Comics: Librarians Choice

Comic Book Month wraps up today, though as with all good comics, it's just a matter of waiting for the next issue! As a final treat, here are a few personal recommendations from some of the comics fans who work at Auckland Libraries: Michelle and Blair from the 2014 Comic Book Month team; Baruk, creator of our new Comics NZ blog (check it out); Stanley from Collections, and myself! Enjoy!



Adamtine by Hannah Berry

This is the first horror-themed graphic novel I have read. Although I admire the artists' skill, the violent gore scenes typical of this genre are a bit much for me. But I do enjoy a good scare, and with this graphic novel I wasn’t disappointed. It is horror with a difference, with the artwork creating a sense of foreboding and darkness. In fact, I have become a big Hannah Berry fan. The artwork is clever and emotive, supporting a captivating, frightening story line that really does keep you guessing. This is a graphic novel requiring more than one read, with each reading revealing more of its mysteries – most of which are hidden in plain sight. It is definitely a thinking person’s graphic novel... oh, and beware the last page!

-- Michelle, Titirangi Library


Faction 1  ed. by Damon Keen, Amie Maxwell

Quite simply, I liked this enough to buy my own copy, and that doesn't happen often. Especially not when it is also available for free (legal) download!

Faction 1 is a Kiwi comic anthology, from 14 very different writers/artists. One of the joys of anthologies is the unlikely juxtaposition of very different styles, and Faction does not disappoint. The artwork moves eclectically from Ned Wenlock's bold primary colours, through Damon Keen's delicate shading or Ralphi's yellowish-greenish-brownish and Karl Wills's detailed black-on-white, to Mark Holland's lush, painterly style. The stories very well matched the artistic styles used to tell them.

Faction was created through crowdfunding, and it is nice to see contributors named on the back page (dammit, I missed my chance at fame!). The Faction website has links to individual artist websites, and a free subscription to the (digital) anthology. Auckland Libraries also holds Faction 2 and Faction 3.

If you like anthologies, you may also enjoy Syncopated, an anthology of non-fiction picto-essays. Or not.

And if I sound like a fanboy, that's because I am.

-- Baruk, Digital Services

Shaolin Burning by Ant Sang


Full of graphic martial arts action and mayhem, Shaolin Burning is a thrilling and fast-paced adventure through Qing dynasty China. The plot centres on Deadly Plum Blossum’s journey to challenge The Monk Who Doubts, who has been terrorising China. Events like the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, and the legend of the five surviving elders place this in a time of kung-fu legends and martial arts monks.

The illustrations of BroTown’s Ant Sang skillfully capture the chaos of the combat; the parries and thrusts of the sword, feints and blows of the fighters come through in the black and white shading and ink, and deftly illustrate the action.

I found the characters a highlight. They are unique and intense figures with legendary pasts, and equally awesome names. I also like the subtle humour that runs through the book, with skillful plays on words, quirky names like The Benevolent Laughing Monkey Palm Gang, and the tiger-costumed group The Killer Tongs. Still, the themes running through this work – the need to control desire, the perils of revenge and the sacredness of life – make it more than just an entertaining read.

-- Stanley, Collections



The Sandman (The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1) by Neil Gaiman

Widely considered one of the greatest comic book series of all time, The Sandman tells the story of Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, as he escapes from captivity and seeks to rebuild his realm. Along the way, Morpheus is forced to deal with the enormous changes within both himself and his realm. The Sandman is a wildly imaginative series that manages to be as effortlessly entertaining as it is thought-provoking. Its dark, adult story set the tone for DC Comics’ fledgling Vertigo imprint. The Sandman is a story about stories, and should be read by anyone who loves them.

(This Absolute Edition format collects issues #1-20 of THE SANDMAN and features completely new coloring on the first 18 issues, as well as a host of never-before-seen extra material. It is the first of four volumes.)

-- Blair, Central City Library

Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt 

I was turned on to Corto Maltese long ago when I went to live in his home country of Italy, where the fumetti (Italian for comics) about the sailor with the pierced ear had attained cult status. Fumetti means puffs of smoke, that being what Italians saw where we saw speech bubbles or word balloons, as well as all around themselves. Everyone smoked, and everyone read comics, and Corto Maltese was everyone's favourite. The art work is brilliant -- the scene where an underwater Corto is drawn with squiggly refracted lines which grow ever more boldly abstract as the panels progress leave me in awe -- and the rhythm is intense and filmic. So are the characters. Corto casts a spell over everyone, men and women, in that Humphrey Bogart kind of way.

“Who knows why you make me think of that Arola’s Tango I heard in the Parda Flora Cabaret in Buenos Aires?” “Maybe there was someone there who looked like me?” “No! It’s precisely because you don’t resemble anyone that I would have wanted to meet you anywhere”. Are those tears on Corto’s chiselled face?

The original drawings were all in black and white, while this edition uses colourised drawings which, as with colourised movies, somewhat detracts from the artistry. But Pratt is such a genius that they are still great. If you like comics, you owe yourself a sail with Corto.

-- Karen, Books in the City 

Graphic Novels, Comics & Cartoons at AWRF 2011

Tim Kidd from Readers Services is a comics reader, creator and appreciator, and the person who takes care of the teeming comics and graphic novel shelves at Central City Library. He is also the only person on our library quiz team who knew which creature possesses the largest eye in the animal kingdom. It's the giant squid. Here Tim casts his own eye (in black bakelike glasses) on the comics and graphic novels session at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, which was chaired by Adrian Kinnaird, cartoonist and writer of the New Zealand Comics blog From Earth's End.
 
The guests were Karen Healey, Dylan Horrocks, Chris Slane and Ant Sang. All four have had books published in the last year, which are available in regular bookstores around the country. Dylan re-released his major work, Hicksville, last year, with a new design, new cover and a lovely new comics-form introduction; Guardian of the Dead is Karen Healey’s latest, award-winning teen novel; Ant Sang’s Shaolin Burning is set in medieval China and tells the story of Plum Blossom, a young woman who is determined to be the best Kung Fu warrior in the land; and Chris Slane’s Nice Day for a War adapts the diaries of Cyril Elliott, a soldier who served in the trenches in France. A big year for New Zealand comics.

It was a nice hour, led by Adrian Kinnaird, who began by asking the creators to talk about their early experiences reading comics, accompanied by pictures of Spiderman, Casper, Tintin, Donald Duck etc. projected on the big screens.

Then Karen and Dylan discussed the role of women in superhero comics. Karen Healey had been involved in the Girl Wonder group that was concerned with rehabilitating the male-centric genre of superheroes for everyone. Dylan had written Batgirl for some time and so had some insights to bring to a conversation about the poor treatment of women superheroes in recent years (for an interview with her and Mr Kinnaird about this and more go to http://fromearthsend.blogspot.com/)

But my favourite part of the talk was when the cartoonists showed some of the preparatory material that went into their finished comics. It was illuminating to see these private sketches and notes blown up large on the big screen. They are such good cartoonists that even what they might consider a throwaway working-drawing still looked great enlarged a hundred times the size. I could see that what might take just a few seconds to read on the page could take many days of work to make. And I liked seeing the very different approaches they took to construct their stories.

Slane was obliged to do historical research for his book and he certainly did not take any shortcuts. Images of the battle fields in France as they look today on Google Earth, tourist photos of the area uploaded to the internet (beautiful green rolling pastures, lovely vineyards, cyclists) were married to photos taken by soldiers of the time ( blackened limbless trees, shattered buildings, mud, holes) and maps of battle positions and trench layouts. These gave him the ability to place his characters into the landscape. He went on to show how he unobtrusively incorporated all this reference work into the finished pages.

It was nice to see his thumbnails (small, sketchy drawings made to plan the comic page as a whole and test how one panel flows to the next). He showed how these were tightened up into more detailed sketches to get the character placement right, the story information clearly shown, and to check for readability. I thought these sketches from him looked good enough to publish as they were. But there was a further version of the page to work out the balance of dark and light tones. Only then came the finished drawings- done in pencil and watercolour. The writing, for him, he said, was inseparable from the drawing.

Ant Sang's Shaolin Burning is a beautifully crafted story and I was excited to see that Ant had chosen to show us the plotting process. He used techniques adapted from cinematic writing and his book does have the feel of a great dramatic action movie. To see the way he diagrammed the plot and the characters' transitions and development was fascinating. He displayed pages full of tiny notes with scribbled arrows leading to other notes to other arrows to more notes. A pair of columns of writing side by side -- each one representing a character -- with arrows shooting back and forth; triangles with words at each corner. His writing was arranged in a very visual way.

Dylan showed the pages from the script notebook he uses for his new story The Magic Pen, as serialised on his website hicksvillecomics.com. To see someone's handwriting blown up so large was very personal and nice. A cartoonist needs to be clear above all other things and he excels at this. I thought it was neat that even his hand-written notes are a model of clarity. Then he showed how a few sketches in the corner of a page could expand into a new character and then how that character could intrude into the story so much that the whole thing changed. It all seemed natural and fun.

-- Tim Kidd