Panel Discussion: Classy Graphic Novel Edition!

I have just not been digging on weekly comics this month. But I have read some killer new graphic novels, which apparently have panels in them as well.

(Click for Full Res)

Most Surprising Revelation - Logan (Brian K. Vaughn & Edwardo Risso)
"I'm the best there is at a couple of things in this world....but what we just did ain't one of them." Someone better tell the fanfic writers that! I think these are some really nice drawings of Wolverine looking a little more human than usual. I like the the second panel of the unused pencils even more...
He just looks so sulky. Don't worry Wolverine, if it can happen to you, it can happen to anyone!


Best Acting - Kaspar (Diane Obomsawin)

In this true story of wild child Kaspar Hauser , author Obomsawin portrays the titular protagonist as a funny, bright, and sympathetic character. His design is simple, but it fits a character who sees things in a uniquely literal way, having been raised in isolation into his late teen years.

I love the bottom two panels of this page; his pride at being able to repeat the names of his guests comes through via the simplest of expressions.
Although he has virtually no education of experience with the outside world, Kaspar is never portrayed as stupid, and his reactions upon each new encounter gets right to the heart of the thrill and pain of discovery, such as this sequence where he plants his name in seedlings, only to have it wrecked.


The thing I love most about his facial expressions is how the first time his plants get stomped on, he cries in disappointment and heartbreak. But the second time it gets ruined (damn cat!), he's just like, "Screw this." I identify with this, possibly more than I should.

When Kaspar is eventually civilized enough to rejoin society, he still retains his acutely sensitive, tell-it-like-it-is attitude.



Most Terrifying Use of Superpowers - Freakangels
Most of the time, the Freakangels just work on building infrastructure for their little corner of post-Apocalypse London and bicker amongst themselves and look stylish and cute. But when a gang of outsiders start to threaten their town, the Freakangels break out the psychic powers and they do not mess around.

AHH! They tore his ribcage apart! That is not a responsible use of powers, you damn kids! This is what happens when there are no square adult superheroes to mentor the under 25 crowd. Vigilante justice is all well and good until you start using telekinesis to extract peoples' bone from their chests. If Superman was here he'd give them such a lecture!

Weekanerd NYC: Six Comic Creators vs Paper Mache Dinosaurs (Dinos FTW)

Monday, March 3

• Shoot Her! Jurassic Park, The Play
  
• 9:30pm @ Market Hotel, 957 Broadway (at Myrtle), 2nd Fl, Brooklyn

I'm telling you people, low-fi recreations....they're reaching critical mass. This production promises to recreate live on stage, scene by scene, the entirety of Spielberg's finest work of cinema. How will they do it? Much paper mache is said to be involved, and probably no small amount of theatrical ingenuity. This event has been talked up quite a bit from the Village Voice to the NYTimes, so I know I'm getting there early.

UPDATE 3/4/08: If you missed this, we've got a full report.


Your chance to meet a whole bunch of comic creators, after the jump...

Tuesday, March 4

• Peter David and Jae Lee Midnight Signing
  
• Midnight @ Midtown Comics West, 200 W 40th Street, Manhattan
  

If you really want to stalk Peter David, you actually have two event options; at 8pm at Comic Book Club, Peter will talk nerd shop with the lads from The Stack, so if you go to that first you can have something to talk to him about during those all important 20 seconds when he's signing your copy of Dark Tower (or any of the other great books he's writing, for that matter).

Wednesday, March 5

• The Global Graphic Novel: Straight Out of Anguleme
  
• 7pm @ Housing Works Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, Manhattan
  

French comic-book creators Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian, the duo responsible for the award winning comic anthology Get A Life, will talk about "the global graphic novel", which sounds very grandiose and probably has something to do with Tin Tin.

Thursday, March 6

• Comic Signing with Danny Simmons & Floyd Hughes, Creators of '85
  
• 6:30 @ Forbidden Planet, 840 Broadway, Manhattan
  

Wow, so many comic artists are doing events this week! They must all be in town to see the Jurassic Park show. Adapted from the book Three Days as the Crow Flies, '85 is a graphic novel about NYC in a tumultuous time, with lots of drug addicts, artists, and other off-the-grid grittiness.

Movie Review: Persepolis

The new Persepolis movie (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s adaptation of Satrapi’s popular comic book) begins with a grown Marjane staring at the departures board in a French airport. She’s looking at a listing for a flight to Tehran. It’s a color scene in a black-and-white cartoon, but you don’t feel like it’s because Marjane is finally alive on the inside or in Oz or anything like that. Marjane looks dismal. She goes through the motions of boarding the flight, but stops short of doing so.

It’s made difficult for certain peoples to see themselves in the representations of other certain peoples. Satrapi’s simple, colorless drawings present an opportunity for overcoming this disability.

The story is told through several long flashbacks, the first of which has Marjane, in late 70s Iran, as a cute, round-faced and extremely self-assured child intoxicated by the glamour of political turmoil. Her parents (Catherine Deneuve and Simon Abkarian) are progressives who worry about their friends and family members being held as political prisoners.

Dealing with an audience who will know at least a little about what will happen, Satrapi and Paronnaud still manage to make the family’s hopeful anticipation of a post-Shah Iran feel immediate and gripping. When the Islamic revolution changes their way of life, the adults in Marjane’s life, vignetted in charcoal, rationalize the situation directly to the camera– half the country is illiterate, religion and nationalism are the only ways the people can come together, things will improve. But Persepolis depicts life in Iran as increasingly repressive and rife with public dishonesty. The movie is very funny, and much of the humor comes at the expense of the most iconic results of the Islamic revolution. Iran sent Cannes a peeved note for showing the film this year, and had it pulled out of Thailand recently.

The social model for women in post-revolution society intrudes on Marjane’s coming-of-age, which is a whole big piece of this story, and the filmmakers are funny and unflinching in telling it. The black head covering and chador – new and bothersome to Marjane’s cosmopolitan family – are used to great effect in scenes at school (a crowd of teenage girls, their differences wiped away), on the street (two old harpies shift and bend around Marjane, offended by her homemade Punk is Ded jacket and Michael Jackson button (“western decadence!” ))

As Marjane grows up, she becomes incompatible with her country. Her grandma (Danielle Darrieux) bolsters her fierce independence, and acts as an external conscience. That sounds maudlin and predictable, but this grandmother isn’t your sweet and dim movie stereotype. When Marjane has a man arrested to distract Revolutionary Guard officers from noticing that she is wearing makeup, her grandma berates her like nobody’s business. And Grandma makes references to the “small dicks!” of various men, a determined and strident reversal of objectification. And when Marjane pretends to be French at a school party in Vienna, Grandma appears as a shadow stalking her home.

The film is beautiful to look at. It employs some familiar old-school cinematic tools – magic-lantern-type animations, silhouetted and expressionistic renderings of ruination and fear that reminded me, in flashes, of a wide range of black-and-white directors, like Murnau and de Sica. Olivier Bernet’s score is wonderful (and it doesn’t feel fake “Middle Eastern” like you’d hear in a Hollywood movie), and it’s super important in Persepolis, which tends toward an almost episodic structure, at times ending sequences with an iris out to black.

Persepolis doesn’t neglect to tell the story of Western tampering with Iranian affairs, and it doesn’t gloss over European xenophobia. Marjane seems like a misfit everywhere on Earth, and she directs her anger outward, at the Khomeinians who have her people in a headlock, at a cheating boyfriend, at bourgeois Europeans. Only during a trippy, drawn-out sequence in which she takes anti-depressants (she ends up in the clouds with god and who I assume is Marx), do we get the sense that she ever struggles with her reaction to her situation. She has not a moment of self-doubt.

Each main character rejects the Islamic revolution totally and completely, which left me wondering about those who would have their private resistance eaten away by time. I was curious about what is was like for Marjane’s parents to optimistically consider something like the Islamic revolution as a brief downtick in the national soul, only to see its grip on your culture tighten. In one of the movie’s last moments, Marjane is in an Iranian airport with her family. Her parents’ black and white oval faces take on the familiar expressions your parents usually have when you’re about to board a plane without them, but she’s never coming back.

Booze For Books, Todd Hanyes, and The Adventures of Space Dog

Friday, October 5, 2007

• Dance Dance Library Revolution
  
• 10pm - 4am @ Enid's, 560 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn (Greenpoint)
  

If you're like me, you have tons of dictionaries and thesauruses clogging up your bookshelves, placed there by an etymology crazed GF. Luckily, The Desk Set is throwing a literary dance party that accepts your old paperback word-books in exchange for sweet, sweet booze. Time to clear some shelf space. No (hard)cover! Get it? Book, cover? But seriously, no cover.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

• Todd Haynes
  
• 4pm @ The Walter Reade Theater, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, Manhattan

I went to a film camp in 10th grade, and they made us watch Safe. I thought to myself, "As a film connessouir, I declare this boring and overrated." I'm now willing to accept I may have missed something. Director Haynes will be talking about his new experimental Dylan biopic, I'm Not There. Tickets are sold out online, but hit the title link for standby info.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

• George O'Connor, Sara Varon, and Nick Abadzis
  
• 6pm @ Rocketship, 208 Smith Street, Brooklyn
  

These are all comic creators from First Second Books, a company known for publishing excellent indie fare. Abadzis has had some recent buzz with Laika, the story of the first dog in space. You can read an excerpt of it here, in which an adorable pup gets put in one of those scary astronaut centerfugues. Historical!

Weekanerd NYC - Fun Home, Wristcutters, Bionic TV and LotF

Monday, September 24, 2007

• MoCCA Book Club: Fun Home
  
• 6:30 @ The Museum of Comic & Cartoon Art, 594 Broadway (4th Floor), Manhattan
  

The first in a monthly series of graphic novel discussions kicks off with a talk about Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. It's a book with a lot of fans, hopefully they'll get a few detractors to keep the conversation lively.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

• Wristcutters: A Love Story
  
• 7:30@ The JCC, 334 Amsterdamn Ave, Manhattan
  

Based on a graphic novel, this Sundance flick got into some trouble with a marketing campaign that supposedly made light of suicide. What's the problem? Suicide is hilarious! Tickets are $10, hit the title link to order.

Wendesday, September 26, 2007

• The Bionic Woman Series Premiere
  
• 9pm on NBC
  

Did you play that Bionic Assessment Test game? I got like 36% Bionic. That's shameful.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

• Lord of the Flies
  
• 8pm @ The Museum of Modern Art (Roy & Nina Titus Theater), 11 W. 53rd St, Manhattan

Childhood was not necessarily a fun time for us geekanerds, but at least you weren't marooned with your classmates on a desert island with a smoke monster. Wait, that's Lost.

BLAHHRG: New 30 Days of Night Posters

"Based on the graphic novel". That's what I like to see. Judging by this movie's early promotional campaign, it seems this film adaptation is wearing it's comic-book heritage on it's sleeve. Stardust could have used more of that attitude. For more on the movie, check out the article at Solace in Cinema.

I'll admit I haven't read the classic 30 Days of Night stories, but I did read the first issue of the new series, Red Snow. The story takes place in 1941 and centers around a family in hiding, a British soldier amongst the Russian Army, Nazi war atrocities, and of course, a herd of vampires approaching over a snowy hill. A scan after the jump.


Love dramatic timing of this art - you can practically hear the violin sting when the girl gets up. Next week promises a whole lot of vampire-on-nazi carnage, and who doesn't want to see that?