Posts Tagged “Oni Press”
John Seven • 22nd Jun 2010 • Comics • Dark Horse, DC Comics, First Second Books, good comics for kids, Grant Morrison, graphic novels for kids, graphic novels for teens, Jane Yolen, Jeff Lemire, Jonah Hex, Jordan Mechner, Kolbeinn Karlsson, Matt Kindt, Michael Allred, Nadja Spiegelman, Oni Press, Prince of Persia, roller derby, Sweden, Swedish comics, Toon Books, Top Shelf Productions, Trade Loeffler, Vertigo
Age of Dinosaurs #3 (Dark Horse)
One of the most beautiful comics in print, this penultimate issue of Ricardo Delgado’s new paleontological epic continues to follow the mass migration of various dinosaur species. Fraught with the violence of nature and the fury of the journey, Delgado’s story unfolds in a total silence that keeps the narrative unfolding on the dinosaurs’ terms and not the readers’. Delgado was an animator on “Wall-E,” but the visuals here are more intimate, and any anthropomorphism comes off as a delicate touch.
Crogan’s March by Chris Schweizer (Oni Press)
In the previous volume creator Schweizer investigated political order versus chaos as a human struggle in a pirate setting. In this new book he tops his previous effort with a tense French Foreign Legion adventure that asks questions about war, borders, bravery, class, prejudice and the tentacles of history. Even with the heavy themes, it’s a lot of fun. With a whimsical but detailed European style of cartooning and an accessible scholarship, this series deserves a lot of attention outside the comics world.
First Wave #1 (DC Comics)
Superheroes with nothing but their fists and guile to help them defeat crime — oh, and a stylish 1940s period adventure to propel them — root around a mystery that will no doubt gather them together in the end. Doc Savage and The Spirit dominate this issue, but Rima, the Jungle Girl, does make an appearance, as do the Blackhawks and Batman — it’s all shaping up to be a fun romp. The beauty of this book is that it does recognize the absurdity of superheroes when placed in a real world setting, but doesn’t allow that inescapable fact to hijack it into silliness — and still the humor is there on the page.
Foiled by Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallero (First Second Books)
Teen fantasy fiction legend Yolen picks up where Minx Books left off with this comedy romance that unfolds precisely before bursting into all out wonderment. Aliera is an up and coming fencer, as well as a high school student with no self-esteem for her social skills. Her game is thrown out of whack by a crush on her lab partner in science class, but as the story progresses, little chips in the walls of her safe world begin to appear — and like many other a teen trapped in a coming of age tale, she finds her place in the universe is far less mundane than she thought. A great one for teen girls with promise for future stories. (more…)
John Seven • 29th Dec 2009 • Comics • Adam Rapp, Antony Johnson, biography, Brian Azzarello, Charles Burns, Dan Clowes, Dan Zettwoch, Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, George O'Connor, history, Holly Black, Jeff Smith, Justin Madson, Kazu Kibuishi, Kevin Huizenga, M.K. Perker, Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Matt Kindt, Oni Press, Pantheon, Peter Bagge, Phil Noto, Rick Geary, Ross Campbell, Russia, Scholastic, science fiction, Toon Books
Amulet 2: The Stonekeeper’s Curse - Kazu Kibuishi (Scholastic)
Creator Kibuishi certainly borrows from modern archetypes — Star Wars and Lord of the Rings in particular, as well as the films of Miyazake — but he is not content to let his own creations wallow in a bath of influences. Instead, his 
science fiction/fantasy epic for young readers leaps off the pages thanks to the natural quality of his storytelling — and having the story center around a cool girl character like Emily certainly helps. Kibuishi has so far skipped the lame supernatural fetishism and overwrought romance that taints too many young adult efforts, preferring story, character, and imagination in an exciting dance.
Ball Peen Hammer - Adam Rapp and George O’Connor (First Second Books)
Ball Peen Hammer moves from the dark allure of post-apocalyptic science fiction into an unrelentingly grim realm populated by unexpectedly noble characters — all rendered with an animated beauty by O’Connor’s hand. The stereotypes are turned inside out, victims of their own personal failures, as humans face a monumental and deadly challenge — and at the center is the sad and too easy decision to exploit children and in the process not only kill hope but create heaps that stand as sad reminders of moral failure. As depressing as it sounds, that’s what makes it worth recommending.
Batman/Doc Savage Special (DC)
Brian Azzarello pens an alluring vignette like something out of the ’70s Brave and the Bold, with strong stylized artwork by Phil Noto. He captures Batman in his younger days and dealing with the authority figures of the time — hence pulp fiction legend Doc Savage slumming in Gotham City as a diversion. In all truth, nothing much happens here — the adventure is basically dropped by the heroes — but this story mostly serves as a prelude for the upcoming First Wave comic, which will feature great DC Implosion characters from Justice Inc. and Rima the Jungle Girl, among others. The tone here is just right — serious but not overwrought, dark but not posturing — and it bodes well for the upcoming series.
Best American Comics 2009 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Charles Burns sets the tone for this year’s edition with a compelling essay that recounts his artistic and professional development as a journey through comic book collecting, where each tangent is a revelatory moment in his embrace of groundbreaking creativity. That he’s mirrored this volume’s selections in the same way is no accident. Easily one of the best in recent years, among the highlights are: Dan Zettwoch’s fictional history of a Church cartoonist’s newsletter; Peter Bagge’s comical slice of pre-Revolutionary America, and Dan Clowes’ attack on film critics and movie fetishists.
Breathers 0-4 (Just Mad Books)
If you want to read the best science fiction comic around, don’t look in any of the obvious places — Breathers is a self-published work by Wisconsin resident Justin Madson that concerns a gritty world of tomorrow that isn’t so far 
removed from today. In Madson’s scenario, the air we breathe has been infected with a virus for the last 40 years and people use stylish respiratory masks called “breathers” to stay alive. Madson weaves the tales of several people together in a series of shorter entries that create a wider tapestry of this future. Some are concerned with their own problems wrought from the situation, while others grapple with larger one — is the virus even real? Check it out at Madson’s website.
Cancer Vixen - Marisa Acocella Marchetto (Pantheon)
Suffering through breast cancer will get my sympathy — and my appreciation for bravery and chutzpah in the face of it — but it does not automatically mean I will think the graphic memoir of your experience is readable. In full disclosure, I couldn’t actually finish this book, so grating is the voice and narrative, and so amateurish and plain awful is the artwork. I read several reviews to make sure I wasn’t missing something, with the full intent of going back and reading the rest, but everything I encountered only cemented my reaction to this book. In contrast to what a good memoir should be, the narrative is manipulative rather than honest. Marchetto takes great pains to control our impression of her by compiling pages and pages of how successful and admired she is before we even get to the cancer. I understand that she does not want her readers to define her as the woman with cancer and have that image be our lasting impression, but then why bother to write a cancer memoir? The reader should be given a chance to discover her best qualities as she fights cancer, not have them dished out in an attempt to circumvent any impression we might have of her as a non-fabulous person with cancer. I bailed out at the diagnosis after having been pummeled by almost a hundred pages of constant bragging Also, I’m really tired of artists who who look as if they are relearning their entire craft starting with kindergarten level work when they go digital — it made an irritating story unbearable. This is a low point to the usually high standard of Pantheon’s output.
Ganges #3 (Fantagraphics)
Kevin Huizenga’s Every Man Glen Ganges faces a sleepless night and what unfolds is a mix of incoherent night rambling and time-passing mishap. Huizenga delivers a quiet tour de force that shows confident cartooning that thrills through its ease and craftsmanship, rather than stylizing the hell out of anything. His Ganges stories function as the American equivalent to Michel Rabagliati’s Paul stories, documenting a normal life with a sharp eye and a penchant for gentle revelation.
The Good Neighbors 2 - Holly Black and Ted Naifeh (Scholastic)
Spiderwyck co-creator Black continues her coming-of-age fairy-style saga as our heroine Rue starts to find her otherworldly family is beginning to take a toll on her friends, the resident Scooby Doo gang, and also that her mother isn’t as helpful as she’d hoped. Black’s first foray into the graphic novel format makes what is the now standard supernatural YA adventure more kinetic than most. and yet toned down in the histrionics and dramatics departments in such a way that grown-ups will have fun with it as well as teens. I confess that I’ll be glad when the supernatural wave in teen fiction dies down and a more open field of subject matter exists again — and also the standard plot of a kid hits a certain age and discovers he/she is secretly a wizard/vampire/fairy/spy/whatever becomes less overused — but Good Neighbors is at least agreeable in its use of these newly-minted chestnuts.
Insomnia Café - M.K. Perker (Dark Horse)
It isn’t a perfect work, but Turkish artist M.K. Perker’s stylized surrealist suspense tale — his American writing debut — 
has a lot to recommend it. Kolinsky is an expert on rare books whose shady past sends him on a downward plunge in the world, sleepless and at a job he hates. When he becomes involved with a coffee shop girl, he gets the opportunity to hide from his problems even as they snowball without his attendance. All is not as it necessarily seems, though, and Perker investigates the manifestations of that very concept from the eccentric to the unhinged. Perker is definitely one to watch.
Little Mouse Gets Ready - Jeff Smith (Toon Books)
If you’ve never considered that a children’s book about a mouse getting dressed would charm you into giddy happiness, you might want to pick this up. Combining the sweetness of old style Golden Books with a modern twist of a punchline, Smith has crafted a fun and funny little sequential picture book here — and Toon Books never disappoints, anyhow.
Skin Deep - Charles Burns (Fantagraphics)
Charles Burns offers a glimpse of what might happen if EC Comics existed today with three tales of intrigue and absurdity in this softcover reissue from the 2001 series collecting his early work. A master of the unearthly atmosphere — David Lynch has nothing on him — Burns unleashes tales of a man transplanted with a dog’s heart, a failing marriage with an alarming secret, and, best of all, an evangelist’s son’s encounter with God and his path to millions because of it. At once cautionary, creepy and curious, Burns is consistently one of comics’ deepest thinkers.
3 Story - Matt Kindt (Dark Horse)
In this somber and beautifully realized tale, Matt Kindt recounts the life of a real giant as seen through the eyes of the three women most important to him — his mother, his wife and his daughter. It’s Citizen Kane meets Gulliver’s Travels. As with Super Spy, Kindt’s styles are multiple and thoroughly accomplished, as is the depth of the biography that measures the perception of a man by the opposite sex. It is an area of mystery where expectations can outgrow and overtake the self that lurks within. In this book, Kindt comes up with a protagonist who is truly as big as the author’s ideas.
Trotsky: A Graphic Biography - Rick Geary (Hill and Wang)
Geary, one of the best practitioners of the non-fiction comics form, tackles the life of Communist thinker and leader by examining his ideas at a time when such radical naivete seemed like just the answer to oppression. Though it’s hard to say that Trotsky comes off as likable, Gear isn’t afraid to present the harsher side of the man in a fight for his own principles and some level of government fairness towards ordinary human beings, even when it involves executions of peasants who refused to fight in the revolution. A person like Trotsky is unlikely to exist again — we’re less tolerant of intellectuals and anyone with foibles — but Geary does a fantastic job at bringing the era to life.
Wasteland Vol 5 - Antony Johnson, Carla Speed McNeil, Joe Infurnari, Chuck BB, and Christopher Mitten (Oni Press)
The originally invigorating Wasteland series suffers another sidetracking setback — Vol. 4 with its foray into nomadic dog tribes was irritating enough. In that, the main characters and their stories were largely relegated to minor purposes, leaving them tied up for the duration of the story. In this volume, four flashback stories are presented, filling in details of the post apocalyptic word and leading up to the stories in the first volume. The problem is that no matter how well done these stories are — and they are extremely well realized, particularly with Mitten’s stunning color work on the final story — they are mostly superfluous. A nice time passer but I hope Johnson will get back to what made this series truly interesting. To that end, I highly recommend the first 3 volumes of the series if you haven’t read them already.
Wet Moon Vol. 5 by Ross Campbell (Oni Press)
Campbell’s ongoing series of graphic novels follows a loose group of industrial-goth art school students in a mysterious Southern swamp town. Based on his own experiences at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Campbell weaves a network of gossip, doubt, and confessions that creates a mystique of experience in those transition years between high school and adulthood. Campbell shows an uncanny respect and sympathy for every character who enters the story, which keeps it down to earth even as the strange feeling in the air begins to wrap mystery around the story in ways you can’t quite put your finger on, even as it careens into an wholly unexpected event.
Year of Loving Dangerously - Ted Rall (NBM)
Unapologetically frank memoir of the year Rall spent as — there is no delicate way to put this — a gigolo who traded his favors for a roof over his head and a bed. Not just one — multiple places of action and rest were his in 1980s New York City, and this maze of mattresses serves as a stellar travelogue to life at that place and time. If Rall comes off as a bit of a rogue, he’s a least one with an interesting tale to tell — a series of misfortunes that saw him kicked out of college and on the streets during one of the scariest times in NYC history to be a homeless person.
John Seven • 6th Mar 2009 • Book Articles, Comics • goth, industrial, Oni Press, Ross Campbell, Southern Gothic
Now in its fourth volume, Ross Campbell’s “Wet Moon” series follows the intricate, daily back-and-forths of a group of freshman college students who are part of a goth/industrial scene in a hot and sleepy Southern town, as they stumble through the growing up process. This might sound like a hip “Afterschool Special,” but it’s the furthest thing from that. Campbell’s story sprawl can be alternately crude and adorable, actually traveling the landscape alongside his characters rather than looking down from above. He’s on their level — and by proxy the level of some of his readers — and it’s this talent that differentiates “Wet Moon” from so many other efforts with similar goals.
The central character is Cleo Lovedrop, the perpetual sweetheart whose heart gets constantly trampled upon. She stands as Patient Zero to the cast, which includes her snarky best friend Trilby and the third wheel flirtation Mara. There are a host of other characters who move in and out of the main action — so many, in fact, that Campbell offers a “Who’s Who” page at the end of each volume and that’s helpful. Any given character might be the focus of a section and then only appear later in page long vignettes that Campbell inserts within the dramatically focused sections. These are great moments that give the Wet Moon series its flavor, giving all-inclusive hints that there is more going on in the town than meets the eye, while still keeping it vague — it’s more atmospheric than physical, and that’s a tribute to Campbell’s choices in his presentation.
There’s definitely something in the air — a mood that hangs in the humidity and drapes the characters into a displacement that makes it seem as though they are walking in the vacuum of space. There’s nothing mysterious going on, though — as the circle widens and the world opens up, the social complications of their tribe become more complex. The characters rely on the same tools they always have, but that rarely involves direct negotiation with each other. The idea seems to be that they haven’t yet mastered the talent of emotional honesty because they are still in that learning stage — they’ll talk about their awkward sexual encounters before calmly addressing issues with each other — and that backdrop of problems never addressed mixes with the weight of the humidity to burden them further.
In Volume 4, the implied bizarre nature of the world around them revs up with the inclusion of a local superhero — a mysterious, down-to-earth one who roams parks at night protecting young girls from stalkers — who, it seems, might be so focused on male violence that she’s missing part of the real threat in the town of Wet Moon.
The implication is that the fringe of awareness is something fleeting for the characters, so burdened by the concerns of their own lives. They do notice things, though, and the way Campbell’s story unfolds has the quality that Wet Moon takes place on the edge of where other comics focus on. Imagine any superhero or horror comic and then figure out what happens to the people who aren’t in the center of that story.
Campbell’s character’s may well seize that focus eventually, but for right now it’s about the slow progression where their inner selves and the world around them are revealed with a precise and sometimes uncomfortable elegance.
John Seven • 23rd Nov 2007 • Book Articles, Comics • Canada, history, Oni Press, Scott Chantler
In Scott Chantler’s “Northwest Passage,” the glory of the western genre is taken to a new place for graphic novels — Canada. Chantler’s tale of a wilderness outpost in 1755 has all the thrills and grit of any novel about men taming the wild, but adds to it a cartoonish charm and a good helping of fascinating Canadian history — with informative annotations
The graphic novel tells the tale of archetypal he-man Charles Lord unfolds, warts and all. Lord is in charge of Fort Newcastle, a remote British-run trading post in what was known then as Rupert’s Land. This area, which included a good deal of Canada including portions of Quebec and Ontario, was under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was given to them by Charles II and essentially handed over to the company a massive monopoly on the fur trade.
With such profits to be had, obviously the company wanted its men to stay put and keep bringing in the money.
As Chantler points out in the annotations, it’s important that the story takes place one year before the Seven Years War, a.k.a. the French and Indian War, which lead to the creation of modern Canada after the seizing of Quebec by the English. Chantler describes the period as “a time of complacency that is about to be shaken up by violence and change” and “Northwest Passage” functions as a gripping parable for the wider movement of Canadian history.
Charles Lord is about to step down as governor of For Newcastle — a replacement is on the way and Lord is struggling with what to do with himself after a life of adventure and service. He also has familial issues to contend with — his son, Simon, part Indian, struggles with the confusion that his parentage offers. At the same time, an old Indian friend of Lord’s shows up at the Fort having been attacked by a mystery party.
Lord must not only defend himself and his men against French privateers ready to seize the fort, but also align himself with remnants of his past, before he was a governor, when he was a wandering adventurer, unleashed on the land with other foolhardy and brave souls and dreaming of finding a northwest passage to the Pacific.
The French, however, also hold specters, most notably in the person of their leader, Guerin Montglave, who keeps terrible secrets of his own that create personal hatred between he and Lord. Chantler proves himself not only a sharp writer whose characters draw a reader in, but a fluid and amiable illustrator. His pen work holds a cartoonish fluidity that lends the characters a feel of movement and personality and he’s great at period details without be fussy about it. In Chantler’s hands, simplicity evokes great depth.
“Northwest Passage” is a fine choice for anyone who loves frontier adventure and is looking for something very different, yet appealing to tradition — it’s packed with bravado and pluck, but also tenderness and danger. It’s a graphic novel for all ages, certain to enlighten and engage people who never considered the real possibilities in the comic book form.
John Seven • 14th Nov 2007 • Comics • Canada, Canadian history, comics for kids, graphic novels for kids, Northwest Passage, Oni Press, Rupert's Land, Scott Chantler
In his graphic novel “Northwest Passage,” Scott Chantler reinvents the frontier western comic book by doing something very simple — he takes it out of the west and puts it into the north. While it’s more Daniel Boone than Two Gun Kid, it mines the same territory of manly Americana, but dispenses of the well trod plot devices by placing his adventure in Canada and examining the pressures between the French and the English.
Taking place in what was known as Rupert’s Land in Canada in 1755, Chantler’s story follows Charles Lord as his past comes to catch up with him on several roads and he ends up having to fight for his post at Fort Newcastle after it is taken over by a French privateer. Lord is forced to team-up with rag-tag comrades from his past, as well as own up to family connections and responsibilities in the present.
Chantler’s story-telling is tender and gripping, while his art manages to keep things light with an almost cartoony style that comes together with the subject matter in an unlikely but highly successful mixture for pure excitement. Adventure trends lean towards bells and whistles, but Chantler has proven himself an ace at doing the most basic thing demanded of a comic book creator that too many fail at— he can tell a gripping story in a straightforward manner, blowing away his competition in most genres.
Chantler lives in Waterloo, Ontario. His childhood comic book interests aren’t immediately apparent from his current work.
JM: When did you first begin to read comic books?
SC: I was pretty young when I first discovered comics…probably only three or four years old. Remember how Gold Key used to package comics together two or three to a plastic bag and sell them in toy stores? I was constantly pestering my mother to bring comics home from the toy store. I was really into Batman, probably because of the ’60s TV show. I was born in the early ’70s, but that show ran in repeats forever.
I didn’t really become a regular comics reader, though, until I was 13. Then it was “Conan,” DC’s “Warlord,” and the other sword-and-sorcery books that were popular at the time. Then, when I was 18, I discovered Will Eisner, and it was mostly Indie books from then on.
JM: What prompted you to conceive of Northwest Passage? What was the process of creating the characters and realizing the plot?
SC: Six or seven years ago, I read two books by popular Canadian historian Peter C. Newman — ”Company of Adventurers” and “Caesars of the Wilderness.” They’re the first two books in his history of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which is the English trading company that was so vital in the exploration and settling of Canada — many of Canada’s major cities are built of the sites of HBC posts. It occurred to me at the time that here was an ideal setting for an adventure story, a setting that strikes the same mythic chord with Canadians that the Old West does with Americans, or that the age of chivalry does for Europeans.
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John Seven • 10th Oct 2007 • Comics • chimpanzee in space, comics for kids, First In Space, graphic novels for kids, James Vining, Oni Press, space program
When you’re coming up with ideas for comics, the words “chimpanzee” and “outer space” conjure up all sorts of wacky images. They certainly did for creator James Vining, who found himself examining all the possibilities after combining the two in an impromptu drawing during his time in the Coast Guard.
“It was a bit of an accident,” said Vining. “I made a doodle of a surly chimp in a space suit and wrote ‘first in space’ next to it on the white board on the ship I was stationed on.”
Vining originally tried to dream up a crazy science fiction story, but those ideas never took him anywhere satisfactory. It wasn’t until he began to research the true story of chimpanzees in space — that being NASA’s early space program in which chimps were trained and vied for the prime spot of being on the first “manned” US flight into space— that everything began to come together.
In Vining’s resulting graphic novel “First in Space,” the focus is primarily on the history of the early space program, but through the experience the unlikely heroes who worked towards the celestial conquest — Gordon Cooper’s gotten enough glory, this story focuses on a chimpanzee named Ham. In Vining’s view, the spectacle of the space program sometimes glosses over the smaller moments that contain stories worth telling.
“The devil’s in the details,” said Vining. “Great to know that we went to the moon in 1969, but a LOT went into that adventure.”
Vining points to the recent documentary “ In the Shadow of the Moon” as a thematic cousin of his work. The extended footage of Neil Armstong’s walk on the moon reveals the kind of moments that fascinate Vining — the moments before the legendary and rehearsed line he utter — and propel a larger tale through a smaller canvas
“The hesitation before he makes the leap, where he surveys the alien environment, really adds the level of humanity that the mythologized and truncated version lacks,” said Vining.
And it’s humanity that Vining is after in “First in Space,’ even through its central character is a chimpanzee being used in a laboratory testing situation but is building relationships as his participation serves a larger purpose, right or wrong.
“The thing to remember about the animal testing in the space program — the chimps in particular — is that the men who cared for them and trained them had a difficult job,” said Vining. “They loved those animals and it always affected them deeply whenever something happened to them, in spite of their efforts to be clinical or detached when dealing with them. Only a monster would be unaffected by these chimps who were, essentially, like little kids.”
“First in Space” also has the advantage of being remarkably kid-friendly while not talking down to the readers — or simplifying the situations. Vining says that he never intentionally wrote a book for kids, but he did consider that they would read it and he hoped to offer something that excited any reader about history.
“The glossed over version we learn in school doesn’t help us when history starts repeating itself,” said Vining. “You have to know a little more about the mechanics of how the Nazis came to power in the 30’s, for example, to really appreciate how scary the world is right now. Plus history is interesting, and better than most fiction. You can’t make this stuff up if you tried.”
Vining notes that comic books have recently been looking to history and science for its stories and much of that has been kid-friendly. Vining himself was a big history buff when he was a kid and it was always the teachers who told the stories he couldn’t find in school books that he loved the most.
Perhaps graphic novels like “First in Space” are Vining’s way of continuing that work in his own way.
“I would love to hear that kids go out and learn more about space history after reading ‘First in Space,’” said Vining. “I’d love it even more if they said, “I wonder what else I don’t know about history” and start digging into other things as well.”
Visit James Vining’s web site.
Purchase “First in Space.”
