Recently in Reviews
Koko Be Good: complex and satisfying graphic novel about finding meaning in lifecomplex
Cory Doctorow at 3:32 AM Wed
Jen Wang's Koko Be Good continues publisher FirstSecond's amazing run of thought-provoking, challenging graphic novels for adults. It's the story of Koko, a "free spirit" in San Francisco who trades on her manic energy and good looks to bumble by in mooched accommodations, borrowed clothes, and sponged meals. Then she meets Jon, a driven young man who is about to sell everything he owns to move to Peru, where his girlfriend is working in the remote orphanage her mother grew up in.
Jon isn't sure about his move, but he feels he needs to be. He quit his band after finishing college (they're now becoming an indie sensation, which puts some urgency into his choice to succeed at something other than music), and now he's not sure what his life is for or what it will come to.
When Jon meets Koko (she steals his tape recorder after a raucous performance at the Zeitgeist in the Mission), he finds himself subject to her withering scorn and tough questions. But the interrogation isn't one-way -- in the process of criticizing Jon's do-gooder ambitions, Koko comes to realize how empty her own life is.
The two of them enter into a struggle to find meaning and happiness -- to be "good" -- and embark on a difficult journey that involves a huge cast of minor characters all engaged in their own existential battles.
All the above makes the book sound moody and brooding, but it's anything but. Koko Be Good brims with manic energy and comedy, a complex story engagingly told with ingenious layouts and lovely art.
Koko Be Good
Brian McCarty's book of art toy photos
David Pescovitz at 3:45 PM Tue
We've featured Brian McCarty's terrific toy photography many times on Boing Boing. He's a master at setting a perfect scene and using just the right perspective to trick me into thinking that the strange vinyl characters on my shelf come alive when I'm not looking. Brian's photos are now collected in a wonderful hardcover book appropriately titled Art-Toys. The book includes more than 100 photos, each on its own page, featuring toys designed by Mark Ryden, Gama-Go, Frank Kozik, FriendsWithYou, Tim Biskup, Amanda Visell, Attaboy, and dozens of other artists. BB pal Douglas Rushkoff wrote the intro. I really dig the back-of-the-book "behind-the-scenes" snapshots that reveal the time, detail, and love that goes into every one of Brian's photos. Art-Toys by Brian McCarty (Amazon)
Comic book autobiography of a teen girl's life with braces
Mark Frauenfelder at 7:22 AM Tue
A 215-page account of a teenage girl getting braces on her teeth may seem like thin soup for a comic book memoir, but Raina Telgemeier's art and storytelling brings Smile to life.
My 13-year-old daughter just got braces so I thought she would enjoy Smile, but I ended up taking it and reading it over the weekend. Raina starts the book with a visit to the orthodontist, who tells her she needs braces. That night she falls face down on the pavement and knocks her two front teeth out (actually, one falls out and the other one gets driven up into her skull bone -- yikes). So what was initially going to be a simple set of braces turns into something more complicated, which nicely parallels with the increasingly complicated issues that a young girl about to enter junior high school must deal with, including new friends and new feelings. The book ends up being less about braces and more about the day-to-day trials and triumphs of early teenagerhood.
Autobiographical comic books, especially ones about people's everyday lives, are my favorite kind of comic book, and I'd place Telgemeier near the top of my list. She's great at presenting image moments. Her use of timing and framing is probably what has gotten her nominated for Eisner, Ignatz, Cybil, and Web Cartoonists' Choice awards. Her use of exaggeration (see panel four, above) is employed sparingly and to good effect. When I was finished with Smile, I felt as though I'd really gotten to know what Telgemeier's early adolescence was like.
Buy Smile on Amazon
Aeropress: fast, portable, cheap, easy, delicious espresso
Cory Doctorow at 5:09 AM Mon
When I decided to take a month off life and hide out at a cottage, I knew I wanted to rough it, but I wasn't about to give up on my morning espresso. So, thinking of Mark's beloved Aeropress machine, I picked one up. I found mine on the shelves at the genuinely excellent Crema coffee-shop in Toronto, and had them grind a couple pounds of each of their espresso roasts for me to try (this coffee went so fast that we ended up sending relations who were joining us later on detours to Crema -- we eventually killed something like 10 pounds of espresso, and I've brought home a couple pounds to enjoy in London).
The verdict? I give it an A, and on a good day, an A+. It's a very simple design: a plastic sleeve with a hollow plastic plunger that is tipped with a tight-fitting rubber tip. You screw a mesh lid onto the sleeve, insert a paper filter (these are reusable, but they're also tiny and cheap, and you get 350 of them with your Aeropress), and pile dry espresso grounds on top of the filter, and rest the whole thing on a sturdy cup or mug. Then you add a measured amount of 175°F water, stir for 10 seconds, and gently but forcefully depress the plunger. The espresso that emerged was uniformly delicious -- sweet, dark, and without a hint of bitterness.
The theory behind the Aeropress is that you can get a better shot of espresso if you extract your coffee quickly, and at low temperatures. In order to do that, you need to really get the water into contact with the fine-ground coffee (hence the stirring step), so that you get a nice shot even without a lot of heat or time.
This is not without its drawbacks: I never managed to get any crema onto any of my shots (looking at Aeropress message boards, I can see I'm not alone). Also, the shots that the Aeropress delivered were really short -- I found myself increasing the amount of water about one third above their recommended levels. Finally, the business of getting your water to 175 Fahrenheit is very fiddly (I used a $6 meat thermometer from Canadian Tire and clipped it to the mouth of the electric kettle). What's more, the Aeropress comes with a couple of largely useless accessories (a funnel and a stand for the filters), but omits the absolutely vital thermometer, which seems ill-considered.
But the disadvantages are vastly outweighed by the advantages. As I said, the coffee is great (everyone who visited us or vice versa got a shot or two, most asked for seconds). The cleanup is really simple: the piston scours the sleeve clean of all grounds and oils, so all it wants is a rinse at the tip when you're done. And the setup is compact, portable, and requires no electricity (though you need some means of heating water). We combined it with a microwaved milk frothed with a little battery-powered whizzer, which was no substitute for properly frothed milk, but beat most chain-store milky espresso drinks hands down.
At $30, the device is a very cheap way of making espresso, and despite the thermometer fiddling, I found it much easier to use than my traditional steam-driven machine in my kitchen. If you're trying it out, pay close attention to the instruction not to press too hard on the piston: just push in an inch or two, wait while the water permeates the grounds, then push the rest of the way in.
I've put my Aeropress in my permanent travel kit.
AeroPress Coffee and Espresso Maker with Bonus 350 Micro Filters
Even Monsters Need Haircuts: kids' book full of great monsters
Cory Doctorow at 4:03 AM Mon
Matthew McElligott's Even Monsters Need Haircuts is a cute picture book about a boy who sneaks into his father's barbershop every full moon and gives haircuts to all the neighborhood monsters. It's full of sight gags -- barbering a gorgon while wearing a blindfold; cutting Frankenstein's monster's hair with a clipper that's plugged into one of his neck bolts -- and complex pictures filled with tons of interesting monsters with extra limbs, eyes, heads, etc, to talk about with your kids.
I brought a copy along on the summer family holiday and it quickly became the favorite of my two-and-a-half year old daughter and three-and-a-half year old nephew, who demanded to hear it read until they'd memorized it. The grownups in the cottage liked the scene where the monsters all help the boy clean up the barbershop at the end of the night, and we made reference to it every time we tried to get the kids to clean up their toys (it worked pretty well!).
Even Monsters Need Haircuts
First impression of the new Blackwing pencil
Mark Frauenfelder at 3:45 PM Fri
In 1998, Eberhard Faber stopped making the Blackwing 602 pencil, and its cult users have been pining for them ever since. An unsharpened Blackwing can sell for $40 on eBay. One person told me his eBay auction for a box of Blackwings went to a "song writer/composer who's worked with Barry Manilow and on feature films, and chooses to only write music using the Blackwing 602."
Today I received in the mail two pre-production Palomino Blackwing pencils, made by California Cedar. Keeping in mind these are pre-production pencils, here are my impressions after using the pencil for a few minutes.
More photos and notes after the jump (click images to embiggen).
Read the rest
Tonoharu: Excellent graphic novel about an English teacher in Japan
Mark Frauenfelder at 6:52 AM Fri
It took me a long time to get around to reading Tonoharu: Part One, Lars Martinson's graphic novel about a young American who gets a job as an English teaching assistant in a small Japanese town. I'm so glad I did, though, because its incredibly good. It reads like an autobiography. Martinson actually did work in Japan as an English teacher, so I'm sure parts of the story are based on his experiences.*
Published in 2008, and a winner of the prestigious Xeric Award, Tonoharu is a story of isolation, frustration, and mystery, with just the right amount of black humor to keep it from being depressing. Dan Wells, the main character, is a recent college graduate who gets a job at a junior high school in the town of Tonoharu. The teachers and staff at the school are mostly standoffish, and because his contract requires him to stay on campus all day even when he has nothing to do, the resulting boredom combined with the language and cultural barrier are at times almost unbearable. The few foreigners that Dan gets to know are too weird to connect with in a meaningful way. And an American girl he meets and becomes smitten with seems to want to have as little to do with him as possible.
As time goes on, Dan establishes something of a social network (including an affair with a female teacher at his school who visits his apartment to have sex with him), and he is introduced to a baffling family of seemingly wealthy Europeans living in an old Buddhist temple.
This book is just the first part in a series of forthcoming graphic novels about Tonoharu. Martinson kindly sent me an uncorrected proof of Tonoharu: Part Two, which I devoured immediately. It's coming out in December. He told me he's half way finished with the third book. It's slow going, because of the exquisite cross hatching he uses, but the overall effect is stunning.
I can't recommend Tonoharu highly enough.
Buy Tonoharu: Book One on Amazon
Sample panels after the jump.
Read the rest
Brody's Ghost: Mark Crilley's 6-part graphic novel
Mark Frauenfelder at 7:28 AM Tue
I learned about cartoonist Mark Crilley through his series of YouTube instructional drawing videos (he's posted over 100!), where he demonstrates his enviable skills at drawing people. I'm not normally a fan of manga-style art but Crilley's blend of Western and Japanese style illustration hits the spot.
A couple of days ago I got a copy of his latest book, Brody's Ghost, which came out this summer from Dark Horse. It's the first in a six-part series of 96-page graphic novels. The book is in black and white, but Crilley's fine sense of grayscale more than makes up for the lack of color.
The story is set in a Bladerunner-esque world, and (like Crilley's art style) it has a blend of Western and Asian architectural styles and cultures. Brody, the lead character, is a disheveled, depressed curbside busker who plays his guitar only when his money jar runs so low that his stomach aches from hunger.
One day, while sitting on the sidewalk, Brody encounters Talia, the ghost of a teenage girl who died of cancer five years ago. She senses that Brody possesses a hidden talent, and she convinces him to help her solve a grisly murder so she can get on with the businesses of leaving the Earthly plane (sort of like Clarence the angel from It's A Wonderful Life doing a good deed to earn his his wings).
Crilley excels in conveying emotions through facial expressions, and the relationship between Brody and the Talia carries the story right along.
While I'm waiting for the next Brody's Ghost book to come out, I think I'll check out his earlier work: Akiko and Miki Falls and read them to my daughters.
Brody's Ghost: Book 1, by Mark Crilley
Heinlein memoir: LEARNING CURVE - the secret history of science fiction
Cory Doctorow at 7:03 AM Mon
The first volume of William H Patterson's enormous Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century is out. It's the first authorized biography of the sf writer who popularized at least three important motifs of the 20th century (polyamory, private space travel and libertarianism) and redefined the field of science fiction with a series of novels, stories and essays that are usually brilliant but sometimes self-indulgent, sometimes offensive in their treatment of race and gender, and always provocative and generally sneaky.
The best review I've read of this book so far comes from John Clute, one of the field's great scholars and critical writers, who devoted his June column in Strange Horizons to discussing Heinlein's work and (flatteringly enough) comparing it to the whys and hows of my own work. I recommend you read Clute's piece now, but for those of you without the time to follow the link, I'll sum up some of the bones of Clute's essay:
Heinlein was notoriously recalcitrant about his early life and the two wives he was married to before his epic marriage to Virginia Heinlein. He repeatedly burned correspondence and other writings that related to that period. Clute suggests that this is partly driven by Heinlein's desire to be Robert A Heinlein, titan of the field, without having to cope with his youthful embarrassments. It's a good bet -- lots of the stuff that drives young people to write science fiction also makes them a pain in the ass to be around until they work some of the kinks out of their system (I wholeheartedly include myself in this generalization).
Read the rest
Kenk: graphic novel humanizes Toronto's most notorious bike-thief without apologising for him
Cory Doctorow at 8:42 AM Fri
Richard Poplak and Nick Marinkovich's Kenk: A Graphic Portrait is a journalistic inquiry into the life of Igor Kenk, Toronto's notorious stolen bike peddler, told in comic form.
I've known Igor since I was 18 years old, and truth be told, I found him confusing, likable, maddening, hilarious, charismatic, criminal, and even honourable after his own fashion. The Slovenian entrepreneur and bike-mechanic was a packrat (Kenk implies that he is a pathological hoarder, and I think this fits) and a seamy, rough-and-ready type who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of a Bruce Sterling story. He occupied a succession of shops at the western end of Queen Street in Toronto, long before the neighbourhood became fashionable, back when it was a depressed and seedy little strip in the middle of nowhere.
Igor used to fix my bikes (and very well, too, at reasonable prices -- and even on credit when I was broke), and inevitably a simple repair would turn into hours of conversation out front of his shop or back in its jammed interior, sandwiched into the tiny clear spaces between the mountains of bike-junk and refuse harvested from sidewalks and garage sales and dumps. I traded in my bike for a better one, paying the difference with cash, just before he was arrested in the early 1990s, charged with selling stolen bikes. Among the bikes that the police seized as stolen property was my old bike, which I had owned for 15 years and had traded in fair and square. I concluded then that no matter what Igor was up to, he was also being railroaded by the authorities.
That bike I bought from Igor? It was stolen later that month. The day after it was stolen, I went down to Igor's shop to get a replacement (on credit -- I was skint), just as two guys showed up to sell Igor the bike I'd just had nicked. I was inside the shop and Igor came in and said, "Go out there and pretend you're a mechanic, look the bike over, I think it's yours." I did, and gave Igor the nod. Before he could say anything, the two guys took off -- one riding his bike, the other riding mine. Without saying a word, Igor grabbed a bike from his stock and chased them down. A few minutes later, he rode back with my bike in tow, and charged me $10 to replace the fenders the thieves had stripped.
I knew -- everybody knew -- that Igor was dealing in stolen goods. Every second-hand merchant does (I was working in a used bookstore at the time and I'm certain that some of the books we accepted for cash or trade were hot, though we could never have proved it or readily distinguished them from the legit product). But Igor seemingly played by the rules: when he bought a bike, he recorded the seller's name and the bike's serial number, held the bike for the required period, and if no one came to claim it, he sold it.
But Igor also dealt in enormous volume, and bought bikes from guys who were so sketchy that it strained credulity to believe that they were just keen-eyed pickers who found yard-sale bargains and arbitraged them to Igor for resale. And indeed, in the end, Igor was arrested after he was caught instructing some of these suppliers to take a pair of bolt-cutters and steal a particularly nice bike.
Read the rest
Unwritten 2: pulse-pounding graphic novel shows the grim and selfish ways that people use stories
Cory Doctorow at 9:21 AM Wed
One of the strongest graphic novel debuts I read in 2010 was the first collection of The Unwritten, a story that peeks into the secret life of narrative and the blood and teeth lurking beneath our fantasies and fairy tales.
Now, The Unwritten Vol. 2: Inside Man, author Mike Carey and illustrator Peter Gross continue to work their magic, in a fast paced adventure story that delves more explicitly into the ways that humans manipulate story to their own ends.
Tom Taylor is the namesake of Tommy Taylor, a globally beloved fantasy character in the mold of Harry Potter from a series of books written by his father, who mysteriously disappeared years before. A Z-list celebrity, Tom ekes out a meager living signing copies of his father's books at conventions until a grad student publicly challenges him with evidence that he is an impostor (news to Tom!).
A pariah, Tom flees angry mobs of disillusioned fans, finally coming to the very castle where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, where a group of famous (and insufferable) writers have gathered. Then, amid revelations about an ancient conspiracy of story and storytelling (encompassing Twain and Kipling), the writers are murdered in most grisly fashion, leaving Tom to take the blame.
Book 2 picks up with Tom in jail in France, the subject of worldwide resentment and hate, in a prison built on the site memorialized in the ballad of Sir Roland's famous rout by the Saracens. Now all the stories are coming together: the ancient ballads, the Tommy Taylor novels, the gossip blogs that follow Taylor's every move -- and now Tom is in more danger than ever.
If you like Willingham's Fables and the way that an adventure story can explore story itself, The Unwritten continues to satisfy. Highly recommended.
The Unwritten Vol. 2: Inside Man
Bill Ayers's To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, a humanist look at education
Cory Doctorow at 9:36 AM Tue
Bill Ayers is perhaps best known as the former Weatherman activist who lived underground with Bernadine Dohrn after a series of bombings and other direct action in the 1970s. But since the 1980s, he has been an educator and professor of education, and has documented this in To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, now in its third edition.
I haven't read the original To Teach, but I was very pleased to read To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, a graphic adaptation of his memoir/textbook, co-created with illustrator Ryan Alexander-Tanner.
To Teach: The Journey, in Comics is an inspiring educational manifesto that describes, at high level, a method for teaching that is based on letting students lead their education -- or rather, embarking on an educational journey with students in which leadership is shared. It's a moving and humanist vision of education, one that flies in the face of contemporary educational practice with its emphasis on technique and standardized evaluation, without much regard for the delight, dignity and curiosity of students.
Read the rest
Check out 