My Photographic Novel, Happenstance, Is Nearly 3/4 Posted! Start Reading Now!

A graphic novel I wrote & illustrated (using photographs and photoshop) has been serializing online for about a year and a half, now.  It's about two friends who change their religious views in opposite ways, but in dialogue with each other; and about the fallout from those changes in each of their lives.  I thought I'd pop up here and say it's still posting! You can go read it!  Two new pages go up twice a week, on Mondays & Thursdays.  It's nearly 3/4 up — I just put up pp. 332-333 out of an eventual 444 yesterday, and we're nearing the end of chapter 9 (of 12).  So click here and check it out:

The graphic novel to date can be read here: http://happenstance.thecomicseries.com/

If you haven't read it, give it a try; and if you like it, share it with your friends!

My Photographic Novel, Happenstance, Is Now Being Serialized Online

So some of you know that I spent much of the past decade working on a (photo-based) graphic novel titled Happenstance. I'm pleased to announce I've begun serializing it online. My plan (kenina hara) is to post new images twice a week, Monday and Thursday (where each image is a two-page spread: the contrast between the pages becomes important down the line).

The graphic novel to date can be read here: http://happenstance.thecomicseries.com/

So please check it out, like & share with your friends!

Forty-Three (How I'm Living Now)

Today, for no particular reason, I was moved to reread Harvey Pekar's classic short comics story, "I'll Be Forty-Three on Friday (How I'm Living Now)".

Since my copy is buried deep in a box, I'm fortunate that someone posted it online. As of now (no guarantee to these things, of course), you can read the entire thing here, albeit in an awkward format.

No, Click Here and Drag Instead

Gerry is right: sometimes XKCD is better than it usual brilliance.  Today was one of those days.

You have to click through to the main page to get the context.  Do a little clicking and dragging.

Then, when you're finding the interface frustrating, go here instead and use this version.  Much easier. (via facebook)

Post Scriptum: While I'm mentioning alternate XKCD format, anyone trying to read the strip on an iPhone or iPad (or, I presume (but don't know personally) on other smartphones/tablets), and who is frustrated that they can't get the mouseover text (always worth it, and often the best-part), should bookmark this page where you just click on the image for it.

Post Post Scriptum, Utterly Unrelated to the Post: It looks like blogger finally did as it's been threatening and removed the old, easy-and-pleasant-to-use interface and replaced it with the new, difficult-and-irritating-to-use-interface.  (Slower, too!)  I feel like The Dude when he stands there and says: "Well, they finally did it. They killed my fucking car."

Ah well.  At least they let me switch back after the first forced-trial and get a few more glorious months of usability out of it.  Now it's done.  Fucking Nazis.  (Are we going to split hairs here?  Am I wrong?)

The Suspension of Disbelief Has Limits, After All

From America's Finest News Source (via), it seems Superman has gotten a bit too unrealistic:

While they acknowledged that enjoying the adventures of a superhero who can fly, lift a bus over his head, and shoot beams of intense heat from his eyes requires some suspension of disbelief, longtime fans told reporters they simply could not accept a daily metropolitan newspaper still thriving in the media landscape of 2012.

"I can play along with Superman using a steel girder to swat someone into outer space, but I just can't get past the idea that The Daily Planet still occupies one of the largest skyscrapers in all of Metropolis and is totally impervious to newsroom layoffs or dwindling home subscriptions," said comics blogger Marc Daigle, adding that it was impossible for him to even look at Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, without immediately thinking he would have been replaced long ago by a freelancer who gets paid nine cents a word and receives no health benefits. "Every time The Daily Planet shows up, I just get taken out of the story completely. I usually flip ahead to Superman freezing a volcano with his breath or something."

XKCD is Awesome, Part 10,000,001,101

So, devoted xkcd fan that I am, I nevertheless missed this one: its April Fool's joke this year.

The comic was called "Umwelt". And the title tooltip (nearly all xkcds have them, and they're often the funniest part of the strip) defined it:

Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web browser.

I don't really recall what cartoon I saw on April 1: but I know I didn't explore it enough to think of, say, opening it in a different web browser.

It turns out that you saw a different comic in different circumstances. Different web browsers or devices (computers v. mobile phones, for instance) gave different comics, but others were region specific, or tied to various other things.

I have not -- oddly enough, given not only what xkcd is like, but what its fans are like -- a definitive list of all the variations, or even a definitive count of how many there were. Granted, it's complicated: some variations were minor alterations of others, some were entirely different cartoons.

But there are a number of discussion threads and other link pages that link to a lot of them. This article gives a good introductory sense of what sort of variations we're talking about. Then the relevant discussion threads on the xkcd forums and explain xkcd both had links to jpgs of a lot of versions. This video shows the way a particular cartoon (it was the one I saw just now, on Firefox on Mac in upstate NY) alters when the browser window is resized. This google docs roundup has a lot of different versions. Perhaps the most complete lists of links are those in this follow-up post on explain xkcd.

But what's most amazing to me about this whole thing is that, while some of the comics are not quite up to par, and some are minor variations on a particular idea, many are actually good enough that you wouldn't be surprised to see them as a regular xkcd installment (including the basic theme under several sets of those variations). Which is to say: this joke must have been a really tremendous amount of work -- for a joke which insured that most people would miss most of the comics.

Which, in my book, is pretty impressive.

I've stuck a few ones I like into this post, but really -- if you like xkcd, you should go explore. They're fun.

And if you don't know xkcd, check it out. (Just hit the random button, ignoring any cartoon numbered less than 100 or so -- he took a while to hit his stride.) Especially if you understand the meaning of the number in the title of this post (hint: look at the number of the comic this post is about.)

Links, links, links

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Links, links, links.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet: Timewasters, sir.

-- Exclusive, previously unpublished draft of Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2* just discovered by the literary researchers at Attempts

For your amusement, enlightenment and procrastination:

Comics:

• Marc Singer's book on Grant Morrison has been published. 'Nuff said.
• Astonishing 24-hour comic: Boulet's Darkness
• I haven't yet read Buffy Season 9, but I hope they handle the event in issue #6 half as well as this one-page fan parody/knock-off (spoilers for Buffy Season 9 #6)
• L'affaire Magneto: What if Herge had Created the X-Men?

Fred Clark Remains One of the Best Bloggers On the Net:

• The very worst thing Nathan could imagine
• When the translators of the bible made up and inserted a character into it
• The 'biblical view' that's younger than the happy meal
• An interesting argument about pro-life advocates' views that I've never heard before

Religious-Related Not By Fred Clark

• Sam Harris on the Fireplace Delusion
• Does the Bible call homosexuality an "abomination"?
• Religion in Japanese:

During the late 1800s there was considerable debate about how “religion” should be rendered in Japanese... It seemed that “religion” could be a type of education, something fundamentally un-teachable, a set of practices, a description of foreign customs, a subtype of Shinto, a near synonym for Christianity, a basic human ethical impulse, or a form of politics (among other possibilities).

Humor:

• Kripke resigns as report alleges that he faked results of thought experiments
• Monty Python's Useless Tips For Anglers
• How to win a fight against 20 children
• I Was Shitting You People - A Message From Ayn Rand
• Jonathan Chait channels the Onion:

The unpredictable Republican presidential race has taken another surprising turn as recent numbers show Mongol warlord Genghis Khan seizing the lead in national polls of likely GOP primary voters. Benefiting from widespread doubts about Mitt Romney’s authenticity and ideological commitment, Genghis has changed the shape of the race by sounding sharp populist themes that resonate with supporters of the tea party. “Mitt Romney wants to manage Washington, D.C.,” he told an enthusiastic crowd in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I want to burn it to the ground, slay its inhabitants, and stack their skulls in pyramids reaching to the sky.”

• The (actual) Onion: Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions

David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years

• In case you haven't yet encountered Graeber -- for various reasons, clearly the Thinker of the Year for 2011, should Time have deigned to pick such a thing -- this interview is probably the best introduction to his ideas
• More from Graeber at Naked Capitalism
• Aaron Brady's review of Graeber's Debt
• Now underway: Crooked Timber's roundtable on David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years. [Update: seminar now complete; link changed to master list linking to all entries.]
• Via the above, another interesting (critical) review of the same.

Tolkien-esque:

• The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil -- an astonishingly wonderful exercise in midrashic counter-reading. (Also worthwhile at the same site is this reinterpretation of Star Wars in light of the prequels.)
• Andrew Rilstone has self-published some of his earlier Tolkien writings, under the title Do Balrogs Have Wings? and Other Pressing Questions (and Other Pressing Questions). 'Nuff said.
• ...Except maybe not, so for those poor benighted souls who have yet to encounter Rilstone's Tolkien writings, here, via web archive, is the title piece to the above-collections, presenting the definitive answer to that question, at least.
• More recent Rilstonish Tolkien goodness: on the Silmarillion.

Other Literary

• Sixteen-year-old high school student writes (in 1963) to a series of well-known novelists, including Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer asking them questions about symbols in their work. Answers presented as given.
• John Clute on Margaret Atwood on SF.
• This interesting review of Stephen King's latest novel makes me want to read it.
• Paris Review's interview with Samuel R. Delany
• Ari Kelman reviews four books on memory and the Civil War

Social/Political

• Woody Guthrie's story of the one-eyed banker.
• Man stopped by the police for "babysitting while white"... again.
• 25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore
• "After ‘The Wire’ ended, actress Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore’s troubled streets behind"
• Garry Wills on contraception and the Catholic church
• Russell Arben Fox's 11 Thesis on 2011 (on Democracy, Anarchism and OWS)
• Natalie Reed on the idea that transsexuals are "biologically" the sex they were assigned to at birth (via her own new, very interesting blog)

As usual, I've forgotten where I saw most of these links. As usual, my main sources for links are Gerry Canavan, Andrew Sullivan, 3 Quarks Daily and Making Light, so most of these were probably via one of them. (Except the Fred Clark links, which were all found in the genuine internet wild.)

_____________________________
* Shakespeare always was ahead of his time.

The Forthcoming Prequels To Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen: Quote Roundup

I don’t want money. What I want is for this not to happen.

-- Alan Moore

A kinda-obvious thought occurs: the actual Watchmen sequel? The last 25 years of superhero comics.

-- Kieron Gillen

The pedant in me wants to point out that the last 25 years are by definition not a sequel to Watchmen, but what they most definitely are, at least on some level, is a response to Watchmen; the artistic ground has been well and truly covered, making any retreading of Watchmen’s ground almost certainly redundant except as an exercise in getting dollars ‘n’ press.

-- Zom

As for comparing Moore's use of James Bond or Voldemoort or Dorothy Gale or even The Peacemaker with the More Watchmen effort, that just seems so clearly to me not the same thing by a thousand degrees I can only look on at anyone making that argument with bafflement. I don't even know how to articulate a counter-argument. From my perspective, it's not saying "the sky isn't blue; it's green" it's saying "the sky isn't blue; it's refrigerator."

-- Tom Spurgeon

What Moore is doing is taking a whole bunch of things from all sorts of different works and repurposing them into something else. He’s not trading off their value as intellectual properties (how many comics fans were clamouring for the further adventures of Alan Quartermain?) but making a commentary on the original works, while creating something new.

-- Andre Wickey

It ought to go without saying, but Watchmen is not like other superhero comics. It has attained a sanctified status as the classic example of the potential of the comics medium. It’s part of the canon that anyone seriously interested in comics is supposed to read. For years it was regularly trotted out as the Best Comic Ever. That’s the reason why it’s kept selling all these years.... Quite simply, the selling point of Watchmen is not the plot or the characters or the premise, but the perception that Watchmen is an Important Work of Art. As such, it is uniquely unsuited for franchising. People care about Watchmen as a self-contained work, not about the Watchmen as characters. And if you approach a story in that way, you don’t put it down thinking to yourself “Wow, what a great setting. I hope they get somebody else entirely to do a prequel.”...

The tension inherent in this whole project is that, in order to make an argument for the legitimacy of Before Watchmen, DC have to argue that Watchmen is in this respect basically like other superhero comics, so that sequels should be judged by the same standards that apply to, say, a revival of X-O Manowar or Cloak & Dagger. But Watchmen‘s reputation rests on precisely the opposite belief – that the book is exceptional and unique and even important, and most certainly not like other superhero comics. And that reputation is the whole reason why we’re meant to care about Before Watchmen in the first place.

-- Paul O'Brien

I'm also not certain how you can see this as anything but a step away from the wider cultural message of Watchmen back in the 1980s: that authors matter, that original work can be rewarded on the same level as reworking someone else's ideas, that comics have literary and culture value for their ideas and expressive force above and beyond their value as entertainment product. I might call DC foolish if they were touting these sequel books as a match for Watchmen's artistic achievement, but that this idea isn't even on the table may be scarier. This is a toy line. This is a happy meal. This is "based on." This is product.

-- Tom Spurgeon

Everybody knows — everybody knows — that this NuWatchmen thing is pretty much what I called it above, i.e. cynical and exploitative…that’s not a secret.

It really isn’t!

My God, it so ISN’T…!

And yet you will try to snow me about it.

-- Plok*

I've enjoyed pieces of work from all of the writers who are contributing to this supremely ill-considered endeavor, but I wouldn't consider any of them to be anywhere near Alan Moore's league. To be fair, the only name writers in the American comic book industry[**] that i can imagine following Moore would be Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman... Of those chosen, Azzarello is the only one who seems to have enough quality output under his belt to even dare comparison to Moore, but in both critical esteem and sales popularity, he seems Lilliputian in comparison. Cooke has likewise written a few very solid genre works before, but nothing that's dazzled in the way Moore's Watchmen's writing does, or even in the way Moore's lesser works do.

-- J. Caleb Mozzocco

A sequel, a prequel or even a suite of character-specific one-shots is one thing. But DC is publishing seven prequels, and each of them is an entire miniseries of its own, running between four and six issues. At this point, the Watchmen prequel event involves 34 individually sold comic books, and there's a promise of at least one more book to come.... This isn't Frank Miller following Dark Knight Returns with Dark Knight Strikes Again, this is 11 of Miller's less-popular, less-successful peers doing 35 sequels to DKR.

-- J. Caleb Mozzocco

I do have to say that I do look at what Brian Azzarello – writing a ‘visceral’ Rorschach series – says and roll my eyes a little: ‘It’s 25 years later. Let’s make them vital again.’

Let’s not kid ourselves here, let’s just look at some numbers. The bestselling individual comic of the last ten years, by miles, is the Obama inauguration issue of Spider-Man, which sold about half a million copies in early 2009. The same year as that, twice as many copies of Watchmen were sold. It had a cover price five times higher.

So don’t anyone delude themselves that this is DC taking moribund smelly clapped out old Watchmen and pouring in energy and lifeforce, hoping a bit of magic will rub off. It’s exactly the opposite.

-- Lance Parkin

Inevitably, once the precedent has been set, now that ‘difficult’ commercial decision has been made, there will be a Watchmen III, and a Watchmen IV. Every few years, from now on, enough material to collect into a new Watchmen book will come out. And DC will be working down their list of creators, and in a few years they’ll be assigning people who managed to boost sales of Hawkman by 15% the previous year.

-- Lance Parkin

If DC will go ahead with more Watchmen, of all things, and, more importantly, if it succeeds... does that mean we'll see a Gaiman-free Sandman relaunch of some sort next?... we're getting "Before Watchmen" anyway. As depressing as that is, here's a more depressing thought: What comes after "Before Watchmen"...?

-- J. Caleb Mozzocco

I’m going to try to explain this purely in bean counting terms. Think about Watchmen as units shifted, think of it solely as product....The unique selling point of Watchmen is that it’s one of the very few comics where you can hand it to someone and say ‘this is it’. You don’t need to collect, you don’t need to worry about what order to read things. You don’t need a Powerpoint presentation from a guy in a comic shop explaining how you also need to buy Thor Annual 5 and don’t forget they renumbered around issue 600 and don’t forget the miniseries that ran alongside the main one. One volume.... Watchmen 2 won’t ‘weaken’ the original Watchmen artistically. It does, though, chop away perhaps its main marketing advantage. Here’s my key objection to Watchmen 2 in purely money-generating terms: they’ve made the wrong corporate decision. They’ve miscounted the beans. This is the wrong way to go about selling more slabs of whatever.

-- Lance Parkin

...DC deciding on prequels seems a little like the publisher trying to get the goose that lays golden eggs to increase her egg-laying...by shaking her vigorously. Maybe more eggs will come out faster, or she'll be so traumatized she lays less eggs, or maybe her neck will break and that will be that.

-- J. Caleb Mozzocco

Ten days or so past the official announcement, I'm thinking More Watchmen may be best understood as a blow to comics' dignity. It's product, not art. It's a limited, small series of ideas derived from a bigger, grander one. It's sad. One thing that Watchmen did a quarter century ago was to underline certain values of craft and intent and creative freedom that have helped to yield enough equivalent expressions -- to my mind even grander expressions -- that we may now see this follow-up project for what it is: nothing special. Not Moore. More.

-- Tom Spurgeon

I read the news today, oh boy.

-- John Lennon****

I have a half-finished post of my own on this whole sad situation, focusing on explaining why the sky is blue and not refrigerator even if you don't think the problem here is strictly one of creator's rights. When or whether I'll finish it remains to be seen, of course.

_________________________________
* Thanks to Plok -- whose name (oddly, from my point of view) is nowhere on his blog -- for leaving his handle in the comments. Incidentally, the ellipses in the quotation are in the original.

** I presume by "American comics industry" he means "mainstream American comics industry" -- in which case I agree. But of course lots of Americans are making comics that are in the Gaiman/Morrison/Moore class besides those gentlemen; they just ain't doin' it, that I've seen,*** for Marvel or D.C.

*** Though I've seen comparatively little outside of the works of those three, in all honesty.

**** Yes, actually, this was about the prequels to a work which itself came out twenty years after this was sung.

The Superhero Genre Invades the Last Remaining Outpost of Literary Culture

...The New Yorker: nay, one better: the poetry section of The New Yorker!

I mean, they've long since left their origin-story fortress in comics and taken up in their new base in films; they have made many forays into literary fiction; but surely highbrow, snobbish poetry sections of major magazines were safe? No: nothing can stop The SuperheroMan™!

Here's the poem in question:

The Chameleon

Alone among the superheroes,
He failed to keep his life in balance.
Power Man, The Human Shark – they knew
To hold their days and nights in counterpoise,
Their twin selves divided together,
As a coin bears with ease its two faces.

Not so The Chameleon. He was
Too many things to count, and was counted on
To be too many things. When he came to grief,
As was perhaps inevitable,
His body was overlooked for hours,
Having been pressed by force of habit

Into the likeness of what had killed him.

-- David Orr

Actually a pretty good poem, I think.

Now, I'll do David Orr the courtesy of presuming that he's willing to cop to working within the superhero genre proper. But I have to guess that the editor who bought it thought of it as a supercilious parody piece, looking down its nose on superheroes.*

But what's amazing is how true that's not. This isn't remotely a satire on, or cynical reworking of, or in any other way a distanced version of the genre. There's just nothing like that version of the superhero genre (which is itself, whether it likes it or not (and sometimes it doesn't), part of, indeed at this point a major element of, the genre), one which has been common in mainstream (and other) comics for a quarter century, and which has also been found, albeit less prominently, in film and mainstream fiction and so forth. It's simply a use of the superhero genre to -- well, sort of tell a story, I guess, but mostly to make a poem.

My imagined version of Orr's editor might leap in at this point to insist that no, this is a metaphor. It's not a real superhero piece! A point which could only be made by someone more or less completely ignorant of the superhero genre, given that so many of its core examples are meant metaphorically in basically the same way as this poem clearly is.

So The New Yorker has not only published a poem which mentions superheroes: it has published a straightforward, honest-to-Superman superhero genre piece. As a poem.

Wow. So maybe the Mayan apocalypse is going to happen on schedule after all?

Incidentally, some of the readers of this poem -- hell, maybe even Orr's editor, or even Orr himself -- may believe that the superheroes mentioned herein are fictional... well, no, everyone knows they're fiction. What I mean of course is that people may believe they're original creations of Orr: that he picked these names (rather than, say, Superman and Spider-Man) because they're not preexisting characters -- nor, from a legal point of view, trademarks.** This is, however, false.

Power Man, of course, is a long-established a fairly prominent Marvel superhero (albeit a second-stringer compared to, say, Spider-Man or Wolverine):

Apparently a movie staring Power Man is in development.

And The Chameleon is an equally well-established Marvel Comics character -- albeit a super-villain***, not a a superhero -- having debuted in no less historical an issue than Amazing Spider-Man #1:

Chameleon doesn't seem to have gotten a movie yet, although he's appeared in several tv versions.

Only "The Human Shark" seems to have no direct predecessor in professionally produced works in the superhero genre (although that doesn't mean that he has no predecessor in comics). And The Shark is an established DC comics villain:

And while he's not called The Human Shark, he does seem to be a human shark (according to the text in the image above, he's "an actual tiger shark struck by an unknown form of radiation that in a matter of minutes carried him billions of years up the evolutionary scale, giving him the form of a human -- but retaining in him his vicious, predatory nature."), so points for that.

This has been the illustrated edition of The New Yorker's poetry section.

Update: Reading this post over a day after I wrote it (including, of course, the poem quoted in it) I am drawn to woner whether Orr understands that the notion of a superhero who has "failed to keep his life in balance", one for whom it is not at all true that "they knew/To hold their days and nights in counterpoise,/Their twin selves divided together,/As a coin bears with ease its two faces", is not in the least original with him, but is, in fact, a central recurring trope in the superhero genre. The problem of "bear[ing] with ease... two faces" is the thematic core of a great many superhero stories, and indeed some superheros are designed primarily to fall into that question. I missed this the first time -- and, again, maybe I'm wrong -- but it seems from the poem like Orr doesn't know this. It adds a superciliousness that I didn't hear the first time I read it -- something which, I must admit, makes me like the poem somewhat less (although I still like it, to be sure).

(Incidentally, it seems to me that one mark of a true superhero geek is that, upon reading the line "As a coin bears with ease its two faces", they will think of Two-Face and his signature coin...)

________________
* I have no evidence for this. Quite possibly I'm doing someone a disservice. If so, my sincere apologies.

** Unlike, incidentally, the word "superhero" itself, which (I believe) is still trademarked jointly by Marvel and DC -- a ludicrous example of intellectual property overreach, and one that I applaud The New Yorker (presuming their fact checkers turned it up) for ignoring.

*** I wonder if Marvel & DC think they've trademarked "super-villain" too?

Quote of the Day

Everything is so fragile.

There's so much conflict, so much pain. You keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it; the dust is your life going on.

If happy comes along -- that weird, unbearable delight that's actual happy -- I think you have to grab it while you can.

You take what you can get. 'Cause it's here, and then...

...gone.

-- Kitty Pryde in Astonishing X-Men #22, by Joss Whedon

Comics-Related Links, Mostly Over a Year Old

These have been sitting in my "I should link to these" folder for a long time. They're all still fun.

• Snoopy writes a Batman story. Really.

• Scott Eric Kaufman on teaching Warren Ellis's Planetary.

• Comics (and cartoon) characters' names in Chinese.

• Scott McDaneil analyzes the layout of a page of Promethea. Anyone who likes my 100 Great Comics Pages series (which I do intend to resume, some day) will like this one.

• Tom Neeley boils down an old X-Men comic to a single page. The comic in question is X-Men #143 (discussion).

• The Peanuts as Marvel characters.

• More Peanuts-related humor.

• Watchmen characters as manga-style young girls.

• Todd Klein on making the "Library of Dream" poster.

• Ng Suat Tong writes about superhero comics, collaboration and writers.

• Sean T. Collins disagrees with ibid.

• Superuseless Superpowers.

• Stuart McMillen's Amusing Ourselves to Death: the Comics Adaptation.

• Ten most iconic Marvel comics panels of all time, from a poll. With links to #70 - 11, in case the top ten isn't enough for you.

• Government comic books.

• Sandman as a quintessential novel about/from the 1990's.

• And, a cri de coeur from two and a half years ago: Tom Spurgeon on why there's hope for comics in the recession (from December, 2008). Since, thanks to the action of our politicians, we're going to be dealing with economic misery for the foreseeable future, still timely.

Xu Bing's Book from the Ground

I'll get around to the explanation in a minute, but the main thing I wanted to do in this post is to quote the first paragraph of an avant-garde novel-in-progress, The Book From the Ground, by the contemporary artist Xu Bing. (The first name is pronounced -- very, very roughly -- like "shoe".*) So before I explain anything, let me quote the opening paragraph:

Go on. Read it. Yes, you can. Really. Just try. ... ... See? That wasn't that hard, was it?

-- that last of which is (if I understand it) precisely the point.

Xu Bing -- who was born in China, moved to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, but who seems to have recently repatriated to China -- is a conceptual artist. My experience of his work, however, differs from my experience of most conceptual artists in that I find that he's actually working with interesting concepts. The work which (as I understand it) really made his name was A Book From the Sky, which is described on the artist's site as follows:

An all-enveloping textual environment, "A Book from the Sky" is composed of massive sheets of Chinese characters, some left loose and some bound into books, which are suspended form the ceiling, pasted on the wall, and laid on the floor. Everything about "A book from the Sky" has the look of authenticity. Form its arrangement of headings and marginalia on the page to its string bindings and indigo covers, the work mimics in every detail the characteristics of traditional Chinese printing and book -making. While donning such a guise, however, "A book form the sky " is supremely inauthentic. Its characters are purely of the artist's invention and utterly without meaning. What is most [unsettling] perhaps is the way in which Xu Bing's characters approximate the real thing , for the artist has composed them from the variant parts that make up Chinese characters.**

The coolness factor here is a bit hard to grasp unless you understand the way in which Chinese characters are made from parts of other Chinese Characters, but if you do get this, it seems pretty cool indeed. (Or shocking -- apparently his work was very controversial when first displayed.)

The Book From the Ground -- a project begun eight years ago and still ongoing -- is conceived as a sort of thematic sequel (sidequel? something) to the previous work. Here's how Xu Bing describes the origins of the project on its associated web site:

Book from the Ground is a novel written in a "language of icons" that I have been collecting and organizing over the last few years. Regardless of cultural background, one should be able understand the text as long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life... This project first began with my collecting safety manuals from a number of airlines... Then, in 2003, I noticed three small images on a pack of gum (they translate into please use your wrapper to dispose of the gum in a trashcan), and came to realize that in so far as icons alone can explain something simple, they can also be used to narrate a longer story. From that point on, through various channels, I began to collect and organize logos, icons, and insignia from across the globe, and I also began to research the symbols of expression employed by the specialized fields of mathematics, chemistry, physics, drafting, musical composition, choreography, and corporate branding, among others...

Xu Bing then connects this to earlier (in and of themselves false) descriptions of Chinese as a universal language:

In 1627, the French thinker Jean Douet, in an essay titled "Proposal to the King for a Universal Script, with Admirable Results, Very Useful to Everyone on Earth," first suggested that Chinese was a potential model for an international language. The word "model" is important here because Douet does not limit this "universal script" to the form of Chinese characters per se. He instead focuses on the universal potential of the system of recognition upon which the Chinese language is based. Today, nearly four hundred years later, human communication has indeed evolved in the direction predicted by Douet. We have come to sense that traditional spoken forms are no longer the most appropriate method for communication. And, in response, great human effort has been concentrated on developing ways to replace traditional written languages with icons and images. For this reason, among others, humankind has entered the age of reading images.

And lastly connects the project with his own previous work:

I have created many works that relate to language. This subject first took shape twenty years ago with a piece called Book from the Sky. It was called Book from the Sky because it contained a text legible to no one on this earth (including myself). Today I have used this new "language of signs" to write a book that a speaker of any language can understand; I call it Book from the Ground. But, in truth, these two texts share something in common: regardless of your mother tongue or level of education, they strive to treat you equally. Book from the Sky was an expression of my doubts regarding extant written languages. Book from the Earth is the expression of my quest for the ideal of a single script. Perhaps the idea behind this project is too ambitious, but its significance rests in making the attempt.

(Despite the length of those excerpts, the full essay is, in fact, much longer -- click through if you want to read more.)

Whether he's successful or not you can yourself judge. Certainly the above passage is comprehensible to me -- and, I suspect, will be comprehensible to many people who speak no English, so it's not that language that's clarifying it for me. (I have doubts about its universality -- it seems to me to be a sort of "language" of its own -- but I agree with Xu Bing that the attempt itself is worthy.)

I should forewarn anyone who wants to read more, however, that the web site's navigation is a bit counter intuitive -- I suppose Xu Bing didn't spend as much time clarifying that as he did trying to clarify his symbolic language. If you go to the web site and click on the "read" icon, you are directed to this page, which is called (in the web browser) "basic", which contains a six paragraph text (can I call it a text?) of which the above-quoted paragraph is the opening. This text is titled, appropriately enough, "". But there's no indication of any further text -- at first I thought that that brief passage was the entirety of the work. If you then click again on the "reading" icon, however, it takes you to this table of contents, which lists fourteen chapters (by number only), with a final page promising "to be continued". There isn't any indication (that I've seen) about the relationship between the initial text and the fourteen numbered chapters. I've only carefully read the former, so I may well be missing something, but a brief scan of the latter makes it seem like the original text is a sort of proof-of-concept sketch, which is then elaborated in (rather than continued in) the first chapter of the actual book.

Still, if you're looking to read more, you'll want to go beyond just the first page.

Since the table of contents lists only numbers, but the actual pages themselves have chapter titles (all in Xu Bing's symbolic language, naturally), I thought it might be of some small service if I were to provide a hyperlinked table of contents to the work as it exists so far:

Preface (?):
Chapter 1:
Chapter 2:
Chapter 3:
Chapter 4:
Chapter 5:
Chapter 6:
Chapter 7:
Chapter 8:
Chapter 9:
Chapter 10:
Chapter 11:
Chapter 12:
Chapter 13:
Chapter 14:

There it is, if you wish to read it. As with many tables of contents, I think you get at least a hint of the story's shape just from the titles. I can't recommend it -- again, all I myself have read is what I'm calling the "preface" -- which is interesting as language, but not so interesting as story. But it looks like the longer version may well improve on that latter score. Someday soon I hope to find out.

A post script: two categorical queries

Is The Book From the Ground a Oulipian work, i.e. a work of constrained literature?

I would say it is not. It is an experimental work, certainly, but not I think "constrained" in the sense that that term is used by the Oulipo and its adherents. I can imagine some disagreement on this point -- the Oulipo has done some work on altered languages, such as Jaques Jouet's "The Great-Ape Love-Song" (published in English translation in Oulipo Laboratory). Nevertheless, it seems to me that a newly-invented language -- particularly one not related to any existing language, but pictorial in origin -- while involving, as every task does, certain constraints, is clearly not constrained literature in any plausible sense.

Is The Book From the Ground comics under the McCloudian definition ("juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer"***)?

Again, I would say no. It's not that I am unwilling to apply McCloud's -- to my mind, extremely fruitful -- definition broadly. (In fact, I have been criticized for doing so in the past (see comments.)) But it seems to me that Xi Bing's work is clearly not comics in any plausible sense of the spirit of the term (again, in McCloud's usage).

Again, I can imagine some disagreement here: one might say that Xu Bing's work consists entirely of "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer", so if it is not comics, then does it not represent a plain counter-example to McCloud's definition? I would say it does not, because what Xu Bing is doing ultimately is repurposing what were pictures and other images into a symbolic language, i.e. by the time he's "written" his "texts" what he's working with are no longer images in the sense that McCloud intends.

That said, I think that you could make a plausible argument to the contrary, and either understand what Xi Bing is doing as comics (it is derived, as noted above, from airline instruction manuals and the like, which McCloud does specifically include in his understanding of comics), or tweak McCloud's definition to exclude it (which risks accusations of monster-baring, but may be the best way to go). Alternatively, you could understand Xi Bing as taking comics and changing it into a textual language -- see it not as comics, but as a derivation of one particular form of them. This might be the most accurate approach.

Did you include this entire postscript just as an excuse to tag this post with "ou-x-po" and "comics", since you thought Xi Bing's work would be of interest to those interested in those categories, despite the fact that it isn't, basically, either Oulipian or comics?

We said just two questions.

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* I haven't seen any site which prints that in proper pinyin, i.e. with tones marked, or I'd reproduce that. Without tones, the pinyin doesn't give sufficient information to pronounce his name. (If anyone happens to know, please leave the information in comments! If it helps, his name in Chinese (according to Wikipedia) is 徐冰.)

** Be grateful I cut off the quote before he started talking about "deconstructive bricolage".

*** Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 9.

Cool Webcomic

I don't read enough web comics -- certainly given my affection for comics, and the amount of awesome stuff out there. I must admit that I myself prefer to read comics on dead trees -- it matters for me for comics far more than it does for prose, for some reason. But Gerry Canavan, the blogger with by far the best hit/miss ratio in terms of his links being worthwhile to follow (modulo my own interests and tastes, natch) just linked to a new SF web comic called "Cura Te Ipsum" -- which is Latin for "heal thyself", as in "physician, heal thyself". Gerry noted that "the SF starts in earnest on page ten", which kept me going through a slightly slow introduction. The link above takes you to the main page, which displays the most-recent page (they post three pages a week, MWF), but I think it's well worth your while to start on the very first page and read forward from there. So far (I just read the first 57 pages) I'd describe it as an SF thriller; it's tightly written, with very slick and well-crafted art. Anyone who thinks "well done SF thriller web comic" is something that they might enjoy should check it out.

Super Duck vs. Rabbitman!

Stealing this unbelievably fabulous image directly from Gerry:

Gerry also managed to score the gimme goal by comparing this to Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit image:

So what was left for me to do except invoke Super Duck to tie it all together in one great big circle?

My Head May Explode From the Sheer Awesomeness of This

John Lewis -- former head of SNCC, participant in the Freedom Rides, and, for the past twenty-five years, a member of Congress (from Georgia) -- is one of the few people I can think of in American life that I would unhesitatingly and unabashedly label a hero.

For those of you who don't know, he was at the center of the Civil Rights Movement in its key years in the early 1960's -- a participant at the lunch counter sit-ins in the early 60's, a freedom rider, head of SNCC, a speaker at the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech (and where Lewis's speech was deemed to radical for the other organizers and speakers and he -- reluctantly, when asked by A. Philip Randolph -- revised it (you can read the original draft here)), and the lead walker at the climactic confrontation of the Movement, the walk over Pettus Bridge, which directly led to the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. A man of matchless wisdom and courage, my admiration for him is really hard to express.

And he's writing a comic book.

No, really: he just signed a contract with Top Shelf to (co) write a graphic novel based on his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, tentatively titled March.

Can I pre-order it yet?

Now, I will admit that my confidence that it will be good is very low. Lewis is a fine writer of prose, but writing prose is a very different task than writing comics -- and most writers of prose who try to make the transition do a poor job of it. Writing a comics script is as different from writing prose as writing a play or a film script is: it requires a real understanding of the medium. If you just think that you've written books, you can write a graphic novel, well, you're wrong. It's not just like writing a book with pictures.*

Nor am I encouraged by the fact that Lewis's co-author, Andrew Aydin, is a member of his staff -- that is, someone who is primarily engaged in politics. Presumably Lewis can tell his own story, after all; what he needs for this project is someone who can help him tell it in the medium of comics.

Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Lewis is a long-time comics reader. Or maybe he's thought about the nature of the medium. But, y'know, he's been busy doing other things -- like, say, being a brilliant activist and politician. So I'm worried that he isn't and hasn't. I'm somewhat more hopeful that Aydin might be knowledgeable about comics; maybe he'll bring a good handle on the medium to the table. But, I fear, that he's been hired much as a politician might hire someone to co-write their prose memoirs, i.e. someone to help with the work, but without any particular sense of the medium.

To make this work, they'll need a really good -- and confident and self-assertive -- artist. And Chris Staros, the editor & publisher of Top Shelf, had better be on his game.

(Incidentally, they are, apparently, still in the process of settling on an artist. If you're a comics artist, I recommend dropping everything and seeing if you can nab it. It'll be the job of a lifetime.)

And even if it doesn't work, y'know what? I'm there. I'm reading it. Because even if it isn't a fabulous artistic production, I'm sure it will be very interesting, and have some insights into a key period of history.

And besides, John Lewis -- John !!@#$%ing Lewis -- is writing a !@#$% graphic novel. It's had to get more awesome than that. In this matter, quality is would be just a bonus.

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* Actually, I suspect that, done properly, writing a book with pictures isn't just like writing a book without them, either. But it's closer.

Miserably Sexist Comics Panel of the Day

From Fantastic Four #12 (March, 1963), by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (scanned from The Essential Fantastic Four, Volume 1 (2001)):

...I was going to comment, but I trust I don't really need to spell this one out, do I?

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, by Barry Deutsch: a Review

Hereville is terrific. Stylish, entertaining, extremely well-done with an engrossing story and fabulous page-layout: plus, above all, Hereville is charming.

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword is the first published graphic novel by Barry Deutsch, a political cartoonist and blogger that I've followed for a number of years. In fact, I was a reader of Deutsch's Alas, a blog (where he posts as "Ampersand" or, informally, "Amp"), before I realized that he was a cartoonist or interested in comics -- only to discover that he was not only a comics reader but a comics creator, which was a nice surprise. Eventually I realized that the fabulous little drawings on the blog were his; and even eventuallier I realized he drew other things, too. Deutsch even cross-posted one of my blog posts at Alas, which was nice of him (since his is a real blog with actual, y'know, traffic). All of which is to say that I was predisposed to be biased in Deutsch's favor, knowing him to be a thoughtful and interesting blogger and (in an internet-acquaintance fashion) a nice guy. So you should sprinkle this review with the salt of possible bias, to taste.

But for what it's worth, in my view, Hereville is a delight.

Hereville is, I think, a book that's well served by it's three-tiered title, so I'm going to follow that to introduce it.

Hereville is set, apparently, in the contemporary U.S., but aside from a few oddities such as electric lightbulbs, you'd never notice it: I think even a careful reader could go through the entire work imagining it in a small village in some unspecified Eastern European past. (There are lightbulbs, but no cars, no computers, no phones; the language spoken is called Yiddish (although the text itself is in English with only occasional Yiddish or Hebrew phrases.)) It's set in a remote village, one that is the entire world for its characters: no mention or thought is given to the outside world, save for the fact that one of Mirka's half-siblings seems to have been raised there (and, thus, unlike her siblings, knows what a pig looks like).* Everyone in the town is Orthodox Jewish (Hasidic, I think); at one point two of Mirka's sisters are shocked at the notion that the witch they've encountered might not be Jewish. So the setting of the town, it's feel, is very well captured by it's title: "Hereville". This is a village which is, to its residents, simply "here".

If the title captures the essence of the location (although no more than that: it is wonderfully evoked, with a real life breathed into the somewhat out-of-time setting), then the sub-title equally pithily captures the book's plot: How Mirka Got Her Sword is the tale of just that, how a heroine came by the sword that she will (presumably) use in future adventures. (I should say, however, that the story is a complete story -- sure, there are a few mysteries are left unanswered, and there are clearly room for many more tales staring Mirka, but you do get a complete story with an honest-to-Hashem ending and narrative closure.) Save for the name (and gender) of the heroine, it would have a familiar ring: lots of famous heroes got their swords in various oft-told ways, and this is how this particular hero got hers.

And that should give you some idea of the story, too: it's a fairy tale -- not a fantasy set in a complete secondary world, nor an invasion fantasy or anything like that, but simply a tale which takes place with trolls and witches and dragons lingering (initially) out of sight, off the margins and outside the town borders. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that it was based upon a Jewish folktale, although to my knowledge it isn't. But it has the rhythm of a retold fairy story, or perhaps two or three stitched together.

Finally, Hereville's sub-subtitle** -- Yet Another Troll-Fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish Girl -- captures the protagonist as compactly as the title captures the setting and the subtitle the story. Mirka is an 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl, who wants to fight dragons -- although she hasn't yet met one; but in the meantime she has a troll (and other creatures) to contend with. The "yet another" might suggest a sense in the book that Mirka is one of a crowd (e.g. in a Buffy sense that, of course young girls fight vampires/trolls), but that's not how it's played in the work: "yet another" is a sly wink at the audience: why not write about a Troll-Fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish Girl? -- although no one's done it before.

Pivoting off the protagonists' age, I should mention that Hereville is being marketed as a kid's book -- ages 9-12, I believe -- and that it certainly has the feel of a book aimed at that age group. And I would unhesitatingly recommend it for (and indeed buy it as a gift for) any kid in that age range -- or, indeed, old enough to follow the story: there's nothing objectionable here for younger kids, just possibly a bit complicated in spots. As for older readers, my only hesitation is precisely that it does feel like, well, a book for pre-teens: a witty, entrancing and extremely well done, but nevertheless not a graphic novel intended for a sophisticated, adult audience. If you think that reading a kids' book is going to disappoint... well, avoid Hereville.*** But for anyone who, as an adult, read Jeffy Smith's Bone or Harry Potter, Hereville is very highly recommended. (Oh, and if anyone happens on this post who's read and enjoyed Hereville but not Bone, go read Bone. Really. It's like what Hereville may be once Deutsch does another nine volumes or so.) Deutsch himself has said in an interview that he thinks of Hereville as "middle reader that anyone can enjoy"; I'd second that, save for adults who don't like to read middle reader books (you know who you are).

So that's what Hereville is; how it is is superb. It's elegantly written and plotted, and fabulously drawn. You'd never guess from reading Hereville that it's Deutsch's first book; it reads as if it could be the work of a far more mature artist (writing and drawing, of course, for kids). And, unsurprisingly, there's a reason for that. Hereville began life as a web comic, and it was published in a complete, earlier form on the web. Then Deutsch revised every page for the book version, and got another artist to do the coloring.

You can still read the web comic version at the link -- but I actually recommend against it. It's similar enough that you might not want to read the better version -- and the latter version really is distinctly better. Good as the web comic is at times -- his layouts are already great -- Deustch just improved a lot, as a writer and as a comics artist, between his first two drafts.

If you want a taste of what the revision entailed, take a look at this blog post where Deutsch lays out two versions of the same page, earlier and later. It's the same story, and if you look quickly it might not seem that much different. But it's the difference between satisfactory prose and elegant writing, between a fine likeness and a great one, a rough version and a full one: the details are just much better, and it makes a cumulative difference in reading any narrative when this is the case -- even if only a subliminal one. So even if you don't notice it, you'll like Hereville a lot more if you read the book version. Use the web comics version to give yourself a taste, if you must, but then go buy the book.

(If you're interested in Deutsch's process, he has another great blog post where he walks the reader through the various choices that went into the composition of one of his panels.)

I would say that Deutsch's writing is elegantly simple, while his art his elegant, easy to read, and formally complex. Let's take the writing first. The story, as I've said, reads like a fairytale -- straightforward, compelling, with a marvelous social world in the background, but essentially a pretty simple narrative. The characterization -- primarily of Mirka and some of her siblings, although also of her stepmother, and of the pig -- is quite good, capturing their differences while making each interesting and rounded. The plot is quite well constructed, and is quite gripping. (And that very gripping nature is used, narratively, to convey the power of the Jewish Shabbat (sabbath): it interrupts the story, a moment of narrative stillness that makes the reader feel and not just see the way that the day works itself into the rhythm of the observant Jewish week. It's one of the best artistic effects in the comic. (And then, right after Havdalah -- Sabbat's end -- the story picks up and continues full pace.))

As far as Deutsch's comicscraft goes, it's also superb. His faces are very simple, Hergé-esque things, but (as simple faces in comics do (for reasons that Scott McCloud analyzes in Understanding Comics)) they work very well: usually the eyes are dots, save in close-ups when they become a bit fuller. Deutsch is expressive with figure, and very focused on making sure both the "camera" angle and the panel transitions are both varied and help push along the narrative.

But what stands out in the illustrations are the page layouts and the lettering. Deutsch uses all sorts of innovative and interesting layouts, which don't complicate the story at all -- they're not hard to read, the way good but challenging comics artists can be (e.g. J. H. Williams III, who for all I love his work sometimes makes you struggle to figure out the reading order). They're just rich and varied and delightful.

Here's an example of how one works. On the fourth page of the comic Fruma, the heroine's stepmother, is arguing with Mirka. Then, almost at the end of the work, on p. 131, Mirka's arguing with someone else -- and the precise same layout is used. This shows how she is modeling her argument after that of her stepmother without being heavy-handed about it: it's just a nice echo brought up by the page layouts. They're really quite close: the expressions and stances that the three overlapping figures in the top right-hand corner of the page are the same in both cases. It's a marvelous, subtle touch. (A very similar, but not quite identical, layout is used in a second discussion between Fruma and Mirka -- this time not an argument, but an informative lecture -- inbetween the two, on p. 69.)

Deutsch uses a rich variety of layouts, viewpoint angles, types of panel transitions, etc, to keep the art lively. It's obviously the work of a dedicated, careful comics reader as well as artist.

Deutsch's use of lettering and ballooning is also very rich. He uses them very expressively, giving the balloons cartoony shape and form that help convey meaning: in one place, a word balloon turns into a weight pressing on another character's head; in a second place, a word balloon physically pushes another character over. When Mirka tumbles down a cliff, her exclamation balloons turn and twist every which way, and the balloon's tails turn into a tangle. And so forth. It's not ostentatious, but its a rich narrative tool, one that works well with his generally cartoony art style.

In both his page layouts and lettering, the largest influence on Deutsch's work appears to be Dave Sim's Cerebus. I checked, and he admits as much in his post on the completion of Cerebus, but honestly I think I would have seen it anyway: the lettering and page-layout in Hereville is simply and unmistakably very Simmesque. But since Sim is a quite extraordinary cartoonist, one of the best to work in the medium (if also possibly the craziest and most misogynistic), this is by no means a bad thing: indeed, a fair amount of Hereville's stylishness and formal inventiveness can be traced to a thoughtful absorption of Sim's lessons. (Plus, y'know, it's shorter, and feminist rather than misogynistic.) Deutsch learned from Sim, but the work is his own, and is very well done.

Another influence, I think, is manga: he uses a lot of manga-esque motion lines and the like to convey action. -- And actually, I'm guessing here -- or perhaps only showing my own limited cultural frame -- but I suspect that another influence was Scott McCloud: Deutsch's use of motion lines, of what McCloud would call aspect-to-aspect transitions, and the like, strike me as ones that betray the influence not only of the sort of comics McCloud talks about but McCloud's own specific analysis as well. (And this is not at all a bad thing, in my view.)

When discussing the art, I should make mention of the coloring. The coloring in the web comic was Deutsch's own; in this book he brought in an outside colorist, Jake Richmond, to re-color the art. It's a huge improvement. Richmond uses a subtle palette for most of the book -- not a two-color palette -- there are at least three or four colors he uses in addition to black and white -- but it's from a fairly narrow temperature range, with a rich, warm orangey feel, that gives the book the feel of a two-color work. Then, towards the end of the book, in the final climactic scene -- which, unlike most of the work, takes place at night -- he switches to a different palette with a similar range but this time in a cool, blueish zone. It's very effective. And the three-page transition at the end of the scene -- sunrise, plus one other page which I shan't spoil -- mix the two palettes in a very marvelous way, before ending the comic with a few pages in the main color palette used in the book. It's terrific, and adds a lot to the work.

I'd like to show some sample pages, just to give a sense of what I'm talking about, but Deutsch has only posted a few so far, and frankly, they're not my favorites. Still, here are a few pages from Hereville just to give you a sense of his artistic style:



I do have a few quibbles with the work, although only minor ones. Mirka's stepsister Rochel has what seems to me a very boyish face: I kept thinking it was one of Mirka's brothers in close-up shots (she dresses as a girl, and not at all as a young Orthodox boy, so it's clearly not -- but it's just a little bit off). And from a production viewpoint, the very end of the book is badly put together: the final page, while definitely an ending, is abrupt enough that one thinks there could easily be another page or two of denouement: but without any words such as "The End", or a blank page to signal a closing, or even the text acknowledgements page to signal an end to the strictly comics portion of the work, the text slides straight into two pages of DVD-extras. It's just a bit awkward -- like stumbling over an uneven pavement tile -- and could be easily fixed by doing any of the things I mentioned above.

But yes, these are quibbles. My main complaint, and it's a serious one, is that volume two is not out yet. I mean yes, I know that volume one's official publication date isn't until November and everything, but the story reads quickly, is engrossing -- and feels like the beginning to a long series (a la Bone or any number of manga). I was ready to set the volume aside and go on to Hereville: How Mirka Found the Time. Draw faster, Amp!

Highly recommended for any and all kids, for fans of virtuoso use of the comics medium, for fans of fairytales, and for any adults with enough of a taste for kids' books to read and enjoy a great one.

Update: This review was subsequently cross-posted at Berfrois.

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* I don't really have any idea where Deutsch is going with his series, but I can imagine some very good narrative potential in letting the series age with Mirka (à la Harry Potter), showing her eventually leaving Hereville and having to confront different cultures, different people and different beliefs.

** Generally speaking, I think sub-subtitles are awkward (excepting things like "a novel" and so forth), but they are currently endemic to graphic novel publishing, and for a good reason: graphic novels are frequently published in series, so that the "title" of a volume is often the series title, and the "sub-title" is the volume title: thus if an author wants an actual sub-title, they need to enter into the swampy domain of the sub-subtitle. Thus, Hereville will be (I presume) the title of Deutsch's ongoing series; How Mirka Got Her Sword is the title of the first volume of that series; and its subtitle is Yet Another Troll-Fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish Girl. Excpet that it's a sub-subtitle, so we can have future Hereville books: and it'll be worth it, once we do.

*** Also: consider get your moods adjusted, lowering the seriousness and stuck-up-itedness somewhat and dialing up the fun-loving, delight-in-childish-tales settings.

**** A propos of nothing (hence, the lack of an upper reference for this footnote) here's a cute drawing Deutsch did of Kitty Pryde (of X-Men fame) putting an orange on a seder plate, which, if you know what the latter is supposed to mean, is really cute. (According to the linked article, the meaning that's come to be ascribed to it isn't what it originally meant... but that's another story.)