Token (Alisa Kwitney)

If you let them, the books that DC publishing house Minx produce can take on the narrative quality of an F My Life page (not sure what that is? Google it, but don't say I didn't warn you). You're supposed to believe that each story comes from a different author, so why does it feel like they're being churned out by some drooling, betentacled hive mind?

The idea behind Minx is that girls in the West are drawn to the comics/graphic novel medium, but don't know where to go to read voices they can relate to. In Japan, for instance, the terms Shonen and Shojo exist for the purpose of delineating comics designed to appeal to boy interests (shonen) and ones designed for girl interests (shojo). They figured that out long ago. But in the West there's no defining terminology beyond the pre-established genre headings that apply to all fiction (romance, sci-fi, horror, lit, etc.).

Minx's tagline is "Your Life. Your Books. How Novel." As if curt, tacky puns are what every young woman aspires to.

What Minx does manage to achieve, despite the blur-drizzle narratives, is a collection of books that address a wide-ranging variety of young women from different social, racial, sexual, and financial backgrounds. And I'll hand it to them for being the first publishing house that comes to mind when I think about books that deal with lesbianism.

Alisa Kwitney's Token, however, might be the exception that proves the rule (is that image meant to look like a pie chart of teen romance cliches? And why is her dad's arm six feet long?).

Until I read Token I was at least quietly bemused by the standard voice and pacing and artistic ability on display in Minx books, and entertained by the variety of adventures these budding young dames found themselves in. But here, it's almost as if the executives reached a point where they realized, "Hey, we don't always have to be pushing the envelope. Let's just tell a boring as mud, average, run of the mill romance story with no surprises or dramatic depth. We've earned it."

I hope most girls will be insulted by the story of a drop-dead gorgeous teen, Shira, who believes she's uncool and ugly for no explained reason, attracts the interest and romance of a shoplifting Spanish boy who looks like he might've slipped and fallen of the cover of a GQ catalogue, as well as the interest of a group of (gasp!) mean girl schoolmates. Stop me if I'm blowing your mind. I mean, who comes up with this stuff?

So Shira decides to start shoplifting. Maybe in retaliation to her lawyer father becoming romantically linked to his secretary. Maybe to get closer to the glitzy movie stars from the 50s who she daydreams about and obsesses over. Maybe just to feel alive! Who cares! If the thieving served any purpose besides to attract the Spanish boy's attention, and to set up a plot conclusion, it may have been worth the inclusion, but Kwitney doesn't bother to connect the dots between Shira's psychological state, the reality of her life, and the symbolism behind an addiction to stealing, and feeling like a token.

The saving grace comes in the form of a group of old ladies in Shira's life, her grandmother and her grandmother's friends. Their dialogue is witty, uplifting, unexpected and inventive. If the book had turned itself on its ear and taken the perspective of Shira's best friend, aging, retired actress, Minerva, it could've reached something approaching valuable.

As it stands, you just want to ditch Token in Shira's box of meaningless stolen treasures.

Oldboy, Vol. 1-8 (Garon Tsuchiya)

Now an award-winning major motion picture in Japan, and an in-the-works major motion picture in Steven Spielberg's future, Oldboy tells the tale of an average top-of-his-class gentleman who enters into a life of post-education work and boredom, who gets kidnapped and imprisoned in a Being John Malkovich-style floor-between-floors prison for ten years. Equipped with nothing more than a TV and a bed, the man comes to forget his name and most other details about his past as his unexplained and inexplicable situation drags on.

Then one day he's unceremoniously released, left to deal with what's happened to him and to pick up the pieces of his old life. But who would spend the unthinkable amount of money needed to keep someone in the secret prison for so long? And why?The absolute dearth of dialogue, and the big-panel shots like the one pictured above make Oldboy read almost like a flipbook. Or a film. But read it too quick and you'll deprive yourself of all the fine, intense drawings.

In hindsight, the story is almost ludicrous. It derives from pulp fiction-style mayhem, but reins itself in from violent indulgences. Most of the violence, like all good violence, is in the dialogue. But since the story is so simple, one can't go into too much detail without giving most of the plot away.

It's no-holds-barred, rollicking fun, with a slice of existentialism to serve.

One thing I wonder is if the title is a reference to Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, whose name translates as, "Aged Child". In an age where a book came out called "Rejuvenile" about why it's bad that people are holding on more and more to the events of their childhoods, I think it's high time we started thinking about how significant these events in our past are, before, like Old Boy, we get locked up in the cages of our hearts when adulthood sets in.

Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography (Andrew Helfer)

Morgan Freeman once chided the idea of Black History Month, since American history, as he saw it, is black history just as much as white history. Still, it's difficult to find a good biography on a black person from before the last twenty years that doesn't have to do with race relations. It's a sad reality, but reality no less.

Helfer's Malcolm X is sober, and a sobering tale.

Skimping on subjectivity, Helfer sticks to the facts as he sees them. The result is a low-key, friendly marriage of race relations and time document. By keeping unwaveringly to Malcolm's story, the book avoids minimizing or compartmentalizing his role in the liberation movement, or the liberation movement itself.

The book also avoids making judgments or suppositions, a difficult task for any biographer. Helfer sticks to a omniscient narrative, entering in quotations that are either factual or irrelevant if inaccurate.

The book is text-heavy, but somehow it flits by. The illustrations are inventive in their arrangement without being senselessly artistic, and the picture content features a nice balance of mundane and horrifying. The drama, and the background necessary to understand the drama, is presented starkly, allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

There's a shirt now that reads, "Rosa sat, Martin walked, Barack ran" and while that's an awesome sentiment, and nicely put, I think it belies our desire to see the liberation movement as a thoroughly peaceful one on the part of those fighting for their freedom. It's pleasant to think that everyone was as peaceful as Martin Luther King and Ghandi. It's not as pleasant, or inspiring, to think that the 'freedom-fighters' required leaders that inspired violent responses, and that perhaps that violence was justified.

Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography shows how one man, almost destroyed in his youth by various vices, rose to a position of power, and impassioned his people to respect, trust, and defend themselves by any means necessary. He flipped from being an absentee father to his people, to being their protective, militant mother. Like a cowboy, he was forced to ride alone, terrorized by infighting, ousted by his friends and followers and loved ones. Yet, in a country that loves nothing better than a good cowboy he was treated like a madman, a zealot, and a criminal.

Why?

Essential reading for anyone interested in race relations, racism, and American history.

Prayer Requested (Christian Northeast)

Northeast has been getting some flack for the apparent vacuousness of his art exercise, Prayer Requested, in which he found inspiration for a book of illustration by looking for prayers published on the internet. It's hard to deny Northeast's technical ability and visual, interpretive imagination, but what seems to be in question is the worthiness of his attempt, which I think some are guessing is just a simple hook to ensnare the religious-minded and the gimmicky.

Part of the problem is that the book's text is muddled and unprofessional, embarrassing in its syntax, and sometimes deeply, ugly private. These aren't the voices of poets or professional writers: they're people. Just people. And what motivates someone to post a prayer on the internet? Is the hope that someone will notice? Is it the belief that inside electric cables and LCD screens and html is some uplink to a higher power?

Why doesn't Northeast include some idea of the religious background of each writer to lend a context, a hint, a clue? To answer my own question, perhaps it's to whitewash spirituality of religion. Save for a few "God"s here and there.
Northeast's visual skill clashes with the poor writing to such a degree that the mind has a hard time reconciling why someone with such prowess would waste time on such a fast-paced book, and, cynically, leads one to believe that it's pure capitalism. But I think there's something deeper at work here.

What Northeast is showing us with these segmented mini-stories is that spirituality has no boundaries; you can't judge one person's spirituality without judging all spirituality. He's stripping the prayers of their identities and offering them new ones. What's especially interesting is how what any of the people in the book are asking for is something anyone might ask for, except for the religiously disinclined the direction of the desire is sent inward instead of outward. But the yearning is the same.

The growing atheist population in the world may be distancing itself from the religious population for reasons of guilt and improved intelligence and greater communication access, but we may find ourselves looking back some day far in the future and realizing that embarrassing though it may seem, our religious counterparts were a natural and necessary part of our development, worthy of understanding and compassion. And maybe they're not too different from ourselves and our own convictions.

If Prayer Requested has a fault it's in the pacing. The books skirts by, succinct but rushed, no words wasted but no words particularly grabbing in and of themselves. Northeast's often off-symmetrical design sense doesn't take long for the eye to compute, and not a lot of symbolism or cleverness sustains the reader's interest toward dissecting the visual treats.

An unusual book from the ordinarily very literary Drawn and Quarterly.

Lucifer, Vol. 1-11 (Mike Carey)

A spin-off series of Neil Gaiman's landmark Sandman books, Lucifer begins as an episodic, day-in-the-life-of-the-lightbringer tale, quickly evolving into a labyrinthine, often nonplussing, epic which spawns dozens of characters in a myriad of locales, factual and mythological.

Unlike Gaiman, Carey's imagination for unique voices is slim, so the characters will blend and blur if you're not paying attention. But like Gaiman, Carey has a flair for pacing, staggering plot arches, and interweaving mythos and drama. The question will be, how much of that staggering and interweaving can you handle. Take a step back after closing the last page and you'll notice that the 2000+-page story wasn't a complex one in terms of actual events. But in the middle of the fray it feels like too much has happened to hold it all together.

The story picks up where Sandman left off, but after an indeterminable length of time. In Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists, Lucifer Morningstar finally grew too contemptuous of his position as God's shadow and abdicated. After locking up hell and kicking out its last few hangers-on, the devil opened a jazz club called Lux where he seems to be its only patron along with his non-hetero-life-mate, the split-faced, marble-mouthed daughter of Lillith, Mazikeen.

It looks like Old Scratch is going to hunker down to an eternity of near solitude in his creator's universe, learning the piano, and drinking from fluted glasses. But when Carey picks up the pen, it's home-is-where-your-rump-rests for Lucifer as he gets caught up in countless intrigues and conflicts and wars all centering around ownership of existence. And, yeah, some other existences get created, and yeah the furtherance of life as everything knows it gets put on the brink more than a few times, but hey, isn't that supposed to be the fun?

The trouble for me starts with the fact that while Gaiman's Endless are silently, supremely confident about their superior roles in the universe, and think nothing of how every culture's individual mythos can somehow coexist without canceling each other out (which always made me suspect that the cultures were less fact, and more collective imagination manifest), Carey's essentially Judeo-Christian reality takes its rules so seriously that you begin to wonder why it concerns itself with the rules of other mythos/cultures, since the buck appears to stop with the capital G God. So references and occurrences that take place within the realm of these other cultures take on a kind of lip service quality, robbing them of any real dramatic worth. That said, what Carey manages to communicate using the Judeo-Christian symbols is astounding.

Where Carey's writing and plotting fail, the art succeeds, since, like Sandman, this project attracted a big crowd of big talent. Everyone from Peter Gross to P. Craig Russell to Ted Naifeh was brought in to draw an issue or three and the result is a visual smorgasbord that moves things along when Carey gets bogged down in philosophical meandering.

The greatest triumph of the series is Carey creating an entirely plausible and engaging yarn about what could happen in the modern universe if God and the devil were really beings that had to live with one another, and deal with old grudges.