Ghetto Brother: Warrior to Peacemaker

Written by Julian Voloj
Art by Claudia Ahlering

It wasn't all that long ago that I watched Rubble Kings, the excellent documentary about the 70s Bronx street gang the Ghetto Brothers.  It explained the backstory behind the excellent Truth & Soul rerelease of the Ghetto Brothers album, which I enjoyed a great deal.  When I saw this graphic novel, there was no way I could resist it.

This book tells us the story of Benjy Melendez, a co-founder and leader of the street gang which eventually negotiated a truce with all of the other Bronx gangs, and ushered in a short-lived period of relative peace, quiet, and social organization in one of New York's worst neighbourhoods during a time of great upheaval.  For the most part, there's not a lot here that you wouldn't already know from the documentary, except for a couple of facets that shine a little brighter here.

One is the focus, both in the story and in the introduction and backmatter, on how the truce Benjy initiated paved the way for the birth of hiphop.  It's hard to read this now and not think about the Netflix series The Get Down, which is set in the same era.

Another thing that was new to me was the way in which the story focuses, towards the end, on Benjy's learning about his Puerto Rican family's Jewish roots, and how learning about his roots helps centre him and give him direction in life.

The book is narrated from Benjy's perspective, and while writer Julian Voloj did meet with him extensively in preparing to write this story, he does note that there are some places where he altered details to improve the narrative flow, which is unfortunate.  I'd rather be able to trust this as a straight biography.

Claudia Ahlering's drawings are often too cramped to really enjoy, and I wonder if this was originally designed for a European-sized format, and was later shrunk to this version, which is smaller than a standard comic book.  It does make it hard to recognize characters in some places.

This is a decent book that helps bring more light to a fascinating story.  We need more people like Benjy, who are resistant to the narrative that the world wants to write for them, and who puts other people first.

How Loathsome

Written by Tristan Crane and Ted Naifeh
Art by Ted Naifeh

The comics shop that I've been buying from for close to twenty years is having to move by the end of 2016, since a developer has bought up two city blocks, and it looks like they are either going to be taking down the beautiful Victorian-era street that it operates out of, or the rent is going to be ridiculous.  Because of this, they've been blowing out backstock like mad, and I found this handsome hardcover in their discount annex for only a dollar.  Knowing nothing about it beyond the fact that it looks nice, I picked it up.

How Loathsome is a very good comic.  It was published in 2004 (presumably it was a four-issue miniseries first), and is set in San Francisco's seedy underbelly.  The main character is Catherine Gore, a writer, who runs with a group of genderfluid drug users.

Each of the four chapters tell a complete story featuring Catherine and some of her circle, as they fall for someone new, party, use, and talk about it.  Nothing major ever happens, but when the book ended, I was wishing there were more stories about these characters.

On two occasions, we read stories of Catherine's.  One features a monk who enters a suicide pact with his young lover, but then doesn't follow through after the boy kills himself.  The other is a ghost story.  They stand out a little, and disrupt the story, but give more insight into Catherine's character.

There is a definite early Vertigo feeling to this book, and Ted Naifeh's art matches that aesthetic well too.  I'm pleased I picked this up, and would recommend it to people who enjoy Ross (now Sophie) Campbell's Wet Moon.

The Broadcast

Written by Eric Hobbs
Art by Noel Tuazon

In 1938, Orson Welles broadcast his radio play The War of the Worlds, adapting HG Wells's novel of the same name about a Martian attack to radio.  Famously, people actually believed that the broadcast was factual, and panic broke out in a number of spots across the country (obviously the people of America were not as media-savvy in the 30s as the people of today, who know that everything broadcast by say, Fox News, is going to be true).

This situation provides the backdrop for The Broadcast, an excellent 2010 graphic novel by Eric Hobbs and Noel Tuazon.  The story is set in rural Indiana, and it uses the event as a springboard to explore class and race at that time.

Our main character is Gavin, the charming son of a farmer, who wants nothing more than to marry Kim Schrader, the daughter of a powerful local landowner, and run off to New York to help her pursue her dream of becoming a writer.  As the book opens, Gavin goes to meet with Kim's father, to get his blessing to propose, but he ends up leaving insulted and angry.  During this visit, we also learn that two of Mr. Schrader's employees used to own the land that he now pays them to farm.  One of the farmers is fine with this situation, while the other, Jacob, a widower, is not.

The final player in this drama is Marvin, an African-American man who was attacked by a couple of whites and almost killed, who ends up near Gavin's father's farm, and is taken in by the very nice family to recuperate from his wounds.

The titular broadcast takes place on a stormy night, and the power goes out at a key point in the radio play, leading the characters to believe that the attack must be real, and that the radio station has fallen to the attacking Martians.  Everyone panics, and all of our main players converge, with their families, on Schrader's farm, which is the only place in the area with a reliable storm shelter.  The hope is that the families can hide out there until the invasion is over.  The discovery of what happened to the men who attacked Marvin (it's not pretty) makes their belief in the seriousness of their situation even stronger.

The big problems is that Schrader's shelter can only hold a small amount of the assembled people, and so everyone falls to in-fighting, scheming, and class warfare.  Jacob is the most direct character here, resorting to violence so as to protect his daughter, but Schrader remains the most interesting character.

Hobbs does a terrific job of setting up these characters and this situation, and then just letting everything play out as it should.  Tuazon's art, like always, is scratchy and at times hard to follow, but that adds to the sense of confusion that the characters are feeling.  Like their more recent book, Family Ties, this is a very good read that is not your typical graphic novel.

Family Ties: An Alaskan Crime Drama

Written by Eric Hobbs
Art by Noel Tuazon

We all know that as the boomer population ages, senility and dementia are going to be a growing problem, involving a lot more health care, and putting a lot of stress on families.  I suppose it also makes sense that more and more popular fiction will also explore the phenomenon, and it looks like Eric Hobbs and Noel Tuazon are working to get ahead of the pack with Family Ties, their mobster story that deals with the issue.

Jackie Giovanni and his associates made the trek up to Anchorage Alaska at a time when the entire state was ripe for the organized crime picking.  They built an empire for themselves, but now Jackie is starting to lose his grip on reality.  When the book opens, one of his two daughters, who have been taking on a bigger slice of the family business, has to deal with a drug dealer who used Jackie's senility against him in negotiating very favourable terms for himself and his dealers.

As the story unfolds, we learn that Jackie's two daughters have their eyes on a lot more than the slow transference of power from their father.  Their younger brother, Cain, has no interest in taking on any of the business, and is more interested in getting their father medical help.  Toss into this volatile mix a recently found bastard son of one of Jackie's closest associates, who has his own designs on how to achieve power, and we get a pretty big mess.

Hobbs's writing is pretty intelligent.  He leaves a lot for the reader to deduce, and that works (even if I sometimes had to flip back a few pages to remind myself how some characters were related to each other).  Tuazon is a very interesting artist.  I've enjoyed his work for a while now, but can see that he would not be for everyone.  He is a very minimalist artist, reducing faces and scenes to a high degree of abstraction, but then also covering the page with a lot of messy lines or blocks of shading that don't exactly fit within the shapes they are tinting.  It can make reading one of his pages a bit of a challenge, especially since some characters aren't as unique as others in their appearance, but at the same time, I enjoy the individuality of his work.

This graphic novel is a very solid read, and worth checking out.

The Sky Over the Louvre

Written by Bernar Yslaire and Jean-Claude Carrière
Art by Bernar Yslaire

I vaguely remember writing an essay almost twenty years ago about the artist Jacques-Louis David and his role in helping construct the public image of the French Revolution.  My memory of this is very vague, and I do wish I'd kept my university essays, simply because it would probably be amusing to read it over now.

Anyway, this beautifully designed over-sized hardcover graphic novel caught my eye, because I usually enjoy historical comics, and it centres on David at the time that he was the most famous artist in France, and was struggling to support Robespierre's Revolutionary Ideal, even as the whole endeavour began to descend into madness and Terror.

Opening The Sky Over The Louvre, I figured I'd be in for a real treat - a serious, literary graphic novel that handles an interesting period of history, withe beautiful artwork.  Unfortunately, the book doesn't quite live up to its promise...  To begin with, the art is quite lovely, and I like the way that Yslaire works digital reproductions of David's art, and of the other painters who filled the Louvre at its opening, into his own drawings.  It adds a level of veracity to the book, and the paintings make an interesting contrast to Yslaire's own slightly caricatured representations of the different historical figures.

The book is not just about David's struggles to remain in the favour of the Revolution - a difficult task with Robespierre obsessing over his concept of the 'Supreme Being' as a replacement for a god figure in French society, but also about David's obsession with Jules, a thirteen year old boy.  The art stuff works; the parts with the kid don't.  We are told repeatedly that Jules is beautiful (although the thick swath of a unibrow that Yslaire gives him makes that a little hard to accept), and we are shown repeatedly how the child catches David's eye, causing him to seek him out to use as a model for his portrait of Bara, a young martyr of the Revolution.  The thing is, David never makes a move on the boy, or seems particularly enamored of him, and so his emotional reaction to Jules's trip to the guillotine later in the book feels completely forced and without justification.

I don't know how much of this part of the book is accurate.  I don't remember reading about this relationship, but it does come off as feeling rather forced.  Similarly, the structure of this story relies too heavily on large chunks of narrative text, as if there was no easier way for Yslaire and Carrière to establish what was happening in the story.

I did find this to be an interesting comic, but when compared to something like the old Vertigo series Chiaroscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo da Vinci, which handled a very similar story, The Sky Over the Louvre comes off as the more shoddy of the two.  Still, I am more than happy to continue supporting graphic novels about important figures in the history of the visual arts, and am curious to find the rest of the Louvre/NBM collaboration books.

War-Fix

Written by David Axe
Art by Steven Olexa

War-Fix is the last of the books that I picked up when I went out west this summer (yes, I am that far behind on my reading). I grabbed it in a used bookstore in Vancouver because it looked interesting.  As anyone who has read my reviews know, I have a thing for war comics, and am always interested in contemporary interpretations of war in comics.  I hadn't realized that the writer was the same person who wrote War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones, which I read about a year ago.

I quickly figured out that there was a relation here, as while I was reading this I was struck by some pretty strong comic book deja vu.  The two books are thematically very similar.  Axe's contention is that war is addictive, and simultaneously very boring, and as a reporter, he finds himself highly motivated to seek out combat situations.

In this book, Axe talks his way to an embed in Iraq, where he plans to cover the war.  He sees some action, but also spends a lot of time sitting around thinking about things.  I felt like not much happens in this book - it really only comes alive when Axe is speaking to a journalist for the BBC, who has covered some twenty wars in twenty years, and was almost executed in Croatia.

A big part of the problem with this book was that Olexa's page designs can be hard to follow.  This is a smaller, square-bound book, so double-page spreads have a habit of disappearing into the fold in the centre, making them difficult to recognize as double-page spreads.  And there really are a lot of double-page spreads.

This is an interesting book, but in the end not terribly memorable, and not as good as the more recent War is Boring.

Bluesman

Written by Rob Vollmar
Art by Pablo G. Callejo

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this project. I enjoyed Vollmar's writing on 'Inanna's Tears' (at least, as much as was ever published), and so I figured I'd give this a try.

This is a very gothic graphic novel, telling the story of Lem Taylor, a traveling bluesman of the American south. Taylor and his partner get hired on at a juke, but his partner is led astray by a woman, resulting in the murder of a prominent white man in the community. Taylor is dumped into a whirlwind of events, as he flees the area, and hooks up with a small band of wanted Natives.

Vollmar's script depicts the people of this time in a number of different lights. He doesn't fall back on complete stereotype or cariacture, instead creating well-developed individuals.

The art, by Pablo Callejo, looks like a series of woodcuts. His thick lines and liberal use of black ink add a certain gravity to the proceedings, and help make this a story for the ages. It's definitely a good comic.