Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #132 by Drew Barth

Peeling the Layers

According to the cinematic touchstone, Shrek, onions have layers. They can be peeled until the core is reached. But then no one wants to talk about the skin. But we should consider the onion skin, particularly Edgar Camacho’s Onion Skin.

Broken up into four parts and multiple timelines, Onion Skin tells the story of Rolando. Having recently lost his advertising job due to a broken arm—gained by frustrations with said job—Rolando is in a funk. What does he want to do with his life? What has he already done with his life that was even worth it? How long can he sit in front of the TV eating chips before his savings run out? Luckily, as is normal, a food truck appears in his life. Nera, the woman living in the food truck, is also at an impasse. She’s never found the thing she wants to do and lives a nomadic lifestyle as a result. At a concert, the two meet up, start talking, and realize that in not knowing what they want to do with themselves, they know that they want to start cooking food on the road.

But Onion Skin isn’t just Camacho opining on the ennui of being in your twenties, it’s also a journey across Mexico cooking food and running from biker gangs. It’s also one of the most clever graphic novels in a while for its usage of panels and time. As mentioned, this story is split into four parts, but those aren’t chronological parts. The first handful of pages give us an in media res moment where we get at the heart of the story’s conflict that comes much later. We’re shown Rolando and Nera, but we know nothing about them. We are, however, already on their side as we smash cut to Rolando in a diner with his broken arm. And this isn’t the last time Camacho plays with the time in his story—almost every part has one of those cuts to help give us a broader context for a moment as we need it instead of just in strict, chronological order.

Onion Skin is graphic novel that you need to read. And food. The fact that Camacho hits that existential feeling of being continually stuck in a situation that only frustrates and infuriates, he never dives into that despair. There’s always some kind of light to keep things from getting too bad, even if those lights are impulsive repairs of food trucks. That’s what keeps the story flowing—we can’t wallow forever.

Get excited. Get layers.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #131 by Drew Barth

Which Witch

The idea of the witch has changed greatly in comic fiction over the past fifty years. From the wart-nosed villains in any adventure and horror comic to a contemporary symbol of magic that can sidle more on the chaotic neutral side of things than the evil ones. As a result of this shift, it feels like witchy-ness and witch-hood have become newer modes for telling stories about magic. And one of the better stories to come out about witches in the past decade just had its first issue release last week: Mamo by Sas Milledge.

Mamo, at its core, is a story about history and the small coastal town of Haresden. This town and history are filtered through Jo Manalo and her own perceptions of what has been happening to the town and her family for the past few years. We get these bits and pieces as she walks with Orla O’Reilly—the grandchild of Haesden’s late town witch—and learn how much has changed. Or, in some cases, how much things have been forgotten. Routine traps by the fae are almost Jo’s own downfall, despite the fact that recognizing those traps is common knowledge in this world. And while we don’t know the full extent of things just yet, we can feel that the curse on Jo’s mother could be affecting her in ways she doesn’t realize just yet.

What is most striking throughout this first issue is the way in which Milledge is able to maintain this quiet energy in every page. If this had a soundtrack, you could almost hear the single, sustained cello note being continuously. This isn’t a negative energy being shown, but something bordering on intrigue and about to teeter over into peril. Even though there is a curse being referred to throughout this issue, that isn’t the source of this sense of unease. Every motion from Jo and Orla plays on this idea as they’re both constantly unsure of what to make of the other. And the panels they interact in only get smaller and smaller as the first issues progresses—going from these sweeping splash pages in the beginning and ending with cramp quarters at the issue’s climax. It is one of the most inventive uses of the medium I’ve seen in a while.

There is a singular vision in Mamo that Milledge captures perfectly throughout this first issue—appropriate as Milledge is the sole creator credited on this series. And that vision is trying to show us so much in our relationships with magic, history, nature, and just people at large. But the story does all of these with such a deft hand that you never once feel like you’re being pulled out of the story to be told about these themes, but they flow into you just as easily as reading.

Get excited. Get witchy.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #130 by Drew Barth

A Question With No Name

Last week, I talked about Wonder Woman: Dead Earth, DC’s large-scale Black Label books, and the impact those books have had on DC’s new label so far. But Dead Earth was only one piece of the broader series of books. What launched just a couple weeks before was an examination of another character and the different facades they have been given over the decades. The Question: The Deaths of Vic Sage by Jeff Lemire, Denys Cowan, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Chris Sotomayor takes the titular Question and begins to play with his history—from his start in Hub City to the evil that has been lurking somewhere behind him for decades.

The Question as a character has always lent itself well to the odder mysteries—the hard boiled with a tinge of the supernatural and super heroic. And this tradition continues with The Deaths of Vic Sageas we have the man with no face going against the Beast with One Thousand Faces across history. Things start relatively simple: busting a corrupt police chief in an underage brothel and broadcasting that to the entirety of Hub City. But then Vic Sage starts seeing things. Single panels that hint at something else buzzing just beyond his memory. His oldest friend, Aristotle, knows nothing. But his former master, Richard Dragon, is able to push Sage into former lives that open up his perception of both himself as The Question and the evil that has been percolating throughout Hub City since its inception.

What really makes The Deaths of Vic Sage all the more fascinating is the fact that it feels as though it picks up right from the ending of the Denny O’Neil and Denys Cowan The Question series in the late 80s. And, as this series was completed when it was announced that Denny O’Neil himself had died, it acts as a fitting tribute to the late creator as well. There is much in The Deaths of Vic Sage that continues that tradition of classic DC storytelling—the revitalization of older characters, the creation of new villains, and a commitment to pushing forward how one could see comics storytelling. What Lemire, Cowan, Sienkiewicz, and Sotomayor have created here, then, is a story that exists both in the past and present. A character like Vic Sage and The Question can exist at any point in time, as the story proves, but it’s that unceasing quest for the truth that makes him all the more relevant now.

Much like Dead Earth, The Deaths of Vic Sage is reminiscent of classic DC blue-sky thinking. This is the same kind of thinking that brought us series like Solo, Wednesday Comics, and the original Batman: Black and White. It’s hard to overstate how something as simple as changing the dimensions of a comic can lend itself to be read with a different kind of reverence—the stories feel like something special as a result. And there’s an Other Story as well that feels just as special.

Get excited. Get questioning.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #129 by Drew Barth

Large Scale

A couple years ago, DC dissolved their Vertigo imprint and started a series of replacements. Half a dozen pop-up imprints came and went with each maintaining that independent spirit Vertigo espoused.

There was also the Black Label. This was another branch of what Vertigo used to be: more adult-oriented superhero stories. Black Label comics were more distinct as they were physically larger than regular issues—DC would call these “prestige plus” comics. Three years later after the first Black Label book came out, how was this experiment? Besides the pile of Batman or Batman-adjacent books, quite good. One of which that stood out more than any other, however, was Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer’s Wonder Woman: Dead Earth.

Dead Earth sees Wonder Woman waking up in the Batcave with no memory of why she was there and on an Earth completely changed and ravaged by what survivors have called the Great Fire. Already thrust into battle with the newest scourge of the planet, the Haedra, Diana does what she can to help the survivors of this wasteland. But surviving isn’t merely enough anymore as she convinces those left to join her on the island of Themyscira, convinced that it has been untouched by whatever Great Fire had scorched the rest of the Earth. Her memory, however, is brought back and she begins to remember what had happened: the war, the nukes, and the fight with Superman that ended in his death. All this and the revelation that the Haedra are much more familiar to her than she first knew causes her to reevaluate what she had known about the world of man.

With Wonder Woman: Dead Earth, Daniel Warren Johnson is now one of the best action illustrators in comics. With series like Extremity and Murder Falcon, his lines pulse with a frenetic energy that feels barely controlled. This ominous style is used to great effect with Dead Earth‘s larger formatting. A couple extra inches of page allows for widescreen comics.

It’s hard to find a take on a long-running character like Wonder Woman that feels simultaneously familiar and wholly different. Johnson’s lines are the main attraction for a book like Dead Earth, but no one can discount his understanding of Diana’s character. Compassionate to a fault, but still human at her core, Johnson is able to bring out a side of Wonder Woman that isn’t always fully explored. As a result, Dead Earth is one of the crowning jewels of the Black Label line. But is there anything else just as good? Well, that’s The Question, isn’t it?

Get excited. Get big.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #128 by Drew Barth

Let’s Take a Walk

How often do we see things that no one else can see? For the most part, there’s always something floating in your vision that only gets harder to see the more you try to focus on it. But what about other things? Things that hide just under reality and could be revealed like they were drawn on a transparent sheet for an overhead projector? These glimpses into another reality are what we see through the eyes of Joe, a young man plagued by what he can see. But it is through his brother, Rory, that he’s able to deal with those glimpses into another reality. At least, until Rory leaves. This is the story running through the heart of Long Walk to Valhalla by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox.

For the most part, Long Walk to Valhallais a story about returning. Rory is attempting to leave the town he grew up in when his car breaks down before he can even leave the town proper. In the middle of rural nowhere Arkansas, he meets Sylvia. Sylvia may or may not be a Valkyrie sent by Odin to escort Rory to Valhalla. But before Rory can make it to Valhalla, he has to die. As he follows Sylvia to what would be his death, Rory encounters the visions his brother, Joe, still sees. But a distraction takes Rory and Sylvia off their intended path and instead take them down the memories of Rory’s childhood and the abuse him and his brother endured at the hand of their meth-cooking father and their eventual attempts at escape.

Smith and Fox know their medium well. Long Walk to Valhalla is the kind of story that feels like it could have been prose, but its visual language—from the creatures Joe sees to the long silent panels of scenery and setting—cements it completely in the comic field. This isn’t the first comic to talk about abuse or escaping said abuse, but it is still one of the strongest. There is a tone Smith and Fox are able to strike throughout this graphic novel—somewhere between mourning and hope that Rory embodies as he takes his journey—and it helps to inform every panel, piece of dialog, and moment where we encounter those strange creatures only Joe sees.

Long Walk to Valhalla thrives in its mood and atmosphere. There is so much here that is unspoken between the characters and between the creators and their audience that giving words to them almost feels like spoiling the story. As it stands, we can only bask in the images Smith and Fox give us and hope to focus in a little more on the things that try to remain unseen.

Get excited. Get walking.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #126 by Drew Barth

Sector’s End

It’s been a full year since I last wrote about the first handful of issues of Far Sector and we return now to the series at its conclusion. I mentioned before how Far Sector was the kind of comic we needed at that moment—how it could capture the feeling of the time as only comics could during a time of massive social unrest. With its depictions of protests and police brutality coming months ahead of the George Floyd protests in early June last year, Jemisin and Campbell created a story that immediately resonated. How have things gone, one year later, now that the world has changed slightly and the series has ended?

When we last checked in with Sojourner “Jo” Mullein, the City Enduring was in a state after protests linked to both the emotional uninhibiting drug, Switchoff, and the first two murders in the city in about five hundred years. Since then, though? We’ve been through meme black markets and sweatshops, further murders, an attempted coup, and a fight in AI-space that could have killed Jo. You know, standard Green Lantern fare. But from Jo doing her best Kamina to the complete upheaval of society, Far Sector does not know how to stop. Jemisin and Campbell are masters are creating the kind of story and pacing that takes full advantage of comics as a storytelling medium. We can get whole issues of almost non-stop action with others that slow the pace and give us time to process and reflect alongside Jo herself. We fight as she fights, discover as she does, and rest in turn.

Even as Far Sector wears the Comic Book Action on its sleeve well, this is also Jemisin with her best lens on the societal ills we find ourselves in constantly. It proves, more than anything, that accountability and consequences are some of the most important things when writing a series about a whole society beginning to unravel. This isn’t a lone warrior fighting alone against a single tyrannical entity that ends in a bloody victory—Far Sector proves that shit’s too fantastical for fantasy. All change in this series is the effort of many more people, more than we ever see. It is the kind of thing that can fill a reader up with hope for something similar happening in their own lifetimes even if their own government tries every trick it has to keep something positive from happening.

As a series, Jemisin and Campbell have created a series where the ending absolutely feels earned as it is the result of hundreds coming together to make things better for their city. As much as we want to laud the single hero, the larger institutional changes of the City Enduring are through the effort of people. Even if it is only a couple people working and protesting, it is all of the small efforts that build up to a grander result.

Get excited. Get together again.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #125 by Drew Barth

MURDER?!

What do we think of when we think of Hellboy? I mean besides Ron Perlman. For the most part, we’re thinking of hellish denizens, ghouls, creatures, and the humanity inherent in most of them. But a series that has been going on for decades and has a world as expansive as Hellboywill inevitably have some spin-offs. And spin-offs are a peculiar thing as they do need to link back to their main series in some way, but not so much that the average reader will find it impenetrable. It is at this intersection of established canon and accessibility that we find The House of Lost Horizons: A Sarah Jewel Mystery by Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson, Leila del Duca, and Michelle Madsen.

As this is the first issue of a mystery series that follows along in the Agatha Christie tradition, a few things must happen. The setting must be established as both precarious and isolated. We start at a mansion on a deserted island in the middle of a storm that has cut off all communication. Next, we have to be introduced to the detective whose reputation precedes them: enter Sarah Jewell and her companion, Marie-Therese, on the last boat to come to the island. Next, the murder. It happened before the sleuths arrive, but just long enough before for some of the tension to diffuse in the mansion. And then, of course, the murder itself. A lawyer at the mansion, Severin, in to appraise and auction the various ancient and occult items being held in the mansion. Then the cast of characters—the lot of odds and ends that are equally innocent and guilty. At least, until another body shows up.

Somehow, even after years and years of reading comics, I have never once picked up a volume of Hellboy. And yet Mignola, Roberson, del Duca, and Madsen make sure that doesn’t really matter in this story. Even if we’re only at the first issue, there may be some small connective tissue linking Sarah Jewell and the other characters in this murder mystery back to the Hellboy world at large, that isn’t the focus here. The focus is on the Christie-esque locked-door murder mystery that unfolds slowly in this deserted mansion. And I’m in. I’m immediately drawn into a mystery like this despite the fact that I have no idea what links could exist back to Hellboy. As the story is, it can stand completely on its own.

A story with legs enough of its own to stand on is the mark of a great spin-off series. And it’s the kind of thing that any longer running series really needs to get more readers interested in the world these characters come from. If a series is going to spin off, it really needs to spin into something else entirely. Different genres give the world a chance to breathe more and complete itself. Not everything has to be about fighting back hell. Sometimes it can just be a dead man in a locked room.

Get excited. Get solving.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #124: Banned

I mentioned last week how important it is to have stories from different points in history that, in the west, are relatively unknown. There are a wealth of stories around the world from different points of time that end up buried under our own history. But comics are helping to illuminate those parts of the past. As Henry Kiyama shone a light on the experiences of Japanese immigrants in San Francisco at the turn of the century, more recent creators like Kim Hyun Sook, Ko Hyung-Ju, and Ryan Estrada present to us Banned Book Club and its look at living under a military regime in 1980s South Korea. 

Centered on Kim Hyun Sook’s personal experience in the early 80s, we’re given not only a look at how things were in South Korea at the time, we’re also given Sook’s own growth from her time entering college to now. In the beginning, Sook was relatively neutral—not exactly on the side of the students protesting the president, but not against them either. This is, of course, before she’s invited to a book club that reads various pieces of literature that have been banned by the ruling regime. This one moment would go on to shape the rest of Sook’s life as the book club leads to “movie nights” showing foreign news reports of what has really been happening in South Korea, university newspapers that act as a front to a more secret newspaper, and clubs that help organize protests and disseminating information to other colleges.

Sook, Estrada, and Huyng-Ju’s work on Banned Book Club is also something that we can be immediately connected to.It’s one of the reasons that graphic memoirs of these stories are so important—not only do we as an audience have that more visceral connection to the story, but it opens up that potential audience to a much wider group. There is an accessibility with comics as its interplay of images and words can lead to a greater understanding of the story. Everything in Banned Book Club, from its depiction of protests past and current to how Sook herself navigated through this time despite the potential for danger, helps to draw the reader in as we empathize more fully with their struggles. And this is what the comic does so well with its story—while these are old struggles under different circumstances, they’re struggles we can still connect to in a modern context.

History is a strange thing, but luckily we have comics like Banned Book Club to show us more of what we don’t know about the past. Going into this graphic memoir, I knew very little about South Korea in the 80s, less so the machinations of its ruling regime and the effort of its citizens to stand against it. It’s why these stories matter as much as they do—without that ability to connect and empathize with people, we simply don’t see their struggles.

Get excited. Get together.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #123 by Drew Barth

Looking Through History

The true start of comics and graphic novels is a contentious subject. Depending on who you ask, the idea of the graphic novel didn’t until begin until 1978 with Will Eisner’s A Contract with God. Others would contend it can go back as far as 1828 with The Adventures of Obidiah Oldbuck by Rodolphe Töpffer or some of the woodcut work in the 1920s. Even still, if we’re talking about comics in the form we recognize today—panels arranged chronologically with dialog in bubbles—one of the first examples of what could be called a “graphic novel” actually came about in 1931 as a graphic memoir. This is where The Four Immigrants Manga by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, and translated in 1998 by Frederick L. Schodt, comes into comics history.

Written over a period of twenty years, The Four Immigrants Mangachronicles Kiyama’s experience as an immigrant in San Francisco at the turn of the previous century. Following four Japanese immigrants who have taken on American names—Henry, Charlie, Frank, and Fred—we see much of their lives over the course of twenty years. While the Henry of the story is Henry Kiyama the writer, the bulk of the story instead follows Charlie through much of his life. Between day laboring and acting as house servants, we’re given an intimate look at Japanese immigrant life at the turn of the century. Much of what we see here is either pulled from Kiyama’s own experience, experiences of his friends at the time, or the stories he would hear from others.

Besides being a twenty-year look at the Japanese immigrant experience in the early 1900s, Kiyama also provides a snapshot of comics culture in the US at the time. One of this main goals in creating this manga was to emulate American styles of comics—most notably newspaper comic strips. From the left-to-right panel and word order to the usage of speech bubbles, Kiyama created a series of comic pages that encapsulated American comics, along with their caricatures and prejudices, at the time. And that these pages stretch from the turn of the century through prohibition, World War I, and the San Francisco earthquake allows us to see how Kiyama’s life as an immigrant had evolved through the decades, or, rather, how little things would still change for him at the time.

As I had mentioned in a previous article going over The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge, there are pockets of comics the world over that tell a comic history that has nearly been lost to us over the decades. The Four Immigrants Manga might have gone untranslated for many more decades if Schodt hadn’t remembered seeing the volume at a university library in the 80s. These kinds of deep dives into libraries have become more and more necessary as comics grows as a medium—the stories still hidden in obscure catalogs are just waiting for someone to come by and rewrite what we know about the history of comics.

Get excited. Get historical.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.