Asking the Wrong Questions

I've written before about the "it's really good" problem—how to review, and direct audiences towards, a work that is simply gangbusters on every level, and seems to offer no access point for the reviewer wishing to praise it. The ecstatic reviews that persuaded me to pick up a copy of Paul B. Rainey's graphic novel Why Don't You Love Me? —the first great 2023 publication I've read this year, and already very likely to make my list of the year's best books—seemed to uniformly suffer from a subset of this problem: how to praise something exceptional without saying too much about it? Guardian reviewer Rachel Cooke wondered : "Will readers stick with [ Why Don't You Love Me? ] long enough to reach the twist that makes the effort of reading its first half worthwhile? I can't be sure that everyone will – and yet, I must not spoil this twist, even in the cause of encouragement."  I demur a little from Cooke's concern. Why Don't You ...

My last PHotF column for 2018 discusses Aminder Dhaliwal delightful webcomic Woman World , recently collected in a single volume.  It's a gently humorous post-apocalyptic story about a world where men have died out, and about as different from the likes of Y: The Last Man as that starting position will let you get.  The comic is sweet, irreverent, and most of all, dedicated to letting its characters be people, and live their lives without the undertone of tragedy that we might have expected. This is also an opportunity for me to take a broader look at how SF handles gender, and specifically, the idea that gender roles and even our definition of gender might change.  When you think about it for just a moment, that's a very obvious component of worldbuilding--we don't look at gender the same way that people from only a few decades ago did, so why should people centuries in the future, who live in galaxy-spanning, space-faring societies, have gender roles that so closely...

The most interesting question raised by Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is why it left me feeling delighted rather than quivering with feminist rage. I bounced hard off the first volume in the film’s source material, a six - volume comic book series by Bryan Lee O’Malley which follows the titular twentyish slacker as he battles the seven evil exes of his beloved, Ramona Flowers, in order to be with her.  I couldn't get over the way Scott treated his teenage girlfriend Knives Chau, lying to her, neglecting her, and letting her fall deeper in love with him even though he’d already fallen for Ramona, all because he could’t face the onerous task of breaking off their relationship. Even the assurances of my friends, who are fanatic lovers of the comics and have been anticipating the film and the final volume in the series with bated breath, that O’Malley does eventually acknowledge the creepiness of Scott’s behavior, wasn’t enough to bring me back. Wright’s film, meanwh...

In hindsight, it seems strange to have given so much credence to the conventional wisdom that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen was an 'unfilmable' comic book. As Zack Snyder's version proves beyond doubt, the book is its own screenplay, not only in the sense that it storyboards its action scenes and provides an aspiring adapter with a wealth of memorable images and set pieces, but because its narrative is a step by step guide to weaving together its interlaced plot strands of past and present into a single coherent, comprehensible story. All that was required to bring Watchmen faithfully to the screen was a filmmaker with sufficient courage to do just that, not to mention a judicious sense of what to cut away. This is not to downplay Snyder's accomplishment. For one thing, to have had that courage, and what must have been a monomaniacal dedication to the original work, to undertake such a task is no small thing. More importantly, Snyder's Watchmen i...

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have, at best, an ambivalent relationship with comics and graphic novels. I can see the potential in the medium, and I've read works within it that I've admired or even liked a lot, but only very rarely do I truly love a graphic work (really, I think it's just the later volumes of Sandman ). So that when a graphic novel gains praise and acclaim, I tend to file its name away for future reference. Then once or twice a year I go on a comics-buying binge, which is how I ended up, over the last week, reading three of the best-received graphic works of the last couple of years. Here are my thoughts. The earliest of the three is Charles Burns's Black H ole . The compilation was published in 2005, but individual issues were published over a period of a decade. Burns's slow and meticulous work tells in the finished result, which is illustrated in stark, black and white drawings that flit effortlessly between realism and sur...

If you love "Calvin & Hobbes," you might not want to watch this video . (Via Crooked Timber )

It's Andrew Rilstone, discussing a Silver Age Superman story which, apparently, manages to treat the 'Superman as Jesus' analogy with a great deal more wit and delicacy than the recent film. For anyone who grew up with Stan Lee's melodramatic over-writing, this 1950s Superman is astonishingly simplistic; even naive. There is hardly one word of what you could call dialogue in the whole story: everyone talks in pure exposition and the "Alice in Wonderland" line made me cringe with embarrassment even when I was 10. However, like many superficially naive children's stories, it actually has considerable complexity and emotional depth. We have a character whose literal darkness is the outward representation of an inner darkness – she has no father, her mother is poor,she thinks that there is nothing nice about the world -- all summed up in her disbelief in Superman. Superman heals her, restores her inner light, her family, and makes her see things she never saw...

But now that I've seen a sample of the recolored artwork, I want it. I imagine that Preludes and Nocturnes makes a great deal more sense with a color palette that extends beyond green.

Seriously, I love Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth as much as anyone, but have you seen the cover of McSweeney's 13 ? It folds out into a broadsheet and the whole thing is covered with Ware's little alter-ego catching shit for drawing comics--his parents belittle him, women spurn him, editors ignore him, the literary establishment laughs at him. Dude, you've won the Guardian First Book Award. There's already a booklet dedicated to you in a series about comics writers. You know those stupid articles that can be boiled down to 'all comics are childish and inappropriate for adults except for...'? You're always in the 'except for' part, unless the writer thinks that you're so far into the mainstream as to make the mention pointless. It's time to find a new shtick.

'A friend declared, "I've read comic books for years and I just decided: I don't like them."' Jessa Crispin, blogging in Bookslut For a voracious reader, I have some stunning holes in my resume. I didn't read Jane Eyre until I was 22 (in certain countries, I believe that's considered sufficient evidence of being male). My mother gave me The Lord of the Rings as a kid, but she never pointed me towards other fantasy titles, so I skipped the Terry Goodking/Terry Brooks/Robert Jordan phase of a fantasy lover's life-cycle entirely. I still haven't read To Kill a Mockingbird or Little Women . Growing up in a non-English speaking country and reading almost exclusively in English makes for some odd reading habits, especially when you're left to guide yourself. Which is one of the reasons I never read comics as a kid. Another, and probably more likely reason is that I'm a girl, and no one around me was reading them. But it's impossib...