hrj | Entries tagged with reviews: graphic novels

I think I mentioned previously that, having bought the Comixology app for my iPad to read a particular title, I went hunting around in their catalog to find other things of interest. Since they have a GLBTQ category in the catalog, I figured that was a good place to start. Mostly filled with very pretty boys kissing each other, as might be expected. But one title caught my eye for featuring a female POV character, a historic setting, and the promise of exciting adventure.

A young woman in late 18th century Spain, on the eve of her debut into society, receives a mysterious message and gift from her missing father: an astrolabe. As a child, her father had trained her with games of puzzle-solving and mysteries, so she takes the gift as a signal and sets off on her own to answer it and reunite with her father. Along the way, she finds herself in company with a brother and sister (or so they present themselves), and is flustered and intrigued by the sister's habit of wearing male clothes and wielding a deadly sword. There's a very Dumas-like feel to the story and setting, but with female characters far more centered than he ever did.

Windrose is a fun little adventure story with mostly excellent art. The first volume (which is what is currently available and appears to collect the first 6 issues) is only the very beginning of the story. It's not so much that there's a cliffhanger as that we're only beginning to climb the cliffs in the first place. It's promising enough that I'll be continuing to follow the series, but I'm also reminded of why I generally don't follow graphic stories much. And this isn't in any way a fault of the particular title, but rather of the format. There's just a very low story-to-page content, and while the art is enjoyable, I tend to read for story rather than art. So here are my likes/dislikes about this specific work.

I liked:

The attention to historic detail in the art. It isn't necessarily completely historically accurate (especially in the clothing) but this is a fantasy version of history so I'm generous on that point. And it has a solid look-and-feel. The characters are well-differentiated and realistic within a manga-style presentation.
The plot moves quickly but sets up a lot of structure for a complex story.
The female characters are complex and engaging.

I disliked:

I'm pretty sure this is a standard artistic convention of the genre, but the faces of background characters and characters in intense emotion are often shown in distorted charicature (often with emoji-like simplicity). I found it jarring and distracting, especially when it was done to one of the viewpoint characters.
At the current point in the story, I'm feeling a little queer-baited. We have a cross-dressing female character and some slight hints of "same-sex attraction from gender confusion," but I'd be more excited about investing in this title long-term if I'd been given in-story evidence that I'm going to get more than that.

If plucky 18th century girls hanging out with sword-swinging cross-dressing girls is your thing (and it very much is mine) I suspect that Windrose will be very much up your alley.

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Having downloaded the Comixology app in order to read Heathen, I had a sneaking suspicion that I was about to start reading more graphic stories. I've been hearing a lot of praise for Monstress, so it was a natural choice for my next set of purchases. Monstress is set in a secondary world built with a flavor of several Asian cultures as well as original invention, and a somewhat steampunky esthetic. Two conflicting peoples: one superficially "human", and one the "Arcanics"--descendents of human-Other lineage, manifesting in a variety of "monstrous" physical forms, many with zoomorphic characteristics. Arcanics also share a hazardous property: their flesh can be harvested and processed to produce "lilium", a mystical substance with various uses. That harvest can be done in whole or piecemeal, so many of the Arcanics in captivity are portrayed as maimed. At some point in the past, peaceful relations between humans and Arcanics broke down, horrendous wars were fought, and the land was divided. Arcanics in human lands are treated as dangerous but useful animals. In this world, a young Arcanic named Maika sets out on a quest...

What I liked

The art is breath-taking. The story-telling punches all my favorite buttons for being plunged into a world with no explanation and revealing details with no coddling or hand-holding. Up until the last page of this first volume, you're learning new things about the characters and events you thought you'd figured out. The plot twists and turns like a snake, destroying your understanding of what's going on even as it reveals. The focus on female characters similarly hits my sweet spot, as do the plentiful same-sex relationships. I love how the story combines familiar, but not over-used tropes from non-Western cultures, while still being an entirely invented secondary world. The stakes start high and get stratospheric.

What I didn't like

I'm really not attracted to stories with lots of gratuitous violence, dismemberment, casual slaughter, and the like. This is a very intense story where it's not a good idea to get emotionally attached to any particular character. Content warnings for graphic, gory violence, dismemberment, child abuse and death, and threats of sexual violence. Maika is strugling against a literal monster inside, and often loses that struggle. I find this work heartbreakingly beautiful and at the same time repulsive. It's beautiful enough and engaging enough (not in the "cute and pretty" sense of engaging--more in the "fish hook in your flesh" sense of engaging) that I will almost certainly continue reading the series, but some may find it too intense to enjoy.

My primary blog has moved, but feel free to comment in either place.

It isn't often that I see a recommendation floating by on Twitter that makes me think, "Yes, I need to add an entirely new media platform to my devices so that I can have access to this thing." But someone mentioned the graphic series Heathen [and do you know how hard that is for me to type correctly the first time?], and one look at the art on the website splash page had me hitting the app store to buy Comixology.

The premise is a heroic young woman in a setting that blends the historic Viking era and the mythic world of the sagas and eddas. Having been cast out of her village for kissing girls (well, actually, they think her father has executed her for it--fortunately for the story he was too tender-hearted for that) she decides the obvious next step is to rescue the Valkyrie Brunhildr from her enchanted sleep in the ring of fires. And then the unexpected stuff starts happening.

I absolutely love the art in this series. This isn't your usual run-of-the-mill comics art, but a sophisticated, bold, impressionistic style that often overlays several artistic flavors in a single sequence. It's simultaneously spare and detailed, and the artist has a solid grasp of anatomy and action that bowled me over.

Taking a semi-mythic approach allows some latitude toward handling themes of queer sexuality, but the author hasn't gone down the path of setting up an unhistoric utopia. Neither the protagonist's heathen culture, nor the rising Christian culture it is coming in conflict with are accepting of her desire for women (or of the other queer characters who pass through), although the gods themselves are rather more open-minded, allowing for some delightfully sensual scenes. Aydis, the protagonist, is a brave, earnest, idealistic hero, who has the good fortune to be befriended by some immortal beings. I look forward to seeing her future adventures.

If I have only one complaint, it's one that attaches to the medium itself and not this specific story. I find graphic novels frustrating to consume due to the relatively small amount of story present in each volume. It's one of the reasons I drifted away from comics back in my college days, after being an enthusiastic fan of several series. (Well, that and the annoying prevalence of "let's find excuses to make people fight" in my favorite superhero comics.) This first volume of Heathen [see, I got it right the first time this time] is barely an appetizer of a story. And too often I lose track before the next installment comes, or I only stumble across a series too late to be able to track down the whole run. I guess Comixology will remind me when there's more to read.

(My guiding principle is that if I have more than one completed item-in-review at the weekend, I post a bonus review so I don't get too backed up. This assumes that I'll consume at least one new piece of media in the week to always have something in reserve.)

I have to confess that I don't tend to read graphic novels of collected graphic series unless they've been strongly recommended. There just always seems to be too low a content-to page ratio. Intellectually, I appreciate that some sorts of stories can be told in graphic format, and that there's an artistry to the combination of text and image that's simply a Different Thing than purely textual fiction. Maybe it's part of how I'm not so much of a visual person. But when enough of my friends talk about a particular graphic work in ways that suggest it will push my buttons, I'm quite happy to give it a go.

I think the entirety of my emotional reaction to Nimona can be summed up in a tweet I sent responding to someone who asked if I liked it: Sharp and true, like a knife of broken glass--and iridescent, as if the glass were buried a thousand years.

This is a story of love and loyalty and being true to who you really are despite what the world thinks of you. It's the story of a young girl who is a monster, and monsters who walk in human form. It's a story of betrayal and redemption. Um…I really liked it.

Nimona is a shapechanger who wants to be the sidekick of the Official Villain who fights against the noble champion of the realm. But while Nimona's talents (and complete lack of morals) would be useful, Lord Blackheart has a lot of awkward scruples in his sinister plots against the kingdom and their champion Sir Goldenloin. There's a bit of a…um, I'm not sure what to call it…medieval mad scientist flavor to the setting. Lord Blackheart was once in competition with his best friend (and maybe more?) Sir Goldenloin to be the kingdom's champion but a tournament accident that may have been no accident set him instead on the path to being its nemesis. Nimona herself has a painful backstory that is only glimpsed in brief flashes, and her motives in offering her services to evil (as she thinks it) are hard to untangle.

But what shines forth is the friendship that develops between the two, and the love and loyalty that outlasts all the adventures, conflicts, and challenges. This is not a story with simple and easy answers, for all that it's present in the form of a comic strip. Definitely recommended.

This is a delightfully informative and madcap graphic biography (sort-of) of Ada Lovelace and her relationship with proto-computer inventor Charles Babbage and his research. I found it reminiscent of such genre-fracturing works as Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of… series or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics in the way it simultaneously uses and subverts the conventions of graphic storytelling to bridge the worlds of education and entertainment. (No doubt there are many other works that do similar things, but I don't actually follow graphic novels much, so these are the ones I thought of.)

It begins as a straightforward biography of Augusta Ada King, Countess Lovelace, daughter of the mad poet Lord Byron, and very arguably the first computer programmer. The visual storytelling is expanded by the use of footnotes (which often interact amusingly with the other graphic elements) and extensive endnotes that expand on technical points, or issues and personages contemporary to the main themes. (I read it in iBooks format and the e-text has been set up to allow easy movement between the main panels, the endnotes, and large-text versions of both foot- and endnotes.)

But the author, having to her dismay hit the limits of pure biography, due to Lovelace’s tragically short life and Babbage’s failure to actually realize any of his amazing inventions, plunges on sideways into an alternate steampunk universe in which Lovelace and Babbage actually build the analytical engine and use it to…wait for it…fight crime! (And other adventurous pursuits.) Here the story explodes into a mash-up of actual history, deranged tour through the political and literary landscape of mid-19th century Britain, and technical manual.

I loved how the story returned to the essentials of steampunk as a genre (as opposed to an artistic aesthetic) in highlighting the exploits of larger-than-life 19th century figures whose dreams and inventive imaginations outstripped the technology of the day. It does not, however, ignore the aesthetic side of steampunk, and aficionados will find all their favorite goggles, Rube-Goldbergian technology, and dashing women in gender-bending historic clothing.

Whether you read the central graphic story purely as entertainment, or delve deeply enough into the technical appendices to understand just how Babbage’s engine was intended to work (and the reasons why it was unlikely to have done so), or split the difference by meditating on the ways in which a brilliant mind like Lovelace’s was betrayed and undermined by the age she lived in, this is a book I recommend in the strongest terms.

I’ve given at least a few indications of my enjoyment of Bechdel’s first graphic memoir in my review of its musical offspring Fun Home. The bookend volume Are You My Mother? was, in my mind, an extremely different book and harder to like. (Heck: harder to finish.) While Fun Home was a sometimes painful, sometimes comic revisiting of Bechdel’s life, Are You My Mother? is an illustrated visit to a psychiatrist’s couch. (Literally.)

The material is dense, disjointed, and layered, working through various psychiatric theories (and their human underpinnings), Bechdel’s attempts to come to grips with her own psychological issues relating to family and relationships, and most especially her relationship with her mother, particularly revolving around Bechdel’s artistic career and the impact her first memoir had on that relationship. The layout is massively non-linear, cycling around through various periods of her life (and her mother’s life) in a way that presumes the reader already knows the basic outlines. (This is probably a reasonable assumption.)

This was not a book that I could sit down and read in a single session, or even in several long gulps. I kept reading a couple pages and then putting it down and having a hard time getting back to it. I think it took me over two years to finish it. I’m not saying the book isn’t good. I think it’s an artistic masterpiece. But it isn’t very enjoyable, or perhaps more accurately, it isn’t very entertaining. The expectations set up by the graphic format are at war with the deeply contemplative nature of the content. I would not have read an introspective memoir of this type as a textual book--just not my kind of thing. So I came to it with the wrong frame of mind to truly appreciate it. And so...I dunno. I honestly don’t know what to say about this book. An artist has to go where her muse takes her. Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For” strips weren’t exactly “fluff”, there was a lot of hard-hitting cultural commentary there, as well as historical chronicling. I would be personally unhappy if the graphic memoirs signal a permanent change in the direction of her work. But I don’t know that it’s possible to go back to that sort of light-hearted anecdotal strip after working at this level. I guess we’ll see.