A Month's Worth of Graphic Novels : January 2011

I decided at the beginning of the month that I would start keeping track of the comics I read. I barely read monthlies anymore so I decided to just stick to graphic novels or trades. Here's what I read in January.




Bone by Jeff Smith : Volumes 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9

A series that's been around for years, kept hearing about how great it was but just dismissed it out of hand. When I finally put in the effort to read the first volume I was hooked. Great mix of comedy and fantasy, complete with prophecies, dragons and princesses. Fun stuff.




Bone : Rose

Prequel to the Bone series, it's a good read but the high point is definitely the art by Charles Vess. Beautiful




Bone : Tall Tales

A ... post-quel? Definitely not a sequel, but a few characters from the main Bone series tell some tales around a campfire. Fun, light stuff, fairly skippable in the grand scheme of things.




Paul à Québec by Michel Rabagliati

The fifth book I've read by this author, it follows Paul through the years. Mainly autobiographical, this volume tells of his father-in-law's cancer and how it is dealt with in the family. It was fantastic. It was incredibly human and avoided the easy sap that could come from a death in the family. I cried way more than I care to admit. I read it in its original French but it is available in English.




Wilson by Dan Clowes

I didn't realize going in that this book was written by the same guy who did Ghost World, which I also read last year. It's written in the same style, telling an overarching story through one page bits. Wilson is a putz, socially awkward and with verbal diarrhoea. It was often cringe-inducing but hilarious, in a Ricky Gervais sort of way.




Parker - The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke.

Based on a series of crime novels, Darwyn Cooke's art style was amazingly suited to the story. It has a great 50s feel and look to it, as though you've stepped onto the set of Mad Men. The story is pretty simple, a jilted crook goes after the mob to get what was his. There's a sequel, which I actually read first back in December, and it's just as cool.




Zot by Scott Mcloud

This huge brick is a collection of the indie series from the late 80s to early 90s. It's a weird mix of super-hero comics and teenage angst with some pretty good dialogue. By today's standards it's a little heavy-handed but for its time it was very progressive, dealing with social issues with more subtlety than was customary. Scott Mcloud went on to write the fantastic Understanding Comics and his commentary between issues is really insightful.




Batman : Year 100 by Paul Pope

A Batman tale set 100 years in our "current" Batman's future, the story revolves around someone taking up the mantle in a dystopian society. A collection of four issues, the story is pretty good and keeps you reading but the art is the real draw (pun not originally intended but fully noticed). Love him or hate him, Pope's style is gritty and incredibly true to detail (folds in Batman's costume, for example) while also being very dynamic.





DMZ volumes 4, 5 and 6 by Brian Wood

Volume 4 was the breakthrough for me. DMZ is one of Vertigo's most popular titles but I really wasn't feeling it. The basic premise is that there is a civil war going on in the U.S. where the South forms an army and attacks the government. The main battleground ends up being NYC which then becomes a demilitarized zone, or, wait for it, a DMZ. While the first 3 volumes set up the characters and the key players, it wasn't until volume 4 that I finally felt like things were coming together and I wanted to find out more about what would happen to the characters. A good mix of politics, journalism and war zone survival.




Batman : Black and White vol. 1


A collection of stories from the mid-90s, this first volume is very uneven. I didn't find any of the art to be bad but some of it was definitely more exciting or worthy of notice, like Brian Bolland's Innocent Guy and Matt Wagner's Heist. Some of the stories are annoyingly dated, even for the mid-90s; expository dialogue was definitely the worst. The story I liked most was Man Handles, by Bruce Timm, drawn and written in his legendary Batman: The Animated Series style.




Scalped vol. 1 by Jason Aaron

Another popular Vertigo title, this one about a prodigal son returning to the Native American reserve he left at the age of 13. Barely back in town, he gets hired by the corrupt Mayor as a police officer but you soon find out that just about everyone is hiding something. While very violent, the pacing is excellent and keeps you reading. I found it to be a great first volume because I'm already invested in it and the intrigues that it sets up.




Strange Tales by various artists

Another collection of short stories, this one was a lot of fun. Unlike the Batman one, it is written by a slew of indie comic writers and it's all very light-hearted. The Perry Bible Fellowship, of online comics fame, tells a few one-page gags featuring our favourite Marvel heroes. Paul Pope also has a fun story with the Inhumans in his unique art style. The biggest surprise for me was a story by Jason, the Norwegian author of Sshhhh!, a great graphic novel with no dialogue. His Spider-Man story was cute but his very presence in this collection came as a surprise to me. I'm very much looking forward to volume 2 though, featuring Kate Beaton.




Edit : I somehow skipped this entry in my list. My bad!

Pluto volumes 2, 3, 4, and 5 by Naoki Urasawa

The first manga I've read in years, Pluto builds on the Astroboy mythos to create an excellent story about robots living with humans. It delves into concepts like advanced AI and robot rights and laws without being preachy or overly-sentimental. The cast is huge but it's introduced gradually enough that you don't feel overwhelmed. Astroboy, or Atom, as he was called in Japan, doesn't appear until the second volume. The basic premise is that of a series of murders targeting the world's top scientists in robotics as well as the 7 most advanced robots, who are getting picked off one by one. The mystery has a fairly large scope and as I'm reading through volume 6 (of 8), light is just now starting to be shed on the major protagonists. Most of the volumes end with an afterword by a leading manga critic and those I've read praise the inclusion of many references to the original series. Not being an Astroboy expert, I can't attest to that but it's highly enjoyable on its own merits.

That's it for January, stay tuned for my February reads.