No One Else by R. Kikuo Johnson

 No One Else, by R. Kikuo Johnson, Fantagraphics, 2021

No One Else Review Link

Reading Through 2021 94: Sentient, by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta

Sentient, by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta

2020

I can now officially say I've given Jeff Lemire a fair chance, and I don't get the hype.

It's a good cover

He's a competent writer, but I don't see what others are seeing when they say he's their favorite writer, or he is put up for awards. My take on Sentient: an okay story told well with great art. That's three stars for the story, four stars for the storytelling, and five stars for the art.

Previously, I looked at his first six issues of Animal Man, which read like the prologue to a story as opposed to one ("Hey, if you just buy the next four trade paperbacks, plus the crossovers, it's gets good!"). And before that, I read his Justice League, which read like something a person was paid to do more than anything else I've written about this year. And before that, I'd read his X-Men run, which was a pillar of one of the bleakest periods in Marvel Mutant publishing history. I even have a hardcover of volume one of Sweet Tooth. It was fine; competent but unexciting.

There are action movie tropes in this

Lemire works hard to create a mood, and to some readers it must be a revelation, but I've just read a lot of other artists who've done it better without being bogged down with genre tropes. It's genre fare with heart. My frustration with his work is not that he's a bad writer. He isn't. It just isn't outstanding, which is what I've been repeatedly told his work is.

Walta's white lines bring out the details of the room and uniforms

That said, of the Lemire books I've read, this is he best of them, though still flawed. 

In advance, I have to mention that this is my first TKO comic, and the production quality is superb. Slightly oversized on a matte paper, I wish a penny-pinching company like Marvel would adopt this standard on its books.

And the art couldn't be better. Gabriel Walta, who made a name on the Vision 12-issue series a few years back, does the drawing duties. On the Vision, Jordie Bellaire did the colors, and here Walta does everything himself. Surprisingly, the color palette is very similar with browns and oranges, but here Walta draws more with the color. He's still relying on linework to create his images, but he creates texture and form using colors in a way that a separate colorist might not feel appropriate doing. 

There are a lot of mopey kids wandering, but kids who've lost their parents tend to mope

Lemire gives Walta lots of room to tell the story in pictures. Silent panels are plentiful throughout the book, and Walta lets the characters "act" out the story. The work is a great showcase for Walta's art, which is loose without being vague or sketchy. Like his work in the Vision, he keeps the storytelling down to earth, without many dutch angles or forced perspectives, and it gives the action scenes more believability.

The story is reminiscent of a number of sci-fi works, here is a play on 2001

The story is... not great. The book collects a single six-issue story, and the first half is quite good, while the second half is fine if you never think about it. The story takes place in the future, on a ship sending earth families to a colonized planet. The earth's environment is collapsing, and there is dissension on the colony on whether to let earth continue to govern it. All the adults on the ship are killed by a separatist, who is in turn killed by the ship's AI. The kids are left with the ship and its AI in a territory between the earth and the colony where communication is impossible. They continue moving toward the colony. As long as you don't think about it, it's fine. Why is a separatist on the earth ship when all the transports seem to go one way? I don't know. What were they going to do with the kids? I don't know. Why would they want a transport ship? I don't know. I can get past that sort of thing. Emotionally, it all works. The comic focuses on the two oldest kids who become the de facto "adults" on the ship, but having just lost their own parents, they are in no shape to be the rock for younger kids.

The story focuses on daily life on the ship, and the emotional states of the kids. This is good compelling stuff. 

The separatists kill all the people on their ship but leave the one guy nutty enough to try to kill kids

A lot of stories don't make sense if you pick them apart, and I was happy to see where this went by the halfway point. It then went to a very boring place. There is a refueling station the ship stops by, and the kids hear an SOS. The SOS is from a guy whose crewmates were killed, and his ship was taken by separatists. When he encounters the kids, he tries to kill them because he's gone crazy. They get away and their ship is boarded by separatists who had left the man on the station as bait! So they could take a second ship and do something with it. The kids fight, the bad guys die, and they go to the colony, the end. None of the separatists goals are addressed. The motive for separating is reasonable enough (freedom!), but it's never established why they would feel comfortable just killing earth citizens. Were they living under tyranny and oppression? On the colony, the concept of separatism is not addressed and life there seems just fine from the few images we see. The kids just live there happily ever after. 

The separatists were mere bad guys. This is a home invasion story set in space. 

So half the book is taken up with plot that doesn't have any relation to the the overall book. The bad guys are only there to give the two leads a reason to come together. It's very similar to the technique Zach Snyder employed in Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice, when he introduced Doomsday in the third act to bring the quarreling heroes together. 

The AI has a fun 2000's iMac design

I would tolerate a story like this in made-for-Netflix movie, but I wouldn't call it great and tell people to watch it. The past five years has seen an explosion of competent but unexceptional science fiction, and this fits right in there.

There are good points to the writing here. When Walta draws silent sequences, that's Lemire having him draw that. I appreciate him letting the artist tell the story using only images. That's good comics. And I think Lemire is writing good characters on an emotional level. The two main kids do not have a good relationship, and are forced to come together. An image of the one character's hand touching the other is a subtle yet powerful way to communicate a change in their relationship.

Probably my favorite thing in the book

That is good writing. It doesn't make this a great book, but it was a fine Sunday read.

Reading Through 2021 32: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine

2020

What an enormously frustrating book.

AAA production values

I love Tomine's work. I really do. I was buying Optic Nerve in the 90's, I love his New Yorker illustrations, and Killing and Dying is one of my favorite comic collections period. Killing and Dying is incredible. Right from the first preview of this, I was not down with The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, a collection of autobio strips about how embarrassing Tomine's life is.

In 2020, it ended up being what seemed like the most reviewed work of the year. Not best-reviewed, but most reviewed. Tomine is a comic artist with fans in a lot of media organizations, so Rolling Stone or EW or the Guardian or the New York Times will weigh in on his work, along with lots of comic sites. And they kept saying it was very good. Everywhere kept saying it was very good! Only a few places, like Solrad, gave mixed to negative reviews of it. The thing is, the positive reviews of it highlighted what I expected would be a negative about it. The Guardian (pulled up as the top pick on an Internet search as an example) said:

 In a series of autobiographical sketches from childhood to the present day, Tomine casts a cynical and unforgiving eye on his fragile ego, the dubious rewards of his successful career and the absurdity of the comic-book industry.

That doesn't sound great to me: a successful artist showing he was unhappy and frustrated in the comic industry. 

"This one time, I was at Dan Clowes studio, and I felt bad."

The majority of the book is a series of vignettes where Tomine is experiencing the dream of indie success and feeling bad about it. He's one of the youngest nominees at the Eisner awards, and he feels bad. He's at a book signing in Tokyo, and he feels bad. He's the subject of a TV documentary program in Angoulême, and he feels bad.

It's honest, and I'm sure he felt that way, but the jokes are only mildly amusing, not really funny, and not so insightful. For most of the book, I was just wondering why I was reading it at all.

"This one time, I was a guest at the world-renowned Angoulême Comics Festival, and I felt bad."

Around the mid-way point, he starts to add some dating themed strips. He hopes that if his girlfriend will see he's a popular cartoonist, it might impress her. This sort of detail was more endearing to me than the cringe stuff, since it was a lot more of a peek into his psychology. It's his own weakness as a person rather than the world not boosting him up enough. But this sort of thing is in a minority of the stories in the book.

The thing is, I knew from reviews and previews before I read the book that this was the main thrust of the book, and I bought it anyway. After reading, I don't think this is what the book is actually about, despite it being the majority of it. The final story is about a near-death panic he has where he reevaluates his life and everything he knows. Tomine is very frank, and direct to the reader in the form of a monologue to his wife about where his head is, that all his perceived slights are nothing compared to the love he has for his family. That final story is that Adrian Tomine magic that I love.

It doesn't change that the first hundred pages of the book are a guy highlighting the negative in every aspect of a long and successful career. He got to where he is through hard work. It wasn't given to him, so I don't want to say that he isn't thankful for it. But I don't enjoy reading a book where he makes success out to be such an emotional burden. 

What he's really trying to say

Other than that, the packaging is gorgeous. It's made up to be a Moleskine notebook, with the elastic band and everything (clout in the industry has some benefits when asking for frills in publishing at least). And the cartooning is incredible. Really incredible. He drew in this style in some of the stories in Killing and Dying. I loved it there, and I love it here too. It's very elegant, very precise, and the level of nuance in the facial expressions is simply amazing. I was regularly comparing panels to see the level of detail, for example, in jaw lines as mouths opened and closed. It's a weird thing to comment on, but it's difficult to draw and he does he perfectly. He's doing very simple images, but the structure behind them is sound. 

He's at the top of his game as a cartoonist. And he's got decades ahead of him to do more great work if he chooses to. 

When I saw him put that text balloon tail in the third panel, I cursed the cartooning for being so elegantly simple and clever

Books can change upon a reread. Maybe knowing that the book uses the first two thirds as a set up of the lonely cartoonist to contrast the family man learning to appreciate his life in the third act will work on a second reading. I read all his stuff twice, so maybe it won't be so frustrating next time. 

Reading Through 2021 9: Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen; Matt Fraction, Steve Lieber, Nathan Fairbairn

Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen; Matt Fraction, Steve Lieber, Nathan Fairbairn

2020

I had to break my "no new DC comics" rule to read this. DC is a dumpster fire of a company, that is slowly destroying their comics business in favor of supporting properties to be leveraged into other media. Just with their changes over the past year, I doubt this book would have got the green light were it proposed today.

And it's really really good! Like, this might be a new classic, along the lines of All Star Superman. Matt Fraction did a similarly great run on Hawkeye a few years ago, Steve Lieber had similarly great art on Superior Foes of Spider-Man a few years ago. This is the first time I've recognized Nathan Fairbairn's name, but he does pretty amazing color work. The colors in this are almost flat, with a slight tone to them, and the pages are matte instead of glossy, so they work with the flatness. It's a great looking book.

I read this faster than expected because I was just enjoying it so much. It's hard to know what to compare it to, because it's not like other books. Maybe this is to silver age DC as Coen Brother movies are to classic noir movies: embracing the genre, making it modern, and embracing the ridiculous without making it stupid. It's this fine line of really dumb things done in a very smart way. Jimmy Olsen is a character a lot in my generation thought was everything wrong with old comics: A bow-tie wearing, happy-go-lucky "pal" to Superman, who got into hijinx. He sucked (and Zack Snyder made a point of putting a bullet in his forehead in the classic shitfest that was Batman V. Superman, because Zack Snyder's brain is firmly lodged in 1995). Fast-forward to 2021, where DC has made death, rape and mental illness pillars of their publishing line, where they made a comic showing Batman's penis because "we're grown up!", and yeah, I wanna read about the happy-go-lucky guy in the bow tie who gets into hijinx.

This book is a murder mystery (Jimmy's own murder!) told in the most complicated way possible, with a dozen independent mini-stories that seemed unrelated at first, but slowly start coming together into one big story. Some of the stories:

-Jimmy gets wrecked on "gorilla champagne" and wakes up married to an intergalactic jewel thief

-Jimmy has a prank war with Batman, including stealing the Batmobile's wheel

-an embarrassed Batman tries to establish that he has a sense of humor

-We meet Jimmy's siblings, Julian and Janie, and learn that one of Jimmy's given names is Jimberly

-Journalist Jimmy Olsen is dead, but blogger Timmy Olsen is on the scene, and has a mustache.

-In the wake of Jimmy's death, four new Jimmy's appear: a robot Jimmy, a steel covered Jimmy, a cool 90's kid Jimmy, and sunglasses-wearing silent Jimmy

Much like classic Coen Brothers movies, the story is simply a plot to hang character, humor and experience on. It's not what they do but the way that they do it. There's no other comic out today that has blue blood-barfing cat in it.

And there is a bad guy named Stealy Thieverman, and it's so dumb, and made me laugh out loud.

Reading Through 2021 8: To Know Your Alive, Dakota McFadzean

To Know Your Alive, Dakota McFadzean

2020

Some Can-Con comics, funded in part by the Canadian government!

McFadzean has been publishing comics for about a decade, and it's absolutely criminal that I have never seen his name mentioned on an American website. I'm sure it has, as he's been printed in some American magazines, but his three collections just don't get properly reviewed it seems.

I first saw his work through his daily comics on Tumblr. He spent a few years making daily strips, and you can see it in his inking and story-telling. He's put in the 10,000 hours already.

This is a collection of short stories from different publications, so there isn't a strong through line in them, except that he goes over a lot of the same themes. If I were to put a finger on his main topics, it would be existential horror and existential banality. I had three favorite stories in this. In one, a new kid at a school is bullied, but the kid is also rotten, so nobody is at fault and everybody is at fault. It's kids. In another, a woman gets a gig as a game tester and wonders what life she has. Another more surreal one has the world's first contact with an alien, and how boring it becomes a few weeks later when the next big news story breaks.

I kind of lean toward the existential banality ones, but he also has lots of stuff about faces melting off. He likes drawing faces coming off.

The art is really good, classical cartooning. In terms of modern artists, I can see Seth, Chester Brown, and Hartley Lin in his work. Clean, easy-to-read work. The only problem with this collection is that the works were originally formatted to different sizes, so the ones that were made to be printed on A3 paper are a little difficult to read compressed to the collection size. All the same, I think this is a phenomenal book, especially if you miss the Drawn and Quarterly and Fantagraphics books of the '90s.

Reading through 2021 4: Blue in Green, by Ram V and Anand RK

 Blue in Green, by Ram V and Anand RK

2020

Image has a house style now, which is tonally very close to the MCU: slick genre work with doses of humor, but usually some sex, swearing, and gore because of Watchmen. This book isn't that.

It's a dour character piece about a depressed jazz musician looking into his family history. It really had me at the first issue, it was a real change of pace for the publisher, and then they put in a tentacle monster. Not every book needs monsters, Image!

That said, Anand RK channels 1980's Bill Sienkiewicz quite well, and it's hard to see where the analogue art ends and the digital art starts. It's a solid package. It's a good book in the moment, but the story makes me think of something in a 1990's music video: in the moment, it makes emotional sense and is interesting, but afterward, it can't hold up to any scrutiny.