Posts Tagged “Rick Geary”

A collection of brief comic book reviews for your pleasure or ire

0John Seven • 29th Dec 2009 • Comics • , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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 ballpeenhammerscience 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 breathersremoved 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 — insomniacafehas 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.

3story3 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.

wetmoonv5Wet 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.

Review: The Adventures of Blanche by Rick Geary

0John Seven • 20th Jul 2009 • Book Articles, Comics • ,

Author/artist Rick Geary has made a niche for himself creating non-fiction books for kids that center in on macabre history. He has deserved every moment of his acclaim with books that, even as they teach history, also study psychology and sociology in regard to criminal behavior and present the subject matter never as pandering and certainly never as clinical.

“The Adventures of Blanche” collects three fictional stories by Geary in which he employs the same technique as his non-fiction work for old fashioned, rollicking adventure.

Geary’s story follows Blanche, a talented turn of the century piano player just starting out her career. In the form of letters to her parents, Blanche’s adventures in the big cities of the world unfold, revealing a polite and intelligent heroine who does not suffer from the typical fictional anachronisms too often given to females in similar scenarios. Blanche is very much a girl of her time but a progressive one — this is a great girl hero who relies on guile and talent in her adventures.

Geary’s method is to have Blanche wrapped around real-life events that offer possibilities for adventure and intrigue. Blanche’s adventure in New York City uses the building of the subway as a backdrop for a mysterious science fiction conspiracy. Meanwhile, the beginnings of the film industry and labor disputes are covered during her stay in Los Angeles, and more science fiction is mixed with Soviet Russian intrigue and the Parisian intellectual world of Picasso and Eric Satie when Blanche visits France.

Geary packs a lot into each adventure — they’re a little over 30 pages each — while keeping a charming simplicity that moves the action forward. There’s a lot more to be said about Blanche, and I hope Geary considers telling us someday.

Review: The Lindbergh Child by Rick Geary

0John Seven • 7th Nov 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • , , , ,

Rick Geary treads creepy crime territory again with “The Lindbergh Child”, a recounting of the famous Lindbergh kidnapping in which the title character hardly appears and the reader is instead introduced to a landscape inhabited by disturbing opportunists and macabre unanswered questions.

In 1932, American hero Charles Lindbergh once again captured the country’s imagination and found himself constantly in the headlines — this time around, it was due to tragedy. His 18-month-old son, Charles, was kidnapped from his bedroom — the only clues were some footprints, a carpenter’s chisel used to pry open shutters, a handmade ladder with three sections and a ransom note written by someone “unfamiliar with the English language.”

What seemed possibly to be an open and shut case — pay the ransom, get the child, nab the kidnappers at the drop-off — turned into a prolonged and bizarre process that brought in a parade of go-betweens and side stories. It soon becomes apparent that what makes this story important in the annals of crime — aside from the obvious tragedy — is its status as a major media event. It’s not just a an isolated incident but a transgression against a celebrity that interjected its way into the lives of average Americans. The cast of characters who become involved in the peripheries of the case — purportedly to either move the investigation forward or commandeer the safe return of the baby — are really people who want to touch that hem of greatness and try to divert that spotlight in their direction, even momentarily.

Years later, the mad rush to recognition did not die away. The unsolved case yielded a number of young men claiming to be the kidnapped Lindbergh baby returned. Were they only after the fortune, or were they also enthralled by the attention?

Geary lends a foreboding tone to the entire incident — there’s a mist of gloom that clouds the vision of many people involved. It’s one that never really lifts and Geary understands how that mist still sits on us all. Its latest incarnation has an election worker faking an attack — crime is just another way to express yourself and try to capture the nation’s imagination.

Review: Classics Illustrated - The Invisible Man by Rick Geary

0John Seven • 12th Sep 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • , , , , ,

Rick Geary takes his skill for evoking Victorian era crimes and turns it to fiction with his colorful, creepy adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man.”

In the latest of the new Classics Illustrated series, Geary continues to differentiate the modern day line from its dry ancestors with the kind of energy and detail that is more typical of a BBC adaptation of a classic than anything Classics Illustrated ever offered. The old line always carried a certain stigma with it — why not read the original? They came off a bit like Cliff’s Notes. The new versions, however, stand on their own and cement graphic storytelling as a form for adaptation as legitimate as film — and perhaps more so.

Wells’ original tale stands counter to the current vogue of both horror and science fiction, functioning as an intimate tale of a small local incident. Geary’s renderings capture this perfectly, following a small group of locals whose investigations and speculations dance around the mystery of the strange lodger in Mrs. Hall’s house.

Wells’ suggests that paranoia and gossip have their place — each presents formidable weapons against the sinister invisible weirdo — and that societies do well to be wary of outsiders. There is also sympathy for the Invisible Man though — mad with power, but a power so silly, so not worth becoming explosive over. The irony is not lost on Geary — the idea that a naked man is terrorizing a town is front and center in Geary’s adaptation. It seems that Geary is laughing and crying at the notion at the same time — so, too, will the readers.

Review: J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography by Rick Geary

0John Seven • 8th Aug 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • , , , , , ,

It’s hard to have much sympathy for the quivering little dictator, J. Edgar Hoover, and Rick Geary’s sober retelling of the man’s life doesn’t offer much to change your mind. By focusing on the fractured psychology behind Hoover’s strengths, as well as his weaknesses, Geary paints a picture of the ways in which people over-compensate in their struggles against their own demons — and how they align themselves to systems beyond their psyche in order to justify the demons.

In “J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography,” Geary traces the legendary FBI chief’s rise to power as a Washington, D.C., native and son of a Department of the Interior employee. As Geary points out, Hoover was by no means a typical American, but he grabbed those virtues and held them close as tenets by which to build a career — whether the embrace was out of love or control is harder to say. For all his rhetoric pushing for ordinary American values, he seemed to have no connection with the people who lived by them — or people in general. With the exception of a few close male friends — innuendoes accepted, but unproved — Hoover comes off as apart from the rest of the world.

So little of his personal life remained veiled that Geary can only really work with his public professional life, and these facts provide clues to the inner workings of Hoover, while offering about as many hard answers about the complicated psychology of the man as they do about his possible homosexuality. He was orderly, he was a harsh taskmaster, he liked glory but did not like to admit so. He knew how to get publicity through propaganda filtered to Americans via popular culture and he really disliked communists.

As with any political examination, there are plenty of lines to be drawn between then and now. In Hoover’s case, a 40-year practice of spying on private citizens, after being granted disgustingly broad powers to do so by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, certainly qualifies. It was Hoover’s indulgence that provided Joe McCarthy with the names and information that painted such a dark moment in our nation’s history. Hoover also used this information to control hiring at colleges, as well as stalk members of the Communist Party in the effort to destroy their personal lives.

Obviously, this is not a glowing summation of the man’s career. Geary has been given another opportunity to shine doing what he does best with the tale of Hoover — and as a work aimed toward young adult readers, he provides an early tour in the subtle corruption that power can lead to. Hoover’s misuse of the authority handed to him in order to further his personal ideologies at the cost of citizen’s rights is something that ought never be forgotten — the same story happens often enough and it’s happening right now and Geary is doing his part to keep the warning alive and the citizenry cautious.

Review: The Fatal Bullet by Rick Geary

0John Seven • 2nd May 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • , ,

When it comes to the study of presidential assassinations, Kennedy and Lincoln tend to draw all the attention away from Garfield and McKinley, but Rick Geary is out to change a little of that with his graphic novel “The Fatal Bullet,” a tight non-fiction affair that not only recounts the assassination, but the circumstances that lead up to it. What Geary delivers is a captivating portrait of two men — Garfield and his assassin, Charles J. Guiteau — in a narrative framework of parallel paths, one all-American, one demented, and both crossing at several points.

Geary begins his book with a very funny cartoon depicting “The Two Roads,” which has Garfield beginning life in “a frontier boyhood of hard work and piety,” while pathetic Guiteau is doomed to “a childhood lost and love-less.” For Guiteau, it’s all down hill from there.

The guiding forces behind Guiteau’s trajectory are twin sicknesses — delusions of grandeur and a devotion to an unhinged religious cult. Guiteau was convinced he would be a man of greatness, even if reality conspired to prove otherwise, and the key ingredient separating one’s mind from reality was planted in him in 1861, in a religious community in Oneida, N.Y. This talent for self-derangement was called upon in a series of swindles that allowed Guiteau to masquerade as a legitimate man of importance, while stealing money from clients and remaining perpetually on the run.

Guiteau began to believe his own lies and, as a man who could not separate fantasy from reality, became convinced that he would gain a position through Garfield, an appointee for a political post abroad.

Disappointment mixed with madness and a word from God himself signaled to Guiteau what he had to do to save the Republican Party and the nation — and he attached himself to his mad calling with a meticulous vigor, stalking the president until he could send him on what turned out to be a slow and painful descent into death.

In Geary’s hands, the story of how Guiteau ends up shooting President Garfield unfolds with a finger-wagging humor brought forth by an overwrought Victorian sneer that wraps itself around the facts of the tale. Not that this attitude takes away from the true story — in fact, it bolsters it, working well with Geary’s visuals to gives the tone of a report being given at the time this is all happening. Not content to stay at arm’s length from the proceedings, Geary’s meticulous recounting of events passes through private moments of both men, tracing the motivations, animosity and madness in a fluid and emotional way.

Along the way, Geary dispenses interesting facts and contexts that make the story — and the world in which it unfolds — even more real to the reader. In his work, published under the umbrella title “A Treasury of Victorian Murders,” Geary has done well to document the fact that psychotic madmen bent on carnage are nothing new to the landscape. The immediacy of our media — and the enormity of its scope — makes it seem as though things have gotten somehow worse in that area. But Guiteau is merely one point in a long line that passes through John Hinckley and Seung-Hui Cho and, sadly, onto an area beyond the latest incarnation.

Review: The Bloody Benders by Rick Geary

0John Seven • 7th Mar 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • , , , ,

It’s not hard to be convinced that Americans have devolved into some alarming form of gruesomeness when you pay attention to the news. Tales of ugly murders abound and find home in our popular culture.

Rick Geary’s extremely mischievous non-fiction graphic novel “The Bloody Benders” relates one more bit of evidence that this sort of horrible behavior has always existed — and only time offers any ability to look at it calmly. Centering around the mysterious Bender Family in Kansas, Geary walks the reader through a tale of murder that somehow manages to be sly and macabre, even disturbing, without actually being gross.

The Benders were four people — purportedly an older father and mother, a simple son and spiritualist daughter — who lived in parcels of land off the Ossage Trail in 1870. This was a busy road and their provisions store attracted many visitors — they also provided meals and, sometimes, a place to sleep. But a disturbing stench crept from the Benders’ demeanor and following the events of the book, there came tales of unhinged madness that showed its face to several visitors who were disturbed enough by it to keep quiet.

Following the Benders’ arrival, travelers began to go missing — though the family was considered odd, they seem to have escaped any real investigation. It was only after they were safe from prosecution that any success was gotten in the case — and only after the bodies had piled up.

At the center of the clan was the daughter, Kate, who enticed men with her beauty and women with her supposed mystical prowess — Kate claimed to be a healer who claimed to cure all sorts of diseases, including deafness, and despite being such an obvious charlatan, many think that she was the ringleader of the murderous clan.

While Geary is sober with his facts, he allows the recent history of Kansas and the legends that swirl around the Benders’ fate to bookend the tale with a foreboding ambiance. The state is born through blood baths revolving around the Civil War, followed by the treatment of American Indians as cattle to be moved from one parcel of land to the next. It was a land of bleak possibilities, where horrible winters were followed by summers which pounded into a person’s resolve. Cyclones, floods, infestations and disease were constant. Through Geary’s pen, the entire state comes off as just the sort of place the Benders would call home.

Never captured, there are many tales surrounding the family’s fate — some in the realm of possibility, some far too fantastic to ever be likely. They do show, however, America’s enduring relationship with horrible murderers. They capture our imagination, perhaps because we cannot understand how someone, with precision and surety, can take multiple lives in order to achieve whatever goal might be in their heads — in the Benders’ case, that would be money. One thing is for certain — when the Benders took off into the distance, their spirits roamed the country and continue to do so. Their names may have been forgotten by many, but their work continues.