Graphic Lit: The big debut

There’s something about the big debut, that new comic or graphic novel from a budding cartoonist suggesting great promise, that gets people (myself included) all fired up.

Of course, not every artist manages to capitalize on all that initial goodwill, but for those who do, it’s worthwhile to go back and re-examine their initial forays.

Take Scott McCloud, for example.

Before he became renowned for books like “Understanding Comics,” McCloud was best known for his superhero series “Zot!”

The comic centered around the titular hero, a carefree teen from another, futuristic dimension, and his relationship with Jenny, a decidedly more pessimistic girl from our Earth.

The new “Complete Black and White Collection” collects the later half of Zot’s saga (McCloud apparently not being terribly satisfied with its initial full-color run) into one brick-sized book.

Reading the series, you can see McCloud constantly experimenting, taking elements of mainstream comics, the burgeoning indie scene and manga (still new and strange back then) and trying to digest them to form his own style.

The first half of the book is mostly set in Zot’s world and is full of fun, zany, dramatic adventures.

Halfway through, McCloud abandons the superhero stuff almost entirely, focusing instead on Jenny and her friends and their everyday lives.

Combining freewheeling sci-fi tropes (robot butlers, flying cars) with realistic, fully developed characters, “Zot!” helped point the way toward comics’ full potential, a trail McCloud would blaze more fully a few years later with “Understanding Comics.”

Another series that initially dealt with superheroes only to change halfway through was “Demo,” which initially attempted to tell slice-of-life stories about teens and twentysomethings coming to terms with their burgeoning supernatural powers.

Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan then abandoned that tack in favor of exploring young people at crossroads in their lives, be it the end of a relationship or wising up to the fact that it’s time to grow up and get a real job.

Wood and Cloonan made their mark with these smart, well-grounded, emotionally involving tales, and while they’ve done great work since, I’m not entirely sure they’ve done anything that’s surpassed their early work.

But while we might look fondly at “Demo” and “Zot!” with the benefit of hindsight, stellar debuts are far from a thing of the past.

Witness “Swallow Me Whole,” a new graphic novel by Nate Powell. I’m not kidding when I say this book knocked me for a loop.

“Swallow” tells the tale of two teenage stepsiblings, brother and sister, each with different mental problems (the brother displays signs of schizophrenia, while the sister has a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder).

Powell’s tale unfolds in a relaxed fashion as the pair trudge their way through school, deal with family and try to cope with their problems.

Eventually, one sibling starts to get better while the other, tragically, does not.

Powell displays a poetic gift for visual metaphor here, articulating the kids’ illnesses with some deft imagery.

He also has an ear for realistic dialogue and situations (a cringeworthy incident at school, for example, seems particularly drawn from life).

In short, “Swallow Me Whole” is a fantastic book. Keep your eye on this Powell kid. He’s going places.

Copyright The Patriot-News, 2008

Graphic Lit: Graphic novel roundup

Yesterday we looked at some recent graphic novels aimed at the elementary school crowd.

Now let's take a gander at some of the more notable fancy-schmancy comic books that have come out recently for the grown-up set:

"Three Shadows" by Cyril Pedrosa, First Second, 272 pages, $15.95.

Three shadowy figures appear on the hill overlooking a farm house, where a family of three resides. They've come to take the little boy. The mother knows this and is resigned. The father, however, refuses to give up his son so easily and takes him on a desperate race across the countryside, though the three figures are always close behind.

Such is the premise behind Pedrosa's powerful allegorical tale about coming to terms with the death of a child. By focusing exclusively on the father, certain other characters, most notably the mom and the son, get short shrift in ways that might have otherwise enhanced the book. And Pedrosa takes several diversions — particularly at the end — that hurt the overall flow and emotional structure of the book.

That being said, there are sequences here that still haunt me months after I've finished reading it. There are sequences here that are some of the best cartooning I've seen in ages. This is a book that, regardless of its faults, demands your attention.

"The Bottomless Belly Button" by Dash Shaw, Fantagraphics Books, 720 pages, $29.99.

Few up-and-coming indie cartoonists have been met with as much expectation and praise as Dash Shaw. He tries to live up to it with "Belly Button," a brick-sized opus that chronicles a seaside family reunion that comes on the heels of the elderly mother and father announcing their
divorce.

The book mostly focuses on the three grown-up children and their reaction to the news while at the shore. Shaw tries a variety of rather ingenious experimental approaches and is quite deft in his characterizations of the younger protagonists, though the older characters — particularly the
mom and dad — come off a bit too enigmatic to suit me.

Still, this is an adventurous, admirable work, one that will further help cement Shaw's growing reputation as a formidable author.

"Skyscrapers of the Midwest" by Joshua W. Cotter, AdHouse Books, 288 pages, $19.95.

Cotter's heart-wrenching, darkly funny tales of growing up in the bleak Midwestern landscape make for a stunningly impressive debut.

Though his influences are writ large (particularly Chris Ware), the book is polished and confident, with none of the awkwardness that tends to plague first-time works.

An episodic look at the trials of a pre-adolescent boy and his younger brother, "Skyscrapers," though fictional (and filled with hallucinatory and surreal meanderings inspired by the brothers' flights of fancy) carries an aura of unflinching honesty and eye for detail that makes you realize the author is drawing upon personal pain. It's a really, really excellent book.

"Too Cool to Be Forgotten" by Alex Robinson, Top Shelf Productions, 128 pages, $14.95.

Remember all those age-switching movies that came out in the late '80s (i.e. "Big," "18 Again")? That's basically the premise behind Robinsons latest graphic novel — a middle age man undergoes hypnotism and finds himself transported back to high school — though he handles the idea with a bit more thoughtfulness and tenderness than those films did.

That may be part of the problem. Protagonist Andy Wicks is such a decent, considerate sort that no real tension arises from his time-traveling predicament. And the "big revelation" at the end is telegraphed so poorly as to be rendered completely unbelievable. Chalk this up as a disappointing work from an otherwise talented creator.