Love & Rockets music

Below is a hastily assembled (and probably incomplete) annotated list of songs referenced in the great comic, Love & Rockets. This is one of the all-time great comics, written and drawn by two brothers, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. Each brother does his own very different stories, but both were (and presumably still are) punk rock fanatics and music lovers in general. This is reflected in their work.

From Jaime's big book, Locas:

• "All Alone in the World"--a song from a 60s Mr. McGoo special, sung by Maggie when she and Rena are lost in the desert.
• "Friday on My Mind" by the Easybeats. Maggie, Hopey and Doyle are driving together to get rid of Maggie and Hopey's foldout couch. The song, of course, is a great example of working class Australian '60s garage rock, a huge hit.
• "Two Faces Have I" by Lou Christie. This is a song that Hopey's band plays that Hopey always thought was called "Do Vases Have Eyes." The song is pretty weak--not nearly as good as Christie's "Lightning Strikes." But it comes from an interesting period--after Buddy Holly dies but before the Beatles come on the scene. Rock was barely hanging on by its fingernails, and people like Lou Christie, the Four Seasons, and Motown each kept it alive in their own way.
• "Valentine" by The Replacements. This is what Ray is listening to on his cheap boombox while talking about Maggie with Daffy and Joey. It basically shows that Ray has (then) current tastes in punk, but its unsually romantic nature foreshadows his relationship with Maggie. It's a less obvious choice than, say, "Alex Chilton" from the same album.
• "You" by X. Another romantic number. Maggie is torn between Ray and Hopey. The song is reputed to have been written by Exene Cervenka for Viggo Mortensen.
• "Whipping Post" by the Allman Brothers. Hopey has joined a hippy cover band, and this is one of their songs. This song is sort of meant to represent the opposite of Hopey's tastes, and therefore her misery at being in this situation.
• "I Can't Do Anything" by X-Ray Specs. A flashback to Maggie and Hopey's early punk days.
• "Dead End Justice" by the Runaways. Ditto.
• "Wig Wam Bam" by Sweet. Jaime named a longish story after this song. This was a special song for Maggie and Letty in their childhood, before Letty died in a car crash and Maggie meets Hopey. Basically, even though Maggie and Letty were two Chicana girls, they loved 70s glam-rock and metal, which was totally uncool in their context. It was their secret thing. This is a great, hard-rocking, silly song from the early '70s.
• "Metal Guru" by T-Rex. Another fave of Maggie and Letty, and another great song. Again an unusual choice--T-Rex had one hit in the U.S., "Bang a Gong."
• "Deuce" by Kiss. Another that they like. (This song, by the way, sucks. Especially compared to the previous two.)
• "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones. This great punk classic represents Maggie and Letty's discovery of punk.
• "The American in Me" by the Avengers. A great punk song loved by Maggie and Letty. The Avengers were a relatively obscure (but excellent) San Francisco punk band.
• "Space Station #5" by Montrose. Maggie is surprised to discover this song on a jukebox in the small Texas border town where her relatives live. This song is a lame, formless example of why people hate so much 70s rock. But it is amazing that it would show up on a jukebox.
• "Brother Jukebox" by Mark Chestnutt. The only country song I saw. Like "Valentine," this song anchors a scene in a time and milieu. Maggie is trying to find a wrestler at a local watering hole frequented by wrestlers. This song was a brilliant choice to have playing in the background because of its lyrics give it a double-code: on one hand, it's like a lot of country songs about lonely guys who hang out in bars. But when the lyrics are written out, they seem unusually cosmic!--"Brother Jukebox, Sister Wine, Mother Freedom, Father Time."
• Amazing Three theme song. Maggie's sister is watching this on TV.
• "Teenage Kicks" by the Undertones. After Danita and Esther get married, Maggie walks down the street singing this old punk classic. It has an ironic effect, because marriage is inherently the end of "teenage kicks."

From Dicks and Deedees. This is a weird book because it starts with Maggie's divorce. Who knew she was married?! Jaime very cleverly inserts a history between Maggie and Tony that goes back to their respective teenhoods. Because there are a lot of flashbacks to their youthful punk days, there are a lot of early punk songs.

• "You can Cry If You Want" by the Troggs. This is playing at Maggie and Tony's "divorce party."
• "No God" by the Germs.
• "Blues" by the Chiefs.
• "Dead at Birth" by the Subhumans. Three punk songs by L.A. bands from the early 80s--they give the flashbacks a time and place.

Palomar is the big Gilbert Hernandez book set in the Central American town.

• "Holidays in the Sun" by the Sex Pistols. This is the title of a story set in the grim prison where Jesus was sent for the crime of assaulting his wife. The title of the song is bitterly ironic, and that irony is carried over to Gilbert's story. The title also refers back to the story in which Jesus commits the crime, called "The Laughing Sun."
• "All Tomorrow's Parties" by the Velvet Underground. Israel goes to a weird, decadent party where this song is appropriately playing in the background.
• "Rock You Like a Hurricane" by the Scorpions. This is the song prefered by heavy metal fan Gerry. And a great song it is. This is the thesis.
• "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies. Another great song, prefered by punk fan Steve. This is the antithesis.
• "Ace of Spades" by Motorhead. The synthesis--this is a song both Steve and Gerry can love.
• "Burnin Love" by Elvis. When Luba is in a great mood, she dances and sings this song.

Love and Rockets X--this is Gilbert's first big story set in the U.S.A. Since it deals in part with a band called Love & Rockets (not the well-known English band), there is a lot of music quoted. Generally speaking, the music is current or the kind of music the characters would like. But Gilbert can't resist using the music to comment on the events, whether ironically or even directly.

• "7 & 7 Is" by Love. Steve is singing this classic 60s garage tune as he skateboards, reflecting excellent tastes way beyond what you would expect (he is a sympathetic but outstandingly stupid character).
• "Love Me Like a Reptile" by Motorhead. Another song sung by Steve.
• "Immigrant Song" by Led Zep. Gerry's car radio is playing this seconds before they pick up Riri, an actual illegal immigrant.
• "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" by Public Enemy. Gilbert introduces some young black characters, and Erf'quake is listening to this tune.
• "Funky Stuff" by Cool and the Gang. Riri and Maricela have this playing as they have a romantic interlude.
• "Lethal Weapon" by Ice-T. This hard-ass song is playing as Erf'Quake gets his hat peed on by his infant son.
• "Miss You Much" by Janet Jackson. Riri is listening to this on her headphones. I wonder why she is always listening to English-language music? No norteno, salsa, meringue, boleros?
• "Failing" by Julie Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti. This sophisticated music is playin at Rex's mom's party. She is a Hollywood exec, and her guests are supposedly Hollywood sophisticates, but Gilbert portrays them as dishonest and fundamentally racist.
• "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell" by Iggy Pop. Igor speculates that this kind of music can never be commercialized. Oh, how naive!
• "My Way" by Sid Vicious. Also playing in the background at the party (weirdly enough).
• "Stranded in the Jungle" by the New York Dolls (or the original do-wop version by the Cadets). This is one of the songs that Sean's cover band does.

Gilbert and Jaime have great musical tastes, but one thing that I wonder is why is there no Latin music? There are plenty of opportunities where it would make sense to have a great Mexican pop song playing. This is not a criticism, just something I noticed while compiling this list.

Enough With Superheroes

When Watchmen came out in the '80s, it was good enough and interesting enough and self-critical enough that it convinced me that superheroes had a reason to exist as a comics genre. The existence of the superhero genre was not up to me, obviously. But I was a comics fan, raised on '70s Marvel superheroes (and reprints of the classic '60s stuff), and I had turned my back on the genre when I discovered Love & Rockets and classic '60s undergrounds. I decided to live in a superhero-free world and to pretend that the mainstream of comics--the comics that were read by 90% of all American comics fans, the comics that were, for many, synonymous with the word "comics"--simply didn't exist.

This attitude carried me along for a long time. Watchmen put a kink in that armor though. Eventually I allowed myself to be sucked back into superheroes (although never full bore). My tastes ran to revisionism and thinly-veiled parody. Think Garth Ennis.

OK, now I have seen the Watchmen movie. It starts off pretty good and just gets worse and worse. (Although I have to say that Ozymandias's scheme is a lot more logical here than in Alan Moore's original.) The movie helped me realize something. I was right--the net good of superhero comics is negative. It would have been better for comics if the superhero genre had died out in the '50s.

Among rock fans, there is a parlor game of creating an alternative history of rock. For me, it has the Velvet Underground as a popular "underground" band, with Love as a big rock hit-maker of the late '60s and Big Star in the '70s. The Village Green Preservation Society would have the same stature in my alternate universe that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has in ours.

It's much harder to construct an alternate history of comics this way because there aren't as many published examples of the alternatives, the might-have-beens and artistically successful commercial failures. It can be done, though, and in my alternate history, there is no comics code, and comics are aimed at multiple market niches (by age, by interests, by demographics, etc.). Superheroes are just one small niche, aimed at boys. They never dominate.

That's what should have happened. Watchmen was supposed to have revolutionized superheroes in a positive, self-critical way. Moore has acknowledged that it failed in that regard, and that's a tragedy I suppose. But the real tragedy is that Watchmen had to exist all--that Moore thought that it was important to subject the superhero genre to this level of auto-critique in the first place.

I can't change history, but for me personally, I am done with superheroes. In my mind, comics equals art comics and old comic strips, with a few interesting translated comics tossed in. All the rest is noise to be tuned out.

The Best Comics of 2008

Not the best comics published in 2008, period, but the best ones I read and wrote little reviews for on Facebook (using the Visual Bookshelf application). I undoubtedly skipped a few worthy ones--ones I read but didn't write about, and ones I never bothered to read. You will notice most of them are reprints, which reflects the fact that I am an old fuddy-duddy. I didn't bother to check if all these books were actually published in 2008, because I am a lazy old fuddy-duddy. I hope you will enjoy this break from politics, economics and finance.

Readers patient enough to read all the way through will notice how many Drawn & Quarterly books I have read and reviewed. This publisher is definitely the best publisher in English at the moment, and that in part reflects the tastes of creative director Tom Devlin. He was the publisher of Highwater Books, and is certainly one of the best modern editors of comics, if not the best. (Too bad he came along right when the entire publishing industry has started to keel over dead...)

I purchased these books either through the publishers, from Powells.com, or from local Houston shops like Bedrock City (owned by fellow Memorial High School class of '81 grad, Richard Evans), Nan's Comics & Games, Domy, and the Brazos Bookstore.

Nat Turner by Kyle Baker. Quite unlike most of Baker's other, lighter work. He willingly steps into a straitjacket to tell this story--there is almost no dialogue, and what text there is is the apocalyptic confession of Nat Turner. Baker let's his pictures do the talking. He doesn't flinch from Turner's murderousness, including the killing of children. Nor does he simplify the slave trade--one of the first scenes is of Africans capturing other Africans to sell to white slavers. He shows what slaves will do to escape--literal escape, of course (Turner's father ran away) but also suicide and infanticide. And the humanity-crushing brutality of slavery is shown over and over. The point, I think, is to demonstrate that if you have a system as evil as slavery, you will necessarily toss up a few Nat Turners along the way. Turner may have been an outlier, but he was a still a logical product of the depraved and evil system which held him captive from the moment he was conceived.

Against Pain by Ron Rege. An astonishing collection. I didn't realize how necessary this book was until I read it. Ron Rege's comics have appeared in various publications (some with huge circulations, some very small) for many years now, and this collection brings together 20 (!) years' worth of work. It includes the classic "High School Analogy"* (the story of Peter Parker's alienation in high school that Steve Ditko only hinted at), "Boys," his staggering collaboration with Joan Reidy about high school sexuality as seen from a girl's point of view, and the emotional "Fuc 1997" from Kramer's Ergot (as well as many other excellent comics). The package and production are beautiful as well.

*Originally published in the classic Coober Skeber Marvel Benefit Issue, a collection marred only by the inclusion of a lame Dr. Strange story.

Nocturnal Conspiracies by David B. It's been said that other people's dreams are as boring as one's own are interesting. David B.'s dreams seem like they would be interesting to experience, but are less interesting to read. This is a book to read for David B.'s artwork and intriguing storytelling. But the stories here are not as interesting as, say, his intriguing historical stories that have run in Mome.

The Freak Brothers Omnibus by Gilbert Shelton, Dave Sheridan, and Paul Mavrides. The Freak Brothers have been around since 1967. This collection is by far the most complete published, so if you wanted to have just one volume of Freak Brothers comix in your library, this would be the one to have. However, you might be a bit disappointed--the printing is not the greatest. Some of the B&W artwork is muddy (a shame, because Shelton and his collaborators sometimes pull out the stops with their linework), and the color sections rather pale. If you can see past the production weaknesses, though, this is a collection of some truly wonderful comics.

Glacial Period by Nicholas de Crecy. Published with the participation of the Louvre, this is the first example (that I know of) of De Crecy's work in English. (American readers might recognize his work, though--he did the backgrounds in The Triplets of Belleville.) It's a slight work, but entertaining. Future archeologists, accompanied by talking dogs genetically engineered to have extremely good senses of smell (their olfactory senses now include carbon dating), are seeking a lost city under a glacier that has covered Europe. One of the dogs, named Hulk in honor of an ancient deity, finds the perfectly preserved remains of the Louvre. His human companions also find it separately, and coming from a post-visual society, they are at a loss at how to interpret the images. But Hulk is actually able to communicate directly with the artworks, who want noting more than to escape their icy tomb. De Crecy's shaky line and beautiful watercolor are on display here, but perhaps so as not to overshadow the artworks depicted, he doesn't push the colors as much as he did in Leon La Came. The art is nonetheless lovely. I hope Glacial Period sparks enough interest in De Crecy's work that someone will consider translating Leon La Came into English.

Classic Screwball Strips: Happy Hooligan by Frederick Burr Opper. We are really living in the golden age of classic comic strip reprints. The general practice has been to reprint every strip, in order, from start to finish. Such an approach would be unbelievably tedious for some strips, so I am grateful that in NBM's Happy Hooligan, they take the position that a well-selected collection is enough.Frederick Opper was a great cartoonist (his work as a political cartoonist for Puck was already legendary when he made the transition to comic strips), and Happy Hooligan, dating from just after the turn of the century, is an important, well-made strip that really codified many of the storytelling devices that would come to typify comics (like the exclusive use of word balloons and abandonment of captions). But the strips are all the same--Happy Hooligan, a good-natured bum, tries to do a good deed, causes mayhem, and is beaten and arrested. The occasional strips where this sequence doesn't happen really stand out. The production values here are pretty good (though perhaps not as good as IDW or Fantagraphics). Happy Hooligan is an important addition to the growing library of comic strip reprints.

Explainers by Jules Feiffer. This brick of a book is amazingly dense. Feiffer's strips were long and wordy (compared to his daily paper counterparts), wry more than funny, quite ironic and clever. He surprisingly goes after liberals as much as conservatives (there has always been a self-criticizing strain of liberalism). His drawing is "minimal" but not in the same way as, say, Charles Schulz. And the minimalism is deceptive, because he is a really good artist--his hand-writerly style manages to convey movement and body-language exquisitely. Where he fails here is when his characters are "over-acting" in their postures. Perhaps Feiffer is taking a cue from contemporary theater productions that would put actors up on bare stages. Like those modernist productions, everything comes down to the characters. It was a radical approach, but similar to Peanuts in its total dependence on its "actors."

Blue Pills by Frederik Peeters. Peeters art is excellent. He belongs to that inky school that includes such artists as Blutch. The subject matter is autobiographical--his relationship with a woman (and her infant son) who are both HIV positive. There is a lot of anxiety about sex, well-handled by Peeters. The couple panic after a condom breaks, and rush to see their doctor. After some questions and a blood test, he tells Peeters that the chances of him getting HIV from this were the same as seeing a white rhinoceros on the way home. This is where comics can do something better than almost any other medium--it can bring a metaphor to life without seeming extravagant. Peeters keeps imagining a white rhino following, which is depicted visually.

Jamilti and Other Stories by Rutu Modan. Excellent, ironic stories and terrific art from the breakout star of Actus Tragicus. This is some of her earlier work (there is quite a bit more, actually, especially collaborations with Etgar Keret). Well worth reading.

Moomin vol. 3 by Tove Jansson. Whimsical and gentle. The kind of comic strip to read while listening to Belle and Sebastian.

Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman. This takes the original Breakdowns, and adds a well-done autobiographical strip that was originally published in the Virginia Quarterly and an afterward. The additions give it kind of a self-obsessed feeling, which has been kind of a weakness of Spiegelman's for a while. I'd like him to bury the self in the other, the way great novelists and filmmakers and even a few cartoonists do regularly. Still, it's a great read over-all, and it's wonderful to see Breakdowns back in print.

Love & Rockets: New Stories #1 by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. Great as usual. Apparently they are doing book collections instead of the comic book. Jaime's story turns several of his characters into oddball superheroes, and Gilbert engages in some of the odd short stories he does so well when he leaves his Palomar cast aside.

Burma Chronicles by Guy Deslisle. He's no George Orwell, but he has a knack for ending up in Asian dictatorships and offering his average-guy observations of them. Humorous, personal, and occasionally alarming.

Alan's War by Emmanuel Guibert. Pretty good. The first 2/3rds are an American's memory of World War II (training in the U.S. and shipping out to Europe). His war is closer to Catch 22 (but gentler) than any heroic "greatest generation" story. The art is fantastic and unique. Emmanuel Guibert's textures and tones recall Alberto Breccia, but his art comes out of a clean Franco-Belgian tradition. It may have been better to end the story with the end of the war rather than cram Alan's post-war life into the back of the book, but since his story is so involved with that of Gerhart and Vera Muench, it would have been a shame to cut off that story right when it was starting, at the end of the war. Alan's War is an interesting, occasionally beautiful book.

The Complete Terry & the Pirates vol. 4 by Milton Caniff. Caniff does a great deal to mature Terry in this volume. He suspected war was coming and wanted Terry to be a creditable soldier when it happened. He has to make Terry go from boy to man with a series of solo adventures, including the great Raven Sherman storyline.

Journey vol. 1 by William Messner-Loebs. Absolutely wonderful--a classic alternative comic from the 80s reprinted. Set during the time of Tucemseh on the frontier, it's much more than a backwoods adventure. Extremely rich characters. It is marred only with some ill-considered "cross-overs" with other alt-comics of the day, which just don't fit at all.

Curses by Kevin Huizenga. Huizenga works in a classical early 20th century comics style--his drawing recalls Mutt and Jeff and Barney Google. Like those strips, he is able to casually combine the just-realistic-enough with the "cartoony." And as Chester Brown did in Louis Riel, he invests this old slapstick approach with a kind of modern seriousness. Sometimes it works well, and even when it misses, the results are still worth reading.

The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard. Really cool. Brainard is a mostly forgotten pop artist who was much more into comic and comic strips than most of his peers, who quoted them without ever really exploring their narrative possibilities. Perhaps it was that he was a poet as well that made him see comics for what they were. These Nancy works range from cute to clever to really dirty, and he plays expertly with pastiche and unexpected juxtaposition.

American Flagg! vol. 1 by Howard Chaykin. Quite excellent when Chaykin was drawing it, but the fill in issues are a bit painful to look at. It's a period piece, to be sure, but an excellent and amusing one. Certainly the cleverest science fiction comic of its decade.

Zot! The Complete Black-and-White Stories 1987-1991 by Scott McCloud. These stories are quite moving. No one is ever going to get too excited by Scott McCloud's artwork, but as YA stories, these comics seem really effective.

B.P.R.D. volume 7: Garden of Souls by John Arcudi, Guy Davis, and Mike Mignola. The appeal of the Hellboy comics was Mike Mignola's excellent art. But I have to admit that Guy Davis's art (combined with Dave Stewart's coloring) is both excellent, unique, and utterly distinct from Mignola's.

The Complete Little Orphan Annie vol. 1 by Harold Grey. Another excellent addition to IDW's library of classic American comic strips. This publisher is doing important work in this field. Extremely clean reproductions for the most part. It's interesting to see how quickly Gray got the characters right--the evolution was very fast. "Daddy" has to be the most irresponsible parent in history.

110 percent by Tony Consiglio. A funny lil book from a great, underrated cartoonist. I wish we could see more of his work.

Gary Panter by Gary Panter. Staggering.

The Complete Terry & The Pirates vol. 3 by Milton Caniff. This volume is where Terry really starts to go from a series of improbable adventures to something deeper. Caniff starts to humanize his previously rather racist deprictions of Chinese, acknowledging their emotional lives and, more importantly, their feelings of patriotism in the face of the invading Japanese. Terry also becomes a more mature character whose presence no longer seems like that of a 3rd wheel, but vital. Great characters like Hu Shee, Raven Sherman, and Dude Hennick are introduced.

Most of the Comics I've Read Since February

Here are some of the comics I have read in the past few months...

You'll Never Know book 1, by Carol Tyler. Great but somewhat confused biography/memoir. Carol Tyler is attempting to tell the story of her dad in World War II. She is faced with a problem, though. Tyler's dad doesn't want to talk about a certain part of it--his time in Italy. We are given hint that he saw a literal "river of blood," and the trauma has kept him silent for decades. Even his wife doesn't know. Tyler herself is going through her own stuff--an absent husband, a beautiful teenage daughter, life. Tyler is better at short pieces, where she can focus. This is a glorious mess, but a moving beautiful one. The format is unusual too. Tyler uses the horizontal format of a scrapbook. Also, for some reason, the whole thing is not being told in one volume. I will eagerly wait long frustrating months and maybe years for the next volume.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam by Ann Marie Fleming. Pretty interesting hybrid graphic novel by a Canadian filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming. It basically takes her research into the life of her great grandfather (which included filming many people who knew him), and jumbling it all up into almost a detective story about the man's life. Her grandfather was Long Tack Sam, one of the great Vaudeville magicians. Stories of his early life in China and how he learned magic are quite confused, and one device she uses is to tell the different versions over and over again as if they were an old biographical comic (these sections were drawn by Julian Lawrence, a really excellent Vancouver cartoonist who has done work for Fantagraphics and his own Drippytown Comics and Stories). The rest is illustrated by with her own relatively crude drawings, stills from her interviews, and archival images of Long Tack Sam and the vaudeville world he lived in. A pretty unique and entertaining project overall.

The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack by Nicholas Gurewitch. This strip has been lavishly praised, and for good reason. The art is incredible, and the strips are usually funny. There is a disconnect between the cute, gentle art and the cruel humor. I like the surrealism, which reminds me in some ways of the panel cartoons of Quino. But Gurewitch utterly lacks the humanity of Quino. To me, his lack of insight makes his humor, which is rather clever, somewhat empty.

Don't Tread on my Rosaries by John Bagnall. I love Bagnall's art, but these stories seem a bit blah. As the title suggests, several of them have to do with Catholicism, but not in any compelling way--one is a weird miracle story and the other is a really inconclusive story about a teacher at a Catholic school stalked by a charismatic priest. The book is full of stories that go nowhere--in fact, the best stuff are simply showcases for Bagnall's art--illustrated lists of mundane professions or phrases disappearing from the language.

Lucky by Gabrielle Bell. Her artwork is fantastic, but distancing. We almost never see a closeup. This is kind of weird for a diary, which these strips apparently are. The constant worries about finding an acceptable place to live get tedious. I felt compelled to read this but I can't explain why. It certainly wasn't out of sympathy for the Bell or any of her friends. They all seem trapped by their inadequacies. Their ambitions are rarely articulated in a way that you feel like their struggles are leading anywhere. And yet still I read the book and liked it. (Well, like I said the art is fantastic...)

Aya by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie. Excellent comic done in the modern French style perhaps best exemplified by Sfar. Unusual in that it depicts daily life in an African country, and especially unusual in that the author is an African. Set in Cote Ivoire during a period of miraculous economic growth (which was undercut in the 80s by declining farm commodity prices), the main character is an ambitious young girl living in a working-class suburb of Abidjan. She wants to be a doctor, so she studies hard and (this is important) avoids getting pregnant. This cannot be said for her wilder friends, who both visit the 1000 Star Hotel (a courtyard with a lot of tables where young folks go to make out and more under the stars). Adjoua gets pregnant, and thinks the father is Moussa, son of a local beer tycoon. This down-to-earth soap-opera like plot continues int he next volume.

Aya of Yop City by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie. This volume takes up right where the previous volume left off. We learn that Moussa is not actually Adjoua's baby's father, and her marriage is anulled. We also learn something rather shocking about Aya's father, Ignace, who is a regional sales manager for Sissoko, the beer tycoon. If this sounds a bit soap opera-ish, it is. But it is also witty and lively, and features some fantastic artwork. This is a depiction of Africa that is rarely seen in any medium. The storylines don't wrap up in this volume, so I assume there is more to come.

From the Shadow of the Northern Lights by various Swedish cartoonists. As in any anthology, the quality varies quite a lot in this collection of comics from the Swedish alternative comics anthology Galago. Joakim Pirinen, perhaps the best-known Swedish alternative cartoonist, shows off his chops in a rather slight story. There are the usual number of druggy nihilism stories (think Peter Pontiac or Henriette Valium, with less skill), but several stories that stood out. "A Private Place" by Anneli Furmark is about an artist who decides to go live in a relatively isolated cabin, where he is having a crisis of confidence in his own abilities. It's about working through that. Then just the opposite is the talky story "Henry Says" by David Liljemark. His artistic chops pale compared to Furmark, but he is able to make a long story about people talking in a bar completely fascinating, revealing, and believable. The collection is well-worth reading.

Journey volume 2 by William Messner-Loebs. The typically peripatetic Wolverine MacAlistaire stays in one place in this volume--New Hope, a struggling hamlet on the west side of Michigan. This village conceals a good many secrets, and MacAlistaire, along with the failed poet Elmer Alyn Craft (who was introduced in the first volume), are stranded there for a winter--MacAlistaire because he is wounded, Craft because he would have no hope of surviving outside civilization, even civilization as meager and tenuous as that in the inaptly named New Hope. This village is claustrophic and full of horrible secrets. Craft is obsessed with finding them--MacAlistaire is only interested insofar as it will help him survive until he is well. Messner-Loebs' drawing has lost what little polish it exhibited in the first volume. It becomes ragged and urgent here, fitting the psychologically intense and unsettling story. This is one of the classics of the 80s, and very much worth rediscovering.

Things Just Get Away from You by Walt Holcombe. Walt Holcombe is a charming cartoonist. His work recalls classic 20s and 30s comic strips and animation. My problem is that in his coy, cute stories, I really find myself not caring. It's pretty to look at, but I just don't feel any connection with the characters and their stories.

The Portable Frank by Jim Woodring. I have read all of these stories many times before in various formats. This is a great presentation for them--simple, inexpensive, it lets the work speak for itself. If you haven't experienced Woodring's surreal comics, this is the best place to start. Frank is an anthropomorphic cartoon of indeterminent species, and he acquires a vastly loyal pet, Pupshaw, and encounters various other inhabitants of his world, a world infused with spirit. The characters all have symbolic meaning but I have no idea how to decode this forest of hermetic signs. The mystery is part of the appeal.

Cecil and Jordan in New York by Gabrielle Bell. Very good--Bell's art is outstanding in a non-showy, matter-of-fact way. In some stories, she never shows you someone's face in a close-up, and in some of her autobiographical stories, almost ever character is drawn full-figure--in other words you see their feet and heads in every panel they are in. The distance from the observer and the characters is pretty large. It's a weird way to tell an autobiographical story--it's as if the author was pretending not to know what was going through the mind of the character. It creates an interesting contradiction, as if Bell was alienated from herself.

That feeling carries through in her fiction stories too. The characters seem to feel disconnected from their lives, even as they have what (on the surface) seem like pretty engaging experiences. Her characters never get happy, which can be kind of a downer for the reader. The title story even features a character who would be happier as a chair--she'd feel useful that way, and not have to struggle the way she did when she was a full-time girl.

Humbug by Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, etc. Humbug has long had a reputation as Harvey Kurtzman's masterpiece, an obscure magazine with a very brief run, in which Kurtzman had full control and a stable of hugely talented artists and writers.

This loving new edition demonstrates how legendary but little-known works can get reputations way out of proportion with their modest merits. Humbug isn't bad, but it surely doesn't seem better than Kurtzman's Mad. I'd contend that the Goodman Beaver strips from Help! are superior to just about anything in Humbug. There are some truly enjoyable pieces here, and Jack Davis's artwork is at a real peak--a joy to look at. But Humbug was never going to make people forget Mad. In fact, Humbug seems like Mad continued. The things being parodies are a bit more adult, but Kurtzman's approach to parody and satire remains the same. Only the R.O. Blechman pieces represent a decisive break in style and approach from Mad.

I greatly admire the skill and care that the publisher took in reproducing these pages--retypsetting and recoloring where necessary, and using original paste-ups when possible. I prefer this by far to the "photograph an original printed page" approach that some reprint collections have used, apparently in some mistaken notion of fidelity to the original.

A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Yoshiharu Tatsumi is, for me, the only really great alternative manga artist yet published in the U.S. (There are several others who are good and interesting, but I define greatness as having the kind of rereadability as Love & Rockets or many Crumb pieces. It's a highly personal definition.) This mammoth autobiography (834 pages) only covers his life up through the early 60s, but generally the detail is useful. A Drifting Life really lets you understand what went into his future work. I think there is an interesting parallel between this ol Japanese artist (born in 1935) and modern alternative American comics artists. He, like many of his American counterparts, began life as an active fan-boy. He belonged (and help establish) what must have been one of the first manga fan clubs. He was drawing his own manga at an early age, even getting some published while still in Junior High. Like Robert Crumb, he was egged on by his brother, who early on seems unstable. But this is a result of a chronic illness that is later cured by a new drug from the U.S.A. His brother becomes a fairly successful manga artist in his own right.

It is fascinating to see how casually he begins his career and how quickly it becomes a vocation. He deals with various fly-by-night publishers and publishers who make disastrous business decisions. His attempt to form an artists' coop is similarly unsuccessful (although as an artistic movement, it works). Readers will learn quite a bit about the evolution of Japanese comics and the age of "rental comics" (comics created especially for for-profit lending libraries.)

Unfortunately, this work is just not as good as his classic short stories, collected in The Push Man, Goodbye and Abandon the Old in Tokyo. These gritty urban working-class vignettes are profoundly moving, and done with a light hand. A Drifting Life, on the contrary, is extremely self-conscious. Tatsumi rarely uses narration in his fiction comics, and in A Drifting Life, he talks about learning this from reading about movie scripts. It's ironic then how much he uses clunky, unnecessary narration here. He literally tells the reader how his characters are feeling--this shows a huge lack of trust in his readers. Likewise, he exhibits a desperate need to show how he influenced other famous manga artists. There is one scene where we see artist Yoshiharo Tsuge (who plays no part in the story) being consciously influenced by Tatsumi's ground-breaking anthology Shadow. I understand that Tatsumi might be proud that he influenced Tsuge (a great great artist), but including these scene just seems like heavy-handed self-aggrandizement.

All that said, this was a really compelling story. Its faults don't change that. I definitely recommend it.

The Professor's Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert. This is a slight work by two cartoonists who have much better solo work. Written by the hyper-prolific Joann Sfar (cartoonist of The Rabbi's Cat, Vampire Loves, and many others) and draw by Emmanuel Guibert (cartoonist of Alan's War), the book resembles Vampire Loves in centering around the romantic life of a horror movie staple--in this case, the mummy of Imhotep IV in his quest for love with Lillian Bowell, daughter of the archeologist who found Imhotep and brought him to England. Sfarr's loose drawing style made this kind of picaresque romantic comedy work in Vampire Loves, but it just never meshes with Guibert's much more controlled style--which is so perfect for the documentary-like Alan's War. In short, two wonderful artists who are not really great collaborators.

The Complete Terry & the Pirates vol. 6 by Milton Caniff. This is the last of Terry. Caniff had signed a contract with Marshall Field to create a new strip that Caniff would own. So here he was running out his Terry contract. The war ends, and Caniff contrives to make Terry an intelligence officer working undercover in China as a pilot for a ramshackle charter airline run by Chopstick Joe (last seen before the war). The Chinese civil war is mentioned, but it seems to impact the characters not at all. There are, curiously in my opinion, no communists in Terry's China. Prior to and during the war, there were nationalists soldiers, including the Dragon Lady, Hu Shee, and others. But after the war, even the Nationalists disappear. The Dragon Lady reappears for a final bow more with a whimper than a bang. She has gone from leading an army of Nationalist guerrillas to being a simple criminal. Other former characters are brought in for a final bow. Burma makes a rushed appearance at the very end that is pretty good. She seduces Terry, but at the same time there is a recognition that she is old. And an old whore is a sad thing. I know the strip was continued after Caniff left, but I like to imagine that when he left, he left their stories open. What do these characters do in the Chinese civil war? What sides do the Dragon Lady, Hu Shee, Connie, and Big Stoop take? Does Terry go back to the U.S. (where he hasn't been since he as 12 or so) to marry April and become an "organization man" in a grey flannel suit. Is Pat tamed (or imprisoned perhaps) by Normandie Drake, and does Normandie turn into her tight-assed mother Augusta, seeking a respectability that Pat is loathe to provide? This final volume is as handsomely produced as the previous volumes. Buying them all will set you back about $300, but it is well-worth it to be able to read the entirety of this great American comic strip.

Get Your War On: The Definitive Account of George Bush's War on Terror 2001 - 2008 by David Rees. This collection is exhausting. In bite-sized chunks, these scabrous strips are funny, but read all at once, they really depress you. David Rees's shtick is that he uses the most utterly banal clip art characters, over and over, to reflect profanely on the absurdity and horror of the War on Terrorism. Right from the start, he seems to oppose American intervention in Afghanistan. Iraq of course sends him over the edge. These strips are sarcastic and snarky to the extreme. If they went a hair further than they do, they just wouldn't be funny. But they are funny. Rees has a flair for over-the-top dialog. He gets his biggest hate-on when talking about "liberal interventionists" like Michael Ignatieff, who's "mea culpa" essay he eviscerates line by line.