Joe Gordon writes to tell me about this review of a new graphic novel by a Finnish cartoonist. Amanda Vähämäki’s The Bun Field sounds to be more like Shaun Tan than like Watchmen, but that’s OK by me. Anything that is described as being inspired by “the old, dark woods of fairy tale” is worth a look. (And it appears to be written in English.)
Comics
Wheeler on Coraline Variants
Andrew Wheeler has a blog post up reviewing a number of graphic novels, including the Coraline adaptation. He has some interesting points to make about how different mediums work:
That’s the great gulf between a novel and a movie, of course: a movie can only show what’s happening on the outside, though it can hint and imply mental states, while a novel can dive right into a stream of consciousness and make the reader know exactly why a character did something. Graphic novels, at their best, hybridize the two forms — they can’t be quite as visually exciting as movies, since they don’t move, but they can come very close. And they can show the inner life of a character just as fully and in as much detail as a novel can.
This is good stuff, but it’s actually a bit more complex than that. During the post-gig party in Dublin Neil was talking about Coraline, and about his discussions with Neil Jordan over The Graveyard Book. He made the point that when he creates something scary in a novel he can often leave much of its nature up to the imagination of the reader. He just has to hint at something awful being there. In a movie, however, the monster has to appear, if only partially, at some point. That’s a problem that a skilled director has to worry about.
It is also a more general problem. I remember, for example, people saying how disappointed they were when the Cloverfield monster finally put in an appearance. I wonder how one could ever film that non-Euclidian geometry that drives men crazy, or how one might go about filming House of Leaves. Prose, comics and movies are all different mediums, and in translating between them you have to make changes.
I am sure this will be lost on many of the people who write about Watchmen over the next few weeks.
California Blues
I have just learned that David Hedison will be at Wondercon this year. Of course it is silly to want to meet someone that you had a crush on 40+ years ago, but there you go. Cool things are happening, and I can’t be part of them.
Loving the Onion
Another classic piece of investigative journalism from my favorite newspaper. This, in which President Obama is appalled that members of his cabinet fail to recognize references from classics of world literature. Take a bow, Roy Thomas.
Scarily I’ve already seen one blog post apparently taking this seriously.
Graphic Story Suggestion
Attention Doctor Who fans. Our Mr. Cornell doesn’t have an episode for Hugo consideration this year as far as I know, but if you’d like to get him on the ballot this year you could always consider the Graphic Story category because he has produced one or two. My recommendation would be that you check out Captain Britain and MI13: Secret Invasion. This comprises the first four issues of Paul’s CapB revival, and because it is tied into the Secret Invasion storyline it is now also available as a single graphic novel. All four issues have 2008 cover dates (though comments here suggest that the collection won’t be out in the US until March – boo!).
The overall plot of the skrull invasion of Earth is pretty silly superhero stuff, but Paul does a good job of making something interesting of it. He also gets to launch a brand new British superhero group that includes Black Knight, Pete Wisdom and Spitfire along with the revived Brian Braddock. The storyline also features John from the skrull Beatles, a guest appearance by Gordon Brown, and the introduction of a wonderful new character Faiza Hussein – the comic world’s first Muslim nurse superheroine. Paul apparently has a posse of young Muslim ladies advising him on the character. I just hope he manages to keep control of her, because I’m not sure that I trust Marvel to treat her with the same level of respect she’s getting from Paul.
A quick nod too for Leonard Kirk, who has done a good job with the artwork, save for an odd tendency to always look for excuses to draw Spitfire with her costume in rags. In his introduction to the graphic novel Paul praises Kirk’s ability to get the characters to “act†– because if you can tell from the art what their emotional state is then the writer’s job becomes much easier. Let’s not forget why Graphic Story is an entirely separate Hugo category and not just subsumed under the short fiction categories.
While you are in the comic shop buying this, you might want to check out the second CB-MI13 story, which has just ended with issue #9. Because, you know, every super hero comic ought to feature a battle against a Duke of Hell called Plokta.
At the end of #9 Paul suggests that he might have been reading Kim Newman, because there is a brief appearance by everyone’s favorite Transylvanian count. Issue #10 will apparently be titled “Vampire Stateâ€.
Success for Sarasvati
Heads up, Finland! Just in case you don’t follow his excellent blog, I thought I’d better pass on the word that my pal Joe Gordon has picked The Sands of Sarasvati as one of the best graphic novels of 2008. And Joe is a guy who reads an awful lot of comics and graphic novels each year, so this is high praise indeed.
Now I need to get him to read Oblivion High…
Oblivion High: Finnish Manga
The holidays are a good opportunity for me to catch up with a whole bunch of things I haven’t done because life has been so crazy in the latter half of the year. One of those things is that I have finally managed to read through the English version of Oblivion High #1.
As you may remember from my Finncon report, this is a Finnish manga, written by Johanna Koljonen and drawn by Nina von Rüdiger. The original is in Finnish, but the English translation is very well done. And so, for that matter, is the whole comic. Vol #1 is titled “Exchangeling”. Rather than me have to try to recap the plot, I’ll just quote what Nina says on her web site:
The Nix, a water spirit, finds a way to take the place of a Japanese exchange student Masato in the home and school of Soon Mi Svensson. What starts off as a lark becomes serious for the Nix when the unpopularity of Soon Mi and her friend Nin rubs off on him. After some initial humiliations, he accidentally manages to help the girls turn their social life around: get a posse to rival that of the bullies, meet boys and even get a modeling job. By the time the girls find out who Nix is, they have a whole deal to lose if he goes.
That’s the basic plot: fairy changeling helps geeky girls fight back against bullies in school (and doubtless eventually find True Love). But there’s quite a bit more too it than that. For example, Masato, the exchange student, is billeted with Mii’s family because Mii is half-Chinese. There’s racism in Mii’s unpopularity. Also Mii and Nin are fans of things Japanese, and the bullies turn this into an excuse for some homophobic taunting.
It also seems (though I have to admit that it was a long time ago for me) that Joc and Nina have their finger on the school pulse. I particularly like the section in which Nix wows all of the kids with his guitar-playing skills, until the music teacher points out that he was playing a folk song, at which point everyone decides he is totally un-cool. Of course Nix, with his fairy charm, has a natural air of ineffable cool, so this disaster doesn’t last long.
There are still bits of the story I think I may be missing nuances of, but this isn’t because of the translation, it is because manga has a whole pile of visual conventions for displaying emotion and I’m not familiar with all of them. I’m hoping Kevin can help me out with that.
The story’s web site is pretty cool too, though it is all in Finnish.
Conclusion: this is good stuff. If there is anyone out there who is publishing manga and would like something that has a bit more of a Western sensibility, and doesn’t need translating, they should be looking at Oblivion High.
Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to #2.
The girls finally realize that Masato is missing.
And that something terrible may have happened. (Those girls have wild imaginations.)
The Sands of Sarasvati
Joe Gordon has just posted a review of the graphic novel version of Risto Isomäki’s award-winning environmental SF novel, The Sands of Sarasvati. Of course I should have done the same some time ago, but I got sidetracked and forgot. Now Joe has done the job for me.
Actually I pretty much agree with what Joe says. It is very obvious in places that the narrative has been drastically pruned in order to fit it into the required number of pages. However, the quality of the story shines through. Personally I’d much rather read the novel, but it does require a very good English translation before anyone in the US or UK will pick it up, and such things are expensive. So if you want to see how good Finnish SF can be, you’ll have to just read the graphic novel. Now if only that had a US or UK distributor…
Locke & Key
I am made of FAIL when it comes to book commentary at the moment. I’m too busy to do more than snatch a chapter here and there while eating, let alone write anything coherent here. I owe you at least three book reports. But I did manage to find the time to race through a graphic novel. After all, we have a new Hugo category to think about. And this particular book was by someone whose writing I have greatly admired.
Of course Joe Hill writes horror, so any graphic novel he produces is going to be full of some pretty gruesome stuff. Locke & Key is no exception, and Gabriel Rodriguez doesn’t pull many punches. He seems particularly fond of doing nasty things to people’s eyes. But, as usual, Joe’s script is full of beautiful human touches. His principal protagonists are all kids of various ages, and he has drawn them very well. Besides, I can’t resist a book set on Lovecraft Island, and featuring a boat called the Kelly Link.
The graphic novel is a reprint of a comic series, but that series ended in 2008 so it is Hugo-eligible.
Must get to a comics shop so that I can catch up on Captain Britain.
Danger, Comics!
I very nearly passed over this Guardian article about the ongoing lawsuit regarding ownership of the rights to the Watchmen movie. After all, Hollywood people sue each other the way normal people shake hands (“Hey, good to see you buddy, here’s a law suit, no hard feelings…”). However, I was struck by the opening line:
Watchmen, the violent, bestselling graphic novel of all time…
Violent? Watchmen??? What, you mean like Sin City? Or 300? Or even Judge Dredd. Nope, I suspect this is just knee-jerk journalism at work. It is a popular comic, therefore it must be full of graphic and unnecessary violence.
Appriopriate Use of Law
I always feel a bit stupid linking to Neil Gaiman’s Journal because I’m pretty sure that everyone who reads my blog reads his as well, but today he has a very good entry and some of you may have skipped over it so I wanted to highlight it.
Continue reading
Watching Comic Creation
I didn’t put Dave Gibbons’ Watching the Watchmen up on my “currently reading” list because, to be honest, there’s not a lot of reading involved. If you are interesting in the process of comic creation, and like to be able to see how rough layouts are eventually transformed into full-fledged comic pages, then it is utterly fascinating. If that doesn’t interest you then there isn’t a lot else. However, towards the end of the book Dave does devote much of a page to a photo of one of these.
Dave says that he and Alan were delighted to win a Hugo because they always had the impression that science fiction fans looked down on comics, so they must have done something truly amazing. Besides, Hugo trophies are really useful. Dave uses his as a door stop. Alan has apparently turned his upside down and stuck it in the ground, in which configuration it makes an excellent bird table.
Ships in the Night
While Gary and I were in the university bookshop in Chicago a woman came in to sign a few books. It wasn’t a public event, though Gary recognized the guy with her as a professional driver who often takes authors around the city. The staff were clearly delighted to get to meet this person, and from snatches of conversation I got the impression that she was signing graphic novels. From her clothes and hair I guessed she was probably a lesbian. I had a suspicion as to who it might be, and a search of Google images suggests that it probably was this lady.
It is probably just as well I didn’t try to talk to her. I would have been embarrassingly fangirlish.
Risto in English
My good friends Tero and Jukka are guest-blogging at Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days this week. In one of today’s posts Tero reveals that Risto Isomäki’s novel, The Sands of Sarasvati, has been translated to an English-language graphic novel. As Tero notes, Risto is great on the SFnal big idea. He also knows his environmental science very well. I’m hoping I can get hold of a copy of this. And someone should get a copy to Joe Gordon a.s.a.p..
Going Under
There is little doubt that Justina is walking a fine line with the Quantum Gravity series. The idea is that it should be a lot of fun and appeal to people who want nothing more than that from a book, but at the same time Justina can’t stop writing like Justina. There were times in Going Under that I was worried she might be losing the casual reader. But then again, there were times when she might be losing the literary reader as well (always assuming that such people can get past the covers).
I think at the moment she’s still got it right, though some fans may be upset with some of the things that happen in this book (she killed off my favorite character!). I’ll certainly keep reading the series, and I hope that it is doing well. One thing that might help is that I realized half way through Going Under that Quantum Gravity is just crying out to be a comic. It is marvelously visual – especially all of the fairy stuff in this book. The only real problem is that the timeline is so tight that you’d either be stuck doing an adaption or you’d have to deviate from the novel plot, but comics have done that before. Someone should arrange for it to happen. (Hint, hint.)
Column Love
Jeff VanderMeer’s latest column is up at Huffington Post. This month he enthuses about Brian Francis Slattery’s Liberation, which will be one of the first books I’ll want to buy when I get back home. I loved Spaceman Blues for the language. Liberation is more to do with economic collapse than alien invasion, and unusually Slattery actually knows what he’s talking about in this regard, being an economics journalist himself.
Meanwhile over at Fantasy Magazine Naamen complains about stereotyping of black super heroes. It is an entirely justified rant (I never understood the Storm – Black Panther thing either), and it also gives me a good excuse to remind you all to read the very wonderful From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain by Minister Faust.
New Tähtivaeltaja
The new issue of Tähtivaeltaja arrived today. It looks so good. I wish I could read Finnish.
Anyway, no Finncon report, but it does contain a long interview with the excellent Ms Mandu duo (hi Joc & Nina!) and one of the supporting images is the cover of Oblivion High Vol 2. Yay!
The issue also contains an article on the all time top 25 manga titles, and a Tom Disch retrospective.
Today’s Book Bloggery
It is an interesting day on The Guardian’s Book Blog.
Firstly we have Lindesay Irvine asking his readers what children’s books they would like to ban. Thankfully most of the responses seem to be tongue in cheek, but not all of them.
Also Ned Beauman holds forth on the failure of the Minx comic line. Apparently US attempts to imitate manga were too safe and the kids prefer the Japanese originals: bishonen, sex changes and all. Why am I not surprised.
Farewell Virgin Comics?
SF Scope carries speculation that Virgin Comics may be about to cease business. That’s not good news for us Dan Dare fans.
All Down To Us Now
The comics and anime communities have noticed the new Graphic Story Hugo and are getting excited about it in various ways. (Including people who assumed that anime had been banned from the Hugos up until now.) However, most of these folks are people who have never been to Worldcon and quite probably never will go to Worldcon. Many of them probably also think that it is the duty of the “Hugo judges” to give the rocket to the “right” graphic story (by which they mean “the one I like best”).
But of course those “Hugo judges” are people like you and me. Many of us are not exactly experts in graphic story telling. And I don’t want to see the Graphic Story Hugo go the same way as the abortive Video Game Hugo that L.A.Con IV ran. So we need help. I shall be doing something a bit more formal over on SF Awards Watch towards the end of the year, but of anyone has any suggestions of things that I should be reading now, please let me know.
Meanwhile Kevin has had a few wise things to say about the process.