Not By Manga Alone, July 2011

Welcome to Not By Manga Alone, a new feature exploring the greater world of sequential art! Our goal is to highlight a variety of comics that we think might be of interest to our fellow manga-lovers. Joining me for the inaugural column are Sean Gaffney, Michelle Smith, and David Welsh. Among the titles we’ll be reviewing are Cat (Workman Press), Farm 54 (Fanfare/Ponent Mon), and Will Superheroes Be on the Final? (Del Rey). Which ones are worth buying, and which ones are worth skipping? Read on for details.

Astronaut Academy: Zero Gravity | By Dave Roman | First Second – I don’t know if Airplane! was a formative influence on Dave Roman, but his scripts have the same delightful, deadpan quality as this 1980 film; one could almost imagine Leslie Nielsen or Peter Graves delivering Astronaut Academy‘s best lines. (Sample: “She was always mean in ways that felt meaningful… or at least meant something to me.”)

The academy of the title is a high school whose motto is “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Fire.” Newcomer Hakata Soy plays straight man to a cast of eccentrics that includes Maribelle Mellonbelly, the self-proclaimed “richest and prettiest girl in all of Astronaut Academy”; Doug Hiro, a dreamy figure who only wears space suits; Tak Offsky, a jock who likes to play with fire; and Miyumi San, a grumpy outsider whose efforts to embarrass Maribelle usually backfire. Though there’s a faint whiff of a plot — an evil robot plots to kill Hakata — Astronaut Academy is really just an entertaining collection of set-pieces that poke fun at sci-fi and YA novel cliches. Roman’s witty, chatty script is nicely complemented by his deceptively simple artwork; for an artist whose faces are little more than two circles and a mouth, Roman achieves astonishing variety in his character designs, populating his story with over a dozen smartly drawn teens, each with a hairdo and an outfit to match their personalities.

Perhaps the best way to summarize Astronaut Academy‘s appeal is to quote a line from Roger Ebert’s review of another Leslie Nielsen film, Naked Gun 33 1/3: “You laugh, and then you laugh at yourself for laughing.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. – Katherine Dacey

Cat | By B. Kliban | Workman Publishing - Most people are familiar with Kliban’s Cat art, even if they don’t know they are. His eccentric, cute but not QUITE cute drawings of cats are a household name now with calendars, postcards, mugs, greeting cards, etc. Unfortunately, lately that seems it’s ALL Kliban is known for, as most of his books (including Cat, in both editions) are out of print, including the six or seven books collected after Cat, which feature a wider (and stranger) variety of subjects. It all began here, though. Kliban had been doing cartoons for Playboy since 1962 (a lucrative market, second only to The New Yorker for one-panel cartoon prestige), and one day a Playboy editor noticed his cat drawings. He felt they should be collected into a book, which they were, and the book took off.

As for the content, it manages to be as widely varied as it can be considering that all the cartoons are about cats. Kliban’s cats are not attractive and adorable — certainly they don’t scream ‘marketing!’ like Garfield does today — but they’re very real, giving the impression of an artist who has spent years watching their behavior. The humans who appear in the book are as eccentric as their pets, with Kliban’s art sparing nothing in depicting their vanity and cruelness, as well as occasionally their sheer bafflement at the animal. Sometimes the cartoons are non-sequiturs of the highest caliber. Nosechair Cat comes to mind as making you wonder what state of mind Kliban existed in. But sometimes they are indeed cats just doing cute, if weird things, such as the cats leaping like fish. And throughout the book, we get cats sometimes just lying there. No joke, just well-drawn art of a large cat (most of Kliban’s cats are huge) at rest. It’s a book for the adult cartoon collector (there are one or two shots of nude men and women in here, though not nearly as many as his other books), and despite overshadowing the rest of his work, it makes a great introduction to the B. Kliban experience, as well as seeing how the artist influenced those such as Art Spiegelman, Gary Larson and J.C. Duffy. — Sean Gaffney

Farm 54 | By Galit and Gilad Seliktar | Fanfare/Ponent Mon – While Fanfare/Ponent Mon has become best known as the house that Jiro Taniguchi built, the publisher’s interests are undeniably more eclectic. The latest example of this expansive bent is this collection of three short stories by Galit Seliktar graphically adapted by her brother, Gilad. The stories capture and fictionalize moments from their childhood in rural Israel. Galit has given those moments an unsettling grimness, which is reflected in Gilad’s illustrations.

The telling of these stories is more focused on evocation of mood than relation of events, which works very well in the context of the intense, adolescent emotions that serve as the pieces’ crux. “The Substitute Lifeguard” juxtaposes a profoundly awkward romantic encounter with an unexpected tragedy, and it’s hard to tell which element struck the Seliktars most deeply. “Spanish Perfume” walks roughly the same path, featuring a group of teen-agers balancing their visceral inclinations with what’s definitely an unpleasant and should be a devastating task. “Houses” features its own contradictions, blending early-adult narcissism into a frankly ugly cultural touchstone.

In short, Galit Seliktar doesn’t give her characters (including herself) a pass on their self-involvement in moments of trial, though she doesn’t condemn them for it either. Gilad’s feathery pencils and bits of spot color serve the material very well, shifting between urgency and abstraction. I can’t say this is my first choice of tone or approach for graphic novels, but it’s an intriguing example of how the medium can be used. – David Welsh

Little Nothings: Uneasy Happiness | By Lewis Trondheim | NBM/ComicsList - For all of its pitfalls, Facebook has spared humanity at least one thing: the enforced viewing of other people’s vacation photos. Now, people just post them in an album, and you can pretend you looked at them and basked vicariously in their adventures without moment-by-moment narration. To be honest, that experience wasn’t always unpleasant, and I’m glad a vestige of it still exists in the form of Trondheim’s snappy autobiographical comics. There are few people I’d rather take an after-the-fact tag-along with to the French Alps or Fiji than Trondheim’s grumpy, self-deprecating avatar.

This third collection isn’t as consistently entertaining as the previous two, but it has plenty of highlights that come mostly in the form of Trondheim finding the exact sweet spot between self-aggrandizement and self-mockery. (A quick litany of the mundane tasks that he managed to accomplish in a couple of hours, followed by a near-super-heroic self-assessment, is as fleetingly funny and identifiable as you’d expect.) His visual approach, watercolor over sketches, is always a treat to the eye, whether he’s warily tromping through the tropics or just hanging out in his house. These comics have all of the strengths of a particularly well-observed, somewhat cranky comic strip with the added bonus of some serious artistic ambition. –David Welsh

Will Supervillains Be on the Final? | By Naomi Novik and Yishan Li | Del Rey | Liberty Vocational is the college of choice for power-endowed young people looking to master their abilities “for the good of humankind” through courses like rescue, superhero ethics, and costume design. Our heroine, sixteen-year-old Leah Taymore, is an atom manipulator so powerful that she has been granted early admission. Unfortunately for Leah, the son of a famous supervillain is one of her classmates, and he’s under orders from his father to sabotage Leah “for the greater good.”

What follows are some tedious scenes in which Leah comes off looking like an idiot mostly (but not entirely) because of this guy’s efforts. She’s teetering on the verge of expulsion when a nearby river suddenly starts to rise. Conveniently, Leah gets left alone to oversee the sandbag preparations with strict instructions not to use her powers, but the surging river threatens some evacuees, forcing Leah to risk the dean’s wrath to save the day.

If all of this sounds insipid, that’s because it kind of is. Maybe I’ve just run out of patience for ditzy yet powerful heroines, but there’s something characters like Sailor Moon have that Leah lacks. Genuine charm, perhaps? In any case, the characters are about as interesting as cardboard, as are Yishan Li’s illustrations. Also, be prepared for a lot of visual monotony. It seems that the only option left when Li visited the Screentone Emporium was the “Lotsa Dots Assortment,” because man, there are a lot of dots. — Michelle Smith

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