May 16, 2012
Dress Your Marines in White
Murder in powdered form. What a life.
May 9, 2012
About Fairies
Some things happen whether or not you clap your hands.
May 3, 2012
At the Foot of the Lighthouse
I am American. We are all Americans.
April 25, 2012
Prophet
Some men are born monsters. Others made so.
Nursery Rhyme Comics, out recently from First Second Books, celebrates rhymes for kids of all ages. (You can check out interpretations from Craig Thompson, Kate Beaton, Mike Mignola, Tony Millionnaire, and more at this link.) But what about adults of all ages?
There are plenty of nursery rhymes for them, too! First Second asked three contributors from Nursery Rhyme Comics to illustrate some very adult verses, ones that would never make it into a contemporary kids book.
And now we present: the comics review round-up section of Steampunk Week. Step on board, strap yourself in, and stay for a few books with pictures!
Return of the Dapper Men, by Jim McCann and Janet Lee
Thing #1 to know about Jim McCann and Janet Lee’s Return of the Dapper Men is that it is lovely. The book is 11 x 9 ½, it’s got a cloth-bound spine, the title is embossed with gold foil, and the whole thing looks like it could come from ye olde steampunk era. The foreground colors for the book are done in marker, and for the backgrounds, some crazy technique with cutting out the parts where the background should be and replacing them with a painted board is used (or so the back of the book helpfully tells me).
Thing #2 is that there is tea in the book, in the end and in the middle (though unfortunately, not in the beginning). In fact, at one point one of the characters (predictably, a Dapper Man), wants tea so much that he takes the time to make a tea plant grow, harvest the leaves, dry them, and then brew some tea. That’s dedication.
Comics are full of monkeys. It turns out that monkeys are fun to draw! And also cute. In honor of Tor.com going ape this week, I’ve put together some of my favorite simians featured in comics.
The archetypal Monkey King is one of the main characters in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. Yang tells the Monkey King’s story as a story of identity, making a parallel to the story of the Asian-American immigrant. The Monkey King is looked down on by the gods and must prove himself by being true to himself; the immigrant must similarly find a balance between the culture of the country he now lives in and his original identity. This book is very good; it’s won the Michael L. Printz Award. And also there is a monkey who flies around on a cloud.
If there’s one thing that would make monkeys better, it’s wings. They’ve got expressive faces; they’ve got opposable thumbs; they’ve even got most excellent tails. All they need to be the best ever animal is flying.
Of course L. Frank Baum realized this early on in his life.
One of my favorite parts of The Wizard of Oz is the flying monkeys. Quick recap, in case you’re one of the people who hasn’t re-read Baum in a while: Oz has a tribe of flying monkeys. They belong to the Wicked Witch of the West, because she has the Golden Cap that allows her to give them orders (because of complicated backstory involving former rulers of Oz and disputes about bathing). Eventually Glinda gets the cap, and good (read: altruistic) witch that she is, she gives it to the monkeys.
Moomins! They are round and fuzzy creatures filled with adorability who live in a small valley and live a generally pastoral kind of life. There is Moomin (who is the cutest) and his parents and a variety of other creatures who together have very ordinary experiences. But you know how sometimes you’re reading someone like Shirley Jackson and her writing makes the ordinary more extraordinary than the extraordinary could possibly be? The Moomins are like that. Except they are extraordinary in the first place, being fantastical hippo creatures like the ones at the right, and they star in a series of books and comics by Tove Janssen, also at the right, eyebrow quirked.
So we bring to you a whole week of Moomins, in celebration of them being awesome, and also in celebration of the fact that FSG and Square Fish are republishing the series with packaging that looks like it actually comes from this century, and Drawn & Quarterly is collecting all the excellent Moomin comics, and the New York Review of Books is publishing Tove Jansson’s novels for adults, so all in all, a lovely conflation of events. Check back on the front page every day this week for a Moomin round-up!
