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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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 PLEASE SUPPORT COMIC BOOK GALAXY BY VISITING OUR SPONSORS
 A few weeks ago, I reviewed Syncopated Volume 2, a journalistic style comic that I highly recommended, but was unable to provide any details on how to purchase the book. Well, editor and publisher Brendan Burford let me know that copies of the book, along with many other fine comix, can be purchased through the Meathaus website. Scroll down a little and check it out. I think you’ll be impressed. Now, how about a few reviews, huh?
Guy Delisle's memoir about an extended work trip in North Korea is a fascinating glimpse into one of the world's few remaining Communist dictatorships. Like Joe Sacco’s best works Palestine and Safe Area: Gorazde, it is an unsettling portrait of a country where human rights violations occur with the sanction of government on a daily basis. Delisle, a Canadian animator, views the tiny Asian nation from an undoubtedly Western perspective. His feelings of horror and revulsion when witnessing atrocities such as citizens being forced to work as "volunteers" in the middle of the night, clearing trash off the highways, are understandable to those of us who value human freedoms. But even though just about anyone who has seen a news report already had an idea of how oppressive a place North Korea was, Delisle’s account shines new light on the exact details of everyday life in a fascist state. Citizens are deprived basic fundamental rights we take for granted, such as freedom of speech (N. Koreans are not even allowed to have access to the Internet!). In fact, when reading this graphic novel, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels to Hitler's Nazi Germany--from the smothering propaganda machine (which requires that portraits of Kim Jong-Il be hung in literally every room) to the “re-education camps” (which “officially don’t exist, but everyone knows” about). But whether the North Korean citizens understand their situation or not is irrelevant. As Delisle points out, “at a certain level of oppression, truth hardly matters, because the greater the lie, the greater the show of power. And the greater the terror for all. A mute, hidden terror.” Delisle's skills as an animator are evident, and his knack for storyboarding--the way he breaks down and paces his experiences--show he is an artist with a firm grasp of sequential storytelling. His simple character designs manage to convey the full spectrum of emotion, thanks to his mastery of body language and facial expression. Delisle is also a cartoonist with an incredibly sharp eye for detail. Like Craig Thompson's Carnet de Voyage, the artwork successfully conveys the sense of place, as Delisle uses maps, drawings of prominent buildings (see sample pages) and other references to bring the reader into the sterile capital city. Delisle also uses gray shading to add depth, shadows and texture to his art without ever washing out or muddling the action. Since most of us will never visit Pyongyang (foreigners are rarely welcome), this is the closest we will probably ever get to being there. It’s an unsettling but enlightening depiction of one of the most oppressed societies on the planet, and like all the best graphic novels, will surely garner attention from literate audiences outside the direct market. Highly recommended! Grade: 5 out of 5
OK, I hate to bag on these guys, because I honestly think that both the SPX and the CBLDF are great organizations, and ones that deserve the support of us online folks. But at the same time, if this is truly “the future of comics,” then I think we have a problem. Not quite as disastrous as last year’s anthology, this year’s collection of new cartoonists is a far cry from the book’s peak in 2001. First of all, there are several contributors who just don’t have strong visual sense. For example, in Brian Chippendale’s contribution, it is virtually impossible to distinguish the foreground from the background. Drew White’s six pager is also headache-inducing, offering virtually no distinguishable action amidst his whirlwind of heavy lines. And Ben Jones’ artwork looks so sloppy, it almost could have been drawn by a five year old. There are other artists who fall into the “love them or hate them” camp, and I have to say, I’m in the latter. For example, Marc Bell’s and Peter Thompson’s surreal pages, melding many different images into one incomprehensible mess, just don’t work for me, though I can recognize the talent on display. There’s just nothing to relate to in the work. Then there are the few talented cartoonists whose skills are wasted on banal, uninteresting stories. A good example is Kaz Strzepek’s “Assteroids,” about how the artist likes to try to break apart his turds with his own stream of piss, evoking the old arcade game of the mid-eighties. The artwork is promising, but the subject is so juvenile, the whole thing just falls flat. The book also has a couple of rip-offs, most notably Jesse Reklaw’s Maus-style recap of his father’s hippy experiences selling drugs in college. Reklaw’s use of Spiegelman’s classic style is not offensive, and surprisingly well rendered, but in the context of his story it seems frivolous and out of place, given the mundane tale he is telling. Similarly, Sindre W. Goksoyr’s contribution is an obvious rip-off of Kaz’s considerably better Underworld strips, complete with the broken needles in the gutter and characters falling off panel. Of course, the book is not without its standouts, though they are few and far between. Dave Lapp’s story of random violence by a group of teenagers is unsettling and beautifully rendered in a style reminiscent of Tomine’s early minicomics work. Nick Bertozzi’s adaptation of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s memoir of months spent on “the ice” is gorgeous and really evokes the Arctic in the way it opens with several silent pages of ice floes, before easing into the story of desperate explorers forced to put down one of their dogs in order to stave off starvation. Jennifer Janviere’s “One Day in Autumn” is an excellent, and beautiful, example of silent cartooning and demonstrates a strong sense of pacing and page design as the tale follows a leaf’s journey after it falls from its tree. Janviere is one of the few newcomers who I’d be interested in seeing more work from in the future. Brian Marucca and Jim Rugg, of Street Angel fame, contribute a four pager focusing on bit character Afrodisiac, which is enjoyable enough, but for the decision to print it on gray paper, which washes out the artwork and gives the whole story an unnecessary clouded effect. Overall, this year’s SPX book was a disappointment, and quite honestly, has lost much of its prestige when compared to the many other indie anthologies (Kramer’s Ergot, Mome, Drawn and Quarterly Showcase, Hoax, etc.) that have emerged in the last few years. Grade: 2.5 our of 5
Drawn and Quarterly’s other major recent release was the first English translation of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s classic 1969 short stories. Although Tatsumi is a virtual unknown to Western audiences, his work is widely celebrated in Japan. This collection, the first of many planned translations, is a gorgeous, deluxe format hardcover containing 16 short stories. The tales themselves explore the darker side of humanity, as we are barraged with one protagonist after another each compelled toward random acts of violence. In one of the collections most memorable strips, “Bedridden,” one man murders another in order to steal his sex slave. In “Sewer,” a man literally dumps an aborted fetus in the sewers of Tokyo. In the title story, the “Push Man” is responsible for cramming as many people as possible onto Tokyo’s crowded subways, but after years of listening to the screams of the passengers, their pleas finally creep into his sexual fantasies until he slowly loses his grip on reality. What these stories all share is an undercurrent of sudden and unexpected violence, usually directed toward women. The male characters are almost always silent, making the women appear nattering and malicious in many of the stories. These are not violent men per se, but rather men whose circumstances force them to the breaking point. What makes these stories relevant today is clearly Tatsumi’s cartooning. Years ahead of his time, Tatsumi’s clear line and gorgeous panels are, as Tomine points out in his introduction, “restrained, minimal, and stylized in a manner that seem[s] appealingly foreign.” In the sample pages above, you can see that while the characters are rendered in a simpler, more cartoony style, the settings are almost photo-realistic. Yet the two styles never clash. In fact, it is the realistic backgrounds, which convey the sense of time and place so well that lends these stories their gritty sense of everyday realism. Interestingly, I loaned this book to a Japanese friend of mine who happens to be 44 years old and grew up in Tokyo. He was immediately taken aback by how realistic the settings were, and even recognized many of the streets that Tatsumi had drawn. He was also familiar with Tatsumi’s work, and considered him one of the great comics artists from Japan. That we finally have a chance to see this work in English is fortunate, and that it comes in such a slick package is thanks to Tomine’s efforts. The book closes with a brief but insightful discussion between Tatsumi and Tomine, and sheds light on the artist’s impressive career. This is a literate, enjoyable work worth checking out. Grade: 4.5 out of 5 That’s about it. Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple weeks. -- Marc Sobel
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Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea
SPX 2005
The Push Man and Other Stories
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi with an introduction by Adrian Tomine