Not By Manga Alone: Night in Tunisia

Welcome to another installment of Not By Manga Alone! This month, David tackles Craig Thompson’s latest effort, Habibi; Michelle looks at Laddertop, a new sci-fi series from Seven Seas; Sean continues his exploration of the Kliban canon with Whack Your Porcupine and Other Drawings; and I review Americus, a graphic novel for teens.

Americus | Story by M.K. Reed, Art by Jonathan Hill | First Second – Part jeremiad, part coming-of-age story, Americus tells the story of ninth grader Neal Barton. Neal and his best friend Danny are obsessed with The Chronicles of Apathea Ravenchilde, a popular fantasy-adventure series in a Harry Potter/Game of Thrones mold. When Danny’s mother, a devout Christian, discovers her son reading about a “witch” (her characterization of Apathea), she dispatches Danny to military school and mounts a campaign to have the Chronicles removed from the local library. Bereft of his only friend, and facing the loss of his favorite books, Neal reluctantly takes up the anti-censorship cause.

Americus is at its best when Neal is sitting in shop class, running the cafeteria gauntlet, or interacting with his single mom. The dialogue crackles with truth and humor, while the illustrations deftly capture Neal’s physical and emotional awkwardness. In one of the best scenes of the book, for example, Neal and Danny say goodbye, their clipped sentences and stiff body language hinting at their mutual inability to say what they’re really feeling about their impending separation.

Where the book falters is in its depiction of the anti-Apathea crusaders. Like Bryce Dallas Howard’s character in The Help, Danny’s mother is painted in such broad, ugly strokes that her primary function is to make the reader feel better about her own beliefs. The problem with a character like Danny’s mother, however, is that perfectly good people can do perfectly awful things, especially when they’re trying to protect their children from harm. By reducing Dan’s mother to a howling grotesque, M.K. Reed allows the reader to choose the “right” side of the debate without asking the reader to consider whether censorship is ever justified: what if Dan’s mother had objected to Tintin in the Congo? Or American Psycho? Or Mein Kampf?

Now that’s a book I’d like to read. -Katherine Dacey

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Habibi | By Craig Thompson | Pantheon - Reading Habibi, it’s hard not to be reminded of the work of Osamu Tezuka – the naïve character designs in service of a very mature story, the often breathtaking page compositions, the sheer ambition of the narrative. Of course, Thompson doesn’t share only Tezuka’s strengths. There’s the shared tendency to preach and a habit of unintentionally trivializing the characters they’re trying to uplift by playing up the reasons they’re marginalized and overplaying their subsequent suffering. (Least consequential, but still worth mentioning, is that Habibi is a brick of a book. Anyone familiar with balancing MW or Ode to Kirihito on their chest will find their muscle memory triggered.)

Habibi is about a nine-year-old girl who’s sold into marriage by her destitute parents. After her husband’s unexpected demise, she’s set to be sold into slavery, but she manages to escape and take a three-year-old boy with her. They live in relative peace on an abandoned ship in the desert until the boy, called Zan, realizes that the young woman, Dodola, is selling herself to passing caravans to keep them fed. There’s also the matter of Zan’s emerging sexual maturity to create tension between the two. They’re separated, each cast into a different kind of despair and enslavement, facing respective worlds of ridiculous wealth and cruelty and of want and decay.

Thompson folds religious lore and ancient legend into their narratives with a great deal of skill, and he tends to keep his cast recognizably human as he does so. He’s less successful with an environmental message that emerges in the course of the book’s 650ish pages, which also features a jarring transition from folklore-like settings to contemporary dystopia. The messages – about racism, misogyny, human greed, and so on – are all well intentioned, but they reach a point that they all but bury the characters and their plights.

Habibi is almost unfailingly gorgeous, with the exception of a longish section that’s nothing but narration. It’s that sequence that highlights the real distinction between Tezuka and Thompson – Tezuka was as much an entertainer as he was a polemicist, and his scripts had as much energy as his illustrations. That’s not yet the case with Thompson, who’s not quite up to managing his multiple threads of plot and theme or to reigning in his tendency to overwrite. - David Welsh

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Laddertop, Vol. 1 | Story by Orson Scott Card & Emily Janice Card (with Zina Margaret Card), Art by Honoel A. Ibardolaza | Seven Seas - Sometimes I have a problem with kneejerk reactions. When I read the blurb describing Laddertop as “an original science fiction manga by the bestselling author of Ender’s Game and his daughter,” my first response was, “Grr, this isn’t manga!” Somehow, this lead me to expect a story that would be derivative and lightweight, but Laddertop turned out to be much better than I anticipated. (But it still isn’t manga.)

Twenty-five years ago, aliens visited Earth. Without emerging from their vessel, they shared the technology of a highly advanced civilization, and gifted humankind with four immense ladders, each one terminating in a space station that helps provide power for the entire Earth. Though many adults work on these stations, children are ideally suited for some of the maintenance work. Competition is fierce to enter Laddertop Academy, and the story follow two girls who have just been admitted.

Tomboy Azure Miles is a natural-born leader and can’t wait to go into space. Her more timid friend Robbi Holten is less enthusiastic, and is troubled by weird things that start happening to her at the academy, like when a mechanical insect tattoos some strange symbols on her arm. After training, culminating in an alien-designed process to judge the recruits’ “compatibility,” Robbi is whisked off to Laddertop itself.

There are quite a few nifty sci-fi trappings in this volume, but what impresses me most is the buildup of foreboding. The aliens give me a distinct Bokurano: Ours vibe, which can never be good, and several of the adults in charge of recruitment are troubled by what, exactly, it means to be “compatible.” Do the aliens want these kids for some unstated purpose? Ominous!

The art is pretty unappealing—characters sometimes look dumpy, and their facial expressions can only be described as “unsubtle”—and some of the humor is just too dumb for me, but if the story can maintain this level of creepy, it could turn out to be a keeper. - Michelle Smith

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Whack Your Porcupine And Other Drawings | By B. Kliban | Workman Publishing – I think this is the volume where Kliban finally settled down and started really trying to be funny. Not in a workmanlike, Jim Davis sort of way — trust me, these cartoons are still incredibly weird — but in the sense that there’s a lot less ‘pictures from my sketchbook’ here, and only one or two pieces that aren’t actually meant to be funny. There’s also some experimentation — the wordplay that was used more often in the last book explodes here, with a ton of cartoons either taking words and expressions and visualizing them humorously; taking a bad pun and trying to make it worse by the art; or twisting a term to turn it into a bad pun by the art. It’s fun to watch, and these cartoons are genuinely clever. A few even had me staring for a good ten seconds before I understood the gag. Though once I understood, it was usually one of the filthy ones.

That’s the other thing about this collection. Kliban seems to be enjoying the freedom that writing for Playboy has given him, and these cartoons are far more explicit than the first two books. A lot more — this book is pretty much rated R. They’re not meant to be erotic or arousing — though try telling that to my 12-year-old self when I read ‘Gloria Has A Visible Organism’ — and as always, Kliban is not interested in the handsome and beautiful but the strange and caricaturable. As with the previous books, the art can be cynical at times — ‘Industrialist’ in particular made me laugh knowingly once I got the cartoon — but Kliban can also poke fun at himself at the same time, as the final cartoon of the collection shows. Possibly best of all is a collection of 22 cartoons all based around one man, The Turk, and his strange and varied adventures in what is presumably Istanbul. Kliban notes that the cartoons came all at a specific period, and vanished just as quickly. They’re also dialogue and captionless, so are a great way to focus on his art — more realistic here — and his very, very odd sense of humor. — Sean Gaffney

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