Meanwhile...

What kind of adventure is that? It's my kind of adventure. And I respectfully disagree with Super Backpack; that does too sound awesome.

Anyway, I reviewed two books at Good Comics For Kids this week (both of which are also good for adults too), James Kochalka's The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza (from which the above panel is taken, obviously), and Monsters & Titans: Battling Boy on Tour, which collects artwork from Paul Pope's Battling Boy and an interview with Pope.

I also reviewed the handful of March releases I didn't get to giving a full review elsewhere at Robot 6 today, so click here for mini-reviews of Jesse Lonergan's All Star, Ian Edginton and Francesco Trifogli's Hinterkind, Geoff Johns and ten different artists' Justice League Vol. 4, Inio Asano's Nijigahara Holograph, Ken Akamatsu's UQ Holder! and Brian Azzarello and company's Wonder Woman Vol. 4.

While you're at Robot 6, you may want to check in with Tom Bondurant, who discusses the first issue of Aquaman and The Others, after a bit of a history lesson on Aquaman...and The Others. I think he liked the book better than I did (Regarding last night's reviews of Aquaman and The Others #1 and Detective Comics #30, I completely forgot to mention the one rather weird part of TEC...or at least the part that struck me as odd. One of the character's mentions Bruce Wayne's son, saying something along the lines of, "Just wait until your boy becomes a teenager," and Bruce doesn't correct her, just makes a sad face. I guess I didn't realize Batman was covering up the death of Damian which, obviously, would be pretty hard to explain—"No officer, I have no idea how he was run through with a huge blade"—particularly since his body was stolen. Still, if Damian's existence was hard to explain to the public, his sudden non-existence has got to be even harder, right? I imagine that's going to be addressed at some point somehwere...if Damian doesn't get Lazarus Pitted back to life in the next few months here. Or hell, maybe it already has; I read Batman and Robin in trade, so I haven't yet seen what Peter Tomasi's been doing there since Damian died).

Also, I found this post at Robot 6 about Evan Dorkin's almost getting to do the Popeye/Mars Attacks! crossover story interesting—not simply because of how crazy it makes the life of a freelance comics creator seem, but also because Dorkin's pitch seems pretty great. I remember liking the Popeye/Mars Attacks! book that ultimately got published pretty well, but Dorkin's sounds like it would have been awfully fun too. At the moment, I want to say it would have been better than what was ultimately published, although I realize that is likely because it exists merely in the realm of possibility, and there is therefore nothing for me to find wanting about it.

Monday Morning Man vs. Cephalopod Moment

(Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy battle it out with The Octopus King in an attempt to entertain SpongeBob Squarepants, in the pages of United Plankton Pictures' SpongeBob Comics #1. The above panels are taken from a story written by James Kochalka and drawn by Hilary Barta)

As it turns out, EVERYTHING I THOUGHT I KNEW ABOUT GHOSTS IS WRONG!

EDILW favorite James Kochalka has a new Johnny Boo book bout, Johnny Boo and the Mean Little Boy. As the title indicates, there is a mean little boy in the story. He enters the story with a butterfly net, attempting to capture a butterfly that has landed on Squiggle's head. Thinking Squiggle is himself some sort of crazy butterfly, the mean little boy chases him with the net and (spoiler alert!) catches him:
The scene is part of a much larger sequence that is as charming and funny as pretty much any other sequence in one of Kochalka's Johnny Boo books, until I realized that Squiggle is, in fact, a ghost. And this boy captured him with a net. And plopped him into a jar, which he could not escape from. He's not just playing along with the boy; he's really stuck in there: Aren't ghosts insubstantial? Can't they, like, float through walls and stuff? And if you hold out your hand to try and touch a ghost, won't your hand go right through it? I thought the only real physical impact ghosts had on the world around them was limited to coldness and, in some cases, ectoplasm. Sure, you hear about poltergeists who can open and shut doors and throw objects around, but they themselves don't seem to have any physical mass. How did the mean little boy capture Squiggle? Is he a wizard? A ghostbuster? A ghost himself?

Kochalka never answers this question at in the course of Johnny Boo and the Mean Little Boy (despite reasserting that Johnny and Squiggle are, indeed, ghosts in near the climax of the story). But it's a pretty good comic nonetheless.

If you'd like to read more of me talking about Johnny Boo and the Mean Little Boy, I have a review of it (and Kochalka's Dragon Puncher), up at Blog@Newsarama today. You can go read it, if you like.

Some women just aren't that interested in Batman

and his penis, while some guys just can't stop talking about Batman and his penis. James Kochalka offers some examples in this charming installment of his American Elf strip.

Squiggle and I feel very differently about Wednesdays.

I love Wednesdays. It's Thursdays through Tuesdays that are my Scaredy-days.



(Okay, that's the last sequence I'll post from the black-and-white preview of Johnny Boo and The Happy Apples until it comes out next month, I swear).

Johnny Boo Vol. 3 is going to be extremely good.

How do I know? Well, I've read a black and white galley of it, although I'll hold off on penning an actual, for-serious, review-review until it's August release.

In the meantime, please allow me to present the following evidence. Not only does Johnny Boo, The Best Little Ghost in the World's pet/friend Squiggle (who is also a ghost) unleash squiggle power, he unleashes it harder than ever before.

Behold:

Everything's better when it's extreme, right? (With the possible exceptions of The X-Men, Justice League and G.I. Joe, of course).

You can read the first six pages of Johnny Boo and The Happy Apples here.

So I guess Michael Jackson is dead,

which means I have thought about Michael Jackson more in the last 12 hours or so than I have in the last twelve years. As is likely the case with most people alive today, I have plenty of very specific memories in which he played some small role, many of them happy memories. I remember closing my eyes when he would start to turn into a werewolf in the beginning of the "Thriller" video, roller-skating to cuts off Thriller at the Roller Den in grade school, playing that terrible "Moonwalker" video game at a bowling alley, listening to a cassette tape of the Jackson Five's greatest hits over and over in my best friends car, having a hard time wrapping my head around the existence of The Wiz co-starring Michael Jackson ad the The Scarecrow, and so on.

He wasn't a vital part of my life though, and his passing certainly won't create a hole in my life the way the deaths of some famous strangers I've never met might (like, say, Tim Russert's death did; I used to spend a solid hour a week with that cat). Jackson did cross over into comics in a few small ways here and there, but not in the sort of way that I think his passing requires a response from me as a comics blogger. (And besides, better bloggers have already covered the various Michael Jackson's comics connection angles already.)

So what's the point of this post?

Well, I basically just wanted to link to some of the cartoonist's reactions I've seen so far that deserve to have attention paid to them. Tom Spurgeon has a helpful link-dump here, and it's well worth clicking on all of those.

James Kochalka, who has a song called "Show Respect to Michael Jackson," has a typically cute American Elf strip paying a sort of tribute to that particular song's muse here, and Kochalka also has a pretty elegant, to the point two paragraphs worth of obituary here.

Also well worth a read is "On the Sudden Passing of Michael Jackson," written by Achewood cartoonist Chris Onstad in the voice of his character Ray Smuckles. It's a typically funny piece of writing, and, again, a pretty elegant address of Michael Jackson's output and the world's relationship with him ("Try wakin’ up tomorrow and writin’ We Are The World. See what you come up with.") I liked the piece, which reminded me again just how amazing Onstad is. In addition to his cartooning, he's created these characters that are so strong that he can sit down and write an insightful, heartfelt blog post that one of his characters would have written, in reaction to news happening in real time. Jesus Onstad is good.

Finally, it will probably be well worth keeping an eye on Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoon Index over the next few days, if only to see how many different uninspired variations of the obvious Michael Jackson-meets-Saint Peter, Michael Jackson-moonwalking-in-the-afterlife and Michael Jackson-probably-wants-to-fuck-the-cherubs gags our nation's political cartoonists will come up with.

Eli Kochalka and I have the same favorite Super Friend

I don't normally read the letters pages of the Johnny DC titles I read—although I do always look at the cool pictures that get submitted by young readers—so I missed the fact that the last issue of Super Friends (the one with the fantastic Pirate Starro J. Bone cover) had a letter and a drawing from Eli Kochalka, the son of cartoonist James Kochalka, and one of the stars of his dad's diary strip American Elf.

The last time I went to check out the elder Kochalka's online strip, I noticed an item about the younger's letter and drawing in the back of Super Friends #12.

Here's a scan from my comic:



So Eli Kochalka's favorite is Aquaman, and he loves the Atlantean Ace, huh?

You know what that means?

It means that it is James Kochalka's responsibility as a father to write and draw an Aquaman comic for DC.

The dramatic emotional range of Squiggle

Pleased:



Pleased with himself:



Pleased by the suffering of others:



Anxious:



Angry:



Scared:



Very scared:



Confused:



Pouting:



Skeptical...but resigned:



These and many other of Squiggle's emotions can be found in James Kochalka's Johnny Boo: The Best Little Ghost in the World.

Kochalka's Johnny Boo: The Best Little Ghost in the World

James Kochalka’s Squirrelly Gray definitely had its charms, but over all it struck me as a somewhat awkward work, due in large part to the hybrid format: One page of rhyming narrative poem for every one page of comics, with the information being conveyed often overlapping.

I’m glad Kochalka didn’t repeat the format in his next kids book, Johnny Boo: The Best Little Ghost In the World (Top Shelf). Johnny Boo is a straight-up comic book told in comic book format start to finish, although it is a hardcover with a spine, so chances are you might find it shelved with the children’s picture books rather than graphic novels at your local library.

Like Squirrelly Gray, the book is quite clearly aimed a little kid audience, however it’s extremely easy to appreciate its charms if you’re a grown-up, cynical old crank (like me). That may be, in large part, because I already know and like Kochalka’s work so much, and I tried imagining what it would be like to encounter this book without ever having seen anything else of Kochalka’s.

I’m as positive as I can be that I’d still love it. Kochalka’s art is as cute as ever, his character designs are all highly inspired and there’s a sort of absurdity to the simplicity of the proceedings that I found a great deal of humor in. The story and dialogue isn’t quite sarcastic, and Kochalka’s not parodying himself, but some of his dialogue seems chosen specifically because of how ridiculous it sounds to adult ears.

So here’s the title page:

Johnny Boo and Squiggle have come out to meet the reader. As you can see, Johnny is a roughly humanoid ghost with an ectoplasmic pompadour, and Squiggle is more of a traditional, leg-less, floating ghost, albeit it one reduced to the simplicity of a rain drop shape.

I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that Squiggle is the “pet ghost” of another ghost.

Squiggle then flies through the next few pages—the publication info, the dedication, etc—before sailing into chapter one. It’s a nice day outside, and the two ghosts are playing in the sunlight. Not very ghost like, really.

Squiggle is flying above the ground, saying, “You can’t catch me, Johnny Boo! I’m too fast! I’ve got Squiggle Power!”

The earthbound Johnny gives chase on foot, noting that he’s “got BOO Power!”

The Squiggle starts breaking out some loop-de-loops (the sound effect for which is “SWISH DE SWOOSH”) and there’s some brief discussion over whether or not loop-de-loops constitute cheating.

Finall, Johnny breaks out the Boo Power, which is him shouting “BOO!”, which scares Squiggle and flips him to the ground.

Squiggle is pissed and won’t accept Johnny’s sorries, but does accept his offer of ice cream. And not just any ice cream, it’s Secret Ice Cream, which Johnny has buried.

The pair sneak off to find it, mindful of Ice Cream Monsters, which frighten Squiggle. And low and behold a giant, cycloptic pink and yellow ice cream monster appears!

But is he a good ice cream monster or a bad ice cream monster? Applications of both Boo Power and Squiggle Power will be necessary to find out, and help navigate the series of problems caused by the Ice Cream Monster.

I don’t want to spoil the specifics of these problems and their solutions, but rest assured it all works out in the end. Here’s the last page of the story, with a nice example of Kochalka’s kid-friendly but adult-funny dialogue:

That’s followed with a few more pages of Johnny and Squiggle wandering through the leftover pages, including the pair looking at a funny looking black and white “photo of the author when he was a baby.”

“Who’s that baby, Johnny Boo?” Squiggle asks, “He kind of looks like YOU!”

He is pale and has he same weird proto-pompadour.

Kochalka uses the same bright colors and bright colored lines (in his art as well as his bubbles and lettering) that he did in Superfuckers and Squirrelly Gray, and I’m fairly positive that this may be the single cutest thing Kochalka’s ever done. Now he’s an artist with a lot of cute things under his belt—hell, his artist’s manifesto is entitled The Cute Manifesto—but with Johnny and Squiggle, he’s reduced character design about as far as he can without sacrificing the character part of character design.

If you’d like to see more, Top Shelf has the first five pages of Best Little Ghost in the World preview-able. And if you like what you see, Kochalka and Top Shelf have two more Johnny Boos scheduled for next year, Johnny Boo: Twinkle Power and Johnny Boo: Happy Apples.

This is not a graphic novel: James Kochalka's Squirrelly Gray

Remember a few weeks back when James Kochalka commemorated his 500-year anniversary of drawing little pictures of himself as a magical elf? At the time, I thought to myself, “Hey, I’ve never reviewed any of Kochalka’s children’s books here, have I? I should do that soon; I’m sure EDILW readers are just dying to know what I thought of Kochalka’s children’s books…”

Well, I’m still waiting on the copy of Johnny Boo: The Best Little Ghost in the World I reserved from the Columbus public library (Hurry up and read faster, little kids; don’t you know grown men are waiting on you?!), but I’ve read, re-read and re-re-read Kochalka’s 2007 book Squirrelly Gray, so let’s start with that.


As you can clearly judge by the cover, Squirrelly Gray (Random House) is a rather adorable book. Of course, it’s a Kochalka book, and everything he draws is pretty cute, even when it’s just a bunch of super-powered teenagers trying to get high, or Kochalka himself arguing with his wife. This is a kids book, so it’s likely going to be even cuter.

The cover introduces us to some of the major players: S.G. himself, the Tooth Fairy, a Hungry Fox (with adorable overbite, saw-like teeth, and giant cat eyes) and a Magic Acorn. Awesome.

Now, there are some problems with the book, despite the predictable super-cute Kochalka art, and the familiar, comfortable Kochalka lettering.

This isn’t quite a graphic novel/sequential art/comics, but it’s not quite a picture book either; it’s one of those weird hybrids. On the left hand side of each two-page spread, there’s a page of pure text, and on the right there’s either a full-page illustration or, more often, a grid of panels, telling a scene of the story in comics form.

The problem is, the comics almost always repeat what has just been described in the words, so that there’s a strange and shifting overlap in narrative; sometimes the comics portion repeats it exactly, sometimes it repeats it differently, sometimes it contains new information alluded to in the text portions but not communicated in them outright. (It occurs to me that maybe this is merely a symptom of this being a book for little kids who are being read to; they can maybe make their way through the comics sections on their own, while their parent or reader tackles the blocks of texts on the left).

The other problem is that the text is all told in rhyme and it’s usually pretty lame. Again, little ones might not be as sensitive to shitty poetry as adults are, but I found myself wincing and groaning my way through passages like “Squirrelly gray, he bravely tried/ His very squirrelly best./ He Freed the little fairy while/ His heart thumped in his chest.”

These storytelling choices of Kochalka’s aside though, the story itself is pretty good. It’s a kind of animal fable about how color came into the world.

Once everything was gray, and out protagonist was a cute little squirrel who “spent his time in bed,/ Just watching static on TV,/ Quite bored out of his head.”

(I think Squirrelly Gray was suffering from depression, actually).

He takes to wiggling his teeth and, eventually, he wiggles them so much that they pop right out of his head. So he puts them under his pillow for the tooth fairy.

He’s awoken by a scream outside, gets his little squirrel-sized flashlight, and rushes out to see who needs help. It’s the tooth fairy, and she’s stuck in a spider’s web. He helps her out, and, for a reward, she gives him a magic acorn. There’s a surprise inside, she says.

This excites Squirrelly Gray, and there’s a neat panel of him frolicking with the acorn (“I always wanted a magic nut,” he says, happily punching it in one panel), until he realizes he can’t open it without his teeth. Irony!

Eventually the Hungry Fox comes along and asks what’s bugging S.G., and he has an idea for helping him crack the acorn open:

That part cracked me up: The fact that the fox has a club collection. Fox swings the club, intending to brain Squirrelly, but instead he hits the nut, which cracks it open, and out pours a rainbow.

Suddenly, the book is no longer black and white, but full-color. And, for some entirely random reason, the fairy nut’s magic power turned the fox’s club into a flower, which brings us to my second favorite page:

I love the panel of the fox being all confused. You even feel bad for the guy; I mean, why should his club turn into a flower. How does that make any sense?

His crushing depression healed, Squirrelly Gray runs off to play, skipping over a hill top while wearing the cap of the acorn like a little beret.

“And that is why the world we know/ Is colorful and bright./ We all have one young squirrel to thank/ For turning on the light!”

Friday Night Fights: Autobio Cartoonist Grudge Match!

James Kochalka is probably best known for his black and white autobio comics, which usually fall under the American Elf title. This Wednesday, he had a new book out, and it was quite a departure from that work—it's a full-color all-ages book about a squirrel entitled Squirrelly Gray.

Jeffrey Brown is probably best known for his black and white autobio comics, like Unlikely and Clumsy. This Wednesday, he had a new book out, and it was quite a departure from that work—it's a full-color book about a race of warring robots that can transform into vehicles entitled The Incredible Change-Bots.

Seeing these two works from these two artists arrive on comic shop shelves in the same week raises an interesting question: If Kochalka fought Brown, who would win?




It looks like Kochalka would win.






Yeah, definitely Kochalka.

If you would like to hear more of their artsy-fartsy discussion of the creation of comics, you'll probably want to check out their 2005 collaboration Conversation #2, available from Top Shelf Productions.

If you would like to see more panels of people punching each other in the face, you'll probably want to check in with Bahlactus.

And don't worry about Kochalka and Brown, they ultimately worked everything out just fine: