COMICS : Shortcomings lives down to its name
Posted on Thursday, September 13, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/201348/
Two new indie graphic novels feature hard-headed young men with relationship problems, each on a search for resolution in his life.
Contrasting these similar books is particularly useful because their few differences reveal how indie books can succeed, and how they can fail.
Exit Wounds and Shortcomings (both $ 19. 95, Drawn & Quarterly ) are from multiple award-winning artists / writers.
Exit Wounds, by Rutu Modan, takes place in Tel Aviv and follows Koby, a young man whose tenuous relationship with his father has degraded to the point that the two haven’t spoken in years. Koby’s simple, conservative life is interrupted when a female soldier, Numi, tells him she believes his father is the unidentified man killed in a recent bombing.
Koby’s journey of discovery leads him into not only the mystery of what his father has been doing, but also the troubled history between the two.
Complicating things further, Koby learns his father was having a relationship with Numi even as he becomes interested in her. It’s a deeply textured plot, an emotional roller coaster disguised as whodunit.
Modan’s art is reminiscent of the great Tin Tin: simple, yet detailed outline drawings filled with extensive coloring. Though her faces are very basic, she captures facial expression with skill, furthering the story’s resonance.
Like Modan, Shortcomings ’ creator, Adrian Tomine, is known foremost as an artist. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire and Rolling Stone, among other publications.
Tomine’s work is similar to Modan’s in that it is sedate, covering scenes from everyday life. Tomine, though, uses a conventional, realistic black-and-white style more typical of indie comics. He’s very, very good.
Shortcomings features Ben Tanaka, a young man managing a theater in Berkeley and being so much of an insensitive jerk that his girlfriend skips town. Ben, not surprisingly, doesn’t see that he’s the problem and responds by chasing after “white girls.”
Much of the book’s focus goes to the racial issues of Asian Americans, with Ben having more problems than anyone, even if he doesn’t realize it.
Eventually, Ben chases his girlfriend to New York, only to find that she’s dating a white guy. After Ben’s predictable freakout, he heads back to California, seemingly having learned nothing at all.
And all too often, that’s the status quo of indie comics. Like many books following the trail blazed by American Splendor, Shortcomings is long on ennui and short on plot. But Exit Wounds features a finely crafted script that is more than a collection of angst-filled character moments. It’s a good story.
SCALPED Jason Aaron, one of the freshest voices in comics, made his name last year with the excellent Vietnam comic The Other Side. He’s back this year with Scalped, now available in trade paperback ($ 9. 99, Vertigo ). While Scalped is written with verve and features sublimely gritty art by R. M. Guera, the subject matter — an undercover FBI agent returns to the Oglala Sioux reservation where he grew up and finds extreme violence and criminality — was a turn-off.
This reservation is an actual place that lies on the southern edge of South Dakota, near where I grew up. I’ve been there plenty of times and my family is involved with the tribe there.
So I can only hold Aaron’s stories of gun battles, drug running and corruption against the less stereotypical picture of what’s happening on the “rez.” The truth holds plenty of negatives (alcoholism rates are sky-high ), but it’s also absent of firefights and organized crime. More than anything, Scalped is the comic equivalent of an action movie. The story is tense and strenuous, even frightening in places. But the pretensions of serious commentary it carries have all the substance of popcorn.
NEW MONTHLIES A wealth of interesting new ongoing series (all $ 2. 99 ) has come out lately, three alone from Dark Horse Comics. Of those, the best is Umbrella Academy, a quirky team book about babies born with strange powers trained to be superheroes by an alien. It pulls in elements of two other famed Dark Horse series, The Goon and Hellboy, a plenty strong pedigree. The first issue features the villainous zombie robot Gustave Eiffel.
Much more conventional is Zero Killer, a post-apocalyptic take on the superhero tale. While the setup grabbed my interest, some stiff fight scenes and the last third of the book, which seemed an excuse for cheesy pinup art, derailed the promising start.
Speak of the Devil, the latest from indie master Gilbert Hernandez, is a mix of success and disappointment. For some reason, a teenage girl sneaks about town at night in a devil mask, peeking in on neighbors. That’s pretty much the bulk of the story. There are plenty of interesting moments and the expected great art, but it feels like a book that’s not sure what it wants to be. The real series to watch for is The Programme (Wildstorm ), which marks the return of personal favorite artist C. P. Smith and horror writer Peter Milligan. A mysterious story of biological experimentation and lingering effects of the Cold War, The Programme is a mix of The Manchurian Candidate and Captain America. If you like superheroes, war books, spy novels or science fiction, this is a book for you. E-mail:
van. jensen@gmail. com