Graphic Novel Review: "Trashed" by Derf

(Originally written for JoeBobBriggs.com)

"Trashed" is the true story of the year the author spent working on a garbage truck for minimum wage. At the time, Derf was trying to decide where his life was going after he dropped out of art school. His new job came complete with road kill, abusive bosses, white-trash neighbors, attack dogs and maggots, to mention just a few of the highlights.

And you thought you had it bad.

Derf goes into graphic detail about the life of the garbage man, and it’s both eye-opening and flat out disgusting. The heat, the mess, the smell, the slime -- you'll feel dirty just reading this book.

And yet it's funny as hell. It's slapstick, gross-out humor, full of people falling in garbage and garbage falling on people, but the timing of the gags is impeccable, and you can’t help but laugh while you squirm.

Derf's art style (which you may have seen in his syndicated comic strip, "The City") complements the story perfectly. His chaotic line work fills every inch of the frame with garbage. His characters are all extreme caricatures of emotional faces. It’s hyper-cartoonish, making things both more iconic and real to the reader despite its exaggeration.

It's unfair to completely characterize this book as just a gross-out. For one thing, I came away with a real respect for the men carting our waste around for us. This is a tough job, and I vowed never to over-stuff a garbage bag again after reading this book.

For another thing, "Trashed," at its heart, is really a coming of age story. Derf spent a terrible year on the back of a garbage truck, but he looks back at much of it with affection despite the hardships. In the beginning of the book, we meet a young man who sees himself as a loser. But when he’s quitting the job to go back to college at the end of the book, he watches his old garbage truck drive away and feels no shame: "In some perverse way," he says, "I'm indebted to that damn thing. I was such a clueless toad when I first climbed on the back...head firmly lodged up my ass...Trash...I hate to admit...made a man out of me!" He's gained direction in his life, and learned how to handle himself.

Of course, he then goes out and gets drunk, and mutters "No more trash" before throwing up on his shoes and passing out.

One more mess for good measure.

Three and a half stars.

Review: "Kolchak the Night Stalker"

(Originally published at JoeBobBriggs.com)

"Kolchak : The Night Stalker" by Jeff Rice, art Gordon Purcell and Terry Pallot

Jeff Rice, creator of the “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” TV movies and series of the 1970s has returned to the character, adapting both his original novel and the first movie’s teleplay into a new graphic novel from Moonstone Books.

If you’ve seen the original “Night Stalker” movie, then you pretty much know the plot of this book: Carl Kolchak, reporter for the Las Vegas Daily News, investigates a series of killings where young women have been drained of their blood. He suspects a vampire did the dirty deeds, and while he’s ultimately proven to be right, Las Vegas city officials cover it all up, and his paper won’t print the story.

There are a few significant differences between this book and the movie, though. The killings and their details differ, there are some interesting “new” characters, and Kolchak’s girlfriend is quite clearly a hooker, something the producers of the 1972 movie left vague.

The graphic novel’s greatest strength is in Kolchak’s voice: Jeff Rice knows this character well, and the cadence of the newsman’s narration moves the story along as a brisk, crisp pace. Rice doesn’t do quite as well with many of the other characters, whose voices can seem wooden and lacking in personality. The pacing is sometimes off, and the transitions between a few scenes are awkward and rushed, if not just plain unclear.

Penciller Gordon Purcell and inker Terry Pallot do a serviceable job on the art. They capture series actor Darren McGavin’s features quite well as Kolchak, but his body shape seems to vary with every panel -- sometimes he’s fat, sometimes he’s lean. The art is loose, and characters often seem to lack the weight to anchor them in their surroundings. Some details are out of perspective.

The book would have benefited from an extra 20 pages. It’s too short as it is, with not enough time early on to develop the Kolchak character for the new reader, and a conclusion that is rushed and lacking in impact.

It also would have benefited from some decent editing. This book can’t decide what year it’s set in. Sometimes, it seems as if it’s set in the movie’s 1972, with Nixon-era dialogue lifted straight from the source material. Then there are characters using cordless phones and a reference to the newspaper’s website, which make the graphic novel seem like it takes place today. But then the villain, born in 1900, is described as being “over 90 years old,” placing the story in the Nineties. Someone needed to make a decision and stick with it.

Ultimately, this is a decent effort, but not quite as good as it could have been with more space and more focus.

Two stars.

Moonstone Books, 2002, $6.50

Graphic Novel Review: "Essential Howard the Duck"

The Essential Howard The Duck by Steve Gerber, art by Gene Colan, Frank Brunner, et al.

When Steve Gerber created the character of Howard the Duck in the seventies, it was as a throw-away character in a horror comic he was writing at the time. But Howard--a walking, talking, cigar-smoking, sarcastic duck, ripped from his own dimension and transplanted to an Earth full of "hairless apes" instead of his native fowl--proved to be so popular that he graduated to his own series, most of which is reprinted in this collection. (Much later, Howard made an ill-conceived jump to film, in one of the biggest box-office bombs in history.)

While Howard's first appearances had him fighting characters like a vampire cow and a turnip from outer space, the comic quickly became a venue for Gerber's acerbic commentary, and Howard just as quickly became Gerber's alter-ego, a smart-ass duck "trapped in a world he never made." Okay, sure, the book stars a talking duck, but this is some sharp, angry, sacred-cow-ripping satire. The comic takes on everything from religion to the oil industry, from mental health to moral censorship. Howard runs for President in 1976, and Gerber's commentary seems like it's about Bush-Gore instead of 25 years ago. He even gets away with more then than he could have today: somehow a modern story about a Presidential candidate (albeit a duck) running from assassins doesn't seem like it would make it in the politically correct 21st Century. With that exception, the topics seem just as relevant now as they were in the seventies (although Howard's human companion, Beverly Switzler, sometimes seems the product of a less enlightened time).

Most of this collection is drawn by the excellent Gene Colan, whose sweeping and fluid line art is probably best known from his other seventies title, "The Tomb of Dracula." While several other artists also contributed to the book, it's the Gerber-Colan team that really brings Howard to life. Howard's a duck, but he's a real person, pushed to the point of nervous breakdown by a world he does not understand.

Gerber left the "Howard the Duck" comic after 27 issues, in a legal dispute with Marvel Comics over the ownership of the character. This book collects Gerber's entire run on the character (with the exception of a newspaper comic strip that ran at the same time), over 500 pages of hilarious, ahead-of-its time satire, reprinted in affordable black and white. Unfortunately, as much as Gerber's wit and intelligence make this an easy book to recommend, the circumstances of his departure make a recommendation harder. He left with many, many plot threads unresolved, and this collection simply ends with the characters' lives up in the air and no hint of what was to come next. If there is ever an "Essential Howard the Duck, Volume 2," it would reprint non-Gerber work, and maybe we would find out what happened to the characters, but that doesn't help us now. After reading 500 pages, Howard is a real character whose travails in a very difficult world demand some closure, and the reader deserves a conclusion, but this book simply ends with a "next issue" blurb and we have no idea what really does come next.

Today, 20-some-odd years later, Gerber himself is working on a new "HTD" series for Marvel after resolving some of his differences, but he has said that any "Howard" story he did not write is not his Howard the Duck (case in point, the misguided movie version, which starred a duck named Howard, but not the "real" Howard the Duck). It's a testament to the writer that we care about Howard so much by the end of this book, but still, a conclusion would have been nice.

Two and a half stars.

Stormy Weather

(Originally published in 2000, but I've lost track of who published it.)

When I was a young boy, living in Buffalo, NY, a late-night storm ripped the window right out of my bedroom wall. I was directly underneath the window at the time.

Sitting through last October’s Hurricane Floyd, I couldn’t help but remember that night from so many years ago. I was in bed, the only one awake in the house, listening to the wind whistle through my window, and shivering in the cold. Finally, trying to get warm, I lifted my legs up to my chest, and put my arms around my knees. As my hands touched, the window above my bed exploded inward. Glass shattered and flew through the air, and the heavy wooden frame of the window smashed down onto the mattress where my legs had been just a second before.

The window frame probably weighed as much as I did, if not more. It hit the mattress, sending me bouncing back up into the air. I really don’t know how I managed to stay on the bed when I landed. All I do remember is staring down at the floor from the edge of the mattress, at a thousand shards of glass winking back up at me, and feeling too detached from the entire event to realize that I should have been terrified.

Meanwhile, the storm made itself at home in my bedroom. Sheets of rain poured in through the ruined window, and an angry wind whipped through the room and slammed my bedroom door shut.

It was an old house. The door was warped. I had never been able to shut it on my own.

The wind actually closed that door. And also managed to lock it.

I’m going to go on the record and say that I’m pretty sure that I never screamed. The slamming door woke my parents, and my father was able to unlock the door from the other side with a screwdriver. It seemed like it took him forever. Finally, he opened the door, put on some thick shoes, and walked in to carry me back out.

I’m writing this the day after Floyd hit New Jersey. Last night, I sat in my living room, in another old house, with the wind whistling through the windows, and the old wood rattling in the rain. Twenty-some-odd years ago, I should have been terrified. Last night, I finally was.

And I sat there for three hours anyway, the lights turned up high, my legs wrapped in a comforter, and a book in my hands. I didn’t want to be there, but at the same time, it was the best seat in the house. I was warm, I was reading a good book, and even though the windows made me very, very nervous, I was safe.

There’s no shame in being afraid to die, only in being afraid to live.

What scared you today? Go write about it. Live a little.

Graphic Novel Review: "Golem's Mighty Swing" by James Sturm

(Originally written for JoeBobBriggs.com)

The Golem's Mighty Swing

It's the 1920s, and a barnstorming Jewish baseball team called the Stars of David is traveling from state to state, playing games with local teams and barely making it out of town with their winnings and their skins intact.

Team manager and third baseman Noah Strauss, the aging "Zion Lion," holds together a tired, rag-tag team, including his hot-headed little brother, Moishe. It's Noah's job to keep the team going through an exhausting schedule -- as the book opens, the team is playing its twentieth game in 14 days -- and to make sure they get paid. It's not always that easy. When their ancient bus breaks down one day, the team finds themselves stuck in a town where they can't pay for hotel rooms. And if they don't move on, they will miss several more well-paying games they can't afford not to play.

Enter an unscrupulous baseball promoter. He wants to make the Stars of David into a star attraction. His idea: create a Golem to stir up the crowds and increase ticket sales.

The Golem is a creature out of Jewish legend, a man made out of mud and dirt to "be a companion, a protector or a servant," says Fishkin, one of the more religious members of the team. "To give a golem life," he says, "esoteric rituals are performed, ancient incantations spoken. Only a kabbalist who has studied for ages possesses such knowledge." Not looking to perform real magic, the Stars instead get one of their team-mates, an ex-Negro League player named Henry (playing on their team as a member of the "lost tribe"), to don a costume and act the part of the Golem.

It works. But it doesn't last.

The book is a vivid portrait of racism in the early 20th Century. The abuse suffered by the Jewish team members at the hands of the local townsfolk is frightening, and the tales of Henry's days in early black teams are positively chilling. And to top it all off, I've never seen a baseball game as dramatic and full of tension as the games in this book.

Sturm tells a compelling story filled with wonderful characters. He uses a bold, simple stroke both with his words and with his artwork in this graphic novel. He effectively uses a slightly cartoony art style to tell a very serious story. It's not to be missed.

Four stars

Writers: Shut the Hell Up

(Originally published in 2000 -- long before the explosion of the blog, MySpace, YouTube, etc., etc., etc.)

Message boards and e-mail groups for writers should be a great resource. Information sharing, markets, self-promotion, a chance to talk about writing, right?

Wrong. Let’s face it, the average message board is just a chance for people to gripe, snipe, attack, gossip, and generally act like high-schoolers all over again.

So stop it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: as writers, you are professionals, and you should behave as such. That means no gossip, no insults, no attacks, no hiding behind pseudonyms or funny names. That means you deal with people fairly, and then you shut the hell up.

Every time you explode on a message board and blister someone who’s offended you, or get in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out verbal war, it’s out there for everyone to see. Forever. No matter how justified you think you are, you are really just presenting yourself as an angry egomaniac. What editor would want to work with someone like that? What reader would want to read your work? You’re just damaging yourself, and you’re doing it permanently, because those messages are never going away.

Just like high school, it’s your permanent record.

So come on, let’s use those boards and e-mail groups for information and for helping each other out. Take all of the rest of that anger and energy and put it into your writing. That’s what we’re all here for after all, right?

Right?

Dem's de Breaks

(Originally published in Jobs in Hell, July 2000)

When do you take a break in your writing? No, no, not what time do you get up for a drink of water, when do you break from one paragraph to another?

In reading entries for a recent short story contest, I saw paragraphs that would go on and on and on and on (and on), often for pages at a time. Ouch!

There are a few rules for knowing when to break from one paragraph to the next. Now, fiction does not have to follow the most formal of rules for writing. You can structure your words for greater effect, but if you think about these while you’re writing, it will help you to keep the flow going.

Break into another paragraph whenever you:

• have another character speak
• switch settings
• establish a new idea
• want the reader to pause
• change the pace of the story
• make a revelation
• switch point-of-view
• change emotional tone
• feel like it

In non-fiction, paragraph structure usually follows the path of an idea: theory, supporting details, conclusion. The next paragraph would then chart the next idea. Not a bad thing to keep in mind.