46% Off Discounts: Buy Cheap Bone, Vol. 4: The Dragonslayer Review

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Bone, Vol. 4: The Dragonslayer Review

Timeless is every way, "Bone" is an expansive story about three "bone creatures" (you'd have to see them to understand) that find themselves in a valley peopled with an assortment of crazy and interesting characters. Looming over it all is the menace of a great evil, first glimpsed by the ferocious (and funny) rat creatures, but later revealed to be something much more disturbing.
"The Dragonslayer," the fourth in the nine-volume "Bone" series, ramps up the tension and dramatically increases the scope and scale of the story, while retaining touches of its all ages humor.
This volume picks up where the third left off, as revelations about the main characters and the evil looming over the peaceful valley central to the tale draw the reader more fully into Jeff Smith's wonderfully-woven plot. Though still geared towards an all-ages audience, the deeper issues that make this compelling reading for adults really begin to show here, taking prominence over the humor through a good portion of the book.
Smith combines the kind of classic storytelling perfected by the likes of the legendary Carl Barks (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge) and Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) - gleefully funny cartooning with outrageously expressive faces and gestures - with the epic and engaging plotting of a sweeping fairy tale. "Bone" walks a tightrope and walks it well, managing to be something fans of both Donald Duck and Bilbo Baggins can enjoy.
Jeff Smith's "Bone" series is a critically acclaimed but criminally overlooked epic. Critics recognize Smith's masterful storytelling abilities and are drawn to his mix of all-ages humor and more mature darkness, but the black and white art and lack of superheroes turn off many comic book readers, making it a hit only in the "underground" sense.
And that's too bad, because this deserves to be read. Readers able to look past the lack of men in tights and color artwork will delight in this series. Little doubt people will still be reading "Bone" 50 years from now. Broad in scope yet personal and quaint, this is a charming story in every way that will surely outlast 90 percent of other comic works on the shelf.

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32% Off Discounts: Best Price The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation Review

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The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation Review

Comics have come a long way, even since the sixties when intellectuals started taking Batman, Superman, and Spiderman seriously. _Maus_ by Art Spiegelman, for instance, was the serious story of Spiegelman's father in the Holocaust, and Spiegelman's problematic relationship with him; it was a quietly magnificent history and memoir, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. _From Hell_ by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell was an examination of Jack the Ripper's story that was as dense as a novel, and with lots of reference notes to boot. If you have been watching comics climb in respectability, they have just mounted upon another rung. It is hard to class _The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation_ (Hill and Wang) by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón as a comic book, for it certainly is deadly serious rather than comic, and it isn't a "graphic novel", the category by which the genre goes now. It is the famous _Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States_ but told in the comic book form. The original prose work, widely praised and even nominated for a National Book Award, was a bestseller when it came out in July 2004. It had 600 pages, while the current one has 133.
Yet this is a condensation of the report, not a dumbing-down of it. Most of the words in it (in the san-serif capitals traditional to comics) come directly from the original report, which is in the public domain. There are some pages that could not have been done better in any format. The book starts with a timeline, four rows extending for twelve pages, counting off the hours of that morning for each of the four flights. The atrocities within each plane and each flight's violent end are drawn, and all readers following the streams will try to remember what was going on at the same time in their own lives that day, and when they started hearing about the crashes. Following one timeline is another, similar one for each plane, showing the "Awareness, Notification, and Response" of flight controllers, the FAA, NORAD, and the air defense sector of the region. Along with maps, these timelines make the flow of the events of the morning comprehensible. The style of the drawings is obviously that of the comic books in which both authors are experienced. These are not young guys promoting a new version of their art. Jacobson, 76, created the "Richie Rich" series and was the editor of Harvey Comics. Colón, 75, drew Richie, and also Casper the Friendly Ghost, before moving on to the more superhero-themed DC Comics. The book sticks to the original report, although it includes imagined pictures of events that happened within the airplanes and within the towers for which there is no documentation. Necessarily, the book does show that people working within agencies of the government were acting at cross purposes at times during the day, just as the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence had failed in the preceding months to share information rather than hoarding it. The confusion of first responders because of the inadequate communications between them is another illustrated failing. One part of the story violates the comic book rule of showing rather than telling; a caption showing a burning and crumbling tower says, "As time grew short and desperate, civilians leaped from the North Tower upper floors." The artists could not bring themselves to draw such an occurrence.
Of course, as in the original report, there are obvious targets for blame, though the commission admitted it was writing "with the benefit and the handicap of hindsight". With its historic view, Clinton does not get let off the hook, although among the difficulties he had in taking action is listed his preoccupation with his impeachment. The commission's view of how well the current government has done in implementing its recommendations is the last page of the report, and it looks like it gets a D. The phrase "constructive criticism" was coined for an effort such as the commission's, and the comic book version can only help get the word out. "Respectful" is not a word usually associated with the comics, but the authors here have shown respect to the report and to the nation that was under attack that day. They have made a useful and unique book to help us understand the events before, during, and after 9/11.

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20% Off Discounts: Buy Cheap Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return Review

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Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return Review

Almost a generation after Art Spiegelman's Maus showed comic books can pack more punch than words alone. Persepolis is the closest thing from you'll ever see from Maus. Both are amazing literary works portraying extraordinary real lives witnessing history unfold. Both done by chain-smokers.
At the end of the first Persepolis I cried. I can't remember a regular book that gave me such emotion before, if ever (I also cried at Maus).
As an immigrant, I identify with Sartrapi more than with any author I've ever read. Maybe because her experiences with loneliness, heartbreak and xenophobia are so vivid they just jump out of the pages.
One thing that's very evident in every page of the book is her immense patriotism. Her country is as part of what she is as much as her family. Thank God for that, because now there's a point of view of Iran little known to Westerners. And it's available in your bookstore. As a comic.
My highest recommendation. Run to get a copy. I hope publishers now realize this art form is here to stay.

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46% Off Discounts: Special Prices for Bone, Vol. 1: Out From Boneville Review

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Bone, Vol. 1: Out From Boneville Review

If you haven't read the work of Jeff Smith, you are missing out on not only one of the greatest series of comics in recent memory, but what may be the greatest fantasy epic since the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. I highly recommend picking up Bone in any of its editions, although I lean toward "The Complete Bone" myself. However, there is one significant advantage of the edition listed here that none of the reviewers have mentioned yet (that I've spotted, anyway): This is the first release of Bone in full colour, as opposed to the black-and-white art contained in the previous tomes of the Bone series (with the exception of Rose). This series is so excellent that I'm tempted to get this edition despite already owning the complete black-and-white edition, and I cannot think of higher praise than that.

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42% Off Discounts: Lowest Price Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began Review

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Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began Review

The second part of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus picks up where the first part left off. His father Vladek and mother Anja are captured and sent to Auschwitz. However, things aren't well at home. Mala, Vladek's second wife, exasparated at Vladek's tight-fisted controlling ways, leaves him. Artie and his wife Francoise rush over to help him out and during this time, Artie continues the interviews with his father and thence into Maus II.
The path of Artie understanding his father is smoother but at a cost. Following the success of Maus I, Spiegelman depicts a pile of dead Jewish bodies lying under the Artie's writing desk symbolizing how much the history his father has bled from that first volume has seeped into him. He is beginning to understand, but at the cost of emotionally and vicariously going through his father's experiences, for which he has sessions with Pavel, a Czech Jew psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor.
Artie gets more perspective during these sessions with Pavel. He tells Pavel that as a child, he constantly argued with his father, who said that anything he did was nothing compared to surviving Auschwitz. Pavel refers to the psychological concept of transference: "Maybe your father needed to show that he was always right--that he could always SURVIVE-because he felt GUILTY about surviving. ... and he took his guilt on YOU, where it was safe... on the REAL survivor." The argument stands to reason. Vladek survived the death of so much family and friends, as well as the millions he never knew.
We learn more of how Vladek survived Auschwitz. He teaches English to the Polish kapo, who expecting the Germans to lose the war, wants to get in good graces with the Americans. Vladek is thus given better food, a better fitting uniform, and the tip to stand at the far left of the line of prisoners during the labour call. Improved health increased chances of survival and a better mental state.
Vladek has enough chutzpah in his tight-fisted but survivalist ways to exchange used groceries for new ones(!) While in the car waiting for him, Artie and Francoise discuss Vladek. Francoise says: "I'd rather kill myself than live through ... everything Vladek went through. It's a miracle he survived." Artie responds with "In some ways he didn't survive," which is key to the book's theme. Yet drastic saving is one way Vladek survived the war and camps. On the way back from the grocery store, we discover Vladek's racism towards blacks, an example of the victim becoming a victimizer.
Maus is a must-read for a personal instead of abstract, statistical look at the Holocaust. It also brings up post-war genocide. Pavel's contention that people haven't changed rings poignantly. Despite the vow of "never again," genocide has repeatedly happened "yet again": e.g. the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields in Cambodia, the massacre in Rwanda, and the ethnic bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps for racial harmony to become a human instinct, all people need to feel the same way, but the relativistic world of the twentieth and twenty-first century to makes that dream virtually impossible. Pavel's statement that a newer and bigger Holocaust is needed to change people grimly prophesizes World War III, meaning that unless we change, we will all die.

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33% Off Discounts: Lowest Price Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art Review

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Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art Review

I like to take things apart and figure out how they work, except instead of doing internal combustion engines or pocket watches I like to play with books, movies and television shows. In "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art," Scott McCloud not only takes apart comic books, he puts them back together again. Certainly comics are a neglected art form. Put Superman, Batman, Spawn and Spider-Man on the big screen and there will be some cursory comments about the actual all-in-color-for-a-dime, and names like Stan Lee and Frank Miller will get kicked around, but nobody really talks about how comics work (the exception that proves the rule would be the Hughes brothers talking about adapting the "From Hell" graphic novels). Part of the problem is conceptual vocabulary: we can explain in excruciating detail how the shower scene in "Psycho" works in terms of shot composition, montage, scoring, etc. That sort of conceptual vocabulary really does not exist and McCloud takes it upon himself to pretty much create it from scratch.
That, of course, is an impressive achievement, especially since he deals with functions as well as forms. To that we add McCloud's knowledge of art history, which allows him to go back in time and find the origins of comics in pre-Columbian picture manuscripts, Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Bayeux Tapestry. Topping all of this off is McCloud's grand and rather obvious conceit, that his book about the art of comic books is done AS a comic book. This might seem an obvious approach, but that does not take away from the fact that the result is a perfect marriage of substance and form.
This volume is divided into nine chapters: (1) Setting the Record Straight, which develops a proper dictionary-style definition of "comics"; (2) The Vocabulary of Comics, detailing the iconic nature of comic art; (3) Blood in the Gutter, establishing the different types of transitions between frames of comic art, which are the building blocks of how comics work; (4) Time Frames, covers the ways in which comics manipulate time, including depictions of speed and motion; (5) Living in Line, explores how emotions and other things are made visible in comics; (6) Show and Tell, looks at the interchangeability of words and pictures in various combinations; (7) The Six Steps, details the path comic book creators take in moving from idea/purpose to form to idiom to structure to craft to surface (but not necessarily in that order); (8) A Word About Color, reminds us that even though this particular book is primarily in black & white, color has its uses in comic books; and (9) Putting It All Together, finds McCloud getting philosophical about the peculiar place of comic books in the universe.
"Understanding Comics" works for both those who are reading pretty much every comic book done by anyone on the face of the planet and those who have never heard of Wil Eisner and Art Spigelman, let alone recognize their artwork. Which ever end of the spectrum you gravitate towards McCloud incorporates brief examples of some of the artwork of the greatest comic book artists, such as Kirby, Herge, Schultz, etc., as well as work by more conventional artists, including Rembrandt, Hokusai, and Van Gogh. "Understanding Comics" is a superb look at the form and functions of the most underexplored art form in popular culture.
I am using Spider-Man comic books in my Popular Culture class this year and will be using some of McCloud's key points to help the cherubs in their appreciation of what they are reading. If you have devoted hundreds of hours of your life to reading comic books, then you can take a couple of hours to go through this book and have a better understanding and appreciation of why you take funny books so seriously.

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