The Ring of the Nibelung

The Ring of the Nibelung
by P. Craig Russell
2001 Eisner Winner for Best Limited Series

I love going to the opera. Seeing the performance on stage is a much more engaging experience than simply listening to the music alone. About a year before I began this blog I moved from a major city to a remote location and the thing I miss the most about the city is going to the opera. There is something that the locals call an opera company in the area: they put on two performances a year and sing in English. I'm far from a purist (I prefer to have the subtitles projected above the stage, for example) but changing the lyrics is over the line for me. So when I say that Russell's adaptation of Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung is exactly like a great performance in comic book form that is the highest compliment that I can give the book.

Even with all of my affection for opera I have not had a chance to watch Wagner's Ring cycle though I know the story from other references. For those completely unfamiliar with then Der Ring des Nibelungen (to use the German name) they are a set of four operas which make up a mythic cycle. Each opera can stand on its own but together they form a saga. It's a story of gods, heroes, monsters, love, and betrayal.

To keep the synopsis simple, an evil dwarf creates a ring whose wearer can control the world. The ring is a corruptive force in the hands of anyone other than its master. Wotan as the king of gods finds himself repeatedly trapped between his promises and desires. Everyone attempts to manipulate heroes in order to obtain the ring.

Something needs to be made clear right from the start with Russell's adaptation: it is an adaptation of the opera and not the story. The difference between the two is that an opera is formatted for a stage performance while a story can be free to drift about where ever it is necessary. An opera has to feature long sections of people singing the plot, the story can use narration. The pacing is radically different between the two. So Russell's The Ring of the Nibelung carries over that structure and the results may put off someone expecting something traditional it captures the flavor of a stage performance wonderfully.

Each issue of the comic corresponds to an act of the opera. That isolates the action to effectively one set for that issue and the narrative has to flow smoothly around that location. The dialog is structured so that the solos in the opera connect to the monologues in the comic. Russell also maintains a lyrical form for much of the dialog which helps keep the feeling of an opera in his work.

Similar to the narrative structure Russell's art also reflects his focus on making The Ring of the Nibelung as close to a stage performance as possible. The focus for most of the scenes is how the characters act together; facial expressions and posing them so that they help convey the story. When it comes time to switch to action things become very theatrical and simple. Russell's dragon, for example, could be a man in a costume.

If you do read The Ring of the Nibelung then I recommend treating it as a companion piece to Wagner's music. The pacing of the comic pages won't allow you to listen to a complete act while following along with the comic (especially during the forth opera Götterdämmerung). Still you'll find the connection between the music and how Russell builds the comic if you do this and that is something worth seeing.

Taken in isolation Russell's The Ring of the Nibelung is a clumsy, unwieldy thing. However with the context of the original opera then it is an astounding work. In terms of visually presenting the story it is the next best thing to seeing the opera performed and for that reason I recommend it. This is not the only operatic adaptation that Russell has created and I plan on getting the rest of them.

Review - Maus

Maus II
by Art Spiegelman
1992 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album: Reprint

Here's the other event from recent history that has been over used for cheap, emotionally manipulative tripe. And just like the previous review Maus is one of those times where the story is told well. Unlike Stuck Rubber Baby though Maus is first and foremost the story of that history even with

While technically the Eisner was awarded to just the second of the two volumes I find it impossible to separate the two since they are one story. That story is the life of Spiegelman's father starting from his life a young Jewish man in Poland. He is in the army when Germany invades and spends years dealing with the occupation of Poland before finally winding up in Auschwitz. Forty years later he's become an overbearing, bitter old man and Spiegelman talks with him and writes Maus in order to come to grips with him.

I think Maus suffers from something that is not it's fault: it is the story of the Holocaust and that story has been repeated so many times that it has lost its impact. If you've read any survivor's account then you know the emotional beats that Maus is going to hit and that drains the power out of the narrative. On the other hand there are few times where the account has been as well done as it is here and I cannot think of another comic that approaches the subject on this level.

Maus also has the complication of not being particularly subtle. Right from the start there's the central image of the Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats. Speigelman does this a lot; when the metaphors aren't being hammered home his writing tends to bluntly state the obvious. This is one of those rare cases where I think it works. Since this is a book about one of the greatest evils in history there isn't much room for dealing with subtleties.

That is not to say that the technique did not backfire as well. I found that the scope and horror of the Holocaust combined with Speigelman's simplistic storytelling methods made the story of his father after the war much less interesting. A bitter old man being unpleasant to everyone around him inherently doesn't carry the same weight and spelling out in meticulous detail the characters' feelings for the readers drags the narrative down in those sections.

Spiegelman's art uses some thick, scratchy lines that help convey the raw emotion. His choice of character designs for Jewish faces on the other hand tends to not be very expressive unless he is going for an extreme reaction. More often it's page after page of blank expressions due to the simple points for eyes and lack of mouths on the figures. He does capture some some stark scenes but they tend to be stand alone images.

Maus is often hailed as one of the great graphic novels and I think it's reputation is overblown a bit by people's visceral reaction to a comic about the Holocaust. Even so it is still a very good book about that period and if you have even the slightest interest in it then I'd recommend it. It's not brilliant and it won't add much if you're already familiar with the mountain of other Holocaust stories out there but it is very well done.

Review - Stuck Rubber Baby

Stuck Rubber Baby
by Howard Cruse
1996 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album: New

There are two relatively recent events that authors have taken up as a kind of lazy man's way to importance: the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. You can almost hear them say, "My book is about a Very Important Subject™ so it doesn't matter if the plot is generic, the characters paper thin, and my treatment of the Very Important Subject™ a shallow parody of the actual event." I hate those books and movies; treating an event that left its scars on history in a cartoonish manner shouldn't be a free pass.

Stuck Rubber Baby isn't one of those books. It's set in the deep south during the Civil Rights Movement and the main characters get tied up in events of the day and at the same time the book isn't about those themes. It is the story of a young, gay man finding himself in every way possible. There's a scene at the March on Washington but it's not the climax of the book. There is no denouement about how race relations changed and the protagonist was at the center of it. Howard Cruse could have taken the easy way out and rode the coattails of history but instead he created an impressive novel that uses the history as a way to color the changes that the protagonist undergoes.

Toland is a young man who lives in a fictional college town in the deep south during the early 60's. He finds himself attracted to men but is determined to live what he views as a normal life. As his circle of friends widens he becomes exposed to some of the fringe social elements of the time and he grows close to a politically active woman.

Cruse avoids going the easy way with his story in Stuck Rubber Baby and that makes it a gripping read. It's told as a flashback so the reader knows where Toland will end up and at the same time there is the question hanging in the air if he could make a relationship with a woman work. At the same time Cruse repeatedly makes the point that while Stuck Rubber Baby is Toland's story the universe does not revolve around Toland. He's not the only person dealing with the complications of relationships and other people's problems weave in and out.

The way that Cruse presents these personal stories makes it clear that this is a book about a gay man's awakening set in the civil rights movement rather than a book about the civil rights movement starring a gay man. So the sequence involving a sit in and riot is really about how Toland becomes directly involved instead of standing at the periphery as some of his friends do.

Cruse draws some impressively expressive faces through Stuck Rubber Baby. You won't have any trouble at all telling them apart. He uses a kind of pointillist (for lack of a better word) shading that I didn't care since it looked like static to my eyes rather than the rounding effect that he was going for. Still I think the quality of the storytelling in the art outweighs any negative I had.

Stuck Rubber Baby is a better book than the subject matter would suggest. Cruse touches on things that have been run into the ground by worse artists but he does a much better job with both his themes of sexual awakening and the civil rights movement than most. And that makes Stuck Rubber Baby well worth reading.

Review - Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid On Earth

Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid On Earth
by Chris Ware
1996, 2000 Eisner Winner for Best Continuing Series
1996, 2001 Eisner Winner for Best Coloring
2000 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album: New
2001 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album: Reprint
1996, 1997, 2001 Eisner Winner for Best Production Design

How's that for a list of awards? This story ran for several years in Ware's Acme Novelty Library where the individual issues racked up a few more awards of their own.

One of the major reasons I took my odd hobby of reading all of these award winning books was to give myself a reason to hunt down and read some of the acclaimed works that I never got around to. That was the case with Jimmy Corrigan which I had seen on lists of "The Best Graphic Novels" and knew that Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library series was held in high esteem but for some reason I never read it myself. I went through a full range of reactions as I read the book and once I reached the end I was left with the conclusion that Jimmy Corrigan is an exception work that I never want to read again.

Jimmy Corrigan is a man in a bland job with no friends. His only regular human contact is with his overbearing mother. Jimmy's father abandoned his mother before he was born so when he is contacted by his father Jimmy travels to meet him. Running along side this story is the life of Jimmy's grandfather as a little boy watching the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 under construction.

The first thing that I noticed about Jimmy Corrigan is how well designed it is. The cover with a dust jacket that unfolds to be even more complex lead into the nearly microscopic details that fill the inside cover. Once you reach the comic itself it plays with exotic layouts and complicated designs. Unfortunately these design choices often come at the expense of readability; there's many times where the panel order is completely unclear and it matters. It initially struck me as a book intended to be looked at rather than read.

As I got further in I was struck by how brutal the narrative was. These are not pleasant characters. Jimmy is an emotionally closed man who gets lost in his own twisted (and yet somehow bland) fantasies. His father is a vile bigot who brags about the children he has abandoned. His grandfather might get to be the most down to earth but still we see mostly the petty cruelties of children. Ware sets up characters who I found myself pitying more than loathing.

So Jimmy Corrigan starts with an almost random narrative about people who I didn't really want to read about. It made those early pages a slog. Then about a third of the way through things change. Ware finds his narrative feet and starts assembling a story out of the disjointed pieces he had. The afterward states that this was originally a comic strip in a weekly paper even before he compiled it into the Acme Novelty Library series which may account for some of that. No matter the cause what had started as an unreadable mess became a stronger story.

Then an even more amazing transformation occurred toward the end. Ware found the good in his characters, the diamond underneath the broken human beings. There's a moment that forms the emotional climax of the book in my view where Jimmy finally reacts that's incredibly powerful given what Ware had built up before.

I think that this is a beautifully designed book even if the page layouts are sometimes unclear. Ware structures his forms around heavy, confining horizontal and vertical lines. There is little in the way of organic curves or even angles other than ninety degrees in the images and never in the panel borders. It's a design aesthetic that works very well for the story of human isolation that Ware is telling.

If I had been Jimmy Corrigan in individual issues I don't know if I could have waited six years to get to that point however taken as one complete work it was striking. I never want to be pulled over the broken glass of the story again but at the same time I'm glad that I did read it. I started out hating it and lost to what people saw in it, then found myself impressed with Ware's ability to get his emotional reaction though still not liking the book, and finally at the end of it all he won me over.

Review - Understanding Comics

Understanding Comics
by Scott McCloud
1994 Eisner Winner for Best Comic Related Book

I was poking through my shelves looking for my copy of Understanding Comics so that I could have it in front of me as I write this review and it was nowhere to be found. Not filed with the Scott McCloud books, not shuffled into in the indy books section, not lost among the wall of trade paperbacks. I couldn't find it in the pile of books by my nightstand or in the massive pile that accumulates around my computer. As it turns out my brother who has been living with me while he goes to college lent it to his girlfriend in order to help her (to steal the title) understand comics.

Now besides the obvious familial conflict this brings home the strength of Understanding Comics. It is not only the definitive guide to the medium, it is also approachable enough for those whose only experience with comics are in the newspapers. When it was first released I gave a copy to someone interested in graphic novels as an introduction. It's not just for newcomers either as it breaks down the medium in a way that even those who have read comics for years can appreciate.

McCloud has created a technically deep work about comics and presented it as a comic book. It's an intuitive leap that's so obvious in retrospect that it's shocking no one had done it before. He spends a lot of time on iconography and representative images which makes his using a caricature of himself as the guide so recursive you'll go cross-eyed if you think about it too hard.

He starts by defining exactly what comics are which is a more difficult process than you would think. It's followed by a side trip to the history of the medium as it flickered at the edges of art for all of human history until it finally came together in the past hundred years. Once the introduction is over McCloud gets into the nitty-gritty of representative images, the complications of pacing, how artistic style changes everything, and the artistic process.

Understanding Comics is a very philosophical book. It could almost work under the title "Understanding Communication and Art". Obviously the focus is on how comics communicate and form art but McCloud establishes a basis for readers to comprehend that in a larger context. I've never encountered anyone breaking down these concepts better.

Artistically the book has a cartoony style that works perfectly for the purpose of illustrating the topic at hand. A more complicated or detailed art style for the essays would have been distracting and McCloud is adapt at mixing in greater detail when necessary to make the point. McCloud uses a very simple design for himself creating a very likable lecturer. The drawings are not going to impress anyone though for this book that's for the best.

I don't have a single bad thing to say about Understanding Comics. If I had to pick a single comic for anyone to read this would be it though that's because I think it would convince people to look for more comics. Even if you think you know comics well enough that the book would be redundant I still highly recommend it for the fresh perspective it brings. McCloud's work is as close to perfect as you'll find.

Review - Graphic Storytelling

Graphic Storytelling
by Will Eisner
1997 Eisner Winner for Best Comic Related Book

I went around a few times on how to review Graphic Storytelling. The fact is that I don't have an awful lot to say about it. I considered pairing it up with the next item in my reviewing stack and in the end I decided to just let it go and not be very long winded.

Graphic Storytelling is as a primer on narrative in comics. It's short, simple, and to the point and that point is exactly what it says in the title: understanding the narrative structure of comics. Remember your high school English class as you picked apart old novels? That's what you have here though instead of old novels it's typically short vignettes by Eisner to illustrate the point. He starts with the very basics of storytelling and talks about how comics interact with the reader. It's far from definitive; the book covers the basic outline of how comics as a medium interacts with storytelling and not must further than that.

Eisner has taught classes in on the comics medium and where Graphic Storytelling works well is when he is providing instruction. For example, he has a brief section on pacing comics like prose novels versus pacing them like film and provides a miniature tableau to demonstrate the difference. Most of the second half the book is like this. The flip side is when he attempts to catalog stories; Eisner spends a lot of time on the most primitive understanding of storytelling.

Graphic Storytelling is a thoughtful look at sequential art as a storytelling medium but not a deep one. Any major comic book nerd who has looked at the techniques in depth is probably going to find the book a bit too simple for them. On the other hand if you're interested in the narrative form of sequential art I can't think of a better introduction.

Review - Batman: Animated

Batman: Animated
by Paul Dini and Chip Kidd
1999 Eisner Winner for Best Comic Related Book
1999 Eisner Winner for Best Publication Design

It's shocking to me that Batman: The Animated Series is close to twenty years old. When Batman started airing it was thin picking for comic book superheroes on the airwaves; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the closest you'd get and the only thing it had in common with the comic book was the title. So when Batman came along and managed the incredible balancing act of being a serious show about a superhero for children it was a revolution. I have never been a Batman fan and the animated series made me interested in him. Batman: Animated is not a history of the series even though it has a bit of that. And it's not a dissection of the production even if there's a bit of that in it as well. Batman: Animated is a celebration of series that set a yardstick for superhero cartoons and it does that very well.

The text in the book is minimal; there might be a paragraph or two on any given topic and I didn't find it very illuminating. If you've ever read an article on the series production then there's little in here that will come as a surprise. There's the expected gushing about the staff that Dini worked with, complaints about the network standards and practices, and the studio executives making unreasonable demands like making the the show about Robin. It's at its best when it goes into the details of the process but those glimpses are rare and fleeting.

What Batman: Animated has that makes it worth checking out is a wealth of art. If it's been drawn, painted, or sculpted for the series then there's a good chance that it's showing up in the pages. There's storyboards, key frame sequences, background paintings, model sheets, design sketches, color guides, and more. While it can't be all inclusive just due to space constraints it's hard to think that someone who likes the series will be unhappy with the book. While your favorite bit might not get featured there's bound to be another five things that you'll love included in its place.

I do have a few insignificant complaints about the selections. A very large portion of the book are double page spreads giving a look at a villain or minor character. It's not that I didn't like these, it's just that the book is far too short which means that they take up a disproportionate amount of space. I wanted this book to be twice as long.

I'm also not fond of the production design. It is extremely busy and it can be hard to tell what captions are referring to. The titles for pages are in tiny text on thin red bars which can be hard to spot. There are multiple gatefold spreads inside the book but due to how the pages are structured the felt redundant.

These are nitpicks, though. Batman: Animated is a wonderful collection of material and page after page holds some nifty treasure from the show. Sometimes it's a glimpse into what might have been like the original design for Harley Quinn or the redesign of Catwoman for an abandoned spin off, and sometimes it's the gritty details that are squeezed into the backgrounds. This book made me appreciate the art of the series even more.