ApocalyptiGirl: An Aria for the End Times

by Andrew MacLean

I enjoyed Andrew MacLean's Head Lopper, so I decided to pick up his earlier graphic novel, ApocalyptiGirl, when I saw him exhibiting at TCAF this year.

This is a fairly typical post-Apocalypse kind of story.  Aria is on her own, aside from the cat that she found who now travels with her everywhere, searching the ruins of a major city for something.  Her day usually consists of singing the arias that she is named after, and trying to get Gus, a large robot of some sort, working again, while also chasing any signals she happens to pick up.

She's not completely alone in the city though - there are two warring groups, the Blue Stripes and the Gray Beards, who she mostly avoids.

This not being a very long book, it's not long before there's a lot of mayhem going on, as a Stripe finds her makeshift home in the subways, and she has to fight for her survival, just as she finds the thing she's spent years looking for.

MacLean has a refreshingly minimalist approach to his artwork.  The drawings are lush and colourful, and while they are detailed, they are also very stylized.  It was his artistic approach that attracted me to Head Lopper, and it works well here too.  This was a decent read.

The Fifth Beatle

Written by Vivek J. Tiwary
Art by Andrew Robinson and Kyle Baker

I've never been a big Beatles fan, largely because to me, it's the music of commercials and montages in comedy movies.  That said, I'm always interested in serious graphic novels that examine periods of history, and so I thought it would be good to check The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story out.

Brian Epstein was the Beatles' manager, 'discovering' them in a small bar in Liverpool, and using his industry connections (he managed a large music store) to get them started on the road to superstardom.  This book is his story, mostly focusing on how he balanced his ambition, his hidden homosexuality, and his abuse of prescription medication.

Vivek Tiwary, the writer of this book, is incredibly knowledgeable about the Beatles, and does a great job of keeping Epstein squarely in the middle of this story, resisting the urge to make it be about the members of the band, who largely remain interchangeable and lost in the background, aside from Paul McCartney, who seems to have had a stronger connection with Epstein than the rest did.

Andrew Robinson is one of those artists who I always feel deserve a lot more renown than they get.  He excels at this kind of character-driven story, while also evoking the era beautifully.  The Kyle Baker segment is a cartoonish look at the band's adventures in the Philippines while on tour, and I felt that it kind of disrupted the flow of the whole story.

As a whole, this is a very sensitive and understanding look at the life of a man whose work is remembered much more than his name, and who had to live secretly and unhappily in order to achieve his goals.  It's sad, but also triumphant.

Hip Hop Family Tree 1975-1983 Gift Box

by Ed Piskor

It's surprising that I hadn't read any of Ed Piskor's incredible series before now, considering that I'm almost as much a hip hop head as I am a comics head.  The Gift Box Set contains volumes one and two of Piskor's oversized Hip Hop Family Tree series, as well as a 90s-style ashcan comic about Rob Liefeld.  Despite a pair of excellent FCBD issues that I enjoyed, I waited until now, which with the release of The Get Down on Netflix, is the perfect time to read this comic.

Piskor's set out to tell the entire story of hip hop music and culture in these books, sharing it in short one or two page strips that combine to tell the much larger story.  The first volume begins in 1975 with the earliest forms of hip hop, and this box takes it through to 1983, and the emergence of Run-DMC as a new powerhouse.

Piskor's research and attention to detail is incredible, as is his ability to keep things interesting and coherent, even though the story jumps all over the place without chapter breaks, blending it all together.  This becomes even more complicated when hip hop breaks out of New York and starts to appear in other parts of the country, such as the early LA scene.  I can see how, as the book moves into the late 80s and 90s, this is going to become more and more complex, since each major city developed its own regional variations.

Anyway, this is a great read, and an example of true virtuosic work on Piskor's part.  The design of the book is incredible, and every aspect of it has been clearly thought out and planned meticulously.  I like the way that the pages look like yellowed pages from that era, but when Piskor shows a scene from later, the colouring and design reflects that era (bright and clear for the late 80s, for example).

I also like the fact that, as I read this book, the Internet makes it possible to pull up artifacts from that time, like Blondie's horrendous 'Rapture' video, and to watch Charlie Ahearn's classic film Wild Style on Netflix, since I was really young during the period that Piskor is portraying.  It feels like early hip hop has become popular again (see The Get Down to see what I mean), and I wonder if Piskor has had something to do with that.

Reading all of this, I am left with one burning question though, and that's my desire to know just what it is that Piskor has against Russell Simmons.  He's really not kind to the man...

The Absence

by Martin Stiff

I grabbed the hardcover of The Absence, which was originally a six-issue self-published series that ran from 2008 to 2013, on a whim.  The art didn't particularly appeal to me, but there was something that grabbed me when I flipped through it.

The story is set in a small English village on the channel coast, starting in 1946, when a storm starts ripping apart a cliffside church, and the local priest has to decide which is better, continued existence in the village, or being dashed to the rocks below.  His choice gives us the sense that maybe thingsaren't so great in this town.

The story really begins as Marwood Clay, the only local boy to survive the war, returns home.  No one is very pleased to see Marwood - there was some sort of scandal before he left, and the town basically considers him a murderer, although we have to read almost the entire book before we can find out why.

Somehow, during the war, Marwood had his lips and the skin around them ripped off his face, leaving him a ghastly sight, which probably doesn't make it any easier to relate to for both the villagers and the reader.  We learn that there is someone else new in town as well, a Dr. Temple, who has brought a small army of workmen with him to construct a bizarre house to very exacting specifications.

As this is the type of English village that doesn't react well to change, no one is particularly happy about anything for the first chunk of this book, and the questions start to pile up.  What did Marwood do that makes everyone hate him so much?  Why does only one girl, Helen, seem to feel differently about him?  What is Dr. Temple's true purpose in building this strange home, and why is so exact about its measurements?  Who is the old man who keeps trying to get in contact with him?  What did Temple do during the war?  Why does he seem to be able to predict random events with such accuracy?  Why do people in the village keep disappearing, including the young boy who tries to befriend Marwood?

Stiff packs a lot into this story, and while parts of it feel very improbable, it is a deeply satisfying read.  I enjoyed the look at life in an English village, but found myself becoming more and more intrigued by the work that Temple was doing (although I never understood it).  His art is kind of rough and sketchy, but it tells the story well, and helps to preserve an idea about a way of life that is pretty much gone.

Tiger Lung

by Simon Roy

I'd read the first story in this hardcover when it was serialized in Dark Horse Presents, but didn't realize that there were two more Tiger Lung stories in the book.

Simon Roy is a very interesting creator, whose work I've been following ever since I bought a copy of Jan's Atomic Heart from him (or maybe it was Ed Brisson) at TCAF in 2009.  He stood out as a strong emerging artist, and confirmed that as he went on to work on Prophet with Brandon Graham, and has just completed an excellent story, Habitat in Island, the amazing anthology that Graham edits.

Tiger Lung is set in the Paleolithic era, and centres on a shaman who works to set his father's spirit to rest, to rescue a girl from hyenas, and to rescue another woman from a malevolent spirit.

Roy's put a lot of thought into what people and their tools would have looked like, but more than that, he's worked to recreate the thought patterns and beliefs of these primitive, yet still complicated, people.

This is a very nicely put together volume.  The map at the end of the book suggests that there might be more Tiger Lung stories to come (six more, according to the legend), and I hope that's something we see soon.  Actually, I'm equally okay with Roy going on to create yet another world on the scale of Habitat too; whatever this guy does, I'm going to follow him to it.