Comic Review: Relish

As a heads up, tomorrow is March 1st which means it's the start of webcomic review month, ie all my regular reviews will be on hiatus until April 4th, which ironically will be yet another comic review, hope you guys are here for the pretty pictures!

As with many books I talk about here, I was both interested and hesitant about reading this one. On the one hand, it had plenty of fantastic reviews but on the other most of these reviewers also liked Knisley's other book, French Milk, which I hadn't enjoyed at all. When I got the book from the library I opened it up, glanced through, and realized I recognized her style from another place, a quick google search later was reassured of my sanity when I found Stop Paying Attention (which I had read before). It's an autobiographical webcomic that gets updated every now and then and, as is the case with auto-bio comics that aren't just about the events in the artist's life but the feelings and meanings that went along with them, I liked some of them and some of them were complete misses for me. With that I just hoped that the focus on food would be something I could relate to the entire time and jumped in.

Relish by Lucy Knisley

Comic Review: Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Search Part One

Hmm, so it appears that my library does not yet have Wandering Son Volume 4 and that it is in fact still in the process of ordering, guess that review won't be up for a while. I had originally hoped to push this review back a little bit in the hopes that my library might get the second volume soon so there wouldn't be a large gap in reviews but, since I recently found out that there was also a third volume in this series and my library just got this volume, it looks like that plan of mine is also a bust. Drat, well, time to talk about Avatar (and it appears that I somehow forgot to review The Promise when I finished it sorry about that folks, might get to that in the future might not!). In case people are confused, yes this is a direct sequel to The Promise which is a direct sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender and I do recommend reading The Promise before The Search, although you could probably follow the story relatively easily if you haven't.


Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Search (part one) written by Gene Luen Yang, illustrated by Gurihiru

The 2013 Wrap-UP

It’s that time guys, time for my big, 2013 wrap up post! As usual I’m going to be talking about all media I consume in one big post since not only is that just easier for me but also because while some areas are easy to talk about (like anime) there are a lot of areas where it’s going to be a little, messy. But I’ll talk about that as I go along! First though a bit of housekeeping, as people have already noticed I’ve started using ads on the site, I’m trying to be more diligent about putting in referral links (should have some to Right Stuf soon, although sadly the reviews that get the most views are the ones which don’t have a physical release yet), and I’m going to change it up a bit more next year as well. When I started the site three years ago the format I chose, breaking everything up into their own sections, was a good idea since it made me consider multiple parts of the show and often made it easier to get going while writing. However I feel like I’ve grown past that point so starting January first I’m going to shift to a more free form style just like almost everyone else uses, and that will be for everything I review. Also, I feel like by doing this the infrequent little essays I write, which for the past year have just been going on my tumblr, will fit in better and I can post those here as well, just trying to catch up to the rest of the blogging community since I like what they’re doing and want to be part of it myself.

So, with that out of the way, here’s what my favorite things of 2013 were!

Comic Review: Bayou (Volumes 1 and 2)

Sorry for the delay guys, for some reason I seem to be stuck working closing shifts all the time at work (I've been home for dinner once in the past seven days, hurray) and once I get home I'm so spent from dealing with prissy holiday retail customers and from dealing with your usual mix of coworkers (some great some not) it's hard to write something that I'm satisfied with. 

As for the actual review, if I had realized that this wasn't the full series I might have chosen not to review it, since my library had two books I just assumed that was all their was. Of course, having done a little research now I can see that the second volume came out in 2011 and there doesn't seem to be any word on when a third volume will be out which is always worrying. I'm fairly sure that volume two isn't supposed to be the final volume not only because I don't see anything saying that it is but also because, well, it's not a good stopping point for a story.

Bayou (volumes one and two) by Jeremy Love

Summary: Lee and her father are sharecroppers in rural Mississippi and life isn't good, or safe, if you're not white. Determined to prove that her father was wrongfully imprisoned Lee goes on a journey to another world to bring back the truth.

The Good: It's not easy to set a story in the historical American South (historical fiction these days is usually defined as stories set pre-1950 but that statement holds true up until at least the 80s) because all of the opposing forces of American culture and politics, especially in regards to personal beliefs and people's rights to exercise them are amplified to the extreme. Therefore it's hard to write a story that acknowledges them, since they are at least on a basic level a part of everyone's life, and Love I feel like greatly succeeds with his refusal to romanticize or attempt to explain roughly Great Depression area Mississippi near New Orleans. With that as a base the rest of the story flows well, in the real world at least, and I did like the mythology he created, it was both old and new and felt really interesting.

The Bad: I believe I've said this before at some point but making a story by re-imagining another, older one is hard. Doing that with a well-known, trickster character is harder yet and I think a large reason why the second volume just didn't sit as well with me was because of Br'er Rabbit. He was so different from the stories I heard as a six or seven year old and in such a way that it felt like Love was trying to be "edgy" not "an alternate look at a well-known character". The story also seems to be setting itself up for a reveal I'm not a very big fan of in fiction, one that I feel like exists to suddenly give another character sympathy without having to do anything and when that appeared in the last few pages it really did sour my mood on the entire story. Other than that, I do feel like the pacing doesn't quite match the plot, in some ways Lee's story has a very tight deadline but the story seems to meander a bit to give the character's more time for, well, meeting other side characters I guess?  

The Art: The art style isn't one I favor, I just don't like the too-soft, as if everything was colored using the gradient tool, art style and the designs were a bit strange as well but there's certainly nothing wrong with it. Although, when you combine the fact that I'm not wild about the art with the fact that I think the story is about to do something I dislike I'm not exactly foaming at the mouth waiting for the next installment.


It's a little hard to rate this, there's not much wrong with the story, aside from the pacing a bit, yet it just didn't connect with me. I think that if I was reading the completed story at once then I probably would have liked it more but again without even a whisper of when the third volume will be out that's not going to happen anytime soon.  

Comic Review: Still I Rise

I picked this book up at my local library not sure if I would like it, much less have anything to say to constitute a review on it, but reminded myself that even if I didn't like it I was practically guaranteed to walk away from it knowing more about American history than when I started. Over the years I've become more and more frustrated with the history classes I've had yet despite that I don't actually go out and try to read a lot of non-fiction history books on my own, something I think I need to change even if most of them, unlike this one, won't leave me with much to talk about here.

Still I Rise by Roland Laird and Taneshia Nash Laird, illustrated by Elihu "Adofo" Bey

Summary: Taking it's title from Maya Angelou's poem of the same name, this comic shows  how Africans first came to the Americas and their long struggle to be recognized as Americans will the same rights and minds as everyone else.

The Good: I most certainly walked away from this book with more knowledge than I did going in, which was incredibly thorough for a roughly 200 page book. It also managed to convey something that none of my history classes ever had, this was a constant struggle for rights and freedom, not something that cropped up every now and again but something that was always in the background. In some ways I'm not surprised, my history classes were a bit selective and we tended to study periods, not look at history as a whole, but it's still sad that it's taken me so many years to actually put that into words. And this book didn't just talk about the African-Americans who were politically involved in trying to obtain rights, it also focused on the scientists, the inventors, the artists which was great since it showed that they were (and still are) a complex group of individuals, not just a group of people who can be boiled down to a single issue.

The Bad: I found this book a little much to read in one sitting or even two, it's surprisingly dense, and really wish it had been split into chapters or such since I had a hard time figuring out where a good stopping place was and really needed a few. I also wish that more of the people in the book had been labeled, I was able to guess at which parts were "made-up" conversations to convey a point and which ones were likely real quotes and, even though I could type them into google and see what comes up, I do wish the people had simply been labeled instead. Finally, while I did like the fact that the story had two narrators connecting and explaining all the events (whom I assume were representations of the two authors) at the very end their conversations felt less polished, like I was reading an unscripted argument between two people instead of, well, an argument with two sides that need to be presented. This only happened at the very end, I started wondering if tensions were just boiling over, but other than that I really did like having two, visible, narrators instead of one.

The Art: The art is, well, not in a style I like and I found it to be sloppy at times. Flipping back through it it's hard to articulate what I felt like when I was reading but a lot of the people look rough and caricaturist to the point where I had a hard time telling if someone was new or if we had seen them before and in a couple of places it looks like Bey just didn't have some particular technical skills. I'm ignoring the last 10 or so pages since they were drawn about 10 years later (the book was originally published in 1997 and then republished in 2009), although there is unfortunately a stark stylistic difference between the two and that's also where the aforementioned arguing between the narrators also happens. I do think that it was a good idea to make this story a comic instead of a prose book, it fits the pacing much better, but I do wonder if Bey had some trouble with the deadlines since the art seems to become even cruder and more "off model" the closer it gets to the end and that did bug me as I read it.

The amount of history in this book and the relative readability of it (I wasn't kidding about how dense it was) I'm giving this four stars out of five and really glad that I took it home and read it after all.

Comic Review: Koko Be Good

Another book that I came across at the library, interestingly enough even though I've heard good things about this publisher (First Second) for a few years now it's only been within the past year that I've started finding their books at the libraries as such (which I will take as a good sign that the libraries are now starting to pay attention to them and will get more of their releases). Maybe I should keep an eye out for them in bookstores too, although the ones I go to barely have any non-superhero Western comics.....

Koko Be Good by Jen Wang
 

Summary: Jon hasn't quite figured out to do with his life but when his girlfriend offers him a chance to come with her to Peru and do missionary work there he decides that this sounds like a good thing to do. Koko on the other hand doesn't do "good" things until she runs into Jon one night and, envious of how collected he seems to be, decides that she'll try to be good as well. But figuring out what you want to do and trying to do good are both hard tasks, especially if you haven't quite figured out who you are.

The Good: There are hundreds, thousands of coming of age stories (I consider it to be a genre unto itself) and it's really hard for me to get excited or interested in those stories after seeing so many (even though, given where I am in my life I should easily be able to sympathize with them). This story is one of the better examples I've seen in the genre and I think part of the reason it worked was because it felt a little more low-key than usual. While Koko is over the top in trying to create a new identity to be happy, Jon is much more low key and knows from the start that he isn't sure of what he wants to do, he's just going along and willing to try something he knows might not work out in the end. I think it was good that his girlfriend was a major influence in him, the scenes where she cautions him about going along with her (showing that even she isn't totally sure this is what she wants to do) really helped flesh them both out and it was great to not see another instance where one half of the relationship is completely confident and sure of themselves and drags the other half along, here with both sides hesitating felt a lot more true to life. I was surprised that Koko's friend Faron was developed as much as he was as well, originally I had thought he was going to be just a foil to Koko but in the end Wang showed us a chapter in his coming of age story as well and I'm amazed she was able to fit three such stories into one so smoothly.

The Bad: While I liked Jon a lot and was surprised by how much I liked Faron in the end as well Koko just never grew on me. I never understood her motivation to "become good" (I know that it was supposed to be that she was envious of Jon's life and tried to emulate him but the story only told that, never showed it) so all of her attempts to do good just felt awkward to me (they were supposed to feel awkward but they also managed to feel awkward in a way I don't think Wang intended). I was also leery at bits that Jon would dump his girlfriend and go for Koko (since the rule is that if you have two straight characters of opposite genders in a story they're gonna fall for each other) and, while that didn't quite happen, there was some chemistry between them that I didn't understand. In short, despite the fact the book is named after her and her adventures I just never understood half of what Koko did and, while the story wouldn't have worked if she wasn't present at all, half the time I didn't see the need for her.

The Art: Like the cover, the art is colored in various soft sepia tones and I absolutely loved how it looked. I liked the art style a lot as well, it had a lot of energy and the pages flowed well, but the coloring was what sold me on the book. It really reflects the mood of the story, even with all it's action it's rather introspective and calm and the best thing a visual work can do is to enhance and add to the mood already created by the story which it succeeds at marvelously here. Like I said, the art really sold me on the book and it makes me want to go and pick up my own copy as well, I don't know if I would have had the same reaction if the art had been any different.


I was very pleased with this book, especially since I just picked it up on a whim since I was in that section of the library anyway, and I'll be keeping an eye out for a copy of it in a store near me. It doesn't appear that Jen Wang has published any other books (aside from being in a volume or two of Flight and honestly it seems like every indie comic artist in the US has been in there at one point or another) but I'm going to also try to keep an eye out for their future works and see what they do next.     

2011 in Review

I decided to be literal, like I often am, and wait until the very end of 2011 to post this, although it seems like all the cool kids posted their thoughts on 2011 a week ago. I wanted to do a post like this last year but my blog was so new that I decided against it. But since I’ve covered more stuff this year (good lord have I reviewed a lot of stuff) I think its now appropriate to have an end of year wrap-up with my favorites in each category.

Anime: This was a good year for me but honestly every year is a good year for me. I try out enough stuff that I always manage to find some stuff I like, even if I find a lot of stuff I don’t like as well, plus I saw a ton of the classics this year (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, the original Ghost in the Shell). Overall the year seemed fairly average, some great shows, some terrible shows, shows that were better than expected, shows that started out great and then crashed and burned, basically what I expect to happen every year. The only thing that surprised me was the noitaminA timeslot which magically managed to have one rather nice show and one show that just didn’t quite work every season. I have reviewed all of them so I won’t re-hash each show (just search noitaminA in the search bar) but it was frustrating that instead of getting two shows I loved I instead got one I liked and one that left me feeling distinctly unhappy by the time the ending rolled around.

So, before I put up my top five favorite shows (ie five shows I just really enjoyed) I find it amusing that nearly everyone one of them either wasn’t on my to-watch list when the season started or just didn’t catch my eye when I first heard about it. I maintain that a lot of times the best stories are the ones you don’t even know you need and this year really seemed to prove that for anime.

1. Mawaru Penguindrum: I like plot heavy shows with plenty of plot twists and lots of visual symbolism and that fits this show to a T. Not everything was explained by the very end but it gave me a full 24 weeks of ideas to speculate over which is pretty impressive. License please?

2. Steins;Gate- I expected hijinks involving microwaving bananas and instead I got a tightly plotted show which deals with time travel better than almost any other story I’ve seen. Very nice, glad to see that Funimation has licensed it and I’m now curious about the OVA episode that will be included on the last DVD in Japan.

3. Last Exile: Fam of the Silver Wing- Fam and the original Last Exile are two pretty different shows (I’m going to have fun talking about all of that and I actually don’t mean that sarcastically) and between this, the Travelers of the Hourglass manga, and all the information about the old series that is just now (re?)surfacing I’ve got a pretty great fantasy series to keep me entertained every week.

4. Tiger & Bunny-Yet another show where I was surprised to find that it had a strong central plot and it’s the best reconstruction of traditional American superhero tropes I’ve seen. I do think that by now it’s overhyped but I did genuinely enjoy the show quite a bit.

5. Un-Go: I was so worried that I wouldn’t have any noitaminA series to put up this year (I did enjoy Wandering Son, AnoHana, and Bunny Drop but they were just not quite right for this list) and thankfully Un-Go was a surprisingly solid series that really understood how to work a setting and ended up with two of the characters talking about their individual philosophies and pointing out the flaws in both of them. It’s not what I would have thought of as a traditional noitaminA series but in the end it does feel more like a senin/josei work so it’s closer than I expected.

Runners up include the other three noitaminA shows I named (and No 6 if it hadn’t had such a stupid ending), Croiseé in a Foreign Labyrinth, Chihayafuru and Level E. I’ve also decided that next year I’m going to start doing an end of season wrap up each season for anime since I’m noticing that I have a hard time remembering exactly what aired in the winter and spring seasons each year (although those are usually the weaker seasons for me as well).

Books! I found out sometime in late August that apparently some people had taken up the challenge to read 50 books in a year (which is pretty impressive when you remember there are only 52 weeks in a year) and if you count non-fiction, light novels, and re-reads into that total (but not the odd book or two I had to read for school) I just barely made that, whew. Of all those books however, not many of them were published in 2011 (not counting light novels since it’s just a headache to figure out if I should count them by their US publishing date or their Japanese publishing date), I believe I only read four that were published this year: Small Persons With Wings (which I had totally forgotten I had read too, I even have a copy of it from a contest), Mastiff, I Am J, and Huntress which isn’t enough books to make a proper “best of” list. Mastiff would be on that list for sure since I adored the setting and both Huntress and I Am J would be really strong contenders for the list but it also seems unfair to make the list since there are so many books I want to read and haven’t had a chance to read yet, mostly because they all were published during the fall and my libraries haven’t had that much time to get many (if any) of the books. So, the other books from 2011 I wanted to read but haven’t gotten a chance yet: I haven’t read any of her other works but I want to try out RJ Anderson’s Ultraviolet, I should probably track down Demon’s Surrender by Sarah Reese Brennan to finish up that trilogy. Last year I was surprised at how much I liked Star Crossed by Elizabeth Bunce (it was one of my favorite books of 2010) so I’ll be sure to find it’s sequel, Liar’s Moon, once it pops up in a library near me. I suppose I’ll check out Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare (I read a little bit in a Walmart recently and it was okay, that and all the fanart I’ve seen from this artist makes me want to continue), The Gray Wolf Throne by Cinda Williams Chima (didn’t like the first book so much but the second book grew on me). I read The Shifter by Janic Hardy earlier in the year and just found out that the final book in that trilogy, Darkfall, came out this past year so I want to check out that (plus the middle book), I adored Karen Healey’s first book Guardian of the Dead so I’m excited to read her new (albeit unconnected) book The Shattering. I tried out the 78 page preview of The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson and I really want to read the rest of it, I’ve of mixed opinions on her other books but I do want to try out The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater, and need to read Goliath by Scott Westerfeld to finish up that trilogy. So yeah, I already have started looking up some books that are getting released in 2012 so I don’t get slammed as much next year but I honestly doubt that it’ll help that much.

Comics/Graphic Novels/Manga/Webcomics/Dem books with da pictures in ‘em

Well, I just did just do a whole month on manga I’m reading and I plan on again having an entire month devoted to webcomics so there’s not much to talk about there. As for everything else, again I didn’t really pay close attention to when most of these books were published until only a few months ago and I honestly don’t remember if I read any from this current year or not. I have been surprised at the growing graphic novel sections in all of the libraries I go to and that I am enjoying most of the things I check out but I still just don’t find myself as engaged by plain old comics as I do by everything else.

Movie time:

Like books, there are quite a few movies coming out this holiday season that I really want to see so I don’t really want to make a list here either (plus, I’m trying to figure out what movies will come to my school and which ones won’t and that I need to see now). I want to check out The Artist and Tinker Tailor Solider Spy for sure, maybe Warhorse as well, and I know my school will be showing The Muppets, Hugo, Sherlock Holmes 2, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and The Adventures of Tintin. I did catch a lot of movies that came out this year but honestly none of  them really stood out to me as ones I’ll remember a few years down the road. It’s been a few years since I saw a lot of good movies in a single year, hopefully 2012 will break that cycle.

Finally, TV Series:

Oh my god, I actually saw more than one on-going tv show this year! Between Doctor Who, Once Upon A Time, and Grimm I saw three of them, still not enough for a list but unlike movies this was better than most years since I ended up enjoying all three of these shows. Unlike in the anime department I didn’t get around to watching a lot of older shows on my backlog but hopefully I’ll be able to fix that next year, thankfully my backlog here isn’t as big as the anime one.

And in a nutshell, that was my year in media. Lots of stuff and still not as much as I would’ve liked to see, curse you holiday season movie/book releases! Next year I plan to watch even more older anime series, read whatever looks interesting at the library and not kill myself doing webcomic review month, sounds straightforward enough.

Comic Review: French Milk

Well, I had HOPED that this would be a review of the rest of the Akira manga but someone else at my school went around and snatched up all the books with a week left to go in school so I wasn't able to get to the last two books. It's a bit odd that those books were checked in all year and that someone checked out books five and six while they still had a request on book four (which I had out), I'm calling it a conspiracy until further notice.

SO, I grabbed this book at my local library simply because it had the same color cover as The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam which seemed like a good reason to pick it up. Plus I like travelogues so travelogue+comics=my kind of reading!

French Milk by Lucy Knisley

Summary: To celebrate her mother's 50th birthday, almost 22 year old Lucy and her mother decide to rent an apartment in Paris for five weeks and just take in the sights and experiences of the city.

The Good: The story flows better with pictures than if it had been all words and the entries have dates so it's easy to track their progress on the trip. It's a light read and a quick one as well (I think I read it in about a day, not that graphic novels that horribly long to read to start with) and it's not badly written at all. It's just a bit, fluffy.

The Bad: In the end, the book feels a bit shallow. Lucy complains a great deal about being stressed (understandable to an extent), not sleeping well, and missing her boyfriend a lot (but shouldn't she have expected that one?). All of that combined over the whole book made it hard to keep sympathizing with her, it makes you wonder why she even went along to Paris in the first place. Also, part of the fun of a travelogue is finding about neat little places that guidebooks don't mention and really getting a feel for the place through the writer's experience. That didn't really happen here, Lucy and her mother visit just the normal tourist destinations in Paris and it didn't feel like they or the reader learned anything new about the place during their trip.

The Art: There are a few photographs scattered throughout the book but by and large the book is told through hand drawn pictures/hand written accompanying text.  The art isn't particularly detailed, it's actually rather simple looking art, but it moves the story along and stays consistent. 

So, starting off the summer vacation with a dud, not a very encouraging thought now that I think about it but, since I've nearly gone through the libraries collection of graphic novels anyway, I'm not sure how many comics I'll be reviewing this summer anyway. Guess I'll just have to get creative as to where I'm getting my reading material then....