You'll Never Know: A Good and Decent Man

By Carol Tyler

The list of excellent graphic novels released in 2009 seems to grow with every other book read, and this particular entry is one that stands out even in its crowded field.  Carol Tyler really makes a name for herself with this "graphic memoir", as the cover calls it, demonstrating an incredible grasp of storytelling structure and a layering of personal and historical incident into a complex, cohesive whole that illuminates her own life along with her subject's.  It's an impressive achievement, and as the first volume of a projected trilogy, it's indicative of the quality to come.

As for that subject, it's a fascinating one, an intimate, warts-and-all portrait of Tyler's father, one Sgt. Chuck Tyler, who served in the Army in World War II.  As with so many of the "greatest generation", it's essential to record their stories while they are still with us, and Tyler does a wonderful job of it, weaving her own history into the tale, along with some contemplation on how her father's history and their relationship affected her own life, especially her relationship with her husband, who had separated with her during the creation of the volume, causing her to be especially reflective on the subject.

This makes the book a sort of rambling, nonchronological discourse on her father, jumping around to different points in his life, with regular breaks for Tyler to relate what is going on with her and her teenage daughter and detail how her father came to tell her the story in the first place, which is important, since she tells how he was reticent to even talk about his wartime experiences at all for as long as she could remember.  The whole thing (or this first third of it, anyway), ends up having the quality of a tale told by a master storyteller, who makes the telling of the story and the circumstances surrounding it as important as the story itself.

That might be because the meat of Sgt. Tyler's war experiences are yet to come; as of the end of this volume, he still hadn't seen much action, spending most of the story talking about being stationed on a base in the U.S., courting his future wife, and working as a plumber in North Africa; he eventually went into Italy and Germany, and apparently had some difficult experiences that affected him for the rest of his life, but we'll have to wait to hear about that.  Instead, we learn about his time growing up, the beautiful love story between him and Tyler's mother, and many of Tyler's memories of him as a father.  It's a wonderful portrait of a complex human being, and after reading just this one volume, readers will feel like they know him, no matter what the title says.

All this would be quite nice on its own, but Tyler's gorgeous artwork really completes the package, bringing an aura of sensuality to every scene, whether it's an aside about the layout of her house or a detail from her parents' memory.  The way she conveys movement is amazing, with images flowing across the page and directing the eye through the panels even when they're full of captioned text, and really capturing emotions at the same time, as in this scene in which she recalls her father taking her to a school dance:

She packs the panels with information, often pointing out details with labels and arrows or adding swirls of colors to represent emotion.  She makes use of the entire page, with artwork extending outside of the panel borders and stretching across the gulf between pages.  This story doesn't sit still; it keeps moving, one scene flowing into another and one memory evoking certain emotions and vice versa.  The sections in which she attempts to create a sort of scrapbook retelling of his history might be the most restrained portions of the book, but they're fascinating nonetheless, with the description of how her parents fell in love possibly being the most arresting part of the story:

The whole thing is beautiful and gripping, and it's obvious that Tyler cares for her father and wants to capture the full extent of her emotions concerning him.  That seems like a tall order, but she manages to do a remarkably real-seeming interpretation of her thoughts and feelings, whether in the awed reverence of everything he's seen in his lifetime:

Or the remembrance of what an accomplished man he was, especially in how technically capable he was with carpentry and plumbing:

Tyler never stops laying on the detail, but she doesn't overwhelm the reader either.  She has a perfect control of pacing and structure, and the book holds together as a pretty amazing whole, full of personal reminiscence, diaristic self-examination, and attempts to capture a history that doesn't just seem like a random accumulation of memories, but a full portrait of a person and his life.  That's a pretty great accomplishment, and if Tyler wasn't on readers' radar before, she definitely should have everyone's attention now, since she's got talent to spare.  The next two installments of the story can't arrive fast enough.

-Matthew J. Brady

'Johnny Recon' Blazes New Path to Publishing Comics

If you missed the first issue of Johnny Recon at Chicago Comicon this year, you missed a heck of a debut issue from Scott Dillon and Mitch Gerads. The story harks back to the pulp days of sci-fi and art is kinetic and beautiful and you can just keep looking at it all day long, something I can't say about a lot of comics coming out these days.

The creative dynamos are gearing up for issue two, and they're approaching comic book making in a new way. Is it the start of a trend? Is it a reflection of the sorry state of the Direct Market?

Who cares. Johnny Recon is worth collecting. And the goodies you get in return for your support make it a fairly bankable buy.

Check out their pitch below:

---

Official Press Release

HELP SUPPORT JOHNNY RECON ON KICKSTARTER.COM

Mitch Gerads and Scott Dillon bring their rising indie comic to Kickstarter.com

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/popgunpulp/johnny-recon-no02-a-daring-hi-fi-adventure-tale

“Johnny Recon is a deliciously fun birthday cake. With a few cups of Dr. Who, a whole helping of Indiana jones, and a dash of retro science fiction goodness, Dillon and Gerads have managed to create the funnest new indie comic I've read in a good long while!” – Mitch Breitweiser (Cover and sequential artist for Marvel Comics, and co-creator of The Futurists)

Howdy, everyone! Our names are Scott Dillon (writer) and Mitch Gerads (illustrator). Last summer, we released the first issue of our self-published, and self-funded, comic book series through our studio, POPGUNPULP Comics: The Daring HI-FI Adventure Tales of JOHNNY RECON.

JOHNNY RECON is a contemporary science fiction adventure comic that borrows from both modern mainstream storytelling aesthetics and an incredible love of old science fiction and adventure pulp stories from the 1940s and 50s.

“These guys show the rest how it’s done. They understand that sci-fi and cosmic adventure comics are supposed to be fun! Not since Jim Starlin's "Warlock" has there been a space tale this exciting! I'm not missing a single issue!” -J. K. Woodward (Illustrator - X-Men: Origins, Star Trek, Fallen Angel)

We are both established professionals in our fields and understand what has the potential to be successful and what is just a passing hobby. We are supremely confident that JOHNNY RECON has the potential to be a very successful franchise, which is only supported by the amount of sales and good reviews the book has gotten from industry professionals, potential publishers, and, most importantly, the fans. We brought the first issue to multiple conventions last year and currently have the book in numerous Minnesota stores and are currently SOLD OUT with hopes of going to a second printing shortly.

“Great design work, sharp storytelling, and a retro flair that I find hard to resist. Mitch Gerads’ work reminds me of everything I like about comic books.” –Matthew Dow Smith (Illustrator - Doctor Who, Starman, Supernatural: Origins)

Mitch is just now starting his work as illustrator on JOHNNY RECON #2, and we really want to bring JOHNNY RECON to the KICKSTARTER community. We are very excited about the script for the second issue, and we are very confident it will be our gateway to bigger, better, and more widely distributed things. We are asking the KICKSTARTER community to help us with just that.

This is where you come in. All of the money that we raise on Kickstarter will go toward the printing of the second issue as well as costs associated with the two of us traveling and attending conventions in 2010 for both selling to fans and pitching to publishers, some of whom have already expressed an interest in seeing more from JOHNNY RECON and us.

In honor of our appreciation, we have put together an affordable and fun list of Pledge Rewards for you to choose from, the centerpiece being the KICKSTARTER Pledge EXCLUSIVE cover to JOHNNY RECON #2 (pictured here) by Mitch Gerads. This cover will ONLY be printed and distributed to supporters from KICKSTARTER and will not be available on our Web site, at conventions, etc. ONLY you guys. Check out the sidebar for all the other great rewards we have set up as well.

At this time, we’re expecting to have the second issue printed and available to retailers and the general public in time for the 2010 convention season, near the end of April.

We really appreciate anything you can pledge, and we both can’t thank you enough for helping our childhood dream come true!

Please take the time to check out our project on Kickstarter.com, watch the video, and help us make JOHNNY RECON a national success!

For additional information about JOHNNY RECON and POPGUNPULP Comics, feel free to check out our Web site (www.popgunpulp.com). Thank you again!

Driven By Lemons

By Joshua Cotter

When it comes to some of the more outre indie "artcomix", one complaint against them is that they can be pretty damn inscrutable, little more than a series of images that don't hold together well or add up to much of anything.  Of course, that could be a reaction to any sort of modern art, but the fact remains that most people come to comics expecting a story, and experiments with abstraction aside, many of those indie comics are lacking in the area of narrative, or at least taking an approach that can alienate those who aren't accustomed to their strangeness.  Luckily, if you're looking to bridge the gap between narrative and abstraction, Joshua Cotter's follow-up to Skyscrapers of the Midwest is here to do so.  It is presented as a reproduction of the sketchbook in which it was created, although if it was actually put together page by page in such a manner, that's a pretty impressive feat.  It's kind of inscrutable itself, with the opening pages including some dense, seemingly-glossolalic text, blacked-out panels next to ones full of masses of tiny triangles and squares, and captions that seem to describe a fractured mental state, but as one continues to turn the pages, a sort of story makes itself clear, seeing a truck plunge out of the sky over the Chicago skyline, followed by a bunny in a sort of space suit crawling out of the wreckage and having hallucinations in the form of pages and pages of scribbly lines and exploding shapes and colors.  Later, that same bunny (or perhaps a different one?) is seen lying in a hospital bed, barely moving, and listening to the sounds around him while having more hallucinations, eventually succumbing to an enveloping scene in which what seem to be different bunny-shaped versions of himself run through an oppressive mental landscape, jostling for superiority until the eventually merge together, then get stuck in some sort of structure while a sort of flaming-headed fox lectures them about emotion and reality, before they undergo another transformation, into a small red twig of a tree, that, after being urinated on by the fox, grows into a thick vine or trunk that plunges up into the atmosphere and seems to obliterate the odd mental machinery of the bunny's mind before withering back into a tiny branch.

Hmm, that description doesn't seem to make very much sense, which sort of ruins the initial argument, but one can only textually paraphrase the images so much; the artwork here really has to be seen to be believed.  Cotter pours on the intricate detail, whether in "simple" depictions of clusters of tiny triangles and squares or in the gorgeously textured depictions of the bunny and his "adventures", and especially in the way he seems to devolve into component shapes and scribbles:

And those "scribbles" aren't just random, childlike clusters of lines; they're intricately detailed as well; they might or might not contain any actual information, but reader's can't help but pore over them to try to perceive some sort of pattern:

The scenes of the bunny in his hospital bed are similarly arresting, although somewhat simplified, and enhanced through repetition, with slight changes from panel to panel signifying the passing of time and the bunny's blank mental state:

This simplicity and stillness contrasts with the rich detail of the bunny's hallucinations, along with the fluid sense of motion that they provide:

Not to mention the incredible sense of color that stands out so much from the black and white backgrounds; when the vine (if that's what it is) starts growing and coursing through the sky, it looks like a stream of blood:

So, yes, it's pretty visually amazing, and seems to have some sort of narrative continuity, but, to ask the ever-present question posed to challenging art by minds that are struggling to keep up, what does it all mean?  The beauty of abstract-style art is that it can contain any interpretation the viewer/reader wants to pour into it; my take on this would be that it is an attempt at a depiction of mental illness, or possibly a damaged brain (from a car accident?) struggling to recover some semblance of normalcy.  The early struggles of the bunny might be an attempt to fight the mental chaos of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or another affliction, culminating in a suicide attempt, which leads to the hospital scenes and the trip through the mindscape that the fox (doctor?) tries to bring under control.  This view is bolstered by the final scene, which sees the bunny out of the hospital and at home, but depicted as damaged almost beyond recognition and still not fully "normal":

The thing about mental illness is that it can seem glorious and amazing to those experiencing it, even while it is incredibly damaging.  Hence the incredible sense of detailed beauty in the hallucinatory excursions, contrasted with the crushing banality of "normality" in the hospital.  But at the same time, the oppressive chaos, brought to life through the scribbly shapes and what looks like complicated mental machinery, threatens to tear one apart completely, and the rebuilding process is long and hard, with the result being far from optimal.  It's a terrible situation to deal with, and Cotter's depiction of it is at turns horrifying, engaging, enthralling, and confusing, making it, even with its near-total removal from reality, just about the most effective depiction of mental illness possible.

But maybe that's not it at all; another reader might come at the book with a completely different, and equally valid interpretation.  Cotter's work here is so well done that it can handle different takes, and it can be fascinating to see what different people bring to the work and get out of it.  One could even just enjoy the uniquely arresting visuals, which are outstanding and gorgeous on their own, divorced of any attempt at meaning, possibly even just evoking emotion or memory in their visceral engagement with the reader's senses. It's a rich, beautiful work, like nothing else out there, and it shows what an amazing talent Cotter has for comics art.  Let's see how he can top this one.

-Matthew J. Brady

Chew, volume 1: Taster's Choice

Written by John Layman

Art by Rob Guillory

This series has sort of been the comics success story of the year, at least in terms of mainstream, direct market, non-big-two comics, and reading it, it's easy to see why: it's entertaining, accessible, and really nice-looking, along with being pretty unique. And that accessibility might be its strongest point, considering how unique it is; it's about a cop (and later federal agent) who gets psychic impressions from whatever he eats, which leads him toward some cannibalistic tendencies in the name of pursuing justice. And that's only one of the odd ideas that writer John Layman tosses out here; there's also a backstory involving the FDA becoming the leading anti-crime organization in the United States following an outbreak of bird flu the leads to the outlawing of poultry, a love interest who has found great success as a food critic due to her ability to describe tastes so well that people actually experience them when reading her reviews, and also aliens, apparently. There's action and banter aplenty, mysteries to solve, secrets, reversals, betrayals, and conspiracies, but it's never complex or hard to follow. In fact, the five issues collected here are all stand-alone stories, easy to pick up and read without feeling lost. It's a surprisingly approachable book, and a hell of an entertaining one to boot.

Layman does a lot of the work here, establishing characters' personalities through dialogue and (aside from brief introductory captions in each issue along the lines of "Meet Tony Chu...Tony Chu is cibopathic", and so on) delivering exposition organically rather than forcing readers to hear somebody explain the whole bird flu situation for their benefit. But artist Rob Guillory really fleshes out that structure and creates the oddball world of the comic, from the dirty back alleys where gangsters smuggle bootleg chicken to the paperwork-littered offices and gross evidence rooms of the FDA. He's got a style that resembles a more clean-lined and brightly-colored Ben Templesmith, which means that the characters aren't especially attractive, but they've got personality to spare. He comes up with some good effects for Tony's psychic impressions and stages some great action scenes too, perfectly balancing seriousness and comedy. It's a great book all around, and at a bargain price, hopefully it will get plenty of people on board for the series, since Layman obviously has plans for a long, involved story. I know I certainly want to see where it goes next.

-Matthew J. Brady

Low Moon

By Jason

What's better than a new story by Jason?  Why, several in one volume, of course!  This book collects the titular serial story that ran in The New York Times Magazine, along with four other stories of a similar length, making for a good deal of great material, equal to two or three of the album-sized volume in which his comics are usually delivered.  And all the better, I say; the more of Jason's weird energy and quirky, poignant storytelling that I can consume at one time, the better.

Jason's style of storytelling probably needs no introduction, so suffice to say that I'm always beguiled by the weirdly relatable inexpressiveness of his anthropomorphic animal characters, and the way that he puts them in such fantastical situations yet still makes their emotions and actions seem real and believable.  It's kind of a mystery how well he's able to do it, crafting easy-to-follow stories in such a minimalist style, but luckily, they're incredibly enjoyable, so one can easily get lost in them, forgetting questions of craft and technique because those aspects become all but invisible.

The five stories included here all traffic in the same sort of alienation and unhappiness that is his forte, with some of them going off into (or starting from) more surreal directions than others.  "Emily Says Hello" sees a hapless assassin picking off a group of men one by one at the behest of the eponymous woman, who rewards him with sexual favors, but never actually emits any warmth toward him or provides an explanation for why she wants them dead.  It's pretty dark, but fascinating in the emotions it evokes and the way the story suggests so much happening beyond its panels.

"&" is a similarly downbeat tale, alternating between two men who are similarly pursuing futile goals: one trying to steal some high-priced artwork in order to finance an operation to save his mother's life, and the other trying to get the woman he loves to agree to his proposal of marriage by killing all the other men she chooses over him.  The latter storyline is pretty darkly comic, with its hero's quest spiraling more and more out of control with each subsequent murder, and the goal becoming increasingly distant as his object of affection keeps choosing others ahead of him.  As a counterpoint, the former story goes in a completely different direction, full of slapstick comedy like something out of a Marx Brothers' movie.  Jason switches storylines on each page, so the two moods get intertwined in a fascinating manner, jumping between light and heavy quickly enough to give readers whiplash.  And then he brings it all together in a perfect Jason ending, fading out on a lasting image that sticks in the memory hauntingly.

The title story is a bit less dark than those already mentioned, but no less rich in quickly-defined but interesting character interactions.  It's a Western, starting with a man returning to a town with an apparent grudge against the sheriff.  But, in typically quirky Jason style, it turns out that the dispute between the two of them involved a chess match that the sheriff won, and now the man has come back for a rematch.  It's rather goofy, the way the characters all treat the match as seriously as if it were a pistol duel, but the real richness of the story comes through the character turns, the way the sheriff has become a washed-up drunk and has a rocky relationship with the local schoolteacher, the bruised honor of his rival, or the quiet resolve the various deputies have in preparing the sheriff for his rematch.  It's fascinating to watch Jason put this all together, creating a sort of melancholy wistfulness and tiredness through the body language and sad inexpressiveness of the characters.  He manages to convey so much so simply, whether in a pained back-and-forth:

A surprised reaction:

Or the choreography of a humorous barroom brawl:

It's a darn good entry in the artist's long line of stories that keep the reader coming back to find new layers of the work.

The final two stories, "Proto Film Noir" and "You Are Here", aren't quite as good as the others, and they suffer a bit for coming at the end after the highs of the first two thirds of the book, but they're still quite interesting and full of the same surreality.  The former sees a caveman wander into a domestic scene and begin an affair with the wife, then kill the husband, but every morning, the victim shows up at the front door, ready to eat breakfast.  No matter how many times or how gruesomely he is murdered, he wanders in with a "Good morning!" and a resolve to do some gardening.  What does it all mean? Who knows, but it gives Jason a chance to come up with more darkly comic violence.

As for "You Are Here", it sees a bickering couple argue via blacked-out word balloons, followed by the wife being abducted by a big, green alien.  The husband then spends the next several decades building a rocket which he can use to find her, while his son grows up, builds a family of his own, and then repeats his father's mistakes (signified by the reappearance of black word balloons), ending up splitting with his wife and joining his father in the search for his mother in the finally-completed rocket.  It's a strange story, seemingly metaphorical for the way a broken marriage might seem inexplicable to a child, but not really holding together as well as most of these.

But even lesser Jason stories are still like nothing else in comics, and considering the quality of the book as a whole, there's little to complain about here.  It's another great example of the strange alchemy that Jason has mastered, drawing readers in to compelling tales of people caught up in oddly familiar situations, even when they're dealing with something that's off-kilter from reality as we know it.  That's the Jason touch, and long may it continue to grace our pages.

-Matthew J. Brady

Why I Killed Peter

Written by Olivier Ka

Art by Alfred

Wow, this has to be one of the most disturbing comics I've ever read. Other comics might feature plenty of shocking material, whether it's gore, death, the supernatural, or any number of other horror tropes, but something like this, with a true story of just about the most awful thing that can happen in real life, is the stuff of nightmares, haunting the thoughts of readers who can't shake the understanding that this isn't some far-fetched attempt to scare, but a bit of all-too-real horror that continues to affect people every day. That terrible act: child molestation, which isn't a subject anybody wants to dwell on, but is one that we must realize harms those affected in life-long ways, as demonstrated by this autobiographical graphic novel written by French author Olivier Ka and illustrated by the singly-named Alfred. It's a striking bit of therapy on Ka's part, relating the childhood experiences that affected his life, especially one terrible incident in particular, and then moving on to show how damaged he was for decades afterward, until he eventually manages to get some closure through the act of putting it all down on paper.

Ka revisits several periods in his life, heading each section with "I killed Peter because I'm [age] years old", and relating a memory from that time. His parents were kind of hippie-ish, open to free love and extra-marital affairs, but he also spent some time with his grandparents who were strictly Catholic, filling his head with visions of hell if he commits any sin, including playing with his "peepee". As with any child, he's still forming ideas of sex and intimacy as he gets closer to adolescence. And then Peter enters their lives; he's a priest, but not a cold, strict, uptight one. Rather, he's joyful and prone to laughter, playing the guitar and spending time with the family without trying to convert them to his religion. He seems like a good friend of the family, and young Ollie spends his summers at Peter's summer camp, Happy River. It seems like a fun, carefree time, but there are ominous intimations even early on, at least in Alfred's art. The placid serenity of the woods is depicted with harsh swipes of black ink, as if danger is lurking in the shadows:

And Peter's scary dog looks like a ferocious beast:

Tellingly, the dog becomes something of a bond between Ollie and Peter, as the latter allows the former to walk it, something he does for nobody else. It's something scary that is shared between them and encouraged to keep separate from others, just one way in which Peter's relationship with Ollie gets creepy and weird in ways that a child can't quite understand.

And then the incident happens, with Peter proposing that he and Ollie sleep next to each other and rub each other's bellies, a disturbing idea that only becomes more so when we see it happen. Alfred's depiction of Peter's proposal is scary, with his juxtaposition of the massive older man against the frail child emphasizing the priest's disgustingly predatory actions, and the bright, sunny atmosphere of the scene acting as an ironic commentary on the darkness of the scene:

But that's nothing compared to the literal darkness of the actual molestation. It's a scene that is just awful and horrible, making the reader want to look away from the page, even though we don't actually see anything that happens; our view is limited to dark, shadowy images and Ka's narration:

It's ugly and terrible, and it stretches on for page after page, forcing us to wallow in the terrible event. While we'll never have it burned into the very core of our being like Ka, it's an approximation of his experience, a never-ending horror that not only seems to last forever, but lingers unforgettably in the memory.

After this, Ollie moves on with his life, but never really recovers from the deep emotional wounds of the experience. His parents split up, he drops out of school and has personal problems, but he eventually gets his life together, falling in love and forming a family of his own. But the scars are still there, as can be seen in incidents like a heated argument with friends who decide to have their child baptized, or a panic attack that comes over him when he enters the church at a friend's wedding. He starts to sink into a depression, experiencing nightmares that demonstrate the extent of his inner pain:

As with so much of this book, that sequence is incredibly effective, showing all the different ways in which Peter hurt him. This was a trusted family friend, and the way he used him in a perversion of an act of love and then cast him aside like garbage, it's no surprise that Ka was still reeling more than twenty years later.

Eventually, Ka decided that he needed to write down the experience, doing what he could to exorcise it from his system. This led to the book being made after he began working with Alfred, a friend and colleague, but the two of them decided to return to Happy River and try to get some closure. Little did they know that Ka would end up confronting Peter himself and forcing him to face the extent of his actions, but that's exactly what happened. It's a harrowing scene, with Ka placing us in his head as he faces the cause of his emotional turmoil, and rather than try to approximate it with linework, Alfred actually switches to photos, depicting the several pages of the confrontation as pictures that have been altered with moody colors to reflect the emotion of the scene:

That's how the book ends, with the note of, well, not triumph, but at least satisfaction that Ka was able to recover from his trauma and make the person who hurt him face what he did. Would that be enough for Ka to regain some semblance of sanity and continue with his life? Who can say, but what he has done here is a powerful work, exposing the extent of the damage that one person can inflict on another, and the total horror of somebody abusing their power on an innocent child. It's a scary book, but eventually a life-affirming one that shows how people can survive, even when subjected to the worst crimes imaginable. Ka has a strong voice, sure of his words, and he found a perfect collaborator here in Alfred, who brings a sort of European clear-line style to the characters, but also fills pages with gorgeous colors and emotional artistic effects without overtaking the story with his style. It's a great package, and if you can stomach its awful contents, it's one that shouldn't be missed.

-Matthew J. Brady

Preview: Art from the Upcoming 'Kick-Ass' Movie

No slackers we.

Our friends at Titan Books just sent over images from their upcoming book, Kick-Ass: Creating the Comic, Making the Movie. The book will be released on February 23rd, and features exclusive John Romita, Jr. art for the movie, Mark Millar script pages and photos from the set.

— Ommus