Archive for the Western Comic/Comix Category


Western Comics: Valor Anthology (English)

November 11th, 2015

ValorWhether they begin “Once upon a time…” or “Mukashi, mukashi…,” fairy tales all begin some time a long time ago, quite often in places without real names. The kingdoms are feudal, evil mostly comes in the form of magic and/or giant beasts that must be defeated and slayed. And, as so many people have commented so many times, they usually star a young man who achieves greatness…and gets the girl as a reward. If you’re an active, self-willed young lady, this can become irritating over time. You start looking around and you find the story of Vasalisa, who uses wits and luck to overcome the witch Baba Yaga, read Barbara Walker’s Feminist Fairy Tales or more contemporary stories like Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch. In fact, it’s hard to not roll one’s eyes at the idea of reworking fairy tales as, by now, it seems to have been done to death. If you’re a gay girl, there’s even Melinda Lo’s Ash, to give Cinderella a much cooler lover than a prince with a shoe fetish.

In Valor, a Kickstarter funded anthology, 24 creators take a look at stories that we know, unravel them, rethink them, revamp them, reweave them and sometimes just create something wholly new and amazing. The collection spans multiple cultures, with both prose and graphic stories.

Some of the stories are merely riffs on well-known tales, such as the above-mentioned story of “Vasalisa,” retold by Kadi Fedoruk or the “Crane Wife,” rendered here by Alex Singer and Jayd Ait-Kaci, and some are wholly original tales, such as the prose “Finette” by Megan Lavey-Heaton and Ran Brown or the gorgeous no-text graphic “Nautilus” by Ash Barnes and Elena “Yamino” Babarich.

Several stories are reworkings of timeless and well-known stories. Of these, my two favorites were “The Steadfast Automaton” again by Alex Singer and Jayd Ait-Kaci, which was a steampunk/scifi version of the Constant Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Anderson with heavy shades of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffman…and “Goldie Locks,” by Joanne Webster and Isabelle Melançon, a clever and fun riff on the classic tale of breaking and entering.

So, while it may seem that this anthology has “been done,” I’d argue that there can never, ever be enough versions of timeless tales. Heck, I wrote a series of  Sailor Moon/Arthurian Legend mashups. How can there *ever* be too many reworkings of archetypes?! And in the case of Valor, we have certainly not seen this version of these fairytales done this way before.

There is a nice selection of sexualities in the collection, as well. Some of the heroines get a prince, others get a princess and all get themselves which, in many ways, is the best ending of all.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

You can buy Valor online, and frankly, I think you should. It’s an entertaining collection full of things you’ve never read before – even if you have read them before. ^_^





LGBTQ Comic: The Complete Wendel

August 30th, 2015

TCWen Back in May, I was lucky enough to attend the inaugural Queers & Comics conference in NYC. At the very end, as a panelist, I was given a copy of the definitive collected edition of Keynote Speaker Howard Cruse’s serial Wendel. Originally begun back when The Advocate was a tabloid, Wendel ran in the pages of the magazine through the 1980s (a decade that I spent mostly without a TV or car, working 2 or 3 jobs at a time and therefore somewhat limited in my participation in the world.)

I have just finished The Complete Wendel and both liked and disliked it in equal measure. It’s important to remember that while this was the Gay Community of the 1980s, I was not ever part of this community, so reading it is as alien to me as reading a book on being a mother of 5 children.

Wendle is a young guy, with a supportive family, working at a small tabloid magazine. He meets Ollie, an aspiring actor and, through the pages of the story, their relationship develops through years of political crisis, AIDS, and regular family and friend nuttiness.

The early stories were the hardest for me to enjoy. They are supposed to be funny, but there are not my sense of humor and so left me sort of “meh.” Wendel is earnest and openly feminist and progressive, but the actual female characters we meet are abrasive and irritating.  Particularly Tina, the butch lesbian girlfriend of Deb, one of Wendel’s coworkers who, as the comic pointed out, if you didn’t hope she was being ironic, was a horrible person. Ollie’s ex-wife, father of his child Farley, is pretty much a one-note  neurotic rant from the beginning to the very final page.

It’s not just the women who are irritating. Ollie’s best friend Sterno, an out-of-control hedonist is tedious. So, here we have Wendel and Ollie, whose main schtick is to be neurotic out loud and adorably in love and their terrible friends. ^_^ It took me a while to warm up to them. But…I did warm up to them.

They lived through the Reagan years, during which I came into being. Had I been 5 years older, I might well have been a lesbian Wendel. In a moment of complete irony, the book ends with some promotional posters featuring Wendel after the comic had ended, one of which was the March on Washington in 1993, which I attended (and wow, what a day that was). So Wendel ends as I began, in a sense. And that, in a nutshell describes my feelings about it.

Lesbian and gay comics have been with us since the beginning. Queer & Comics was about those comics and about the people who drew them. We’re incredibly lucky to have so many of them still alive and willing and able to tell their tales. It’s up to us to read them and remember them and pass them along.

The world of the bathhouses and the early Gay Liberation marches, are the history I read about, the shoulders that I stood upon. Wendel is my fictitious older brother’s age, never my own. But once I  got to know him and Ollie and his friends, they came to have meaning to me.

Ratings:

Art – 8 (It’s a style that is so wholly unlike manga, it’s fascinating to delve into. Every background, every cross-hatched shadow was done by hand.)
Story – 7 Slice of life with “silly” filter
Characters – 8
Service – Lots of male nudity and sexual situations, no explicit sex shown
LGBTQ – 10

Overall – 8

I’d never have Sterno stay the night and would probably have told Tina to shut the fuck up, but I could see myself sitting and listening to their stories and understand that without them, I might not have been here.





LGBTQ Comic: The Infinite Loop, Issues 1-4 (of 6)

August 21st, 2015

TIFL1When I first heard that Pierrick Colinet and Elsa Charretier’s series The Infinite Loop had been licensed by IDW, I was immediately intrigued. For one thing, this series is a Bande Dessinée (BD), a French-language comic. We in the USA are just starting to get a real grip on the breadth and depth of the BD industry. International comics shows that specialize in cross-cultural exchange, such as Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Tokyo International Comics Festival and Angoulême International Comics Festival are making it easier than ever before for fans and creators to reach past borders and get to know the broader range of comics globally.

In addition, The Infinite Loop is a science fiction series. I know I’ve mentioned this from time to time, but when I was in my early years of reading all the lesbian literature I could find, a great deal of it was science fiction. The speculative nature of that genre and fantasy were comforting to LGBTQ writers who were not yet afforded a place on bookstore shelves.  In recent years, LGBTQ sci-fi and fantasy have been vital and thriving…but not so much in comics. Scifi particularly, and comics have mixed less than one might suppose, given the crossover fandom.

So, yay, a BD about a lesbian that is a sci-fi story! Win, win, win.

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Teddy is a time traveler, whose job it is to clean up time anomalies, left by tourists and terrorists and anyone fucking with the time stream. Agents have a relatively short shelf-life, as infinite possibilities and selves play havoc with their sanity and Teddy is the agent who has been active the longest. Teddy’s good at getting rid of anomalies, until she encounters one that looks like a beautiful woman who is in danger. Teddy immediately protects her and takes ‘Ano’ to safety.

Teddy’s partner is Ulysses, a meaty guy with an overt crush on his partner. But he’s put in a very tight spot when Teddy violates the rules.

The art is adorable in a retro futuristic way, almost Jetson-y. The color palette is vibrant. I love the panel design, the crazy paving works especially well when Teddy is having schizophrenic conversations with herself, or multiple things are happening simultaneously in various timelines.

I generally like the story, and will certainly read it to the end, but there are some problematic areas. Of these, the first real problem is something I can only express as a “man writing a lesbian as if she were a female-shaped man.” Now, I am aware that there are crass, vulgar women on the planet, but of the lesbians I myself know, none of us are in the habit of referring to other women as having “nice boobs” except, perhaps, in bed. There is a male-gazeness about Teddy that grates on me ever so slightly. This continues throughout, with dialogue that is supposed to be cutesy, sexy jokes, but just come off as icky-making, eye-rolling double entendre’s. I’ll hope that the humor was merely lost in translation. The writer himself outs himself in the afterword, so it is not an issue of “straight guy writing lesbian wrong,” just a guy writing lesbian oddly. ^_^

This is a small, but persistent irritation, but not my biggest complaint. And even this is not “big” it just really stands out. On Twitter I commented “Writers, please do not introduce characters for the sole purpose of treating them badly to prove the bad guys are bad. It’s weaksauce.” And, in a nutshell, that’s the problem. Spender and Prospekt are the bad guys (so far). They are two more meaty guys who arrive on the scene with a load of misogynist, homophobic and transphobic insults, this way we know they are bad people. Then they kill a perfectly innocent person so we know they are really bad. Really, really bad. Yeah, we got it. They could have been multi-faceted, complex characters, instead they are just two-dimensional violent sociopaths who have somehow made it to the top of the organization, while Teddy, who is at least as skilled, is persecuted for her relationship. I think I’ve read this one before.

Once again I find myself wishing this was in manga page count, rather than western comics “squeeze the story in quickly, then spend 4 pages on a sex scene! Hurry Hurry!” mode.

The Infinite Loop is not yet available as a single volume, but the collected volume is being released in December 2015, it is listed on the Yuricon Store. I’m reading individual issues on Kindle. (Issues 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5| 6 TBD). The kindle app breaks the complicated  panels up for slightly easier reading, but also allows a full page mode to see the full effect. Overall, a very decent reading experience.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Character – 8
Story – 7, could be higher, depending on the resolution
Service – 7 there is a sex scene
Yuri – 8

Despite minor distractions, there are some genuinely interesting turns of the story. As I say, I’m still reading and looking forward to the resolution.





LGBTQ Webcomic: The Hues

August 9th, 2015

TheHuesV1A few months ago, I had the pleasure of backing a Kickstarter for Alex Heberling’s webcomic The Hues. A post-apocalyptic magical girl series isn’t a new idea, but “new” and “original” are overused and overrated. What I am actually looking for is a good story.

By good story I mean characters that are not a checklist of components, have complexity and personality and a plot that actually uses these characteristics, not just tortures the characters for our amusement. I realize that by saying this I have castigated about 97% of modern media entertainment.  In one of my reviews of Sound of the Sky (which I tried hard to like, but ended up loathing), I said this:

“…so many anime studios have [fear] of *telling us an actual story.* It’s as if they cannot, will not and obviously do not feel comfortable with a female cast in a serious drama, and must relentlessly infantilize them so we can never, not for one second, take them seriously.”

I had a similar problem with Sound!Euphonium, when I tried to watch it last night. When I watch or read a story, once the cast has been presented to me, I have a weird expectation of them actually doing something.

In The Hues, we first meet Sami, a young woman whose own fate she has been well aware of, but never understood, When everything hits the fan, Sami is shocked, but not surprised. She is joined by several other young women, Andrea, Hannah and Lauren, all of whom understand they have some part to play, but don’t yet know what that part is. And then the plot happens. That, my friends, is how you write a good story. The set-up is set up for the story, then the story happens. If the set-up *is* the story, it’s much less likely to be good.

The Kickstarter gave me Volume 1 of The Hues as a print edition. The color pages work very well in print and the print quality is exceptional, so everything has more depth and fullness to it than the webcomic. It’s a nice book and I’m glad to have it.

Volume 1 is primarily focused on setting the board and the pieces upon it, so we have little time to devote to character development. In Volume 2, we spend a bit more time with building the world, which admittedly is in flux, the characters and giving us more insight into the overarching plot.

In Volume 3, having carved out a refuge in this post-alien invasion world, the protagonists now have a bit of time to get to know each other. I pegged the lesbian character right away – not because she’s stereotypical. None of the characters embody stereotypes, in fact. Even the minor characters are diverse and developed. And while there is a fair amount of queerness among our protagonists, there is also a refreshing body type and ethnic diversity.

The Hues is an original, diverse and realistic take on magical girls in a sci-fi setting. It’s got solid, complex characters and a plot that still has a lot to be developed. Definitely worth reading. And since you can read it online for free, there’s no excuse, is there? ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8
LGBTQ – 7
Service – 0 so far

Overall – 8

See, Japanese anime studios? It can be done. Try using the characters you create to do something once in a while. You might like it. I know I would.





Western Comic: Rise – Comics Against Bullying

July 8th, 2015

Rise_1-463x700The older I get, the more I am convinced that it’s rare to feel normal. Too smart, too stupid, too hairy, too pale, too dark, too clumsy, too graceful…everything in life is stacked against everyone, honestly.

But it’s obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that some groups bear the brunt of systemic bullying. Kids are a horrible little microcosm of humanity, without the filters and buffers we (presumably, hopefully,) develop as adults.

Awareness of bullying – and of the depths to which bullying destroys people’s humanity, whether they are victims or bullies, is increasing and increasingly reported.  Not surprisingly, comic artists respond to this crisis by creating comics that are designed to take on issues surrounding bullying.

Rise: Comics Against Bullying, is a so-far two-issue anthology series published by Northwest Press, full of shorts designed to make people feel less alone, to explore all the facets of being  a bullying victim or a bully and, most importantly, to increase empathy for others. In addition, proceeds of sales benefit organizations including GLAAD, Prism Comics, and Stand For The Silent.

Taking a look at people suffering from bullying as children, adults, and for any number of reasons, from health issues to cluelessness, these comics also address bullying of children by teachers, and the kind of bullying that develops in adult groups when scapegoats are chosen. Some stories included apologies later in life and others did provide closure of one kind or another – at least for the reader. Whether that closure would be sufficient in the real world when a child is being bullied by a parent or teacher is left unexplored.  Like all Northwest Press comics these issues are available in print and digital versions.

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RISE2Volume 1 and  Volume 2 include stories that take a fanciful perspective on bullying such as children geniuses calling out a brutal teacher, or a woman with health issues who channels her migraines into superpowers.Other stories stuck with the tried and true issues of bullying of gay kids or kids who like geeky stuff in school. These also took a moment to remind us to have empathy for those bullies who are themselves abused, neglected, fearful or scared.

These stories are presented in a way that “ought” to be palatable to any young person, but I don’t know how many kids who are being bullied will feel better reading a comic about it.

Ratings:

Overall – 9  Art and content are variably of interest to each reader, but very good as a whole

Thanks to Northwest Press for the review copies! As a bit of feel-bad-to-feel-good comic storytelling, Rise does two things – remind us as we are not alone and help us support causes that give marginalized people voices. And that is something I can get solidly behind.