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.

Foster

Written by Biran Buccellato
Art by Noel Tuazon

I was pretty excited to finally be able to sink my teeth into the completed Foster.  I'd picked up the first two issues a couple of years ago at TCAF from artist Noel Tuazon, and really enjoyed the beginning of the book.  Like many self-published titles though, it kind of disappeared, except for prohibitively expensive 'convention editions' or digital editions available online.  Now the whole six issues have been collected into one trade paperback by OSSM Comics, a pretty new company, and I could finally read the whole story.

Foster is set in Vintage City, which is Buccellato's amalgam of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and LA (although it mostly resembles New York), in their dirty seventies and eighties incarnations.  The city is run down, as are the people living in it.  Eddie Foster is one of the most run-down people around.  An alcoholic and a war vet, Foster is haunted by the choices he's made in his life, and mostly spends his time drinking in a crummy apartment, next door to a junkie prostitute he used to date.

One day, he comes home and finds that his neighbour has taken off, and has left her son, Ben, with no one to look after him.  Foster takes him home with him, and gets him to school the next day, assuming that his responsibilities are complete.  When he gets home, a gigantic man-like creature, a Dweller, shows up looking for the boy.  The Dwellers are evolutionary offshots (or maybe forebears) of humanity, who live in secret, preying on the edges of civilization.  Lots of people are aware of them, but nobody talks about them, and in their dark trenchcoats, they blend in with the urban decay around them.

As it turns out, Ben is the only hybrid born of a human woman and a Dweller (I'm not sure how they reproduce, because they all look like men to me in this book).  Foster does everything he can to keep the kid safe, as the King of the Dwellers wants his son back, and the other Dwellers just want to kill him.

Buccellato really builds the story nicely, and has a good feel for that era.  Tuazon's rough pencils are perfect for portraying this kind of world, as everything feels like it has a layer of grit on it.  This graphic novel is nicely self-contained, and would work very well as a film.  I am very glad I finally got to read the whole story, and recommend checking it out.  It's a good chunk of story for only $12.99.

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.

Foster Anthology 2012

Written by Brian Buccellato, Troy Peteri, Vince Hernandez, Robert Place Napton, Eric Wallace, Mike Johnson, Sterling Gates, Kyle Higgins, and Paris Buccellato
Art by Jason Copland, Noel Tuazon, Steve Buccellato, Dan Smith, Don Hudson, Aaron Gillespie, Hector Collazo, Rod Reis, Karl Altstaetter, and Paris Buccellato

When I was at TCAF (the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, the best comics show you'll ever attend) in 2012, I bought the first two issues of Foster from Noel Tuazon, the series artist.  I really enjoyed these two books, which are set in Vintage City, a down and dirty American city that looks and feels like it got stuck in the grimier part of the 1970s.  Vintage City has all of the usual problems of an American city, but is also home to a large group of Dwellers, mysterious and shadowy creatures who are descended from Cro Magnon man (if I remember it correctly), and who live in secret.

The series is about a guy, Foster, who is trying to protect his young neighbour, who is half-Dweller, from them.  I liked the books, and was pretty happy to see that the series was being solicited by Diamond, although nothing past the first issue ever came out.  It's possible to buy 'convention editions' off of writer Brian Buccellato's site, but they're kind of expensive.

Anyway, I was at the Toronto Comicon last weekend, and saw that Tuazon was selling copies of the Foster Anthology, a Kickstarter project that Buccellato made.  This book has a number of short stories set in the Foster universe, by a number of different creators.

The best stories are the ones set in various historical periods.  Buccellato writes a story (drawn by Jason Copland, of Murder Book fame) about an attempt at a military alliance between Ancient Rome and the Dwellers.  Troy Peteri and Tuazon have a very nice story about a trapper in the 19th Century who runs into the Dwellers in the woods.  I also really enjoyed Kyle Higgins's story about a cab driver in Vintage City who won't pick up Dwellers.  Rod Reis's art in this story reminds me of Bill Sienkiewicz around the time he was doing Elektra Assassin.

It is my hope that the Foster series will get collected into a trade format soon, as I'd really like to see how the story ends (and am not interested in reading it digitally).

Elk's Run

Written by Joshua Hale Fialkov
Art by Noel Tuazon

I really don't know why I've never read this book before now.  Creators Joshua Hale Fialkov and Noel Tuazon made Tumor together, an excellent detective graphic novel, and independently of each other, I've loved Fialkov's Echoes, and am very excited to see a new issue of Tuazon's Foster, whenever it's supposed to come out (issue three is very, very late).  I've seen Elk's Run numerous times, but it wasn't until recently that I decided to finally buy it and read it.

It's excellent.  Elk's Ridge is the name of a small former mining town in West Virginia.  When we first see it, it looks like any other idyllic small American town, but slowly the reader comes to realize that all is not as it seems.  The town was populated by Vietnam War vets who wanted a better life, and they've gravitated around John Kohler, a charismatic and firm man who has a vision for the town.

The area is completely cut off from the outside world, accessible only by a tunnel that goes through the surrounding mountains.  The rest of the area is surrounded by electrified fence, and supplies are brought in only occasionally.  Things sound great, but not to the teenagers who live in the town, are bored out of their minds, and a frustrated by a lack of young girls to get to know.  John's son, also a John, is our protagonist.

The story opens with John and his friends playing in the tunnel, a place that is forbidden for them to go, especially after dark.  The youngest of the boys is hit by a car, driven by one of the neighbours who has decided to flee the town.  This death leads to the execution of the man, and later of the police who come looking for him.  This is turn leads to John Jr. stepping up his rebellious nature, as he discovers new information about the father that he already hates so much.

Fialkov does a masterful job of combining usual teenage angst with the isolationism of a certain breed of Americans.  This story touches on events like those in Ruby Ridge and Waco Texas, while also tapping into post-9/11 fear of the wider world.  It's a very effective combination, and he uses the location well to create a very exciting climax.  Tuazon's art is never very detailed, and that works well here to help propel some of the uncertainty of this story.  This book is a very solid psychological adventure, and I recommend it.

Foster #1 & 2

Written by Brian Buccellato
Art by Noel Tuazon

When I looked through this month's Previews, the one new project that most caught my eye was Foster, a self-published series by Brian Buccellato (co-writer of The Flash, and colourist of many titles), and Noel Tuazon (who drew the wonderful graphic novel Tumor). The title sounded very cool, so I figured I would give it a chance, and added it to my pull-list.

Luckily, I hadn't sent in my July order yet, because Noel Tuazon was at TCAF this last week-end, and had the 'Special Limited Edition' of the first two issues for sale.  Despite their costing significantly more than the direct market editions will be selling for, flipping through these comics, I knew I had to have them.  That Tuazon drew a sketch on the back covers of each was really just a bonus.

Foster is a very good comic.  It's set in a gritty, 1970s style city (apparently it's an amalgam of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles).  Foster, the title character, is an unhappy alcoholic Vietnam veteran who lives in a rat-trap apartment.  When his junkie neighbour Trina disappears, he ends up looking after her young son Ben.  Foster feels some responsibility for the kid, as he and Trina were together for a while, before her behaviour brought back too many memories of his childhood.

The next day, after dropping Ben off at school, and deciding to wash his hands of the kid, Foster is visited by a large and menacing character - one of the Dwellers, a race that lives secretly alongside mankind, who is looking for the kid.  They aren't vampires - they are more likely an offshoot of Neanderthal man.  There is a reason why they are after Ben, but I feel it's pretty significant, so I don't want to say what it is.

Needless to say, Foster feels the need to look out for the kid, although it's not long before the police are interested in him as well, as is a researcher at the university.  There's a lot going on here, as Buccellato plays with a number of genre tropes, but mixes them up in an interesting way.  By the time I got to the end of the second issue, I found myself completely invested in the story.

A lot of the credit for this goes to Tuazon.  He captures the urban environment perfectly, and his Dwellers are very menacing.  His art is not all that detailed, which leaves the finer features of the Dweller to the reader's imagination, and that makes them all the more creepy.

This is a very good comic.  It's in this month's Previews, and I can not urge you enough to check it out and pre-order it.  I imagine that this is the type of project that a number of comic stores may not be aware of, so if you are interested, please speak to your retailer soon.  You won't be sorry with it.  Also, check out Buccellato's website to read previews or order your own copy (or a download).

Tumor

Written by Joshua Hale Fialkov
Art by Noel Tuazon

Tumor is yet another crime comic centred on a down on his luck private eye "with a twist."  The thing is, unlike many of the Vertigo Crime graphic novels, this particular twist works really well.

Frank Armstrong has a tumor in his head which is causing him to have intense flashbacks, or fall into short-lived comas.  Frank was never a particularly good PI (neither in terms of quality nor morality), and so at the end of his life, he has very little going for him.

He takes a job with a notorious drug lord, who is looking for his missing daughter.  As it turns out, the daughter had stolen money from him, and he is looking to have her killed.  When Frank meets the daughter, Evelyn, she reminds him of his deceased wife Rosa.  In fact, he frequently confuses the two, and he decides to help Evelyn in the one way he couldn't help Rosa.

The book is very tightly plotted, and Fialkov uses Frank's disease as a way of driving the plot, as it adds to his confusion, but also works to help us understand exactly what went down with Rosa in the first place.  There are some interesting tricks done with the timeline of the story at the beginning, but as the book progresses, that aspect of the storytelling calms down.

Tuazon's art is pretty nice.  It suits the story, and I like the way that the flashback scenes are drawn in what looks like charcoal (the book is black and white).  Tuazon makes Frank look old, and he seems to become more drained as the story progresses.

This story was originally sold as a webcomic on Amazon, but I think it works great in this nice thick little hardcover.  There is some supplemental material, including a prose story of Frank's first job as a PI.  This is worth checking out.