Posts Tagged “Russia”

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: Private Century

0John Seven • 7th Dec 2009 • Film • , , , , , , , ,

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Director Jan Sikl’s Czechoslovakian epic of love, family, betrayal and political struggle “Private Century” — which saw a screening at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year and is now released by Facets Video — captures decades in the lives of several families, peering into their personal nooks and crannies with a precise passion.

Most astoundingly, not only is every story presented true, but their on-screen realizations bypass actors and sets, opting instead for the original players.

How is this done? Through hours and hours of original home movies, letters and diaries, piecing together the ups and downs of ordinary citizens living through both world wars and the communist takeover — revealing that, no matter the political and social climate, personal lives the world over are essentially the same.

“Private Century” runs in eight episodes, each covering one specific story, with the various pieces brought together by Sikl into cohesive wholes. The general timeline of the series follows citizens through World War 1 on through World War 2 and the Nazi occupation, into the aftermath of the war and up to the late 1960s and the corrupt domination by Russia and the communists. Despite the heavy rumbles of history through their lives, the people revealed still have time to love and to cheat, to bicker, to raise children, to have hobbies, to struggle with parents — to be real, whole people. (more…)

Review: Alone in Four Walls

0John Seven • 9th May 2009 • Film • , , , ,

Alexandra Westmeier’s stunningly filmed documentary film examines the lives of young Russian boys confined to state reform schools for a variety of crimes — from petty theft of jelly jars to multiple, brutal murders — with an elegance that is unexpected and a dignity that never panders.

It’s a gloomy tale with a few bright spots — troubled boys are sentenced to jail time in a seemingly genuine effort to not only rehabilitate them, but to utilize the incarceration as an intervention in lieu of effective social services. Westmeier takes the time to investigate as many boys’ personal stories as she can fit in, with a couple that she gets further inside, and but the commonalties of the tales are grim. Every boy has pretty much the same background — poverty, physical abuse, absentee parents, substance abuse and an alignment with criminal gangs more than any structured family or educational situation.

Despite the rough lives, many of the boys aren’t any different from any kid you would meet in your own hometown and some of them are impossible to imagine committing any sort of crime at all. Others betray a certain level of sophistication in their presentations, particularly Tolja, in jail for the murder of another boy. Westmeier spends the most amount of time establishing his story. She visits his father, his accomplice and the mother of his victim in order to patch together a more complete picture of the boy who self-assured in interviews and, in that process, paints an uncritical but enlightening portrait of an unrepentant criminal who is also a victim.

The main message a viewer walks away with, though, is that the incarceration is better than anything these kids have at home — a major flaw in the Russian system. As explained at the end of the film, 91% of these boys return to adult prison and the implication there is as complicated as the psyches examined in the film. The reformatories can offer discipline and self respect, but that can’t alter a poverty-stricken landscape to offer the opportunity to flex what they have learned. That they returned is an indication of not only a societal incapacity to offer real opportunities, but also a troubling reminder that jails can provide desirable comfort to those whose lives are marginalized beyond hope.

Review: Andrei Tarkovsky 2 Pack: The Steamroller and The Violin and Voyage In Time (Facets Video)

0John Seven • 4th May 2009 • Film • , , , ,

In the pantheon of singular film geniuses, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky seems to be of such a cult that it barely registers against the more splashy personalities that cinema has had to offer. For too many people, he is best known as the guy who directed the original version of “Solaris” before Steven Soderbergh, but to Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky was the greatest filmmaker ever — a title he deserves from so many more people.

Tarkovsky’s movies were unique, intense, spiritual affairs, wrapped in some form of Christian mysticism — and while they often presented darkness, they never wallowed in it. Many of his films offer a kind of redemption via the darkness, a light born of sacrifice and hurt — a personal responsibility to a greater, intangible good in the world — that is accentuated by a painstaking slowness that is contemplative and precise. To experience Tarkovsky at his best is to indulge in a life-altering meditative process with a movie screen.

The tragedy of Tarkovsky is that he died too early — at the age of 54 of lung cancer, and shortly after his first taste of freedom from the Soviet system. In 1984, he was in Sweden preparing his final film “The Sacrifice” and refused to return to his home country, embracing the opportunity to make films without restraint. A year and a half later, Tarkovsky was dead.

In this new double pack, opposite ends of Tarkovsky’s career are revealed, from his 1960 diploma film “The Steamroller and The Violin” to “Voyage in Time,” a 1983 journal by the filmmaker that chronicles his search for film locations in Italy to use in his film “Nostalghia,”a trip that provided him with the first real taste of freedom that would cause him to eventually leave his home. (more…)

Review: The Singing Revolution

0John Seven • 29th Jul 2008 • Film • , , , , , , ,

When Estonia won its independence from the Soviet Union after half-a-century under its thumb, it was largely through peaceful resistance that was fueled by one of the most important obsessions of their culture — singing. In the film “The Singing Revolution,” directors James Tusty and Maureen Castle provide a thorough overview of the the Soviet chapter in Estonia’s history that highlights its musical enthusiasms. (more…)

Review: Tintin and the Land of the Soviets, Tintin and Alph-Art by Herge

0John Seven • 3rd Mar 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • , , , , , , , ,

The Belgian reporter Tintin — the creation of Herge — has charmed children and adults worldwide for decades, from the first adventure in 1929, to his final complete one in 1976. For French cartoonist’s 100th birthday, three volumes of adventures that had never been released in the United States beyond some limited edition, small press hardcovers were announced for release. In the end, the controversial “Tintin in the Congo” has not made it to release amidst charges of racism and a rather ill-advised embrace of the sort of colonialism that has been happily relegated to history. The two titles that have been presented are exciting for their historical significance, for their revelations of the artistic process, and for their simple enjoyment.

Plain and simple, Tintin is the way that so many of us learned to read graphic novels and accept them as part of the realm of literature — they were not open-ended, seat of your pants superhero monthlies, but self-contained, fully-realized adventure books that could be found in any library alongside the classics and contemporaries of the prose world. In fact, Tintin books were the exception — there just weren’t any acceptable graphic novels for anyone in America and their release here pioneered a form that has been embraced wholeheartedly by such ventures as LIttle Lit, and at least partially by the phenomenons of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and “Hugo Cabret.” These books might not be as successful without Herge and Tintin to pave the way.

What these new release have done is create book-ends to the adventure series, revealing where Tintin came from and showing where he ended up. Much like his readers, Tintin’s adventures begin from a more facile world view — politics and societies slowly unfold through the decades of intrigue and by the time Herge conceived of “Alph Art,” the audience is able to look at something like “Land of the Soviets” as one would a naive kid — charming, filled with bravado, but with so much to learn about the world.

Almost everything is primitive about “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets,” from the lack of nuance in its politics to the spare and clunky, black and white art. Herge redrew all the earlier adventures except this one, and it works as a document to the way his hand moved on the page prior to his trademarked style, which has cast a net on so much comics work in the world. Hardly as tight as any of the later adventures, the book has Tintin going on a loose journey of discovery to Soviet Russia, essentially amounting to an extended chase scene that allows Herge to create satire around the Soviet system and its claims of being a successful and superior way of governance. On one hand, this means the story plays into propaganda of a certain stripe — on the other, years after the bohemian glamor of American communist groups and the instant sympathy created by the witch hunts in the 1950s, it’s easy to see that Herge was not far-off in his lampoons of the country. And old style anti-Soviet satire makes for some nostalgically pleasing cartoons — it seems so far away from the terrorist-fearing, security state we currently live in.

On the other end of the scale, “Tintin and Alph-Art” is an unfinished adventure that Herge began working on in the late 70s, but died in 1983 before it was anywhere near completed. In this new edition, the story is presented as a script, embellished by reproductions of Herge’s unfinished page layouts and various sketches. The script leaves off before the end, but is followed by pages of development sketches and notes that show how Herge arrived at the story he did begin producing.

Strangely, this is a compelling volume and as a script, the story is entirely delightful. The adventure involves the world of contemporary art — ripe for satire despite Herge’s apparent embrace of the form — and a link with the usual litany of international crime, this time revolving around art forgery and new age swindles — there’s one great mystical character who wields electro-magnetic energy on his new age followers. The fact that Herge’s passing left Tintin in a cliffhanger couldn’t be more fortuitous or symbolic — Tintin stories are compilations of cliff hangers, they are one perpetual cliff hanger, and it’s a fitting tribute by the gods of coincidence that its at a cliffhanger that he leaves us. To boot, the circumstances of the cliffhanger itself, in which Tintin might be united with a piece of art and put on display in a museum forever, is such a perfect summation of the character’s fate in literary and cartooning history that, in some ways, “Alph-Art” takes on a Dennis Potter style quality with in mine, the character leaping from the pages and actually being preserved in our world through art.

The downside of these volumes is that they are works that can be only really be recommended to fans — but that really shouldn’t dissuade anyone from thinking it’s too late to become fans. They are around to be enjoyed after you’ve introduced yourself to the other 22 books in the series. There’s bound to be plenty of opportunity — Steven Speilberg and Peter Jackson have announced their joint venture, a trilogy of Tintin films, which is sure to unleash a bombast of interest and product in the boy reporter from Belgium. Do yourself a favor and get a head start before the movies obscure your view of the real Tintin, as presented by Herge.

Review: Laika by Nick Abadzis

0John Seven • 23rd Nov 2007 • Book Articles, Comics • , , , , , , ,

You can’t argue with a nice comic and Nick Abadzis’ “Laika” is as nice as they come — gentle and humane, it’s almost so low key that I can barely believe it’s a comic, let alone one about the Russian space program. And yet this tale of the first dog in outer space reveals within an oppressive bureaucracy shy people, strong in spirit but soft in emotion, facing a moment in history in the only way they can — from their small vantage point.

It’s nice, indeed, but that doesn’t mean that it ignores the darkness implicit in the story he has chosen to tell — nor the human complexity.

Abadzis finds several small vantage points from which to allow his tale to spring, all converging to some grim overview of the Soviet reality. Korolev, the future chief designer of the Russian space program, walks away from the belittling oppression of the gulags to promise himself greatness. Kudryavka the dog is a runt who can charm some, but can’t get any sort of break in life — a survivor of all the cruelty that Soviet self-loathing can conjure, Kudryavka will one day be Laika, the Russian dog that was sent into orbit.

These two sorry lives turned towards greatness converge in the space program — and with their associations with Yelena, the lab technician who nurtures the mutts and runts that have been gathered in order to go through competitive training to be that first canine in space. Yelena, considered possibly too soft in the beginning, proves to be publicly solid if privately filled with hear — so much so that she warms that of Gazenko, who quietly creeps through the Russian system of bureaucratic oppression, attempting to do his best within a process where the is no room for personal pride, everything is done for the state.

Abadzis has crafted a warm tale about the march of history, focusing on a small incident with big implications that was borne of the passages of myriad lives and personalities — not just workers in the space program, but various children and adults living normal lives in Russia against whom the various players brush in crucial and emotional ways. In this way, Abadzis dissects the parts that build to an event and unearths the complexity of any given historical moment.

It’s a low key work and Abadzis takes his time to let the themes unfold — you’re almost unaware that they exist until the final moments in the book, when everything that has come before drifts up out of the pages and the scope of it all is contained — still as ever before — in the little moments of the little lives of ordinary souls.