Like most modern comics readers, I have a bookcase full of trade paperbacks. This is one of a series looking at what's on my shelf--and, therefore, what should or should not be on yours.
I am, shocking no one, organized in my shelving. First comes all the works primarily recognizable by their creators, alphabetized by first listed creator, and within a creator, generally in chronological publishing order.
If a work is more likely recognizable by its character, such as Superman or Batman, it goes in a later section.
We start before the beginning, actually, because stacked on top of my bookcase, because I ran out of room for it on the shelves, is the 22 volume set of Eagle, by Kaui Kawaguchi, published in America by Viz. This is a manga series about a fictionalized American Presidential election in 2000. (Viz, of course, had no idea that their version would be less fictionalized than the actual thing, but that's a different rant.)
Eagle is the story of a Japanese-American's campaign for the White House, and the man who observes the process, a Japanese reporter who's secretly the candidate's illegitimate son. The candidate is a Senator, a football player, a war hero, rich, and married to a white woman, which, were he real, might actually overcome his race. We almost voted for Colin Powell, after all.
It's good. There's a lot it gets flat-out wrong--less than I'd get wrong trying to write about Japanese national elections--but there's a lot that it gets right, and it's an interesting outsider's look at the process. The story's often a bit histrionic, which probably mostly arises in manga convention. While I don't regret buying it, I'd probably hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wasn't a political wonk. And you're going to have to take the errors as additional evidence of the outsider's perspective, rather than errors.
First thing on the shelf, there's the collected works of Kyle Baker: The Cowboy Wally Show, Why I Hate Saturn, You Are Here, I Die at Midnight, King David, Undercover Genie, and Cartoonist. Kyle Baker is damn funny, although nothing since quite reaches the peak of Cowboy Wally. I also prefer his pen and ink work, whether black or white, to his directly-in-color work. Why I Hate Saturn is kinda tied to the late 80s; if you can place yourself in that time, go there. (OTOH, I didn't like Seinfeld, and WIHS might be Seinfeldian.) Definitely get Cowboy Wally, and proceed through the rest as you will.
After that, there are a few Desert Peach volumes by Donna Barr. This is the story of Erwin Rommel's fictitious gay younger brother in the German North Africa Corps in World War II. Some of it is damn funny. Some of it deals with the awful evil of WWII; it's effective, but I don't particularly want to read that. Barr's art is highly stylized and she's an excellent letterer.
Then comes the Kurt Busiek section. First, there's A Wizard's Tale, with David Wenzel. This resurrected Eclipse project published by Homage is a beautiful, but reasonably obvious fairy tale. Entertaining, good for the kids, but not too fillling. Next, there's the superhero title The Liberty Project, with James Fry. This is another Eclipse book (collected by Nat Gertler's About Comics into a nice volume). It's an entertaining but not exceptional story about a group of superpowered juvenile delinquents who get a chance to go straight.
Then there's Astro City, with Brent Anderson. I have all the collections in hardcover, except Confession. If you don't know Astro City, and you read superheroes, you need to pick up Life in the Big City immediately. Astro City was the herald at the forefront of the post-deconstruction superhero revival, along with books like Morrison's JLA and Moore's Supreme that led to superhero comics no longer necessarily having to suck. I tend to prefer the single-issue stories to Busiek's multi-part stories, but it's all good, and you couldn't ask for better post-Adams superhero art than Brent Anderson.
Next up: More than two letters of the alphabet.
Posted by Greg at May 5, 2004 11:27 AM