Chicanos Vol. 2

Written by Carlos Trillo
Art by Eduardo Risso

Carlos Trillo and Eduardo Risso had a long and prosperous partnership together, creating some very interesting comics like Vampire Boy and Borderline, but their Chicanos is probably one of the stranger and more memorable projects they worked on.

Chicanos tells the story of Alejandrina Jalisco, a short and awkward private investigator who can barely rub two dimes together, who lives and works in a poor Latino area of New York.  She is cursed with terrible luck - she has a tendency to get hit by buses whenever things start to go her way, which isn't often - and is generally mistreated by almost everybody she knows, yet she maintains a level of optimism and goodwill about her.

This second IDW volume collects the second half of Jalisco's stories, I believe for the first time in English.  The collection is interesting - the stories stay pretty bleak but are humorous at the same time - and Risso's art looks very nice, in the way that his work always does.  I wish IDW had done a little more to separate the various chapters, as it's not always clear where one story ends and the next begins (plus, I'm sure there are some beautiful Risso covers that weren't collected).

If you're looking for an oddball graphic novel to entertain you, you could do a lot worse than this.

Video Noire

Written by Carlos Trillo
Art by Eduardo Risso

I'd wondered why more of Carlos Trillo and Eduardo Risso's comics weren't being published in English.  Having read some or all of Vampire Boy, Borderline, and Chicanos this summer, I've formed a very favourable impression of this prolific Argentinian duo.  Then I read Video Noire, and became thankful for editorial curator-ship, when it comes to non-English comics getting translated for the North American market.

It's not that this book is bad...  Well, actually, it kind of is.  The story is about a gorgeous children's television host who is using mass media to affect the minds of the young, so that they will participate in Satanic rituals with her.  A hermaphroditic clean freak hires a private detective to investigate her, but he is killed.  Soon, his partner and ex-friend takes up the cause.

This is a bleak and mean little story, hampered by the fact that it hasn't aged very well, and has been surpassed by the creator's later efforts.  Risso's art is always great, and he draws some lovely ladies here, and continues to fill his backgrounds with silent stories of their own (people get held up a lot in his comics), but he isn't quite able to breathe enough life into this predictable and at the same time bizarre script.

I'd avoid this one - read Vampire Boy instead.

Borderline Vol. 1

Written by Carlos Trillo
Art by Eduardo Risso

Having been so impressed with the first chapter of Vampire Boy when I read it about a year ago, I figured it was time to track down the rest of Trillo and Risso's collaborations.  They deserve to be seen as one of the legendary writer/artist pairings in comics, as their work together is phenomenal.

Borderline is set in a strange, dystopian future.  Two organizations, the Commune and the Council, run the show, although they do not communicate well, and often allow their rivalries to supersede anything else.  One group (I never did quite get a handle on which was which) employs Crash, a 'captive agent' and the girl on the cover.  She looks a little like Kelly Lebrock in Weird Science, if she had a gun and was unable to communicate with people around her because she had most of her organs removed and replaced with technology.  The other group employs Blue, a 'ten year'; an agent who has signed a contract making him an indentured servant for the period of a decade. 

Now Blue and Crash have some history, having been in love before Blue sold Crash to organ harvesters so he could buy drugs.  Now the two are in conflict with each other in a game of one-up-manship between their controllers.

This is a nice gritty comic, told in short episodic chapters.  There is an interesting set of supporting characters - I particularly like Mike and Jack, Crash's handlers, who are insanely jealous lesbian lovers.  There's a strange sense of humour at play in this bleak comic, and I'm very interested in reading the next three volumes.  I always knew I could trust that I would enjoy looking at any book Risso has drawn, but it's heartening to see that Carlos Trillo's writing is just as good as his reputation says it is.

Vampire Boy

Written by Carlos Trillo
Art by Eduardo Risso

Dark Horse's complete edition of Trillo and Risso's Vampire Boy is one nice, big, satisfying chunk of comics goodness.  I'd previously read the first volume in the SAF edition, and while I liked the larger pages, there is a real aesthetic pleasure to reading a nicely put-together 475 page graphic novel.  Especially one this good.

The vampire boy of the title is a nameless Egyptian child, the son of the great Pharoah Khufu, who was strangely transformed into an immortal at the age of ten, when a mysterious plague struck down his father and everyone else he was with.  Except for one other person, an ambitious and manipulative priestess named Ahmasi.  The two of them have nurtured their hatred for one another over the millennia.

When the book opens, the child awakens after hiding himself in a New York sewer for some fifty years.  Unlike traditional vampires, these two are restored by sunlight, and don't need to feed on blood alone; in fact, the boy eats just about anything he can find.  As the book progresses, our vampire boy meets a kind old Oglala Sioux man who helps him, but also draws Ahmasi's attention.  From there, the two immortals scheme to murder one another once and for all, and many of the boy's new friends become victims of Ahmasi's excesses.

This book is touching, sexy, and violent in about equal measures.  Trilllo provides plenty of information of the child's life over the years, and develops him into an interesting character - someone with the wisdom of many ages, but the impulses and reactions of a prepubescent boy.  There are times when the writing is perhaps a little too precious, but a character like a nameless vampire child would be difficult to humanize without resorting to sentiment from time to time.  Ahmasi, on the other hand, works very well as a heartless villain.

Risso's artwork is always brilliant, and he really cuts loose with some of the scenes here, as the setting shifts from the ancient world (Egypt, Greece, Rome) and the modern (NYC, New Orleans, and London).  I found this book to be very enjoyable reading ,and recommend it heartily.

Chicanos Vol. 1

Written by Carlos Trillo
Art by Eduardo Risso

Over the last couple of months, I've amassed a number of graphic novels by the team of the recently deceased Carlos Trillo and collaborator Eduardo Risso.  I've been buying these books on the strength of Risso's unconventional art, but haven't read anything by this team beyond the first chapter of their Vampire Boy (the nice new Dark Horse edition of which is on my 'to-read' pile).

Anyway, Chicanos is an interesting project.  It was clearly serialized in short installments when it was first published in Europe, as each story is pretty short.  For whatever reason, when designing this trade paperback, the people at IDW decided to place the various short stories that make up the book in a continuous stream of pages, with the effect that it's sometimes confusing to read the book in prolonged sittings.

Chicanos stars AY Jalisco, a short, pencil-legged, over-endowed Latina private detective operating in what I assume is New York.  Poor Jalisco is pretty bumbling and clueless a lot of the time, as she stumbles from case to case or problem to problem.  She doesn't have many friends or clients, and spends too much time stuck in her own head.  None of this stops her from going up against mobsters time and again.

It's interesting to see how this European comic portrays Jalisco and the people that make up her mostly-Latino neighbourhood.  To begin with, I don't think many poor New Yorkers have bidets in their bathroom, but Jalisco does (minor point, but it really stood out as being strange).  Also, it's hard to believe that there has been a period in the last twenty years where anti-Chicano sentiment and prejudice has been as virulent as it is shown here.  This book implies that Latinos live under Jim Crow-like conditions, where they can't even enter the front door of hotels, let alone hail a cab (that one being more believable).

Still, Chicanos is a frequently funny and engaging comic.  Risso's art is always brilliant, if never beautiful.  It's interesting to look at his pre-100 Bullets work and see how his style has developed and been refined.  I will be looking for Volume 2 of this title, and am glad that the two books are connected, but are not exactly continuations of each other.

Boy Vampire Vol. 1: The Resurrection

Written by Carlos Trillo
Art by Eduardo Risso

I saw this at a used book store at a very good price, and couldn't resist the allure of Eduardo Risso's art.  I haven't read any of his other work with Carlos Trillo (like Chicanos), although I've been meaning to for some time now.

Boy Vampire is not a typical vampire story at all.  To begin with, the usual vampire rules - sunlight, stakes, garlic - don't apply to this series' nameless protagonist.  He is a very old vampire, having lived since the times of the great Egyptian Pharoah Khufu, who was his father, but in all that time he has not aged beyond his ten to twelve years.

When this book opens, the child's body is found in an old, unused length of sewer pipe.  Once it is exposed to the sunlight, he is revived, and has to make his way through the world after fifty years of rest.  He needs to eat prodigious amounts of food, and never is able to ease his hunger, even when he drinks someone's blood.  He makes a few friends - an old Oglala Sioux man and his granddaughter, but is soon pursued once again by Ahmasi, his father's concubine, and his immortal enemy.

The writing is quite nice.  I quickly found myself liking the child, despite his vampiric tendencies, and I liked the way Trillo set up such a different approach to such an otherwise familiar story.  The art, of course, is incredible.  I found it interesting that so many of the techniques that Risso used in 100 Bullets are also on display here - the strange angles (my favourite being the shot filmed from inside a skull, looking out through the eye and nose holes), and the way he will include little visual stories into the foreground of the scene that is essential to the book.  I thought many of those were from Azzarello's scripts, but I guess not.

It was strange the way these two European creators chose to portray the United States.  I could never quite figure out where this story was set.  One picture made me think this was supposed to be Washington DC, but at other times, it resembled New York.  But then, there is a sub-plot involving the last land to belong to the Oglala Sioux, who would not have been in either city in any numbers.

Regardless of things like that, this is a very cool book.  Apparently Dark Horse is publishing the whole thing in an omnibus edition this summer, and I know I will be picking it up.