This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Evan Narcisse, Douglas Wolk, Matt Peckham and Graeme McMillan talk about a handful of books that were nominated for this year’s Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards that we didn’t review when they were originally released: Jim McCann and Janet Lee’s Return of the Dapper Men, Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako, Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys, and Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma’s Morning Glories.
MATT: So it’s like this: To repurpose a cliché, Jim McCann and Janet Lee could paint the phone book and I’d buy a copy. Return of the Dapper Men qualifies first and foremost as a dazzling objet d’art. I mean the book itself, from its meaty heft to its embossed metal-leaf clockwork iconography to the Apple-red clothbound spine. Lee’s decoupage technique (think “collage” art, each page a mélange of pine wood, paint, and paper) allows hills and clock towers and whirling, looping clouds to cast outlying shadows as colored textures underly the scissor-cut geometry, lending pages a liminal three-dimensional feel forced perspective lines alone can’t achieve. Holding this weighty, oversized, 11-by-10-inch tome reminds me why we’re absolutely crack-smoking kidding ourselves if we think the iPad or Kindle could ever supplant the sublime physicality of an art book like this.
(More on TIME.com: Weekly Comics Column: The 2011 Eisner Comics Award Nominees)
Conceptually, McCann’s story’s a bit simplistic: Without time we lose perspective, and without perspective, we lose ourselves. I’d call it curiously anti-Proust in that it’s positing memory is in fact not involuntary, and that to be nearer some vaguely harmonious state requires a sort of ongoing, manual accounting of one’s actions. Not to overly politicize the tale–McCann and Lee have in fact gone out of the way to avoid heavy-handed allegory here–think of it as a fairy tale version of Gore Vidal’s Imperial America: The United States of Amnesia, though the subject matter and backstory are mythically abstruse and omni-cultural, not historically specific. It’s essentially George Santayana’s proverb about ignoring and thus repeating history reified through a glass vaguely Dave McKean meets Heinz Edelmann.
DOUGLAS: I fear I’m going to have to disagree with you on a few counts on Return of the Dapper Men, Matt. Not the part about how it’s a lovely object, which it is–the cloth spine, the gold embossing, the non-standard dimensions, the little trademark sign next to the title (okay, not that last one). Not the part about how eye-catching Janet Lee’s art technique is, either: I really like its color textures, and especially the bits of Winsor McCay and Art Nouveau that sneak into the design. A lot of her actual character designs seem underdeveloped–partway to something interesting, not all the way there. Still, there are some gorgeous individual pages; the one with the organic and robotic birds fanning their wings out, surrounded by a wreath of flowers and four vintage gears, is just ridiculously pretty.
The story itself, though, left me entirely cold. There’s a bit in the middle where something is described as “a massive symbol whose meaning was long lost”; nearly everything and everyone in this book seems to be laden with symbolic weight to the point where it doesn’t have room for literal meaning. And a lot of McCann’s symbol-systems seem either obvious or entirely private, tangled in third-generation Neil Gaimanisms and pseudoprofundities. I don’t think I can give the book credit for being a riposte to Proust–its argument doesn’t seem coherent enough for that. Its characters are glyphs, its plot has to be nudged along at every turn, its worldbuilding is a bunch of details that don’t turn into a sense of place. As an excuse for Lee to do her thing, it’s fantastic–the McCay-ish spectacles (like the arrival of the Dapper Men in their identical pinstripe suits and green bowler hats) are delicious. But there’s never a moment where what happens next seems to matter.
(More on TIME.com: The Comic Book Club: Captain America and Batroc, FF, and Stumptown)
(Also, Return of the Dapper Men gets an extra demerit for the back-cover blurb from Tim Gunn. I understand that one wants to have a nice positive quote for a blurb, but calling this book “a transformational experience, a morality tale that is certain to become an instant contemporary classic” clears the top by a few miles.)
MATT: I’d argue in polite dissent that while I enjoyed it more than you, Douglas, I suspect that’s in part because I didn’t read Return of the Dapper Men as McCann trying to be a profound (or even pseudo-profound) subtext masquerading as an esoteric fairy tale. It’s certainly destabilizing, even mildly disturbing, though in ways Gaiman’s drier, modern-grounded fairy tales aren’t (I’m not seeing that link). And the bit about Proust and Vidal is just me grafting something that resonated in broad strokes, like drawing the Madoff scandal onto a story that riffs on Aesop’s “The Dog and His Bone.”
Stripped bare, the story’s a simple morality play by way of intentionally disjointed and ungrounding–if never quite subversive–imagery. It’s like browsing something written by Roald Dahl illustrated by Richard Scarry–strategically poignant, but only vaguely purposeful or resonant tactically. I don’t see that as explicit weakness here, though as I said above, it is simplistic. That, and I’d listen to an argument about tightening up (or expanding–you could go either way) a few of the actual story beats, some of which do feel indulgent and meaningless (I’m thinking about the Fabre villain thread, which really goes nowhere).
But yes, the introduction by Tim Gunn feels out of place, and he doesn’t help by advising we read “with Google and MerriamWebster.com” to hand. It’s not that sort of book. There’s nary a ten- (or for that matter five-, or even two-) dollar word in sight. It’s a book you read without a dictionary (or, for that matter, a semiotics encyclopedia).
DOUGLAS: I didn’t really get a chance to write about Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako when it came out last year. Originally serialized in 1972 and 1973–and published in English for the first time, in a single, hulking, 700-page volume–it’s supposedly one of the manga master’s career peaks. (There’s a ton of Tezuka out there in Japanese, and only bits and pieces have come through in English so far, most recently via Vertical’s editions of this, MW, Apollo’s Song, Ode to Kirihito, Buddha and Black Jack.) I was very pleased to see it on the Eisners nominee list, even though I feel pretty conflicted about it. The short version is that it’s both one of the best and one of the worst comics I’ve read in a long time.
The “worst” part first: the English translation of Ayako is mostly at the lower end of the decent-to-excruciating range. A lot of the major characters are supposed to be country bumpkins or simpleminded or children, and their dialogue hits that point with a giant jackhammer. I just opened the book to a page at random, and saw “Ya know, when Jiro big bro went on th’ lam ‘cuz of that incident, I went t’ th’ police.” Another page: “Why didn’t ya say so sooner, ma! Wit’ it, we can avoid all sorts o’ knotty problems, now.” Another one: “Lookee, lookee! One fly on toppee anutha, like giddy-up!” And so on. It’s tin-eared, it’s embarrassing, and it keeps bumping me right out of the story.
Which is a pity, because this is a phenomenal piece of work: smart, sharp to the point of cruelty, tightly focused but epic in the scope of its implications. I don’t want to give away too much about it, but it’s about the way the corruption of a family–which Tezuka suggests is connected to the social and political state of postwar Japan–manifests itself as poisonous sexuality, a disaster that wrecks everything around it. Frictionless storytelling? Instantly indelible character designs? A simple but incredibly evocative sense of place? Heartstopping set-pieces? It’s Tezuka: of course he can do all that. A lot of the Tezuka books that I’ve read have a very wide sentimental streak; he could really pour on the syrup and glitter. This one doesn’t escape that altogether, but it’s incredibly unsparing–especially the way its big-eyed, slender, adorable title character becomes a commentary on “cute manga girls” and indicts the way their audience is accustomed to reacting to them.
GRAEME: Your mention of Tezuka made me think of Naoki Urasawa, and his multiply-nominated 20th Century Boys series, probably because Urasawa reworked Tezuka’s Astro Boy for the absolutely wonderful Pluto. And, as much as I enjoy 20th Century Boys, I find myself wishing that there was more Tezuka to it, if that makes sense, because while Pluto was almost perfectly paced and plotted, there’s something about the most recent volumes of 20th Century Boys that are just… meandering, for want of a better word. It lacks the tension and focus of Pluto, instead opting for a plot that substitutes shock and surprise for logic more than once (the serialized nature of the original strips is very obvious from some of the chapter breaks in the US collections, and makes for choppy reading with “It can’t be! Not– YOU!” endings and letdown continuations every few pages), and, surreally considering the title, a time-jump midway through the series that takes the story outside of the 20th century altogether. I don’t know if any of you have read Death Note, but the feeling of “This story should have ended a while back, and while the twists and turns are fun, they’re also pointless” from that series is very, very present in the writing of this one.
(More on TIME.com: The Comic Book Club: Jimmy Olsen and Butcher Baker)
DOUGLAS: Oh, see, I’m going to argue with you on that one: I loved Death Note, and while I can see where it might easily have ended midway through its run (and plays rope-a-dope for a couple of volumes after the big twist), I thought the actual final couple of volumes were fantastic and really dramatically satisfying. But anyway…
GRAEME: 20th Century Boys‘ dialogue, as with your Tezuka book, Douglas, feels like it’s gone through an awkward translation more than a few times. I can never tell if it’s that jokes have been translated without much thought to whether the humor comes with it, or whether I’m missing out on some cultural staple or two, but almost every attempt at any genre other than melodrama feels horribly awkward.
But all of that said, I still enjoy the series for some reason. Maybe it’s because the twists and turns are fun, and that there’s something about the… inventiveness, perhaps, or more likely, the increasing ridiculousness and WTFness of the choices taken to keep the stories from reaching their conclusion that is weirdly compelling. It doesn’t hurt that the art is continually just stunning, with surprising Jack Davis influences to accompany the “traditional” manga stylings that you might expect from this kind of series.
EVAN: We’ve talked about Nick Spencer’s work before, but it’s all been superhero stuff. He actually made his name off of his independent work, so it’s fitting that it’s his creator-owned work that’s received the Eisner nominations.
I never read any of Spencer’s creator-owned stuff before, so I was eager to see how Morning Glories compared. What I’ve loved about Spencer’s superhero scripts is the ability to find new angles in fictional universes stuffed to the gills with fractured continuity and age-old characters. But he doesn’t have any of that to lean on in Morning Glories, and it turns out that he doesn’t need it.
(More on TIME.com: Weekly Comics Column: “Morning Glories,” Types and Archetypes)
You don’t get a whole lot of forward plot movement in the first trade of Morning Glories. Readers get the basic cast introductions and enough information that gears are turning in this world. Other than that, it’s one long tease, and if it weren’t so damn fun, no one in their right mind would hang on to wait these plot threads. The key to hooking the readers, though, is by giving them characters so pleasurable that you want to see where they wind up. The other part of what makes Morning Glories work for me is that it’s so clearly a riff on a certain kind of genre, that kind of high-school skullduggery most recently popularized in the Gossip Girl books and TV show. It’s also a weird inverted mash-up of the X-Men “gifted children” premise with prison break and heist elements.
Speaking of genre ingredients, even someone like me who didn’t watch the show can see MG is a post-Lost book, and Spencer plays into that, to the point of referencing it in the dialogue. There are unexplained fantastical elements, unexplained time-shifting, unexplained mystery characters and unexplained relationships. Still, you’re given enough breadcrumbs to think that there is an underlying logic to it all. All you have to do is hang on, like those poor kids in Morning Glory Academy.
(More on TIME.com: The Comic Book Club: Xombi and Fear Itself: Book of the Skull)