Graphic Novel  Reviews: 11/2/2009

-- Publishers Weekly, 11/2/2009 3:49:00 PM

Having already established his reputation as the world's leading comics journalist, Sacco (Safe Area Gorazde) is now making a serious case to be considered one of the world's top journalists, period. His newest undertaking is a bracing quest to uncover the truth about what happened in two Gaza Strip towns in 1956, when aftershocks from the Sinai campaign may have resulted in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military. Sacco first came across the stories during research in 2001 and was shocked to discover that, but for one brief mention, the incidents had never been fully investigated. The resulting book is a blow-by-blow retelling of how Sacco, on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, embedded himself in Gaza and set about interviewing every witness he could find who had been in the towns of Khan Younis and Rafah on those fateful days. Sacco's art is alternately epic and intimate, but he exceeds himself in the scope of his ambition (particularly in one sequence that shows in vivid terms how desert refugee camps from 1948 turned into the teeming slums of today). But it's his exacting and harrowing interviews that make this book an invaluable and wrenching piece of journalism. (Dec.)

This reboot of Motter's groundbreaking retro-future cult favorite from the '80s for the 2000s comes up with an odd mixed bag. When Radiant City's mood-soothing “psychetecture” starts eliciting assorted mental and emotional disorders in its inhabitants, the local government decides to raze the metropolis and build anew, a plan carried out by giant robots that kill a respected sect of architects. But the reconstruction can only spell a horrible outcome, so the city's mysterious designer, Mister X, returns after having disappeared years earlier and endeavors to retrieve his original blueprints while eluding the corrupt government, vicious gangsters and the police, who think he may be the serial killer who's leaving a trail of bodies. The narrative moves at a measured pace and at times reads like a dream of a place and era that simultaneously never was and is yet to be, the art a cold yet alluring fusion of the film noir aesthetic and a push-button future as imagined by the likes of film directors Fritz Lang or William Cameron Menzies. Motter certainly delivers in terms of mood and visuals, but the end result comes up curiously uninvolving. (Nov.)

Just about the last thing that the comics world needs (apart from more action/horror mashups) is another dry and inspiration-free autobiography—thankfully, Alec shows with thrilling certitude that quotidian observations make just as great comic art as the most action-packed fiction. This monster of a book (billed as “the definitive edition”) contains a life's worth of Campbell's previously published Alec MacGarry stories. Running from 1981 to the present, these witty and thoughtful pieces (etched with the prolific Campbell's typically scratchy impatience) show Campbell's alter ego progressing from irresponsible Scottish pub crawler to striving graphic novelist to responsible and reasonably successful Aussie father. Along the way we can trace Campbell's rise from penny-pinching obscurity to relative fame, sketching an engaging portrait of the comics community. Though best known for his Alan Moore collaboration From Hell, Campbell shows in his MacGarry stories a breezy comic touch that can still flirt with darker topics of artistic responsibility and mortality without weighing down the narrative. The book can drag in its earlier, more minutely observed pages, but taken as a whole, delivers a life-size work, a great and epic comic documentary novel like no other. (Nov.)

The Wild West has always been the setting to examine what happens when humanity abandons its rules. And the werewolf is an ideal path to explore the mind of a person who loses all self-control. The natural connection between those two elements is only the starting point for this engaging, intricately crafted western horror series. As Colin MacGregor, a former Pinkerton's detective with a hidden past, arrives in the isolated town of Blest, Tex., his only goal is to catch a man with a price on his head. Soon he's hired to rescue a kidnapped girl, and events spiral into two more connected episodes of supernatural horror spread out across the landscape of the American West at the dawn of the industrial age. Gallaher adeptly layers elements from many mythologies to create a rich melting pot of mysticism matching the diversity of settlers in the towns where the stories take place. Ellis's strong artwork captures the mysterious, lawless atmosphere, rising to the occasion whenever the tale calls for the reader to be frightened or awed. (Oct.)

Rin-ne is the newest manga from Takahashi, creator of Ranma½ and Inuyasha, two of the most successful anime and manga series of all time. Sakura is a teenage girl who can see spirits due to a narrow escape from the wheel of death and reincarnation as a child. One day, her classroom is plagued by a ghost, and she meets Rinne, a living boy filling the role of a shinigami—a supernatural being who guides spirits to their rest. Poor and alone on Earth, he tries to cadge meals and scam a living in between dealing with unquiet spirits. Despite potential melodramatic fodder, both characters are too practical and matter-of-fact for theatrics. Instead, Rin-ne tells the wry and funny adventures of two lonely kids becoming friends against a background of ghost stories that are more melancholy than frightening. Rin-ne is not the most profound of comics nor is it the most visually stunning, but it is a satisfying and heartfelt story, with promise of greater things to come as the tale unfolds. (Oct.)