Craig McDonald & Kevin Singles: Head Games

I've never read any of the Hector Lassiter novels by Craig McDonald, but have read several good reviews of them, so I picked the graphic novel version of his first novel, Head Games, up in the comic book store my friend runs here in Turku. The drawing style looked stylish, and the story line sounded good.

I wasn't disappointed. The story about Pancho Villa's severed head and people hunting it is funny and tragic, and it reminded me of several other novels and films, such as Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I liked how the father George Bush Sr. was brought into the story.

Hector Lassiter himself is an interesting character, a bit macho adventurer, cynical but still humane, good-looking but aging. Lassiter's sidekick, free-wheeling poet and reporter  Bud Fiske is maybe even more intriguing: with him Mcdonald brings up points about the whole era and its change during the late fifties and sixties. The art of Kevin Singles is quite nice, retro but not too retro, which is fitting, since the story takes place in 1957 (there's also an epilogue that takes place in the early seventies). The pictures are black & white with only one process colour (not sure if this is the right word), which works quite well. The style in all is a bit reminiscent of Darwyn Cooke's great Richard Stark graphic novels. It's not only a film noir pastiche.

There are quite many crime graphic novels coming out at the moment. There have of course always been crime comics, but this seems like a boom or a trend, starting perhaps with Road to Perdition, 100 Bullets and Scalped and going on with the Hard Case Crime comics, My Friend Dahmer and what not. Head Games is an entertaining addition to the cycle, which seems to concentrate on hardboiled and noir.

Friday's Forgotten Book: It Rhymes with Lust

Possibly a first edition,
based on the defects on the cover.

One of the stablemates in any genre is to discuss what was the first artifact produced in the particular genre. Hence there are many first graphic novels. I don't know what the first graphic novel really is, but I do know that there were many before It Rhymes with Lust was published in 1950 by a small outfit called Picture Novels, a subsidiary of St. John Publications.

It Rhymes with Lust was written by Leslie Waller and Arnold Drake and illustrated by Matt Baker. Drake and Baker had been doing regular comics for some time, mainly for DC, Waller had published a crime novel or two. Later on he did lots of movie novelizations. There have been two reprints, one in Comics Journal ten years ago and one by Dark Horse in 2007. It's been sold out for some time now, but I managed to pick up a copy.

It Rhymes with Lust (a great title, by the way!) is a slightly noirish exposé story of a cynical journalist who's called to a town called Copper City to run a newspaper published by the big man of Copper City, Buck Masson. Masson has passed away just before the story starts, but our man doesn't know it entering Copper City. It's soon revealed to him that Copper City is a corrupt place and eventually he has to stop the corruption. He has to face some thugs run by the deceased Buck Masson's lusty widow, Rust ("it rhymes with lust"), but he also falls in love with Buck Masson's daughter.

It Rhymes with Lust wouldn't be great literature if if were a prose novel, but now it's interesting, at least as a curiosity. It might work also as a movie, but even then it would be cliched. The active woman, Rust, is a bad femme fatale, and the passive one, Buck Masson's daughter, is a good girl. You've seen this a thousand times. Matt Baker draws well (beautiful women especially), his line is fluid, and the continuity is pretty good - this stuff reads fluently -, but as a story this would require some extra twists.

Picture Novels published another graphic novel, The Case of the Winking Buddha, by pulp novelist Manning Lee Stokes and illustrator Charles Raab -, but that's never been reprinted, so I'm not very likely to be able to read it. It has a great cover, though. Stokes wrote some crime novels from the thirties on and later he did a dozen Nick Carter paperbacks.

I noticed while reading this that a new small publisher Automat.Press has just launched a new Kindle edition of another early graphic novel, also in paperback format, i.e. Joseph Millard's Mansion of Evil. It was originally published by no less than Fawcett Gold Medal! Millard was an interesting character in his own right, making comics in the 1940's and 1950's and then moving to paperback originals. He wrote as Joe Millard some The Man With No Name westerns in the early seventies (though everyone knows Clint Eastwood has a name in all the Sergio Leone movies he's in). There are some free pages of Mansion of Evil in Amazon, and from those it seems that Mansion of Evil is purer noir, with its doppelgangers and all that stuff. Graphicwise, it doesn't seem as solid as It Rhymes with Lust.

Joseph Millard's graphic novel

Joe Millard's rare and early paperback-sized graphic novel is available now on Kindle. Jeff Vorzimmer has uploaded the first chapter to be viewed for free on Scribd here. Millard, who later on wrote lots of Westerns, including the ones with "The Man-With-No-Name", did also the art, at least that's how I figure it. Am I right about this? I don't find any mention on the artist on the site.

Logicomix

The Logicomix graphic novel (which I believe is available in English) has been getting high praise from just about everyone here in Finland. The premise is interesting: it's a metatextual rendering of the history of mathematical, exact logic. It's told from many perspectives: the artists discussing the book under construction and Bertrand Russell telling about his life in a public speech, with the story moving forwards and backwards in time. The examples of logic Russell gives in his speech are also played out in the present time, with the artists discussing them. 

Logicomix is a fluent read, but I got the feeling it's also overhyped. The art is a bit stale (the artists are said to have collaborated earlier on the Babar animated TV show...) and while there's a lot of stuff going on all the time, with many important mathematical thinkers and philosophers popping in and popping out, I didn't realize what the fuss was about. (Plus I didn't understand many of the dilemmas presented, which may explain why I wasn't as fascinated as some others.) The stuff with Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably the most powerful. But I'd say if you're interested at all in the mathematics or the history of philosophical logic, you should try Logicomix. I just wish it would've been more original, more courageous. As a graphic novel, it's way behind Spiegelman's Maus, anything by Will Eisner, Alan Moore's and Eddie Campbell's From Hell etc. 

Comixology on The Hunter

Interim here's a link to Comixology's post about the new graphic novel adaptation of Richard Stark's The Hunter.

Parker graphic novel

The guy's no Lee Marvin, but still these previews of forth-coming Parker graphic novel look very neat.

Richard Stark graphic novels

Darwyn (JLA: The New Frontier) Cooke will adapt the first four "Parker" novels by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) as a series of graphic novels for publisher IDW. The titles, which have a "mild continuity" as Cooke explained, will be: The Hunter (aka Point Blank), The Man with the Getaway Face, The Outfit, and The Mourner. The first title, according to Cooke, is targeted for a late 2009 release, with the successive
three titles coming out in two year-intervals after that. (...)

The graphic novels will be fully endorsed and approved by Westlake, as Cooke has been in contact with the author, and referred to the process between himself and the original author as a collaboration that will reflect the tone of the original novels.

In regards to his art style, Cooke said that Parker graphic novels will be similar to his usual style, but will be "choppier and grittier - a far rawer look" than his mainstream superhero work. The art will be in black and white with one color.

From Newsarama.