Meanwhile...

Today at Robot 6, I have a review of this week's The Multiversity: Guidebook #1, which I discussed just briefly here last night in order to point out one aspect and one revelation.

Last week on Robot 6, I wrote a bit about Norm Breyfogle—one of my favorite Batman artists, one of my favorite artists period and one of the artists who first got me interested in comics—and the current effort to raise $200,000 to help defray the costs of his stroke treatment. They're still less than halfway there, which I find pretty frustrating, as $200,000 is a lot of money...but it's nothing in terms of Batman money. You can give directly by clicking on the previous link, and, I think it's well worth noting that DC has apparently solicited a rather huge Breyfogle-focused collection.

That's welcome news under any circumstances, as, despite the fact that Breyfogle drew hundreds of pages of Batman comics during his time as the regular artists on Batman and Detective, his work isn't too terribly well-represented in DC's extant trade line, He was working in a period prior to the graphics novel boom, but later than the foundational or formational periods of comics that also see a great deal of collections in our current Golden Age of Collections. So his comics work predates the Everything Gets Collected era of superhero comics, as well as the writing-for-the-trade era. Much of his work that is collected--and hasn't gone out of print--then is a chapter of Knightfall here or there, or something along those lines.

Over at Good Comics For Kids, I've had a pair of reviews in the last two weeks: Ted Naifeh's Princess Ugg Vol. 1 and Super Heroes: My First Dictionary (The latter of which I hope to discuss in much greater detail here in the near future).

Ted Naifeh on Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard

As previously discussed, Ted Naifeh (Courtney Crumrin, Polly and The Pirates, Good Neighbors) is one of the three artists who contributed a short story to Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard #1. I asked Naifeh some questions about his story and the creation thereof for this piece on Newsarama, but didn't have room to include every interesting thing Naifeh had to say about Mouse Guard, drawing and drawing Mouse Guard. So I'm putting it here. As with the previous piece in this little mini-series of posts, my questions are in italics and the artist's answers are in regular font.


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How did you come to work on this project, and why was it one you wanted to devote your time too? I imagine you must have been a fan of Mouse Guard previously?

Mouse Guard was one of those books I couldn’t ignore. There aren’t a lot of them. But it has a presence. Something about the format, the craft, the cute little mice treated with such grave seriousness. It’s beautifully complete. I ran into David last year at Dragon Con and we got to talking about his world, and he brought up the Legends book. I was immediately interested. I even came up with the basic idea right there in the midst of conversation. He loved it. In January, I called Archaia regarding another project, and the Mouse Guard editor asked me if I had time for this. It turned out I had a window while I was waiting for approval on the thumbs for Good Neighbors Vol 3. The timing was perfect.


How did working with David Petersen work? Did you have carte blanche to do whatever you liked? Was there a lot of discussion regarding your story?

There was less than I’d expected. I understood David’s world pretty well, and we’d already decided on the idea. But I hadn’t known the format, that it was tales told in a tavern. So I had to re-conceive the conclusion of the story. It had been a bit more tragic. But if everyone dies, no one can tell the tale.


I smiled when I noticed you did a story with bats, given the spooky settings and characters you’ve worked with before. What attracted you to the bats of Mouse Guard as subject matter?

I really liked them in the main series. They struck me as the goblins of the Mouse Guard world, except cooler because the can fly. But more importantly, they’re not wicked creatures. Any more than the mice are. There’s just this attitude of mutual distrust. I like the idea that mutual distrust can turn a foreigner into a monster. I’m a big fan of the Hobbit, but I feel like there was something a little to convenient about the sudden appearance of the goblin army. It seems to me that what everyone wants in a war is a goblin enemy, but what you really get is dwarves, elves and men seeing each other as goblins. Is that too geeky? Sorry.


What was it like drawing a story set in a world as thoroughly defined by another artist’s style and aesthetic? Did you find yourself trying to draw David Petersen-like at all, or modulating your style to “fit in,” even if only unconsciously?

Oddly, I had no trouble slipping in to his world, both in writing and in art. Obviously, I don’t stylize mice the way he does. I prefer to look at real mice and stylize in my own specific way. My bats were based on real vampire bats, but they ended up looking like gargoyles on gothic cathedrals. But it’s clearly a story from his world, because his world is so unique it could hardly be anything else. As for the story, I feel very much in step with the way he writes, so it was easy to write something in way that fits into it. I have a much harder time writing established superhero comics, because I don’t get the style as well. But David’s work just clicks for me.


Was it challenging working with animal characters as opposed to humans (and fairies and monsters)? It seems like a more difficult task to convey emotion in the face of a mouse instead of a human, and the bats especially have pretty spectacular visages.

Not at all. Facial expressions are hard wired into our brains. You can get a strong range of emotion out of punctuation. Look at Wallace and Gromit. Gromit doesn’t even have a mouth, but he has this huge gamut of emotions. The only thing he can’t do is smile. Which is fine, because he rarely has cause to smile anyway. It’s the same with the mice in Mouse Guard. They don’t smile much, but it’s a pretty somber book anyway, so you don’t miss it. I find that artists like myself start losing emotional range when we get caught up trying to be too realistic, or too fancy in our stylization. Artists forget than the first purpose of a comic character is to convey emotion. Everything else, like realism, or other kinds of virtuosity, is an optional extra. If you sacrifice expression for the sake of other concerns you’re putting the cart before the horse. We’re all guilty of it from time to time, but it’s not good comics.

Review: The Good Neighbors Book One

Holly Black may be new to comics, but somehow I doubt that her relative inexperience in the medium will be all that much of a detriment to the success of her first original graphic novel, The Good Neighbors Book One: Kin (Graphix).

The success of her prose work, the juvenile fantasy series The Spiderwick Chronicles and young adult fantasy novels like Tithe and Ironside, means she has a built-in, ready-to-read-her audience, and fans among the folks who stock bookstores and libraries.

The artist she’s working with is Ted Naifeh, a highly accomplished cartoonist with all-ages fantasy projects like Polly & The Pirates and Courtney Crumrin (and plenty more) to his name, and the publisher she’s working with is an imprint of Scholastic, one of the newer players in the booming graphic novel industry which has nevertheless internalized one of the better strategies for getting in on the comics game: Hire the best cartoonists (In addition to reprinting Jeff Smith’s Bone, Scholastic has reprinted Scott Morse’s Magic Pickle, and commissioned work from Raina Telgemeir, Chynna Clugston and Dean Haspiel).

It probably doesn’t hurt that Black turns out to be pretty damn good at writing comics, though.

Good Neighbors reads a lot like the immediate post-Neil Gaiman era of Vertigo, and Black doesn’t over-write or over-narrate (nor under-write or under-narrate), trusting Naifeh to tell much of the emotional content of the story through the expressions and body language he draws for the characters.

The protagonist is the rather unlikely-named Rue Silver (Her dad is an English professor and her mom’s a fairy, so perhaps that explains the goofy name), a sixteen-year-old high schooler who enjoys drinking coffee and breaking in to abandoned buildings with her friends.

She’s currently pretty worried about her mother, who has been missing for weeks, and her father, who has shut down in her mother’s absence. Meanwhile, she’s beginning to see things she shouldn’t be able to see, like fairies walking unseen or glamoured/disguised as humans. Is she going crazy?

No, as I’ve already spoiled for you, her mother was a fairy, which gives her the ability to see fairies, and has to do with her mom’s sudden disappearance.

While it’s over 100 pages, Kin is structured more like a comic book than an original graphic novel; there’s no real climax or conclusion, no resolution to the majority of the conflicts. It merely ends with a suspenseful cliffhanger, not unlike the way your average Geoff Johns book might.

Black is definitely in her element with the subject matter, and her knowledge of fairy lore—not the Tinkerbell, “clap if you believe,” butterfly-winged variety, but the sort one encounters in Robert Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth and British folk tradition—is deep, accurate and anchored fairly naturally to the plot.

That plot isn’t terribly inspired, mind you. It’s awfully similar to Jamie McKelvie’s Suburban Glamour in several respects, but not uncomfortably so—the whole alienated teenager who finds she’s really part of a more fantastical reality that intersects with the everyday reality she shares with her readers and that, hey, it’s actually kind of dangerous certainly wasn’t McKelvie’s invention (Although both McKelvie and Black and Naifeh make their teenagers look kinda cool and punk rock; I can’t speak for today’s teens, but in both cases the casts are of the sort someone of my generation might have run into at shows).

When Rue discovers her true heritage, she discovers she has a few fairy powers, and meets some people from her mother’s world, including her scary grandfather, and a cute, conflicted, teenage boy fairy who flirts with her. It’s the sort of story that I would find repulsively tedious experienced in another medium—it’s not hard to imagine this as YA novel, or one of those post-Buffy, Smallville-esque 90210 + Fantasy or Sci-Fi formula shows, something I wouldn’t be able to crack the cover of, or to sit through the pilot for.

But in the comics, where a writer need not explain a strange site (and there’s no limited special effects budget with which to work in), the admixture of fairies and suburban life is easily, even convincingly accomplished. Naifeh need only draw a woman with a goat’s head in a crowd scene, and she looks just as realistic as the “real” people around her; we don’t need Black to spend a paragraph explaining how it looks like something you’d suspect was a hallucination, because we’re seeing it just as the protagonist is.

As I mentioned before, Black is quite well served by her partner here. Naifeh’s made a career of slightly creepy, off-kilter character design, and it’s a pleasure to see him working in a style that is slightly more representative and somewhat harder-edged than his most famous works, which have rather cartoony characters at their center.

Naifeh’s working in black and white, but it’s a highly shaded black and white, full of different tones and shadows, which not only aids the realism of his art, but helps blend the fairies and the humans more effectively.

As accomplished as the book is, it never quite transcends its genre. There’s nothing here that you likely haven’t seen somewhere else (or several somewheres else), and there were one or two elements that struck me as off, including the intended audience (the publisher suggests it for teens, and while I don’t disagree with that assessment, there seemed to be occasional tension in the book, between leaning towards an all-ages audience and leaning toward a grown-up audience) and the uncertainty of setting (A caption in the first panel tells us we’re in generic suburb “West City;” which is apparently some sort of personality-less Anytown U.S.A….the presence of British fairies in a place that isn’t Britain, or at least nearby countries on the continent, always seems somehow wrong to me).

Of course, “transcendental” is hardly the litmus test for whether one should read a comic or not. This is an engaging enough modern fairy-flavored fantasy, full of great art and a story that was compelling enough that I look forward to book two.

And, for what it’s worth, I would have been positively ecstatic about this if I had encountered it when I was a teenager.