…and Mark Millar’s Wanted.

One of these things is not like the others.

(the French edition of American Elf published by Ego comme X, (c) James Kochalka)

There’s some manga on the list as well, notably one by Junji Ito (creator of Uzumaki), but considering that about one-third of all comics published in France are manga, I was expecting a bigger Japanese presence. For the most part, the list is a celebration of the greats of contemporary French comics, and even though I haven’t read most of the nominated albums, I recognise a lot of the names: Blutch, Chabouté, Emmanuel Guibert, Christophe Blain, Etienne Davodeau… Just listing them makes me wonder if the Francophone comics readers consider themselves to be living through a golden age, just as Douglas Wolk suggested we Anglophones are. I think I might have to conquer my shyness about my subpar French and go to Angoulême next January. There’s a lot to see, if you’re in the right place to see it.

Katherine Farmar, when not trying to work out how much she can bring back in terms of BD and aromatic fromage from Angoulême, writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.

(cover to the paperback edition of Charlie’s Halting State, published by Orbit and featuring a neat little computer game character version of the author himself, although I should point out the real Charlie is slightly less pixellated, at least on a good day. Since the book deals with the intertwined nature of the virtual and the real world economies its a perfect example for Krugman to refer to. Its also a brilliant techno-thriller and darkly funny and highly recommended – Joe)

(Note for pedants: the economics prize was not part of Alfred Nobel’s original plan and wasn’t endowed by him but by the Sveriges Riksbank in 1969, so sometimes people say in a sniffy sort of way that’s not a real Nobel prize. These people are wrong. Winners of the prize are called Nobel Laureates and are listed on the official website of the Nobel Prize, which is good enough for me.)

Katherine Farmar, when not hiding from geometric patterns, writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.

Enter Junji Ito, and Uzumaki.

Uzumaki is a horror manga about spirals. You might well ask me what’s scary about spirals, and that’s just it: there’s nothing scary about spirals. Spirals are everywhere: snail shells, watch-springs, whirlpools in draining bathwater, the whorls on the pads of your fingers, the cochlea in the inner ear, the coils of your DNA. My tai chi teacher used to say that the chi or life-force that flows through the universe moves in spirals, which may or may not be true; even so, it may be everywhere, and it may be pretty, but the spiral is just a shape. It can’t hurt you.

But what if it could? What if the spiral wasn’t just a shape, but a malevolent, corrupting force that sought to consume and distort everything into its own likeness? What if the spiral had a will of its own and you could never escape it?

That is the premise of Uzumaki, and the end result is a manga that is not just scary, but profoundly unsettling. The town of Kurozu-cho is gradually consumed by spirals: mesmerising, mystical spirals that warp space and matter and drive the town’s inhabitants deeper and deeper into obsession. Both those who love the spirals and those who fear them are unable to resist their power – the spirals spread and spread without ceasing, while the people of Kurozu-cho carry on their lives, pretending that everything is just fine.

Usually when I write a review of a comic, I like to talk about what makes it work the way it works – the specifics of the artist’s style, or the particular influences the writing displays; but with Uzumaki I don’t want to delve too deeply. The things that scare us often scare us for entirely irrational reasons, and exposing the fear to the light of day makes it evaporate – and I don’t want this fear to go away; I’m enjoying it too much. I don’t want to analyse Uzumaki, lest I should rob it of its power over me.

To give you a sense of how insidious Ito’s concept is: as I type this, I have just finished reading the first volume of Uzumaki, and I’m trying not to turn my hands palm-up, because I don’t want to see the spirals in my fingerprints. On a conscious level, I know the spirals can’t hurt me, but the uncanny nature of Ito’s ideas and the relentless nightmare logic of his stories has seeped under my skin. I’ll be seeing spirals in my dreams tonight.

Katherine Farmar, when not hiding from geometric patterns, writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.

And, well… It’s a bit good, isn’t it?

(cover to the DC-published Elfquest Archives Volume 1 by Wendy and Richard Pini, cover art by Wendy Pini)

It took me the whole of the first issue to get past my original dislike of the character designs and start to appreciate the story and the characters for what they were. Wendy and Richard Pini have created something really special in Elfquest: a coherent alternative mythology populated by characters who are both the larger-than-life archetypes that mythology demands and the flesh-and-blood creatures of modern storytelling. The exploits of Cutter and the Wolfrider tribe are the stuff of legend, and at the same time their desires and motives are only too understandable. They want to escape the persecution of the humans who call them “demons”; they want to learn more about the mysterious High Ones from whom they are descended; they want to keep their loved ones safe from the dangers of their world while holding on to the “Way” that makes them what they are. They have a quality that’s usually called “human” in fictional characters, though in this case perhaps I should call it “Elven”; it’s easy to believe in their feelings and to understand their actions.

All of this is done through Wendy Pini’s remarkable art. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t immediately drawn in, but after I’d gotten over my initial reaction, I quickly came to realise that Pini is one of the most versatile comics artists out there. Without cramming the page with mind-boggling amounts of detail, she nonetheless uses every square millimetre of it, creating a three-dimensional world for her characters to move through – not just having 2D characters move past a 2D background, but using the whole of the picture plane in a way that’s rare and delightful. Time after time I was bowled over by some intensely clever bit of page design or some stunningly beautiful drawing. And the more I read of the series, the more I came to appreciate even the character designs that had initially put me off. The Pinis’ elves are both adult and childlike, and they are distinctly unlike Tolkien’s elves; it only makes sense that that should be reflected in the way they look. Their large eyes reflect their emotional openness (most obvious in their telepathic conversations, and especially when they exchange “soul names”), while their long, pointed ears reflect their otherworldly origins.

(an intricate page of colourful art from the very first issue of Elfquest showing the Elves arrival, borrowed from the online version on the official site and (c) Wendy and Richard Pini)

I’ve only read the first 20 issues of the Elfquest saga, and I’m glad, because that means there’s more for me to enjoy in the future. It’s taken me far too long to start reading the series, but now that I’ve started, I’m not going to stop until I’ve read the lot.

Katherine Farmar writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak. 

(the cover to book two of Berlin, City of Smoke, by Jason Lutes, published Drawn & Quarterly)

Katherine Farmar: I’d like to start by asking about the inspiration for Berlin. What was it about that city in that particular period in its history that made you want to create a comics series about it, especially one with Berlin’s wide scope?

Jason Lutes: I was finishing up my previous book, Jar of Fools, and thinking about what I wanted to tackle next. I knew I wanted it to be big – expansive where Jar of Fools had been intimate – and about characters who were distinct from me. As it neared completion, I recognized that the characters in Jar of Fools were all embodiments of aspects of my own personality, and I found myself wanting to get outside of myself more, to try and inhabit the lives of people very different from me.

Although the decision to write and draw a 600-page book about Berlin between the wars seemed arbitrary and impulsive at the time (made as it was immediately upon seeing a magazine ad for a book on the subject), the more I researched the period, the more interesting and resonant it became to me. I do not speak or read German, had never been to Germany, and knew close to nothing about the Weimar Republic, so I saw it as an interesting challenge – one that would test my technical and imaginative capacity as a cartoonist. From the beginning the goal was to create a portrait of the city and its people, using all of the tools I had at my disposal.

(arriving in Weimar-era Berlin, the wide streets, the grand buildings and sophisticated citizens – and the horribly maimed sons of the trenches of the War To End All Wars, in an early scene from Berlin: City of Stone by Jason Lutes, published D&Q)

KF: Expansive is a good word for it. One of the things that’s so striking about Berlin is how many characters there are, and how even very minor characters who only appear in a couple of pages are given their own perspective on events, which, combined with the attention to detail in the setting, gives the work a uniquely rich texture. How do you manage to juggle so many characters, and how do you approach the task of researching the background? For instance, do you ever find pieces of information or visual references that you want to use, but can’t? Are you ever tempted to fake it?

JL: Oh, I fake it all the time, but usually only in the sense that I don’t corroborate every last detail. I research as much as I can, but there end up being so many gaps that I have no choice but to let my imagination fill them in. Each bit of research – every photo or personal account or artifact – is like a dot added to a page, and my imagination allows me to pick images or patterns out of the growing accumulation of dots. I find great stuff all the time that I decide against using, but it all feeds into a greater understanding of the time and place where the story occurs.

It’s certainly a challenge to juggle characters. In my planning stages, I make lists and diagrams in an attempt to weave their stories together in a satisfying way, but invariably ideas get cut, some of the players recede from the stage, and new ones step out. When I set out on this project, I saw Kurt and Marthe as the main threads that would carry the story, and that plan still holds; what I didn’t expect or plan on was who the various secondary characters would be, and what I would be exploring through them.

KF: Can you talk a little more about the secondary characters? Did any of them take you by surprise, moving the story in an unexpected direction? And in general, how much do you plan in advance? The story of Berlin seems very carefully constructed.

JL: The story of Silvia Braun, Gudrun Braun’s daughter, has become much more central than I ever anticipated. I see it now as a vital thread, but when she first showed up I had no notion of her mother’s eventual fate, or what it would mean for the Braun family. Pavel, the beggar who takes Silvia under his wing, was at first just a walk-on part, but his perspective became interesting to me and his role grew to reflect that.

In a way, nearly all of the characters besides Kurt and Marthe have been unexpected. In many cases I would draw a crowd scene or incidental encounter, then follow one of the “extras” to see where he or she would take me. In the earliest conceptual stage, before I had written or drawn any part of the story, I had several sketchbook pages of secondary characters intended for inclusion – a boxer, a Communist agitprop theatre group, a female intellectual – but only one of them, Carl von Ossietzky (who was a real person), has made it into the story so far. The rest have walked in off the street, so to speak.

(the less glamorous side of city living in City of Smoke, art and (c) Jason Lutes)

I generally work a chapter at a time, but once the story reached its midpoint it became necessary to work further out. Currently I’m plotting the entirety of City of Light, the final book, before I get down to the serious business of page engineering, writing, and drawing. My initial planning consists of a very loose structure, a simple timeline defined by real historical events like the May Day Massacre or the [stock market] Crash of 1929. From there I’ll decide how much calendar time I want a given chapter to span, make a list of which characters need to move forward, break the chapter down into scenes involving those characters, and decide how many pages to devote to each scene. Each chapter has a strict limit of 24 pages, and I’m a big believer in invention born out of limitations. My biggest challenge as a storyteller is to utilize those 24 pages efficiently, jumping back and forth across a broad cast of characters without short-changing any of them, while maintaining a pace that’s satisfying and appropriate to the overall narrative. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t.

KF: It’s interesting you mention the 24-page limit, because that’s one of the most common external constraints on comics, due to the way they’ve historically been serialised, and a lot of comics creators have been abandoning it as new publishing models arise. I find myself wondering sometimes if this is entirely wise, since a lot of the time it seems to result in a loss of structure. In any case, it reminds me of this entry on your blog where you talk about the “sweet spot” between high and low levels of detail in visual art. Can you expand a little on your artistic philosophy (if that’s not too grand a word) and how it informs your work?

JL: Constraints are the catalysts of invention. They provide structure, as you note, and they force the artist to be creative in ways he or she wouldn’t otherwise choose. I often devise constraint-driven exercises for my students at the Center for Cartoon Studies.

I see the “sweet spot” thing more as a matter of taste than a philosophy. I can appreciate photo-realistic rendering (whether traditional or electronic), and I can appreciate the spareness of the work of an artist like Mondrian, but the visual art that really grabs me is the stuff that gives me just enough information to provoke my imagination without filling in all of the details for me. The stuff that asks me to participate and work a little, instead of being so “high resolution” that there are no unanswered questions, or so opaque and open that there’s nothing to hold on to.

I try to keep my own work in that middle zone. There is a degree of exposition in Berlin, but I try not to spell everything out for my readers, trusting them to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of Weimar Germany on their own. On a visual level I strive to make the world of Berlin feel alive (animated by the reader’s imagination) by laying in enough detail to suggest authenticity, but not so much that my characters are caught and frozen in a dense web of lines. When I err, it is usually on the side being overly dense.

KF: I’m glad you mentioned the Center for Cartoon Studies, because I wanted to ask you about that. How did you come to be involved, and what’s your experience there been like?

JL: James Sturm, another D&Q cartoonist and an old friend from Seattle, moved to Vermont and co-founded the Center for Cartoon Studies with administrator extraordinnaire Michelle Ollie in 2004/2005. I love talking and thinking about comics, and I had always wanted to teach at an intensive adult level (having taught mostly kids before), so as soon as James started nudging me I began looking for a good excuse to move to east. My girlfriend is from Vermont, and her folks still live here, so being able to get our 2-year-old daughter within proximity of her grandparents made the decision a lot easier. The school is an amazing institution, a testament to James’ vision and Michelle’s organizational and fund-raising acumen, and it’s become a cornerstone in the revitalization of the small town of White River Junction. In a lot of ways it embodies my fantasy of what a comic book school should be like.

Teaching is by turns inspirational and frustrating. Being able to talk about and work on comics with other people who are passionate about the medium is an enormous pleasure, and one for which I am very grateful at this stage of my life and career. There are around 36 total students (an average of 18 per year of a two-year program), all of whom move to this small, relatively isolated railroad town (the radio motto of which is, “White River Junction: It’s not so bad!”), which can be a difficult experience for some. With such a small population, group chemistry has a huge impact, and that kind of thing can be hard to predict or manage; some classes play out perfectly, and others feel like pulling teeth. All of the teachers I’ve consulted in my efforts to get a handle on the process tell me that’s just a fact of teaching, but even so, I’m trying to learn from the pitfalls of my first year and think constructively as I head into my second.

In short: I love the school and I love teaching!

(a beautiful landscape frame from Berlin: City of Smoke in which the heavy black almost glows like a city night; art and (c) Jason Lutes)

KF: Just to return to Berlin: you’ve been working on this one great project for over ten years now, and you’re into the last third of the work, the home stretch, so to speak. Are there any projects you have in mind for when Berlin is completed? And how do you think it’s going to feel when you’ve finally drawn a line under it?

JL: It’s going to feel really good. It’s been a struggle on many levels, and I will be very relieved and happy to finally complete it. There are many, many other stories I want to tackle – no end to them, actually – and I am eager to do so. Recognizing the finite number of working years I have left, and how that limitation makes it impossible for me to write and draw even a tiny fraction of the work I feel I have in me, I have begun to write comics for other artists to draw. Houdini: The Handcuff King (with Nick Bertozzi) was sort of a test run for me on that process. I will still work out the pacing and staging for these stories, but someone else will do the hard drawing work, while I continue to write and draw the stories to which I feel the most attached. I have many ideas, in many different genres, and for most of them I or my publisher will be hiring artists.

(I couldn’t resist borrowing this photograph from Jason’s own blog showing the arrival of Berlin: City of Smoke to his home)

I will certainly be sad to close the book, so to speak, on the characters that inhabit Berlin. It’s a cliché, but your characters do become part of you after a while. Or, perhaps more accurately: they always were a part of you, and over time you get to know them (yourself ) better. I felt this very strongly when I finished Jar of Fools, and I know I’ll feel it with Berlin, but I think it will be easier to let them go. In that sense my efforts to get outside of myself in telling this story may pay off; the more separate they feel from me, the more they live on the page itself, the easier it will be for me to let them go on without me.

KF: Jason Lutes, thank you very much for sharing your time and thoughts with us. Jason’s second Berlin collection, City of Smoke, has just been published by the good people at Drawn & Quarterly and is available to order now. You can keep up with Jason’s life and work via his blog Coyote Vs Wolf. Katherine is a regular contributor to the FPI blog and also muses on comics over on her own blog, Whereof One Can Speak.

After a brief reflection on the morality of this decision, Light sets about his task with glee and gains the attention of police forces worldwide, who dub the mysterious murderer “Kira” (a Japanese pronunciation of “Killer”). The eccentric detective L decides to join the chase. Once L comes into the picture, the story settles into the form it retains for the rest of its run: an increasingly complex cat-and-mouse game between Light and the people investigating him.

It’s in the twists and turns of the pursuit that Death Note comes into its own. Tsugumi Ohba doesn’t go in for character development, and doesn’t bother much with exploring the moral dilemmas the existence and use of the Death Note throws up; instead, the focus is on the plans and manipulations and gambits and counter-gambits Light engages in to cover his tracks, fool his pursuers, and further his ascent to virtual godhood. Sometimes these plans get ridiculously convoluted; in the words of TV Tropes, they cross the line from Xanatos Gambit to Xanatos Roulette, with all parties involved seeming to know too much and manipulate events with far too much skill. More than once, the moment when you’re convinced that Light has been caught in a trap and cannot possibly get out of it will be followed by Light grinning his evil, satisfied grin and thinking to himself: “Exactly as planned!”

There’s always an explanation, but it’s not always terribly convincing, and even when the plans are more or less reasonable, there’s always a lot of lengthy introspection along the lines of “he thinks that I think that he doesn’t know that she knows that I know…”, repeated for each character so that you can be absolutely sure who knows what about whom. Provided, that is, that you can hold it all in your head.

I get lost a lot when I’m reading Death Note, and sometimes it’s irritating, but it’s worth it for those moments when the dominoes fall in exactly the right way and Light’s plans — or someone else’s — work out just perfectly. The bizarre thing about Death Note is that I actively dislike most of the characters, and yet that doesn’t hinder my enjoyment at all. Would you enjoy a chess game less if the king was a sociopath and the pawns were all naive morons? It’s the moves that matter, not the pieces; not even the players.

Takeshi Obata’s art is never less than gorgeous, and one of the interesting things about revisiting the first few volumes for this blog entry has been seeing how his style evolved over the course of the series, growing smoother and slicker by imperceptible increments. The subtle, understated touches he adds in facial expressions and body language make up somewhat for the thinness of the characters as written. It says something for his range of faces that characters as superficially similar as Mogi, Ide and Matsuda are impossible to confuse for each other.

Does Death Note live up to the hype? Yes and no. Yes, in that it’s a compelling read from beginning to end with more twists than a ten-mile corkscrew; and no, in that every aspect of the storytelling other than the simple unfolding of the plot is thin and unsatisfying. Ohba gestures towards moral reflection, but doesn’t follow through, and most of the characters are, as I’ve said, either very lightly sketched or thoroughly dislikeable. (Don’t get me started on Misa. I don’t normally hate fictional characters, but dear God, it’s so easy to make an exception for her. As Shaenon Garrity put it: “She’s the stupidest creature on planet Earth. Even stupider than the other female characters in Death Note, who are all stupid. Even stupider than other idol singers… a woman with the mind of a squirrel monkey.”) What’s more, after volume 7, there’s a sudden dip in the quality of the plot, as the events of that volume leave a hole in the manga’s narrative structure that’s never quite filled. The last five volumes are less compelling than the first seven, and the plotting begins to get sloppy by comparison. To be fair, the pace picks up in volume 9, and even if it never quite matches the tightness of the early volumes, it’s always fun to read.

And, ironically, a large part of what makes it fun is the very sketchiness of the aspects I’ve described as “unsatisfying”. One of the Death Note fandom’s favourite characters is Matt, a character who appears in a grand total of 12 panels. Not 12 pages: 12 panels. The very concept of the Death Note encourages speculation: if you had one, what would you do? If you were in Light’s shoes, and wanted to do what he did, could you do a better job? If you were investigating Kira, what steps would you take to find out who he was? Death Note is set up to encourage the fans to read between the lines, to speculate, extrapolate, and come up with their own ideas. It may not be deliberate, but that’s the effect, and that being so, too much detail in the characterisation or in the moral reasoning would be counter-roductive — it would leave less space for the reader’s imagination.

So in the end, the thing that makes Death Note so powerful is the same thing that makes the Death Note itself powerful: the fact that you can write anything you like in it.

Just don’t write any real person’s name. After all, “The human whose name is written in this note shall die…”

Katherine Farmar writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak. You can read Katherine’s thoughts on the movie adaptation of Death Note here on the blog.

The American woodcut artist Lynd Ward was an early pioneer of “novels in pictures”, or “graphic novels” as we call them now, though Ward’s work is unlike anything you’ll find in a comics shop today. Nick Mullins has unearthed some scans of illustrations Ward did for a 1934 edition of Frankenstein. They’re remarkably powerful pieces, bringing to mind William Blake as an antecedent and Shaun Tan as a descendent. Ward eschews literal, naturalistic illustration in favour of evoking the intense emotional states of the characters and the Gothic atmosphere of the novel; it’s strong stuff, and it’s a bit shocking that they’re all out of print, but thanks to the internet we can see them in very nearly their full glory.

(Lynd Ward’s striking illustration of the monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein, borrowed from Nick Mullins)

Speaking of hard-to-find gems: it’s a bit surprising to me, in retrospect, that I never got into Elfquest. Given the way my tastes usually run, you’d think it’d be right up my street, but for some reason the stars were never right and I was never in the mood for something like Elfquest at the same time as being in a shop that sold it. In recent years I’ve found that the books are both harder to figure out (on account of how they keep publishing more of them, and the timelines keep getting more complicated, so it’s not immediately obvious where to start) and harder to find (though maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places). Fortunately on both counts, the Elfquest site has both a simple timeline laying out which series take place when, and an online archive of many old Elfquest comics, going all the way back to the very first appearance of the title in 1980. New issues are being added all the time, so if you’ve always been wondering what the fuss was about, or you used to be a fan but lost track somewhere along the way, you’ll soon be able to get completely up to speed.

Of course, Wendy and Richard Pini are not the only publishers to put older works online. (They’re not even the only husband-and-wife self-publishing team creating fantasy comics to put older works online; Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius has been on my “do an archive binge some day when I’ve got a spare afternoon” list for a while.) It’s a wonderful way of satisfying your existing audience with regular and frequent updates if pamphlet serialization isn’t an option; but, of course, that’s not the main reason why publishers tend to do it. In general, the main reason to put old comics online is as a shop window: people are more likely to buy them if they get a chance to sample them first. This is probably the main purpose of DMP’s new eManga site. Although technically one can “rent” the manga on the site, I doubt many manga readers will be willing to shell out $4 for 72 hours of access to an online version of the manga that costs about $12 in print; the manga cannot be downloaded and the e-reader DMP are using is rather clunky and doesn’t show off the art to its best advantage. At actual size it looks fine, but at actual size it’s too big for a standard monitor to display a full page; meanwhile, at the smaller sizes the text is so small that it’s uncomfortable to read, and the art looks blurry and generally awful, as if it were a photocopy of a photocopy. There’s a compromise between the two in the form of “panel view”, which automatically shifts focus from one panel to the next, but that doesn’t let you see the whole page, and the constant shift of focus made me either seasick or impatient until I figured out how to get it to run at the right speed.

To be fair, the site is in beta at the moment, and DMP are open to feedback, but I just can’t see myself spending any money on what’s on offer. I’d rather stick with the dead-tree edition.

But, on the other hand, until I looked at the eManga site, I hadn’t realised that DMP/June had published Kiss Blue by Keiko Kinoshita, one of my favourite BL creators. I don’t plan on renting the eManga version — in fact, right now I can’t, because only a short sample of that title is available at the moment. But now I have one more title to add to my wishlist, one more pink-striped book to look out for when I’m at the comics shop. And maybe that’s the real point of eManga: not to be an online store for DMP’s online manga, but to be a sample counter for their printed manga. If that’s the case, it would be wise for them to start putting up samples of their adults-only line, 801 Media. In shops, these books are usually shrinkwrapped, which makes it impossible to browse, and a sample online could give readers a chance to see if they like the art style and the writing — they wouldn’t even need to put anything on the site that was strictly 18-rated.

(scene from Order of Tales, art and (c) Evan Dahm)

Finally, to comics that were put on the web and then printed: I’ve raved here before about Evan Dahm’s Rice Boy, and I’m very pleased to tell you all that Dahm is currently working on another story set in the same world. It’s called Order of Tales and there are 56 pages up so far. What’s more, Rice Boy itself is now available as an honest-to-God book, that you can take to the bath or curl up with in bed. It looks gorgeous, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Katherine Farmar writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.

Written by Ray Fawkes, art by Cameron Stewart

Published by Oni Press

Here’s an object lesson in marketing: 90% of my reason for buying The Apocalipstix was the title, because even if it isn’t an Invisibles reference, it’s a bloody cool title. Unfortunately, the content of the book doesn’t quite measure up.

The premise is one of those high-concept “X meets Y” ideas that sounds perfect when you pitch it: a three-woman rock band travels through a post-apocalyptic America, fighting mutants and pirates and eating canned peaches. That’s a bullet-proof idea, right? I mean, it practically writes itself, right?

Up to a point, Lord Copper. The Apocalipstix has a lot of verve and style, and Cameron Stewart’s art is gloriously kinetic – it looks like he had a lot of fun drawing it, and for a while that fun rubs off on the reader. Until, that is, the reader spots the one glaring flaw that brings enjoyment screeching to a halt: Ray Fawkes has neglected to include a plot.

(even after the apocalypse you still have to worry about ants ruining your picnic in Apolcalipstix, story by Ray Fawkes, art by Cameron Stewart, published Oni)

That’s a little harsh, but honestly: this first volume has three chapters with no connection to each other whatsoever, other than the main characters and the setting being the same in each one. The first two chapters don’t even feature the kind of plot that would be satisfying in a short story: in the first one, the Apocalipstix fight some pirates. In the second chapter, the Apocalipstix fight some giant ants. In neither case is there a plot; there’s just a bunch of stuff happening, with no sense of conflict or progression or suspense. The characters are so one-dimensional that it’s impossible to care about them, and the order of events makes it impossible to doubt how things are going to turn out.

In the third chapter, there’s a real plot, which is welcome, and one of the Apocalipstix even acquires a second dimension; but it’s too little, too late, and the attempt to make the scarcity of fuel a cornerstone of the chapter is laughable, considering the chapter is about a rock’n'roll battle of the bands. Call me a nitpicking killjoy if you like, but if fuel is so scarce, how are they powering their instruments? Those guitars don’t look acoustic to me. This little inconsistency, the bizarre mutations, and the fact that a ridiculous number of rock musicians seem to have survived the apocalypse combine to give the impression that Fawkes didn’t put much thought, if any, into how his setting was supposed to work. I’m a world-building wonk, so I’ll freely admit that things like this bother me more than most people; but even I could happily enjoy a completely kitchen-sink post-apocalypse world, with giant ants and marauding bandits and whatever else you care to mention, if the writer didn’t then expect me to take the setting seriously enough to care about Megumi meeting another Japanese person when she’d assumed she was the last one on Earth. The crazier your setting, the crazier your storytelling needs to be to keep up, but Fawkes doesn’t actually do much with the standard tropes of the post-apocalyptic story, other than toss them all in the pot and stir.

(the end of the world may have come and gone but there’s still time for some rock’n'roll in Apocalipstix by Ray Fawkes, art by Cameron Stewart)

It’s a shame, it really is, because Cameron Stewart’s art is terrific to look at, and the fight scenes are good fun, and The Apocalipstix does have some of the ingredients for a great story; but the end product comes across as half-baked. If you’ve been craving more Cameron Stewart art ever since the last issue of The Other Side, The Apocalipstix isn’t a bad way to get your fix; but if you want a story, you won’t find one here.

Katherine Farmar writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.

No manga series has truly hit the big time until it’s got at least a TV adaptation, whether live-action or anime (or sometimes both), and preferably also drama CDs, character song CDs, light novels, visual novels, video games, and miscellaneous “character goods”. But it’s relatively rare for a manga series to be adapted to a live-action feature film, especially for manga with supernatural elements. This makes the DVD release of Death Note (the 2006 live-action adaptation of the phenomenally popular manga series) particularly interesting. How faithful can such an adaptation be? And how well does the story work in live action?

The answers are “more than you might think” and “surprisingly well”, respectively. The film-makers didn’t feel a need to tamper with the story much, perhaps because Death Note has such a strong central concept – the notebook that kills anyone whose name is written down in it, the crusade that the notebook’s owner embarks on to rid the world of criminals, and the cat-and-mouse game that ensues when the police start trying to hunt him down. The film only adapts the first nine chapters of the manga; there have been two sequels covering later storylines, not yet released in English. Some of the plot details are different, even so – though if anything, they’re improvements on the manga; the introduction of two new female characters and the expansion of the role of Naomi Misora is highly welcome, since one of the manga’s weaknesses is its paucity of interesting women. In other ways, the manner of storytelling has been changed to fit the new medium: where the manga depended a great deal on thought bubbles and narration, the film naturally opts for punchier, simpler visual exposition, which has the odd side effect of slightly softening the character of Light: he seems less calculating in the film, if only because we’re not constantly being told what he’s planning.

Although, that said, a certain amount of the softening comes from Tatsuya Fujiwara’s performance. Fujiwara has an open face and a ready smile that makes it hard, at first, to think of him as the cold and sociopathic Light Yagami of the manga. As Light uses the Death Note more and more, and graduates from killing vicious murderers to killing people who get in his way, he smiles less and less, and during the train sequence (very faithfully adapted from the manga) he finally displays the cold, triumphant grin most often seen on the manga Light’s face.

Fujiwara aside, one of the most striking things about the film is how recognisable the characters are: as soon as there was a glimpse of the police unit investigating “Kira” (the codename for the owner of the Death Note), I could immediately pick out Matsuda, Aizawa, Ide and Soichiro Yagami, before a single word had been said. Naomi Misora, Watari, and L are likewise uncannily true to their manga incarnations. As with the manga, the film kicks into high gear as soon as L appears. Ken’ichi Matsuyama is perfectly cast as the eccentric but brilliant detective who comes close to rooting out Light’s secret.

But perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the film is Ryuk, the shinigami (god of death) who drops the Death Note into the human world and follows Light around to watch what he does. Ryuk’s ghastly, clown-like appearance is rendered in CGI, and while there are occasional moments when the animation doesn’t quite work, for the most part he’s utterly convincing; he moves that little bit more fluidly than the human characters, floats around weightless, flies on his bat-like wings, and passes through solid objects, but still looks just as real and just as present as the live actors. Shido Nakamura gives Ryuk a deep, gravely voice that likewise marks him out; it’s not surprising that Nakamura was cast for the same part in the Death Note anime.

As both a stand-alone film and an adaptation, Death Note works remarkably well. Its faithful without being slavish, transferring both the narrative spine of the manga and the dark, tense atmosphere that makes it so compelling to read. I enjoyed it a lot, and I look forward to the English-language release of the sequels.

Katherine Farmar writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.

(Fotogloctica by Farel Dalrymple, borrowed from the Tor site and (c) Farel Dalrymple. Is it just me or is there something here slightly reminiscent of Bill Plympton – in a good way?)