A rule I’ve developed is that if a book makes me laugh loudly enough to be embarrassing on the train, I have to find a way to write about it. In that spirit, THE WENDY AWARD, by Walter Scott (Drawn & Quarterly, 200 pp. $22.95) is the latest and arguably greatest in Scott’s screamingly funny series about Wendy, a fine artist whose work about a fictional character named Wanda draws on her own life to a disturbing degree. (Just so you’ve got that straight: Walter, who is a real fine artist, makes comics about Wendy, the heroine of the book, who makes comics about Wanda.)
Wendy is a mess. Blessedly, she is not a lovable mess — much of the joy of “The Wendy Award” comes from Wendy’s complete lack of lovability, or even likability. She is needy, always late, self-involved, insecure, inconsiderate and generally a walking disaster.
Wendy’s alcoholism comes to a head during “The Wendy Award,” and while Scott finds some of the requisite pathos in Wendy’s confrontation with herself, he steadfastly refuses to couch it in a way that’s not funny. The effect is remarkable: It’s a story of personal dissolution, betrayed friendship, and tentative recovery with a hefty cast of rich characters, but it’s almost purely comedic, drawn in a deliberately simple near-scrawl. In an era where it’s hard to avoid soulless computer-generated simulacra of art — especially at the comic-book store — “The Wendy Award” feels especially vital.
You can’t fault Atsushi Kaneko for a lack of ambition: The manga veteran has chosen to adapt Osamu Tezuka’s classic manga “Dororo” as SEARCH AND DESTROY (Fantagraphics, 224 pp., $14.99) with the same sense of mayhem he brought to “Bambi and her Pink Gun.” Tezuka, who died in 1989, is best-known to American comics readers for “Astro Boy” and “Buddha,” one a beloved children’s franchise and the other a masterly multivolume biography of Siddhartha Gautama. But “Dororo” is as intense as any contemporary manga fan could want. The original story follows a young man whose father, an evil samurai, bartered away parts of his son’s body to four dozen demons in exchange for power and wealth. In Kaneko’s sci-fi retelling, the child is a girl named Hyaku whose body has been parted out to future Japan’s corrupt middle class of gangster-bureaucrat robots, and whose formidable cyborg prostheses give her enough of an edge to reclaim her transplanted parts.
“Dororo” had at its core a faith in human nature; Kaneko’s vision is far more cynical, but his version of this story is more interested in class and prejudice than Tezuka’s was. I miss Tezuka’s gorgeous drawings of monsters from the original book, but Kaneko’s richly imagined future society and the balletic choreography of his fight scenes are certainly suitable replacements.
Richard Corben, who died in 2020, was one of the most gifted artists to emerge from the wonderfully fertile 1960s underground scene, but, like too many of his peers, his early, influential comics have either not been reprinted or were dreadfully mangled by a parade of now-defunct publishers. It is therefore a joy, if a slightly strange one, to read Dark Horse’s hardcover editions of his works, lovingly restored by the artist José Villarrubía, one of Corben’s final collaborators. DEN 2: MUVOVUM (128 pp., $34.99) is the second in Corben’s saga of his largely unclad hero, Den, and his various adventures among alien worlds and alien maidens. It’s an improvement in every way on the jokey first volume in the series. The “Conan the Barbarian”-style stories are as frank and silly as anything Robert Crumb drew, but Corben worked primarily in painted colors, and with a facility few of his peers ever matched.
If I had to put my finger on when, exactly, I felt sure that Matt Fraction and Terry and Rachel Dodson were going to stick the landing of “Adventureman,” their neutron-star dense pulp sci-fi series, it was probably about halfway through this most recent volume, GHOST LIGHTS (Image Comics, 64 pp., $14.99). I can even tell you what page: It’s the one where Chris, a heroic cowboy using the nom de guerre of The Crossdraw Kid, stampedes through the subway tunnels under Manhattan, reins in his teeth, six-guns blazing with special bullets that can kill ghosts, wishing he could share his one-liners with somebody other than his horse, Big Man. “Horses got terrible sense of humor,” he narrates morosely.
“Adventureman” comes out too rarely, but when it does it’s absolutely worth the wait. The story follows Claire, who has inherited the mantle of Adventureman, and with it a whole host of weird bad guys and allies, some of whom are drawn from her life as a single mom with bad hearing and a troublemaking kid named Tommy. For pulp fans, it’s a treat to see how Fraction and the Dodsons map the adventures of old sidekick-heavy pulp novel series, notably “Doc Savage,” onto a cast of characters more familiar to contemporary readers, like Claire and her sisters, who seem to have stepped out of an especially good family sitcom.
The post Pulp Homage and Art-School Laughs Brighten July’s Graphic Novels appeared first on New York Times.
