Every Christmas, it seems, someone decides they’re the first to come up with the idea “What if Santa … nervous? ”So we have Santa Claus wearing a trench coat and pulling to the side, or elves knocking over a bank, or Krampus building a meth lab in a trailer. (Remind me tell you the story of one day when I was a kindergarten assistant in an animation company about 15 years ago and the bosses were trying to raise the money for a feature film that included Christmas elves. but oh what could have been.)
Generally speaking, the ‘something cute but not cute’ premise isn’t enough to support much – it needs a spark to really justify its existence, which is why Grant Morrison’s Klaus The series, which is now around 5 years old, was such a hit when it was released and deserves an annual revisit. Imagine Saint Nick, but in medieval super-vigilant with a wolf companion and a sword that kills the fascists. Pleasantly enough, the series manages to live up to its rich premise with some violent fling and moments of tender thoughtfulness. It has been two years since the last addition to the Klaus series. But like Santa Claus himself, the work is timeless.
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Otherwise, it’s a pretty quiet week for new releases, as you might expect. But there are a handful of treasures to be found, as well as books that I missed when they first appeared. Thanks as always to Phoenix for the recommendations!
ROBO SAPIANS
If you hand me a book and say “this is a calm and melancholy contemplation of the unfulfilled dreams of robots”, I will probably respond with an uncomfortable look as I frantically try to find a reason not to read it, as it seems. Like not at all my thing. Or at least I would have before I read Sapiens robot, which knocked me over despite the heavy premise. (And the challenge of remembering to read manga from right to left.) It’s many years into the future, and humans live in relative contentment alongside human robots. The robots are also happy, because they don’t seem to have been designed with the ability to sense another emotion. But their lives are not as calm as their behaviors might suggest: there are lovers of cursed robots, malfunctions, slavery, disasters, wars, lost memories and, finally, in the end, l fulfillment. Robots respond to all of this with detached observation, and we have almost no time with human characters, who don’t live long enough to register as more than a blip. Who cares about humans, however? Robots have been programmed to serve humanity, but with their modulated responses to the catastrophes of existence, they function more like teachers than servants.
Evaluation: ?? (5/5)
History and art: Toranosuke Shimada
NO TAKES BARDING PROBLEM # 1
There is addicting giddiness in this comedy starring William Shakespeare and his trusty assistant as masked vigilantes who battle crime. It’s Batman and Robin, transposed to the Elizabethan era and written, surprisingly, in mostly iambic pentameter. The tongue pulls off an interesting trick to land jokes and modern references while slipping in and out of a historically plausible style: “My curse be on this horrible business!” Because I’m too old for this excrement ”, this kind of nonsense. Reading such dense dialogue in comedic form is an unfamiliar experience, and readers may find their minds moving at a slow pace – it’s fine in slow scenes, but it’s a bit uncomfortable during action sequences. , when the eye wants to dart from one panel to another but the flowery tongue insists on a meticulous reading (or, alternatively, rendering the beautiful passages the disservice of skipping them). Still, the bright colors and clever banter turn the pages, and like the best of Shakespeare’s work, the clever writing ensures that the book brings new pleasures over multiple re-readings.
Evaluation: ?? (4/5)
Writer: Eric Gladstone. Drawings: Gabriell Kari, Dave Kloc.
IT’S A FLYING RAT
At the end of the year, I’ll be catching up with some tracks that I missed when they first released – and oh damn what an oversight I haven’t seen again. It’s a flying rat earlier. Just an absolutely delicious picture book for readers ages 4-8, with plenty of fun opportunities for adults to read aloud to provide silly voices. What starts off as a cute but rather dry educational work on pigeons is quickly derailed by a chaotic rodent intruder, who throws the book’s staid narrative into disarray and our pigeon hero into fits of outrage. At the end of the 32 very digestible pages, we learned a little about pigeons, about rats, but also about friendship and kindness. A plus: the creatures are depicted with simple shapes that are so pleasing that they will be easy for young budding artists to reproduce in their own work. I’m not a fan of pigeons after what they did on my balcony, but the bird in this book won me over.
Rating: 🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦 (5/5)
Written by Andrew Cangelose. Illustrated by Josh Shipley.
ALSO: SUPER SANTA, A NEW JUNJI ITO COLLECTION, and CATS !!!!!
As mentioned above, give Klaus have a look if you are looking for a tough snowy adventure. Also fun this week: New Firefly and Power Rangers books, plus A dark night from DC and Avengers forever from Marvel. I can’t wait to snuggle up with Cats! Perfect strangers, a book about three girls who become cat companions for the first time. There is a new collection of older works by Junji Ito titled Deserter, full of precisely the kind of horrors one would expect from Ito’s work. And from Graphic Mundi, two big memoir-style books, both of which have perfectly descriptive titles: Iranian love stories is precisely what it seems, as it is Menopause: a funny treatment.
