband's S&M sex games are escalating to the point that her life is in danger. Dwight starts to look out for her and finds himself pulled back into a destructive relationship with Ava.

I know this is a personal reaction but reading A Dame to Kill For again made me think, "Yes, this was when Frank Miller started going off the rails." The initial chapter is is a good example of this. It's almost completely extraneous since all of the character establishment gets repeated in the next chapter anyway. It exists almost entirely for a very long scene in which a man handcuffs a prostitute to a bed and then gets his money's worth. Our hero Frank... er... Dwight has to save her from a bad situation that follows and she has a heart of gold just like the many, many other prostitutes in the story. In isolation of just this story it's part of the gritty Sin City setting; in context it looks a lot more like the author's fetishes put on display.

And that continues through the whole book. There's a theme of masochistic sex that dominates the book. This is a story about people hurting themselves (intentionally or otherwise) for sex. I'm wavering back and forth on how sensationalized it was against how it was used as an intentional theme and that says to me that Miller did use it well. Sin City is firmly attached to its pulp roots and sensationalistic is exactly how to connect to them. Being able to convey that theme of sex and pain so that it comes through the fetishizing of it means that it has been done well.

That theme wouldn't have worked if the main cast weren't so well defined. Dwight, Ava, and most of the rest of the major cast are pulled into destructive orbits and the reader gets a front row seat to that. It's an interesting examination of those self-inflicted wounds.

I did have a bit of a problem with the pacing of the story. Besides the almost redundant first chapter there is a long stretch toward the end of the book where the plot seems to be spinning its wheels. This was originally an eight issue miniseries but it feels like it's six issues worth of story.

It goes without saying that Miller's art is still just as nice to look at as it was in the last Sin City book. You could copy and paste my comments on that. It still features the heavy black inks with the definition in the picture provided by the white negative space. It still features the strong layouts and striking images. Even when I have problems with Miller's writing his artwork is consistently strong.

I know I'm down on A Dame to Kill For but I am going to recommend it anyway. My problems with it are mostly metatextual and without the same context what you'll have is an exciting pulp story which handles some mature themes well. It's not my favorite Sin City story but it is a good one.

James Jean's Eisner Winning Covers in 2006

I've been completely overwhelmed this week but there's still time to get some covers. Jean also provided covers for Green Arrow this year. While I like to sample everything that an artist did that year and not put too much emphasis on the covers for a series that they've won multiple awards for I think his Fables covers are much better than the Green Arrow ones. The Green Arrow covers are usually simple action shots while the Fables covers always look lovely.

Review - The Rabbi's Cat

The Rabbi's Cat
by Joann Sfar
2006 Eisner Winner for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material

The Rabbi's Cat was a slow burn for me. For the first two-thirds of it I wasn't enjoying the book. The ending however takes the themes of that beginning and brings them all together in a way that I wound up liking.

In Algeria there is a rabbi, his daughter, and their cat. The cat eats a parrot and gains the ability to speak. The cat is still a cat though and behaves like it demonstrating the dishonesty and behavior that any cat would have. The book then follows the cat observing Jewish culture in Algeria.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike The Rabbi's Cat. The story is almost entirely told in captions that are written in the passive voice. The dialog, such as it is since it's mainly in those captions, tends to be stilted. Because the story is broken off from the action scenes and characters feel disconnected from the story. I got the feeling as I was reading that I was being told about interesting things that were happening but not actually getting to see them. A cat debating a rabbi about whether a cat can be a Jew should be an interesting scene with plenty of room for character building, witty dialog, and emotional give and take; Sfar's style makes it as interesting as a CSPAN recap of the House agricultural committee.

It's not simply the translation that's the problem there. Sfar's artwork is similarly bland. Every page is laid out exactly the same; two columns of three panels. And the individual panels aren't well drawn. Sfar uses a cartoony style but is completely inconsistent in design from panel to panel. Images shift from realistic to almost completely abstract with no rhyme or reason. I wouldn't have had a problem with the strange style if it was used consistently or with the shifts if they made a kind of thematic sense in the panels but The Rabbi's Cat has art that just comes across as sloppy.

What won me over was the character development. In the final third of the book the rabbi's daughter gets married and the rabbi joins the newlyweds on a trip to Paris where the culture clash between ancient traditions and the modern world are put on display. Earlier in the book the rabbi has a friendly encounter with a Sufi mullah which might as well have had a flashing neon sign above it reading "Tolerance is good!" That last third has the same lesson but it's about the more subtle differences between everyone and it is much less blunt about it. The rabbi has a crisis of faith when he is removed from his comfort zone and gets to observe the secular world up close. His daughter is dealing with the complications of new in-laws and having second thoughts about her hasty marriage. The cat, however, remains a cat.

It's a close call but I don't think I'd recommend The Rabbi's Cat. I was left with a positive feeling thanks to the huge improvement in quality of storytelling at the end but I was unhappy with the rest of the book. So I can't really recommend a book on the basis of it ending well. Still if you happen to come across it and read it then I recommend sticking with it because it gets much better toward the end.

James Jean's Eisner Winning Covers in 2005

James Jean did not simply provide cover art for Fables. He also was providing covers for Batgirl at the time:

Review - Sin City: The Hard Goodbye

Sin City: The Hard Goodbye
by Frank Miller
1993 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album: Modern Reprint
1993 Eisner Winner for Best Penciller/Inker: Black and White Publication
1993 Eisner Winner for Best Writer/Artist

Frank Miller has become something of a joke in comic circles lately and not without reason. It's become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between a Frank Miller comic and a parody of a Frank Miller comic. Sin City is often considered to be part of that descent into self-parody. It's Miller's attempt to make a story so hard boiled you could use it crack skulls. He wasn't always successful at it but with the first storyline, The Hard Goodbye, he created something interesting to read.

Marv's a tough guy with a scarred face and on medication to keep his hallucinations in check. One night he meets a woman named Goldie, they have sex, and he falls asleep right afterward. When Marv wakes up she has been murdered in bed next to him and the police are on their way. Goldie was kind to him so Marv feels a need to avenge her and to do it he'll cut a bloody path through the underworld, the police, and the halls of power.

The Hard Goodbye was initially printed in short chapters in the anthology comic Dark Horse Presents and that had a major impact on the pacing. Miller has to get through the plot point for the chapter and end on a cliffhanger so things move at a breakneck pace. It's an hyperactive story but Miller never loses track of the focus; there are no side plots that derail the story for a few chapters. It makes the book exciting and tense.

Marv as a character is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. He comes from the tradition of hard boiled protagonists who are tough as nails, charge through obstacles, and loyal to a fault. He's also capable of gruesome violence and relishes in it. He takes far too much enjoyment in hurting people. Marv is as bad or worse than the people he's killing and he only keeps the reader's sympathy by being the focus of the story.

Miller's artwork for Sin City is distinctive. It's a black and white book and instead of simply being black lines providing outlines of white space he applies that black ink with a roller. White space tends to provide shape to the heavy shadows without actually being enclosed in order to make an outline. It's a book done almost entirely in silhouette or negative images and it looks terrific due to that.

I'm not fond of all of Sin City but it's hard to find a reason to not recommend The Hard Goodbye. If you hate depictions of extreme violence then this is not a book for you (though the most gruesome of actions generally happen off panel). This is a brutal, violent book and while I think Miller handled those themes well (I'd never want to be anywhere near Marv) it's also a situation where it could easily repel some readers. On the other hand if you like that kind of pulp detective, action story then The Hard Goodbye is a great one.

Review - A Small Killing

A Small Killing
by Alan Moore; Art by Oscar Zarate
1994 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album: New

I have been thinking about how my reaction to the Eisner winners has been generally positive and why that is. When it came to Hugos, Nebulas, and the World Fantasy Award my reactions to the winners was a lot more varied. Am I letting flaws pass in Eisner winners more than the others? Perhaps a bit thanks to some forgiveness of genre conventions, though I do try to point out when that's the case. Could it be that the panel that decides the Eisner winners is less politicized than the groups that select the other awards? I doubt that's a major factor though there seems to be less of a tendency to select a winner based on their career instead of the nominated work when it comes to the Eisners.

So I was worried that I might be too kind hearted to a medium that I have some affinity for when I read A Small Killing and it helped alleviated those fears. I disliked it. I didn't hate it; it isn't something that worked me up into a frothing rage. I just through that the story wasn't told well, the characters weren't interesting, and the art was flat.

There is a yuppie who has risen to the top of the advertising industry. As he prepares to leave to handle the biggest contract his firm has ever had this yuppie is being stalked by a child in schoolboy's uniform. The child who only turns up when no one else is around (and winds up being exactly who you'd think it would be from this brief descriptions) is trying to kill the yuppie. As the yuppie goes home he thinks back through his life and the changes it went through.

This story is as subtle as an elephant in a wading pool. The story of a man who had once been a good person but was corrupted by the world is common enough but this exact situation wasn't fresh or new when A Small Killing was published. He's an advertising man which has been used a storytelling shortcut over and over to tie someone to consumerist society. The "good" people in the story are the ones who make handcrafted art; again lazy shorthand that's been done many times in these stories. You know that the yuppie was once a good person because when he was in college he wrote a play about Che Guevara. That one isn't a common shorthand mainly because being that clumsy with your characterization could never gain much traction.

Moore tries to tell the story of the small compromises that people make through their lives but he fails to actually show this except by sloppy implication. "Oh, he used to make anti-apartheid posters," the reader is supposed to say. "He must have been a better person then before falling to that ugly thing." Of course this precludes the possibility that he continued making anti-apartheid posters. The main character getting a job at an advertising agency doesn't equal "selling out" unless you hold intractable views on that. Without showing clear transitions between periods of his life it falls apart.

Zarate's artwork was a mixed bag for me. A Small Killing is a painted book and I liked how he used some garish colors to make certain scenes stand out. But his use of perspective made every scene seem flat as a pancake. I'm sure it was an intentional choice but that doesn't make it pleasant to look at.

The only thing that I took away from A Small Killing is Alan Moore hates yuppies. Hating yuppies as a concept was stale in 1993 and hasn't aged well. This is a book that I think can only really be enjoyed if you'd read it nodding your head to Moore beat and I'm just not part of the choir he's preaching to.

James Jean's Eisner Winning Covers in 2004

Not to get ahead of myself but since 2004 only one person has won the Eisner for best cover artist: James Jean. His painted covers for Fables have been impressive and I've enjoyed how well they integrate with the story in the issue.

Review - Strangers in Paradise

Strangers in Paradise Volume 1
by Terry Moore
1996 Eisner Winner for Best Serialized Story

I have this picture of how Terry Moore came up with Strangers in Paradise in my head. He set out to create a touching romantic comedy with a trio of characters caught in each other's orbit but unable to ever quite connect. While he was plotting that he was also working on a violent, noirish crime drama. Then one day he tripped while carrying both scripts and the pages got scrambled. As he was trying to put them back in order he said, "Hey, this could really work!" and history was made. I don't care if it isn't true, it feels like it should be. There's no reason why such an odd mix should work but it turns out it does in Strangers in Paradise.

Francine is an insecure woman who undergoes a traumatic break up with her boyfriend over her not wanting to have sex. Her roommate Katchoo is an artist with anger management problems and is in love with Francine. David wants to go out with Katchoo but she claims to have no interest in men though she finds herself becoming attracted to him more and more. Together they are alternatively funny and sweet as they try to feel their way through the relationships. They also have very dark secrets and one of them is being hunted.

The strength of Strangers in Paradise is in its characters. Moore's cast, including the extended cast, are not your typical romantic characters. Their relationships are well outside what you'd normally find depicted in stories; their emotions are rocky and prone to wild swings, their attitudes toward sex cannot be summed up simply, and their lives are not simple. I haven't read past volume one yet but if the love triangle resolves by the three of them deciding to have a group marriage to each other I wouldn't be surprised. I don't want to see any of them hurt which just tells you how much Moore managed to make a connection between me and his characters.

Since the characters are defined by the romantic possibility that's the setting that they work best in. Those slice of life portions are whimsical and charming. They carry an undercurrent of simmering passion that hasn't come to the surface yet in the series.

The flip side of that is the dark, violent crime drama and that is less effective. It's not that it isn't good. Having the cute characters put into the path of harm ratchets up the tension. The brutal violence is shocking in the context of a book that was about the love lives of the group a few pages before. It's just that this storyline is much less developed in the first volume. I couldn't wait for it to be over so I could go back to the lighthearted portions.

With the art Moore took the interesting direction of using a varied style depending on which plot was moving forward. When things are romantic the characters are cute and cartoony but the art gets a harsher look when the violence comes. Moore draws some impressively expressive characters. His artwork is an important aspect of bringing them to life.

I've only read one volume of Strangers in Paradise but I've ordered the next two. I'm enthralled by the lives of these characters and I want to see if through to the end. Moore has made it easy to fall in love with them just as they fall in love with each other.

Review - Nexus

Nexus
Written by Mike Baron; Art by Steve Rude
1988 Eisner Winner for Best Artist

If you listen to some people the concept of mature superhero comics was born when Alan Moore woke up one day and decided to make Watchmen. Obviously this is not true; Moore's work stood on the shoulders of many people and came in the middle of a pack that were changing superhero comics. One of the more interesting of those contemporaries was Nexus which took a crazy high concept and brought it down to earth. It was good but that wouldn't be enough to make it stand out without the brilliance of Steve Rude providing the art.

Nexus is a man with absolute power. In exchange for this power though he dreams of the victims of mass murders and feels their deaths. The dreams will not stop until he executes the murderer. Nexus lives in the distant future on a planet that was an abandoned ruin before his family arrived there. He opened his planet to anyone seeking asylum. His mission may be simple as he can walk in as an unstoppable force of justice but his life is complicated. He's a killer who would rather be arguing philosophy.

It's that contradiction that elevates Nexus above other superhero books. Baron went on to write the original Punisher series which was also about a man who wore a costume and went around executing criminals though it was a dramatically different series. Nexus may feature human cruelty on a grand scale but it never wallows in it or puts it on display. It's a strangely hopeful series since the message that it keeps coming back to is that a man pushed to killing can hold onto his soul. It might not be easy and it might not be morally justified but it's possible. That, along with the ethics of capital punishment, form the backbone of the stories.

This wouldn't work without an incredibly strong cast of characters. Nexus is represents the thoughtful side of things but his best friend is in love with the idea of being a dashing adventurer. His girlfriend cares for him though she can't always deal with the stress of having a vengeful god as a lover. The only weakness here is that most villains never get a chance to develop; it's rare that they get to survive more than a single issue.

Another distinctive aspect of the series was how the story developed over the long term. Baron treated it as though the time passing in the comic was the same as the time that passed in the world. It allowed a long term plot to slowly boil. Nexus starts alone on his planet sized home and brings refugees back with him from a mission. Word spreads that his planet is open to anyone fleeing oppression and the population grows over the years until the refugees have formed their own government dealing with overpopulation. Other plot lines develop gently over the course of years.

As much as I liked Baron's storytelling the real star of Nexus was Steve Rude. His vision of a future looked like a collaboration between Dr. Seuss and Jack Kirby; a sleek, fluid design done on a larger than life scale. His character designs were distinctive and expressive to match his gorgeous landscapes. It's a stunning looking book when Rude is drawing it.

I won't say that Nexus is a perfect series. Baron's dialog sometimes falls flat and individual stories, especially later in the series, sometimes aren't that interesting. But even at the weakest moments of the story Rude's artwork makes reading it worthwhile.

Adam Hughes's Eisner Winning Covers

I'm a bit baffled as to why Adam Hughes won the Eisner in 2003 for his Wonder Woman covers. While I'd never call them bad, Hughes artwork never stood out to me (well except in two respects). But setting aside my preference he only did six Wonder Woman covers that year. That's a fairly small sampling of covers for the award.

Review - The Tale of One Bad Rat

The Tale of One Bad Rat
by Bryan Talbot
1996 Eisner Award Winner for Best Graphic Album: Reprint

I had exactly one problem with The Tale of One Bad Rat (which should tell you right away that this review is going to be positively glowing). The main character is a very troubled young woman. She's almost certainly schizophrenic and at the beginning of the book she seems to be right on the verge of a final break with reality. Authors like to simplify such psychological issues for the sake of the story and in this case I think it was a misstep given the details that reader saw. I had a few other problems in mind but as I thought back over the book I decided that they worked in context which made The Tale of One Bad Rat a very interesting book.

Helen is a runaway teen on the streets of London. She fled her family due to her abusive parents and now the only living thing that she can stand to touch is a rat that she carries with her. Helen also has hallucinations and focuses on suicide. She also shuns people, or did until a gang of wild kids invite her to stay at a house they're squatting in and that starts her on a new path.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is all about getting inside Helen's head. Talbot puts a face to her fears and depression that makes the story compelling. Helen also has an obsession with rats and Beatrix Potter and uses that to relate to her own life. She finds comfort in the uglier aspects of Potter's early life and Helen finds herself following in Potter's footsteps. Helen latches onto Potter and her anthropomorphic rodents as a lifeline. It is a good depiction of a mentally ill girl and Talbot pulled him into her world.

Talbot plays with a variety of stories about Helen in the course of the book. Initially it's the story of an urchin on the streets of London but he takes it to many different places. The most striking is a segment near the end of the book with her story told as a pastiche of a Beatrix Potter. Helen moves through these changes in story as she undergoes her own changes. She's never the same at the end of one segment as she was at the beginning and it's that development that makes The Tale of One Bad Rat so compelling.

The artwork does a decent job of supporting the story and when Talbot wants to fit in Potter illustrations he's up to the task of making them look natural. He does draw some very masculine looking faces for his women which threw me off at a few points. Early on the first time we see that Helen's mother was also abusive I initially thought it was her father wearing make up which would add a whole other layer to the psychological aspects of the story.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is a compelling look at child abuse and its consequences. Talbot may have chosen a simple climax but the rest of the character examination was worth it. I doubt I'll want to read it again any time soon but I am glad that I read it.

Dave Johnson's Eisner Winning Covers

How about that? Someone other than Alex Ross and Brian Bolland won an Eisner for cover artwork in 2002. Dave Johnson was providing covers for Detective Comics and 100 Bullets then and he infused each of them with covers that remind me a lot of dime novels from the sixties.

Review - Runaways

Runaways
Written by Brian K. Vaughan; Art by Adrian Alphona and Takeshi Miyazawa
2005 Eisner Winner for Best Writer

When the time comes in the not too distant future when American superhero comics die and the postmortem is performed there will be a lot of pointing fingers at who or what killed it. Along with the cultural shifts there will be names mentioned; people who will be blamed for not choosing the correct course of action or who initiated a shift in the medium that was poisonous to it in the end. When that day comes that Marvel and DC comics close up shop and are reduced to just warehouses for intellectual property there is one person who will not be blamed because in the waning days of superhero comics he took the chances and he reached out to a new audience. Brian K. Vaughan recent efforts with superhero comics have been ingenious in breaking new ground and in breaking the genre mold.

Runaways has a simple premise: six teens who are the children of supervillains run away from their parents and look for a way to stop their plans. They each have their own inheritance from their parents which they hope to turn against them. What makes this story work is that Vaughan writes them as teens. They have the same plan of all teenagers in rebelling against their parents but they're lost on how to do this. So they've just run away from home and hide out together trying to figure out what to do. And one of the group is still loyal to their parents.

The strongest aspect of Runaways has to be the characters. Vaughan created a cast of believable teenagers who are in turn scared, angry, rebellious, immature, and argumentative. They spend a lot more time fighting each other than their parents. The group feels like teens on the run who like the idea of being runaways but have no idea actually how to do any of it. That gives the group an interesting dynamic.

Ostensibly this is a book about superheroes but you'll be hard pressed to actually find any. They don't wear the costumes or really fight many villains other than their parents. In a way very similar to his Ex Machina Vaughan uses the structure and concepts of superheroes to tell a very different story. This one is naturally all about teen rebellion, family ties, and establishing a life. It just happens to have a girl who can life a bus over her head in it.

The first eighteen issues of Runaways is one complete story and Vaughan won his Eisner for the period when that story was concluding. Most of the artwork for those issues were done by Adrian Alphona with a little bit from Takeshi Miyazawa. I liked Alphona's art quite a bit as it had a slick, dynamic style. With Miyazawa on the other hand I did not like how he drew the character's faces; his manga style lacked a lot of definition and made things look flat.

I have the impression Runaways is intended for a younger audience and I suspect that they'd like it a lot. The tone and style is something that I think someone the same age as the characters would appreciate. As someone whose teen years are far behind them I still loved it. Runaways transcends its genre roots and is worth checking out.

Review - The Big Book of Conspiracies

The Big Book of Conspiracies
Written and Edited by Doug Moench; Art by a cast of dozens
1996 Eisner Winner for Best Anthology

I have to start this review with what I expected from The Big Book of Conspiracies. After The Big Book of Urban Legends I was anticipating an anthology of one or two page stories humorously illustrating some conspiracy theory. I doubted that there would be any emphasis on facts though a few genuine conspiracies would be included. Basically I was anticipating a romp through the oddballs.

And there is some of that in the pages of The Big Book of Conspiracies. The problem is that more often the book comes across as an illustrated paranoid rant. It's like picking out the worst posts on the worst web forum and just adding some pictures to them. The majority of this book is dry and surprisingly dull for a book filled with stories about how the CIA is secretly poisoning us all. There is little in the way of storytelling; just reciting "facts" (and occasionally real facts). It gives the majority of the book the feeling of a paranoid tenth grader's class report.

As with The Big Book of Urban Legends a huge team of creators conspired to make this book but unlike the earlier one they lacked a tight structure. Most of the conspiracy theories are given seven or eight pages which is generally too much room. They're padded out with single panels that illustrate some detail being related which isn't very interesting.

Oddly enough the small, "real" conspiracies generally are better done than the wild speculative ones. It's due to how those tend to have a narrative behind them; a complete story that can be told in a few pages and followed up with speculation. Telling how William Randolf Hearst had a party on his yacht where a film producer died under very mysterious circumstances is interesting. Relaying a hundred and fifty different (and often contradictory) weird things about the Kennedy assassination is boring. A story of corporate maleficence has a hook for a reader; page after page of random spouting from a person who claimed to work on taking apart flying saucers in area 51 does not.

The lone exception for me to the non-stories being dull was several pages of cartoons depicting the many real ways that the CIA considered assassinating Fidel Castro. It was lively, goofy, and charming in a way that a beautifully but darkly illustrated ten page story of swirling theories around a shooting.

I don't think that the creators involved with The Big Book of Conspiracies actually believe the conspiracy theories they illustrated (at least I think most of them don't) but the book rarely becomes playful with the conspiracies. It's a problem of tone; more often then not they're treated with a kind of dead pan seriousness which is just dull.

I suspect that I would have enjoyed The Big Book of Conspiracies more if I had read it when it came out in 1996. At this point though thanks to the Internet I've been exposed to more conspiracy theorists than I could possible hope to remember. I've already gotten the rambling rants that the book offers me so many times that I have little tolerance for them any more. So perhaps if you enjoy reading conspiracy theories still then you'll enjoy it more than I did, but I suspect that most people find it just as dry and boring as I did.