Who knew cooking comics could be so cool?

Many, many apologies: I've come down with an awful cold and sore throat and haven't been able to rouse all week. So, belatedly, enjoy this cross-posting of a review I recently did for the comics review website comicsvillage.com.

Recently I ran a comics camp for boys and girls ages nine to twelve. For one week, these kids dove into comics like you wouldn’t believe. They drew and drew and drew, and drew some more. We talked about character, plot, action, but also visual elements like panels, word balloons, speed or emotive lines, and how to draw eyes and mouths to show what your character is thinking.

Now, I’ve taught comics to kids off and on for fifteen years. Whenever I start, the first thing I ask is “What’s comics?”

At first, I always got “Spiderman!” or “Batman!” or the like. About a decade ago, I also got some “Dragonball!” answers, maybe a “Sailor Moon!” or two. This time, it was only at the very end that I got the superheroes. Their initial answers were newspaper comic strips and Manga.

A big part of comics camp is reading. I pull out dozens and dozens of graphic novels, comics, manga, and collections of comics published over the last seventy-five years. And the kids are voracious readers—I had to bring in extra material midway through the week just to keep ahead of their reading. Which brings us to this review. What follows is a review by one of the campers. Auguste came last year to my comics camp, but I honestly didn’t know he liked it so much. This year, he was eager to draw, eager to read, and eager to talk about the books he read. So I handed him the first volume of Iron Wok Jan. This is what he had to say:

“I read the manga book Iron Wok Jan and it was great. It is about two cooks named Jan and Kiriko. They try and compete to see who is the better cook. In the end Jan makes his first mistake and he’s mad but then he fixes his mistake. I think this book also teaches that if you make a mistake, try to fix it. This book takes place in the best Japanese restaurant called Gobanchi. There are many other characters but they don’t appear as much as Jan and Kiriko. I highly recommend this book and give it 9 stars out of ten. I think this book is better for older kids or adults because it is a little hard to understand but you may prove me wrong. I also advise you that there are a few curse words but other than that it is a good book.”

Later I asked him what the bad words were, I felt bad and was worried what I may have “exposed” him to. They were minor ones, a “crap” and “damn” here and there. Language aside, I completely agree with Auguste. Iron Wok Jan is a riot of fun and action, probably the most “balls-out” cooking manga ever. It’s pretty much an over-the-top rager of a battle manga, using the coolest, grossest, wackiest food ideas ever. I bought the first fifteen volumes when Dr. Master was running a sale several years ago, and I read them back to back to back over a few days. From about volume thirteen, the stories get a little repetitive and the print quality lags a bit (the inks are muddy and the paper is crappier), but in later volumes that’s all fixed. I love this series, it’s got the perfect combination of anti-hero, great characters, crazy action, humor—it’s got it all.

Rats by Robert Sullivan

Rats don't get much love from nature writers. Most natural history books are about wolves and condors and such, representatives of some distant and vanishing wilderness. Rats are filthy scavengers, common vermin, and beneath our notice.

If we take the time to look, though, rats are actually pretty incredible. Their front teeth are harder than iron and can chew through concrete. They average about 16 inches long from tip to tail, but they can squeeze through a crack three-quarters of an inch wide.They're excellent swimmers, and the stories about them coming up from the sewers through toilets are astonishingly (or horrifyingly) true.

To write his book Rats, Robert Sullivan spent a year speaking with biologists who study rats and working with exterminators who kill them. He traced how rats went from being symbols of Satan's evil during the Black Plague to being, well, symbols of slum lords' evil during the rent strikes of the 1970s. The heft of his book, though, is observations from an cramped alley in Manhattan, where Sullivan watched a rat colony dominated by a huge corkscrew-tailed male he named, "the Rat King."

Sullivan's alley rats live well off the trash from a Chinese restaurant. They fight and breed, struggle and die, forming an ecosystem only a few blocks from Wall Street. The most incredible thing about rat is--unlike wolves and condors--they're city dwellers. Humans drive off predators and provide a steady supply of edible garbage, so rats have adapted to live wherever we live, their colonies spreading out in the shadows and under the floorboards of our own.

Calling rats and humans "brute neighbors," Sullivan writes, "Rats live in man's parallel universe, surviving on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage. I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but similar, thriving or suffering in the very cities where we do the same."

The best nature writers remind us how big the world is, how wonderful and strange it can be. Sullivan manages it in Rats, revealing a hidden wilderness right under our noses.

Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz

Here's my confession. I'm a southerner - born, raised and still live in the south - and I've never seen Gone With The Wind. For some of my fellow southerners, this is akin to heresy. Heck, to movie fans across the world this is a sin. But I have my reasons. And some of them are explored in Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz's journalistic tour across the many southern states involved in the American Civil War.
There's no simple way to describe any southerner's view of the Civil War, so Horwitz carefully sidesteps the complexities of this problem by focusing on his own connection to the war via his boyhood fascination with the various battles, gods and monsters associated with it. What begins as a wide-eyed boy's dream of the glorious past quickly becomes a murky, muddled journey into the heart of the American South, replete with the requisite gothic characters, racist powermongers and Old South legacies that have ever haunted the region. If the narrative seems a little far-fetched and heavy-handed at times, it is, but don't let that fool you into believing there is no truth in it. It's hard to overexaggerate something as over the top as the modern South.

The centerpiece and the binding force of what could otherwise be a directionless collection of essays is Horwitz's ongoing friendship with and grudging admiration for a Civil War re-enactor named Robert Lee Hodge. Actually, to call Hodge a re-enactor is to do him a grave disservice. He is, in his own parlance, "super hardcore." This means, among other things, that he shuns the traditional re-enactor's (called a "farb" by detractors like Hodge) tendency towards "play acting" and attempts to get at the heart of what (for him) is a genuine Civil War lifestyle and experience. Trudging miles with minimal (if any) footwear, eating molded bread and spoiled sowbelly, and sleeping in mosquito-riddled ditches are just a few of the lengths Hodge will go to in order to capture the essence of Civil War life and suffering. Horwitz joins up with Hodge at various points throughout his narrative, and each journey plumbs the depths of Civil War obsession and hysteria all while testing the limits of a "normal" man's constitution in this modern reconstruction of an antebellum world.

I admire Horwitz for his commitment to his task, even if at times he seems particularly preoccupied with the oddities, incongruities and outright hypocrisies of the modern South. There are moments when he seems to be mocking more than anything else, and that's problematic for me. Yes, it's true that the south has more than its share of Civil War throwbacks. Heck, just a few weeks ago some dunderheads a few miles south of my home threw their annual "Redneck Games" replete with more rebel battle flags than I ever care to see assembled in one place, but events like the "Games" are more the exception than the rule, and it would have been nice to read a bit more balance in Horwitz's approach.

Still, Confederates in the Attic, taken as a whole, does manage to balance the eccentricities of the post-bellum South with the serious implications of a society that cannot reconcile its own past. Whether you're just a "farb" or a "super hardcore," you're sure to come away from the book thinking differently about the past, present and the future. And you might convince me to finally sit down and watch Gone with the Wind. Might.

Ghost Town by Richard W. Jennings

Richard W. Jennings, author of the critically acclaimed Orwell's Luck, sets his latest novel in Paisley, Kansas. The narrator is Spencer Honesty, who is stuck in this recently abandoned ghost town with his mother. After a plant closed, the residents steadily moved away until the two are alone. They remain in Paisley, since the Postal Service employs his mom and the Post Office is kept open. As someone who grew up near some old closed-up railroad towns, the story of Paisley is quite interesting.

They are incredibly lonely and Spencer is mostly left on his own to entertain himself. The only person that returns to Paisley is Spencer's imaginary friend Chief Leopard Frog. Spencer has a complex relationship with his imaginary friend, who gives out sage wisdom, carves evil totems and writes bad poetry. Eventually, Spencer finds an old camera and begins documenting Paisley. The device, however, is a ghost camera which can photograph Paisley's former residents. Spencer breaks some promises to his friend along the way, and tries to make it better through his relationship with the publisher of Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find, which sells things like vegetables that resemble celebrities.

There is a large cast of great characters, which is impressive considering that this novel is about loneliness and discovery. Jennings pens a coming-of-age story, but it is much more than that. Spencer's imaginary friend seemingly has all of the answers and in some ways embodies what Spencer wants to be. Ghost Town is about dealing with the past and the importance of new relationships. Some of the conclusions seemed slightly out of character with the rest of the book, but this is a super fun and quirky novel with some brilliant moments. It reminded me a bit of Tom Drury's novels and would appeal to anyone who enjoyed Daniel Manus Pinkwater's The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization.

It Ain't Called GUYS Lit Wire For Nothing

Being that this is GUYS Lit Wire, I’m now going to offer, for your consideration, the most guy-centric book I’ve read in a long time. Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter (by Cooke) is a guy’s book, right down the line: stone-cold criminal Parker comes walking back into town with a razor gleam in his eye and the urge to strangle someone in his powerful hands. He’s supposed to be dead, or so thinks his wife and her partner Mal, who pulled a double cross and left Parker to burn to death. It’s that simple, but what follows is a hunt through an underworld filled with seedy dives, rough women, two bit flunkies and corporate killers in neck ties and fancy suits. It’s right out of the first Parker Novel (there were a whole series of them) by famous crime writer Donald Westlake (using the Stark pseudonym) that began in the early 60’s when they really new how to tell a crime story just right. Cooke, who captured the look and feel of an era gone by in DC: the New Frontier, keeps the action set in 1962 and evokes a different time period like never before with a washed out, sepia-toned art that will bleed grit right onto your fingers. Even though it’s not quite in keeping with all the macho, I should say that this could also be the most gorgeous graphic novel of the year.

Well, that’s a lot of testosterone, so let’s balance things out just a tad with a fine Wonder Woman yarn. Sorry to say, there haven’t been an awful lot of those in the history of comics. Of the Holy Trinity of super-heroes (Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, of course), she’s always had a more difficult time defining her archetype, being that the genre is very much about guys doing guy stuff (beating up criminals, natch). But, with Wonder Woman: the Circle (by Simone and Dodson), that situation is at an end. As Wonder Woman races to stop a Neo-Nazi invasion of Paradise Island and confronts a deadly conspiracy of Amazonian Warriors, we get a tale not only filled with action and character and burnished with a nifty shine of mythology, but also and finally a clear understanding of what Wonder Woman is and what she represents. The balance she strikes between fierce warrior and thoughtful diplomat has a fantastic potential, which you can follow into the next volume, if you like. And the art is so beautiful it practically glows, as only befits an Amazonian princess, after all. Even the backup tale, featuring WW’s battle, both physical and philosophical, with a renegade Green Lantern, offers a level of moral consideration you seldom see in mainstream comics. That maybe more depth than you’re used to in your summer action extravaganzas, but I reckon you can handle it.

Where Wolf?

Well, originally I was going to write about how effective a nonfiction writer can be. Then I looked around the web for impressions other readers gave of Never Cry Wolf.

It seems it is not totally nonfiction. But Farley Mowat's book did spur readers to rally around the cause of conservation. Wolves were being exterminated rapidly until he showed how much of "common knowledge" about them was just wrong.

Mowat told his story with a bit of "poetic license," you might say. He writes about being posted in the Canadian wilderness alone to study the wolf. Actually, he was part of an expedition of three biologists and was never alone, according to his supervisor, Frank Banfield (of the Canadian Wildlife Federation).

In Mowat's latest book, Otherwise, he backs off. He doesn't claim that he saw wolves surviving primarily on rodents, or that he tried such a diet to determine if they supplied him enough protein to survive the winter.

But I still recommend the book. Readers learn about wolves (Understanding wild dogs helps us understand our pets, for one thing.), and Mr. Mowat is a good writer. He will make you laugh. His descriptions of interactions with the government bureaucracy are hilarious. A little exaggerating for comic effect? We can only hope.

I laughed enough that I know I will read more of his books. Otherwise sounds like one I might want to review. Stay tuned.

A World of Geeks

It might be too late to plan a geek-themed vacation this summer, but it's never to early to start thinking ahead.

Not an atlas in the traditional sense, The Geek Atlas does manage to span the globe with the locations of museums, cemeteries, and assorted locales of interest to the geek-minded traveler. Sort of like a travel guide to tourist sites of interest for the scientific, technological and mathematically inclined. Also works for the generally curious who enjoy leaving the beaten path while abroad.

Now, gathered in one place, you can read up on the Mendel Museum of Genetics in the Czech Republic, learn about the world’s longest suspension bridge in Kobe, Japan, or make plans to visit The Taipei 101 in Taiwan, the tallest building in the world with a 600 tonne pendulum near the top to prevent the building from swaying and vibrating. Each of the entries not only explains the importance of each place but also follows up with a brief explanation of the science or math involved.

For example, the listing for the Tempio Voltiano not only honors the accomplishments of Allesandro Volta along the shores of Lake Como, Italy, but also explains Volta's invention of the first battery and includes the science behind the making of a modern version of what is known as the Voltaic Pile.

I knew none of this before reading the book. Reading this book made me smarter.



Listed alphabetically by country, each entry in The Geek Atlas lists its geo-positioning coordinates, a couple of icons indicating whether it is free of charge, availability of refreshments, suitability for children, and if it's whether-dependant, followed by a description of what the site has to offer. Magnetic North, for example, is listed as being free – suitability for children and weather is the sort of thing best left at the discretion of the geek parents involved. It also contains a nice explanation of the Earth's magnetic field and how magnetic north keeps shifting.

While intended as a guide for travelers, the book has a broader appeal as a geeky almanac, the type that teen boys are often drawn to. It has lots of facts, can be read out of sequence, is full of places both practical and absurd, and is informative without being pedantic. Armchair geek travelers will enjoy the virtual world tour, and for some the book could provide the sort of inspiration to get out of the house and explore the world. Or at least plant the seed.

The book is available in stores, but also directly from the publisher in a variety of down-loadable formats. Normally I wouldn't note such things but I think that for a title like this it could come in handy both as travel reading or as a reference on a mobile device while on the road.

The Geek Atlas
by John Graham-Cumming
O'Reilly 2009
http://oreilly.com/

The Storm in the Barn

If you've learned about the early 20th century in school, you probably learned about the two World Wars, the stock market crash of '29, the Great Depression, and the New Deal. And maybe along the way (in either history or English - Out of the Dust, maybe, or The Grapes of Wrath), you learned a bit about the Dust Bowl. Whether you have or not, today's selection - a brand-new graphic novel coming out in early September - will give you a very clear dusty introduction to that time period. It's not, however, a work of nonfiction - not only is it fiction, it's pretty much a tall tale.

The story is set in Dust Bowl Kansas. Our main character is the aptly named Jack Clark, age 11, a young boy who is worried about his sister Dorothy, who is suffering from dust-related pneumonia, and who is relegated to chasing after his baby sister Mabel, who sometimes goes where she ought not to go.

Why did I say that Jack Clark was aptly named? Well . . . let's just say it has something to do with the nature of this particular story, which is party tall tale/fairy tale (a la "Jack and the Beanstalk" or "Jack the Giant-Killer", or, well, any of the so-called "Jack tales", American tall tales based in the Southern Appalachians). It's so common for boys in those sorts of tales to be named "Jack", in fact, that in Ian Beck's book, The Secret History of Tom Trueheart, the main character (Tom) has six older brothers, all of whom are heroes, and all of whom are named "Jack." But I digress. And "Clark" has its root in the same word as "Clerk", which originally comes from the idea of a religious scholar once known as a cleric. A cleric is generally a good guy; a clerk is generally someone we think of who serves a useful purpose. Jack Clark is all of these things – plain and simple, a hero, a good guy, and a boy who serves an extremely useful purpose, as it turns out. And he does it by employing the sort of bravery and cleverness that his namesake in the Giant-Killer and Beanstalk stories did.

In this story, Jack Clark discovers a mysterious being hiding out in the barn abandoned by neighbors who could no longer stand to live in the dust and the drought. Over time, he manages to figure out exactly who that being is. Jack, used to being bullied and overlooked, makes a decision to act in hopes that he will help not only his sister, but his town, to recover from the effects of the drought.



The artwork in the book is stunning. You can get a sense of some of it from this book trailer, created by Matt Phelan and available on YouTube:



The book's most memorable spread is – for me – found at the bottom right corner of page 128, and is at the center of a particularly gripping (and violent) episode in the book, when Jack observes his father and other men (plus older boys) engaged in a jackrabbit drive. The author's note at the end of the book makes clear that the particular event depicted actually occurred during the Dust Bowl, and is one of the events that most haunted survivors of that time on the plains.

The written portion of this graphic novel is actually quite small, percentage-wise, with words only as needed to convey the story and fill out the context for the pictures. The menacing form in the barn is well-done indeed, conveying secrets and power more than creepiness, although there's decidedly several frissons to be had when in the presence (visual or implied) of the being in question. Dorothy Clark, Jack's sister, is a compelling character; you can tell that she and Jack are quite fond of one another, and Dorothy spends her time reading (when she's not sleeping or coughing, that is) about another Dorothy in a different Kansas, who travels not only to Oz but also to the desert near the Land of Ev.

Another character of whom I'm particularly fond is Ernie, the kindhearted man who runs the general store. Not only does he try to protect Jack from the older boys who bully him, but he also tells Jack tall tales, all of them involving a hero named Jack. And he's not just kind to Jack's face; he also harbors great expectations for Jack, believing that one day Jack will do something truly heroic.



I had the chance to interview Matt Phelan at my own blog, and I can say for certain that his background as a theatre and film major contributes to the way he conveys the story in The Storm in the Barn, which has a cinematic feel to it. His pacing is spot-on as well.

So, to sum up: Interested in graphic novels? Or history? Or tall tales? This is the book for you. On sale on (or before) September 8, 2009.

Suicide Dogs

There’s never been a road trip quite like this. In Crash Into Me by Albert Borris, Frank, Owen, Audrey, and Jin-Ae are visiting the graves of famous people who have committed suicide, and at the end of their cross-country journey, they plan to kill themselves together in Death Valley. Each has their own reason for wanting to die, reasons you’ve probably heard before in teens that you know of who have attempted or committed suicide—a breakup, not living up to family expectations, not being able to come out as gay to a conservative family. Owen, our narrator, has a slightly different reason. He blames himself for his brother’s drowning death. Owen was playing in the pool, pretended to drown, and his brother jumped in after him, hit his head, and died. Owen was only 7 at the time, and for the past 8 years he’s been trying to kill himself in various ways, been in and out of hospitals and seeing multiple counselors.

What Owen, Audrey, Frank, and Jin-Ae have in common is incredible loneliness. They originally met online, and when they realized that they had all attempted suicide at least once, they decide to meet for this final suicide tour, calling their group Suicide Dogs. Meeting in person may provide the desperately needed connections to the world that could ultimately save them, but the group mentality may also spur them each to ultimately do something some of them have begun to reconsider.

With visits to the graves of Anne Sexton, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, and Kurt Cobain (as well as other sites that master researcher Owen finds along the way), and activities from the “things to do before I die” lists that they’ve each created, this book keeps a fast pace, with none of the true drudgery that can come with a long road trip. Interspersed with the narrative of the road trip are some of the original online chats from when the teens first met and started to plan the trip. The author, Albert Borris, has worked extensively as a teen counselor and seems to have a good sense of dialogue—these kids aren’t spouting philosophy at every turn, they’re confused and trying to figure things out, trying to find out if they have a place in the world. I wouldn’t like this book if I felt like it glorified suicide. It doesn’t. Each character is aware of the serious consequences of his/her potential actions, but feels that they are out of options.

Albert Borris’s web site has further information on him (including his most embarrassing moments!), as well as suicide prevention information. Crash Into Me has characters that many people will feel a connection with, and is worth reading to find out how they come out on the other side of their journey.

Hit List: Keller, #2 -- Lawrence Block

For the past few months, I've been writing about Hard Case Crime titles here at Guys Lit Wire. But, as is usual for me, I got distracted. Hard Case led me to Lawrence Block, which led me to Keller, and I now I won't be moved from Keller until I've read all of the books about him.

Keller is a hit man. He's good at what he does. He doesn't do it because he's a vigilante (though he has been known to go against the client's wishes if he disapproves), and he doesn't do it because he enjoys it. No, he kills people for a paycheck. At one point, he was actually planning on retiring, but then he re-started his boyhood philately hobby -- so now he has to keep the money coming in so that he can continue adding to his stamp collection.

In Hit List, Keller meets a girl. She introduces him to an astrologist, who tells him that he has a murderer's thumb. That doesn't sit right with Keller, because, despite his day job, he doesn't think of himself as a murderer. And the idea that his profession could have been preordained bothers him. And after meeting with the astrologist, things feel off. Jobs don't go right, and eventually, Keller realizes that his life is in danger -- someone, for reason or reasons unknown -- wants him out of the picture.

What I love about the Keller books is that they aren't action-packed go-go-go thrill-rides about an assassin. They're books about a smart, slightly odd guy who has likes and dislikes and a job and who goes to jury duty because it's the right thing to do. And I love his conversations with Dot, the lady who sets up his jobs. This excerpt will give you a brief taste of the awesome that is Keller:

"The cop's black," he told Dot, "and the defendant's white. I don't think I mentioned that before."

"You and Justice," she said. "Both color-blind."

"At first," he said, "we didn't know. I mean, we knew about the defendant, because there he was sitting with his lawyers, and middle-aged white guy with an OTB face and a bad rug named Huberman."

"His rug's got a name?"

"What is this, English class? You know what I meant. His name is Huberman."

"I know what a rug is," she said, "whether it's got a name or not, and I never saw a good one. But what's an OTB face? Off the books? On the button?"

"Off-track betting," he said. "There's a look horseplayers get."

"A kind of woulda-coulda-shoulda look."

"That's the one."

While this one wasn't a collection of short stories like the first one, it still reads like a series of connected vignettes -- due to the pacing, I think that not everyone will take to it, but those of you who do will adore it.

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Previously:

Keller:

1. Hit Man

Other Lawrence Block:

Grifter's Game (Hard Case #1)
Girl with the Long Green Heart (Hard Case #14)

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(cross-posted at Bookshelves of Doom)

Book source: My local library.