What are you reading in Comics/Manga/etc?

Sparks!, Ian Boothby (illustration by Nina Matsumoto) (2018)

This'un is a fun'un. A super dog that's actually two cats in a super suit. I'm very much enjoying this as I read it to a 7 and 4 year-old evenings. Highly recommended for chilluns and grown-ups just pretending who like adventure novels. 

For further context, Boothby was lead writer for Simpsons and Futurama comics and is the author of the Exorsisters series. Matsumoto is an artist who has also worked on Simpsons and Futurama comics as well as her own manga series Yōkaiden.

Lankhmar: Swords and Deviltry, a Conan-esque tale of two adventurers making their way across a fantasy world. I expected it to be more misogynistic but it was better than I'd feared - possibly because it was published in 1970 and not 1932, although apparently the earliest of the Lankhmar stories was written in 1939. Perhaps Fritz Leiber was just less of an ass than Robert E. Howard?

Anyway, I usually have trouble reading stories from the Golden Age of sci-fi/fantasy. Let's face it, the prose is almost always a slog. Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin has excerpts from the stories of a fictional Golden Age sci-fi writer and one reviewer pointed out they were far better written than actual stories in the magazines at the time. However, the prose in this book is actually going down easy for me, run-on sentences and all.

Edit: Shit, I meant to post this in the books thread. I will keep this post up as a reminder of my eternal shame.

Coyote Doggirl, Lisa Hanawalt (2018)

I have not ever watched an episode of Bojack Horseman; however, I know of its existence and have seen some clips. This western graphic novel showcases Hanawalt's watercolour skills and attention to line. The story is a nice one and uses all the broad strokes of tropes to knit a slightly new outfit that looks the better for its wear. 

Man-Eaters is one of the worst comics I have ever read. Though its all bad, you can tell the two points where Cain started to give less of a fuck than before.

I’m reading Again!! by Mitsuro Kubo. It’s a manga about a guy who spent his entire high school career friendless and alone, cursing his peers as lamers and suck-ups who obsess about frivolous and stupid shit like after-school clubs and grades and dating. You see, he’s a misanthrope who just went to class and went home every day for years, carrying on with the bare minimum of life in high school.

And then he graduates. He has no plan or aspirations or dreams, and possibly no soul. However, the day after his graduation, he experiences a bizarre and inexplicable mishap and wakes up again on the first day of high school. The first time around, he was too shy to even answer when asked to join the "ouendan", which is a club devoted to a male-dominated type of Japanese cheerleading. As Wikipedia describes it:


In this go-around our protagonist barely makes an audible response to the recruiter, but it's enough for her to shanghai him since the club is in desperate need of new members. Despite himself, he finally experiences all those things he'd looked down on - giving his all as part of a team, caring about his friends, having a crush on a girl and desperately wanting to know how they feel, and many more parts of high school life that he'd only seen secondhand.

And here we come to the misanthrope's secret. Many misanthropes actually hate the fact that they hate other people and wish they were part of the community they see around them. "I wish I were a better person," is the fantasy at the heart of this comic. I just wished it would remember this fact.

See, in a high school series, it's easy to get caught up in the numerous setbacks that beset our characters. Oh no, the club might be dissolved! Oh no, the team captain and the manager might get into a love triangle with our hero! Oh no, that silver-tongued hottie seducing that girl is secretly an asshole! I mean, yeah, high school and life in general is a bunch of stuff happening one after another. The point of a narrative is giving structure to those events. Plus, if you're just doing a story about a guy's high school life, what's even the point of the time travel angle?

The manga does come back repeatedly to the time travel thing, but mostly as a plot contrivance. There's time spent on another person also being a time traveler, and more time spent on what kind of time travel we're talking about (many worlds theory, parallel universes, grandfather paradoxes, though those specific terms aren't used by the characters, but that's what they mean). However, there's less space given to the emotional experience of reliving life. The protagonist himself mentions that he hasn't taken advantage of his experience to talk more to his grandmother even though she passes away during his time in high school. More could also have been done with the second time traveler, who is actually a girl who enjoyed her high school life and is rather resentful that our protagonist managed to drag her along to a somewhat crappier version of her original experiences. By the latest translated volume, she remains a supporting character in our hero's story and still hasn't really come into her own.

Perhaps I'm overly critical, but I'm just a bit frustrated because I can see the manga only occasionally hitting its story potential, or at least not hitting the story potential I wish for. However, don't be discouraged, there's definitely something there to the manga as it is, since I wouldn't have read 9 volumes over one week otherwise.

And one thing I can unequivocally praise about the comic is its artwork. I mean, look at it:




The sense of anatomy alone is superb - the weight in the step, the off-balance foot, the angle of the body. And the use of negative space!



This image shows off the negative space more clearly. And the expressions on the characters' faces are so detailed for just a few simple lines. I often end up just pausing to stare at a splash page and enjoy the artistry.

Anyway, tl;dr: I think Again!! is an interesting manga that has the potential to become something more, if it ever figures out how to fully connect its plot to its premise.

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: The Ice Sword Saga, (Disney Masters #9) , Massimo De Vita (2019)

I claim this publishing effort to be the most valuable of all Disney properties in the context of near-term evaluation. Yes, that is a dig at Disney+. Anyhow, the international writers and artists for Disney from the 1970s are most commonly engrossing in their efforts. I wholly recommend this and the other volumes for reading to children or yourself. Shine on, Fantagraphics. Shine on. 

You know, I checked one of the Donald Duck collections out of the library a couple years back to read with the kids and it didn't really take, but now that Owl Jr.:
a) Can actually read himself
b) "Gets" graphic novels because of his obsession with Dog Man
c) Loves the DuckTales cartoon reboot

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to try again.  Any recommendations on where to start/what to avoid?

Owly (text free, maybe too obvious a choice?)
Archie comics from before the reboot
Most of Raina Teglemeier's work
Big Nate
Batman Adventures

Yea, it went about like this

Yea, I've thought about Tintin in the past, but trying to work around the racial stuff scared me off.

LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford. The conceit: first contact has happened and the world is full of aliens, and USAans are still racist to them, and also still racist to black people, and Dr. Future Chukwuebuka has to fight for equality for both herself and the aliens she brought with her, and really that sounds kind of stupid when I write it out but it was way better than I am making it sound. Ford's art is very impressive, and the book also delves into African politics, which is something I haven't heard too much about.

My kids enjoyed the Amulet books, and Mouseguard

 

The kids kinda aged out of Amulet before it finished (he's on vol. 9, and I'm not sure if he's done).  Liz n Dicksgiving is running/playing an RPG based on Mouseguard, though, and can probably second my recommendation.

I haven't read an entire Mouseguard book yet, but the artwork is spectacular! From what I have seen, it's very swashbuckly and imaginative. I think I would have been all over the series when I was a kid.

"Back to the Klondike" (1952)
"The Horseradish Story" (1953)

Both of these are from Fantagraphics Carl Barks Library. I don't recall what volume at the moment. Despite the "of its time" rendering of certain aspects of human culture, these stories are rollicking good fun. I mentioned earlier that I revere Fantagraphics' work in lovingly reprinting these works in long-lasting, physical books. I didn't read the Disney comics much as a child, pre-teen, teen; however, they're worth something. And in this regard I mean they manage to invoke some sense of innocent fun, which is quite an accomplishment in this unyielding shitstorm of the 21st century.