Petrograd

What makes this book immediately stand beside such indie masterpieces as Skyscrapers of the Midwest and Funhome is the masterful engagement of an interesting subject with a stylized look and a great delivery.  Petrograd is set in 1916 Petrograd and concerned with the plot to assassinate Rasputin.  It is historical fiction divorced from tropes of the autobiographical that you find in many indie graphic novels.  It is also not a historically driven piece such as one would find with Pekar’s work.  It is an intrigue tale set in the visually rich world of winter in a Russian city on the eve of a singular revolution.

The narrative follows the actions and reactions of a British intelligence officer named Cleary, who is charged with the mission of making sure that the Russians do not make peace with the Germans, thereby removing an important front of Allied support during World War I.  To this end he gets pushed into a situation where he must carry out a plot to kill Rasputin, though he has no desire to do so and is pressured into it only to be abandoned by his field office.  He also makes friendly relations with a member of a revolutionary communist underground, who becomes not only his lover but the source of his salvation when the Russian government wants him arrested (so they can kill him) and the British government that wants to return him to the German front since he has been classified a rogue agent.  The rock and a hard place situation keeps the intensity up, and the character makes a sympathetic hero who is just trying to survive in a situation of politics and war that has decided that he, by name, needs to take the blame for the sins that espionage commits as the matters of its practice.

Crook’s art is great.  Clean black and white panels with a bit of roughness.  The drawing belie a relative simplicity that propels the reading of the panels and the movement to the next page but are quite beautifully textured pieces.   The black and white rendering of the art is aided by a sepia shading that adds to the readers lens of age on the events as well as establishing a historical framing for the context of pre-revolutionary Russia.  Visually all these factors build up to a striking underpinning for the text that makes this an above expectation package of text and art.  A winner on all counts and a perfect book…at least I had no complaints.

It was an epidermoid tumor, a benign tumor that is a result from abnormal cells clustering in the cranial vault during fetal development.  It grows very slowly, and then at sometime during a person’s 30s they have motor function problems from the pressure that the growth puts on the brain.  In my case it had become so advanced that it nudged my brainstem to one side and grew around some nerves that were responsible for swallowing and breathing.  The tumor also caused some pressure to a nerve cluster that resulted in hearing loss in my right ear, though having visited an audiologist I found out that it is a perception problem, not mechanical.  The tumor also caused some nerve damage in my right hand which makes fine motor functions more difficult.

The analogy my be crude, but an epidermoid tumor is kind of like how an oyster grows a pearl from a grain of sand.  Except that I grew the pearl in my skull.

Sure, Kirkman had hilarious moments in his contributions.  The look on the face of Galactus after the zombies ate the Silver Surfer stands out.  So does the way that the Hulk transforms into a bloated Bruce Banner after his zombie feeding.  Later Marvel Zombies contributions differ though in the way that Dawn of the Dead differs from Day of the Dead, especially if you see the cut of Dawn… with the pie fight in it.

Marvel Zombies Return features the zombie Spider-man trying to do the right thing and stop the zombie plague that has spread to a new alternate dimension.  The tale takes a far more humorous take on the zombie subject that Kirkman’s at times creepy portrayal.  Van Lente rustles up more continuity and in-world references for Returns, and as such the book has a strong parody feel since it commands so much self-referential content.  Van Lente also writes some crazy ideas, which are the things I read comics for in the first place.  The series also ends perfectly by pulling a Finnegan’s Wake where the end to this book is the beginning of the first Marvel Zombies series.  It was a great way to end the story and bury (pardon the pun) the franchise.  You also get zombie Moonknight, which is awesome and you know this.  Add to that a zombie Wolverine versus a regular Wolverine while in the middle of a melee with Hand ninjas, including a reanimated ninja attacking and screaming “brains” in Japanese.  There is some great material with Tony Stark and World War Hulk.  A longtime Marvel reader will enjoy all this playing (and death) of supporting characters and continuity.  Those readers without those resources and knowledge will be lost and might not enjoy this work beyond the splatterpunk aesthetic.

This book collects Marvel Zombie Return issues #1-#5 and the Spotlight one shot of interviews.  The Spotlight material is ok, but it can also seem a bit unnecessary padding.  You also get a gallery of all of those zombie variant covers that you have come to expect whenever a new Marvel Zombie series is coming out.

The story is an interesting view of technology and the role of military weaponry in the maintenance of  peace in the technologically driven industrial military complex.   It makes some points about the needs for human agency in the state of war in order for human morality to be maintained.  Diggle questions the shift to the drone version of mechanized war, similar to the way that the Iron Man 2 movie approached the subject.

Portacio does some great art.  His Batman is a gritted teeth version, much how Frank Millar’s Year One presented the character.  His layout are solid, action oriented and smooth.  Sometimes he has an Image feel, in my opinion, especially in the way that he draws Jim Gordon’s mustache.

It was an alright yarn.  I have not read a lot of Diggle’s work, so I reserve judgement of whether this is representative of his style.  It was not a great story, but it was pretty good and had a lot of fun things going on.

This book follows a main character, autobiographically named Seth, as he researches and searches out information about an obscure 1950s gag cartoon creator who signed his work “Kalo”.  The book follows the search for more information about this forgotten cartoonist and some meditation on the subjects of nostalgia, failure at relationships, and some self-examination of the motives that comes with a man who lives in modern Canada but collects old issues of The New Yorker from the 1950s.

The narrative, in synopsis, is nothing too spectacular.  The way Seth handles the story shows its great literary merit despite this.  Several moments in the book have an impact that belies the simple story of the search for an identity of Kalo.  Seth makes emotive sequences out of the worry over sick pets, the realization over how pathetic one feels at the recognition that no one really cares about things that seem terribly important to you, the inability to maintain a relationship because of avoidance of emotional entanglements, the subtle hypocritical way we often fail to listen to others about the things that interest them but expect them to take an interest in what we are into – that gentle egotism that we build up around all of our hobbies that we fold into our conceptions of what our identities are.

Seth describes short gag cartoons as an interesting device in the narrative.  The choice to describe the strips in a visual narrative as text based anecdotes is an inspired choice, drawing the situation metaphor to what is visually occurring but expressing it verbally in what is felt like a stale, bad joke.  This is mirrored in the character of his brother, who appears mentally challenged and is constantly telling bad jokes that Seth has contempt for.

It was a really interesting and complex read, has a lot of heart and is entertaining as well as conceptually enchanting.  Seth has a style that really appeals to me, and this book is a good example as any of how he blends a deceptively simple art style and panel layout to make a very readable and engaging narrative.

Part of the reason it took me so long was the shear emotional exhaustion that came in the final issues of the compendium.  Those were some wrenching stories, the doom that comes with the Governor’s return, the battle of the prison and the deaths of many central characters.  In a way, the series seemed to end:   Lori and her baby getting blown away, the Governor getting shot by a member of his own army, Rick and Carl fleeing in to the woods, Tyreese’s end…so many things converged in those last issues of the compendium that seemed to read like the tragic fifth act final scene of the grizzliest of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy.

But the series persisted.

Maybe that is one of the most interesting and provocative things about The Walking Dead comics series.  The continuation of  this serialized narrative follows the truth of the zombie apocalypse itself.  When the outbreak comes and kills off everyone that the characters know, creating a post-apocalyptic Year Zero hell on Earth that they can only strive to survive and find some modest area of safety, which turns out to be fleeting because security seems to be a thing that those with more power, and meanness, want to take away from you.

Book Five introduces a couple of new characters who are trying to make it to Washington D.C. to hook up with whatever is left of the US government.  Rick manages to reconnect with Glen, Maggie, Andrea, Dale and some of the other crew that left the prison before the Governor attacked.  Together they decided to try for Washington but Rick’s authority is questioned by many, notably Dale, after the prison events and Rick lacks for his own self-confidence to be a leader.

This volume similarly looks at the psychological meltdowns that are happening to the various surviving characters.  They are all trying to cope not only with the grief from losing loved ones but the trauma that this new zombie infested hell on Earth has caused them.  It has turned some humans into monsters.  An attempted rape of Carl, Carl shooting a man and coming to grips with it, Maggie’s suicide attempt, Rick’s reliance on Carl for help and protection now that he only has one hand, Dale’s anger over what he views as Rick’s attracting a zombie herd and forcing him to abandon a hopeful (if naive) idyllic on an abandoned farm, all of these tensions fuel interest in the characters and the continuation of the series beyond that flash point at the prison.

I will add that the television series made my wife interested and she tore through the omnibus in two days, about the same amount of time that it took me to read it.  The tv series has made the trades extremely popular at the local library, at which I have placed a hold on the next one.  Now she read some comics, but not many.  However, The Walking Dead captivated her attention in such a way that makes me notice that it has some literary merits that can reach beyond the medium.  It will not win awards like Maus or Asterios Polyp.  It will not be a darling of independent comics elitists.  I think it will probably be reckoned as a high concept book that superhero fans enjoy or a guilty pleasure of indie aesthetic elitists.  I think it is one of the best, most interesting and original comics out there – it takes the overplayed genre of the zombie apocalypse and just keeps on going, keeps on exploring and thinking about how humans react to the world that comes with dead who walk.

This hardcover (it is also available in a cheaper softcover) collects the five issues of this monumental achievement in comics.  As usual I was late to the party, having heard on some podcasts back in 2009 how great this series was.  I happened on a copy of the hardcover at my local library and checked it out.  It only took 45 minutes to read, but I was blown away.

This series is like historical noir crime fiction set in Germanic Viking times of the 9th century.  It is awesome.  The characters live in a harsh and violent world where their excesses of violence lead to their own undoings.  The last issue is a bit forced, with a turn towards irreconcilable love in the face of the harsh world created and continued by the character’s violence.  There is something a bit Shakespearean about this ending, like the romantic woe of Romeo and Juliet meets the body count implosion at the end of Hamlet.  The ending is good, don’t get me wrong, but it feels awkwardly rushed at the end of the story, as if the fifth and last issue should have been longer to keep the pace with the earlier narrative.  This at best is only a minor complaint of a very minor disappointment that I had with the story overall, and really pretty insignificant when one considers the outstanding quality of the book as a whole.

Nic Klein’s art is amazing.  Going for larger pages helps and his style is a rough, loose impressionistic style that fits with the subject.  Many scenes are at night or during cloudy days and the way that Klein piles on shadow and frames the characters as being in relief against darkness or bathed in fire or moonshine as light sources goes along way towards aesthetically drawing you into the story.

Ivan Brandon writes a compelling narrative, but one of the noticeably unique and praiseworthy things about this book is how he approached the dialog.   It is English, in the sense that those who read English will have no trouble in understanding it, but it uses an interesting linguistic approach that avoids modern sounding words and grammar.  There is a poetic roughness at the broken speech, the way that nouns in our world are used as verbs in theirs.  The effect is a bit like a machine translation or rough interpretation from someone who is not really fluent in English.  I have some Akira Kurosawa bootleg movies from China that utilize what is probably a native Chinese speaker’s translation in the subtitles, very rough compared to the masterful translations in the subtitles of the Criterion versions of the films.  Despite that roughness there is a certain interest I find in such a dialog, self-imposed limitations that are an imagined approximation of what people would speak like in that time.  It may not be the most historically accurate rendition of 9th century Germanic grammar out there but it made the narrative stronger and helped it stand out from any other book out there.  As much as I enjoyed Northlanders, this blew it out of the water.

All in all it comes as a highly recommended read.  Great stuff.

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