In case you haven’t already encountered it, here’s the deal with Achewood: If you come across the comic strip online right now, in it’s seventh year of publication, you’ll probably feel like you have no clue what’s going on.  Something about cats, and bears, and robots, and a naïve otter.  Heck, you probably won’t get it when you read the first strip. But if you spend the time to go back through the archives, read from the beginning, and take the time to learn about the characters and their history, you’ll quickly become engrossed in one of the most savagely funny evolutions in comics today.

Writer/artist Chris Onstad has developed a small universe inside a pathologically erudite world called Achewood.  It’s a place where your toys and your pets live human-esque adult lives right alongside us.  Our hedonistic habits, shopping centers, television shows, celebrity chefs, and fashion labels are theirs.  And in Achewood, Onstad has created a cast of characters that have effectively satirized contemporary life through their own distinct personalities.  It’s rude, it’s frequently crude, and some of the smartest work being done in webcomics.  Not only do you have the semi-regularly updated online strip, but Onstad has created blogs for each of his major characters, displaying a range of voice and a breadth of cultural savvy.  There’s even a series of Achewood cookbooks.

Which makes it both a triumph and a challenge that Onstad’s The Great Outdoor Fight has finally been collected in hardcover book form and is now available through Dark Horse Comics.  The “Great Outdoor Fight” story-arc is one of the most sustained sequences of the strip’s history, and is a mixed-sentiment fan favorite (explanation to follow).  It ran over a number of months online, and the amount of backstory and characterization make it a perfect stand-alone collection—if you already know Achewood. 

This isn’t an easy one for new readers to pick up.  It’s just not possible to understand the absurd humor if you haven’t come to know Ray and Roast Beef—essentially the two main characters of the strip, and the central focus of this storyline.  Knowing something about Ray being the luckiest semi-idiotic egomaniac with a heart of gold in the world is important to getting the joke of his being invited to the event that gives the book its title.  Knowing that Roast Beef is a chronically depressed hypochondriac with the world’s worst self-image is important to understanding the transformative moment of Beef taking charge in an event that is entirely about machismo.

For the Great Outdoor Fight is the most aggro of competitions.  Three Days, Three Acres, Three Thousand Men.  An all-out, nothing-barred, bloody fight until the last man standing is declared the victor.  It’s hyper-violent, completely over the top, and a hilarious commentary on the historical urge for bloodsport.  And yet, because Ray is the son of a former champion, the entire fight becomes an observation.  There are graphic moments, but those are less important and less visible than the people involved and their reactions, from the Achewood gang at home following along online (through a blogger using a Blackberry from inside the fight itself) to the strategy discussions of Ray and Roast Beef.  The hows and whys and spectacle of the event are more important than the action.  When this initially ran, it actually drew a mixed reaction from the fans, who only received small chunks in daily updates.  This made it hard to sustain the momentum, and the lack of visual violence and the almost necessarily pat conclusion left some feeling underwhelmed.  But when it’s placed in full context in this book, you can see the complete picture and not stall out waiting for updates.  And sure, you can get this experience by reading it online in the strip’s archives, but something about the book form makes it feel more unified.  If you’re already hip to the language manipulation of Achewood’s style, it flows much more smoothly in this form.  Plus, you get a few neat little extras, characteristic of Onstad: a text intro and history, some fight-related recipes, and some new art.

But if you’re someone who’s had Achewood recommended to them, or is curious about Onstad’s recent ascendancy to New Yorker blog subject and GQ comic strip appearance, do what everyone is told to do: go start from the beginning and read the strip online.  Then read the character blogs.  And then you might fully understand why the release of The Great Outdoor Fight in a mass-market form is a great thing. 

—Patrick Schabe

As 2008’s sultry midpoint has come and gone, the looming tower of incoming books and comics often begins to attain critical mass. Perhaps it’s the approach of the holiday season that spurs the increase, or maybe it’s nothing more than the recalcitrant procrastination of the receiving writer. Unfortunately, these books aren’t going to review themselves, though hopefully such plans are in the works at Amazon’s R&D department. One can dream…

Whatever the truth may be, the year has so far been an impressive one for graphic novels, whether they’re of the brooding caped superhero type or your standard-issue shoe-gazer indie introspective. The sheer number seems to grow from year to year, but so too does the quality increase, with a respectable stream of praiseworthy work coming out of a number of the smaller houses, who haven’t let the major publishers’ forays into the field crimp their style. And so, on to looking at what’s worth reading, graphic novel-speaking, before fall comes calling.

Good-Bye by Yoshohiro Tatsumi (Drawn & Quarterly)

Though the two artists would seem to share precious little in artistic style or worldview, if there were a Will Eisner for Japan, Yoshohiro Tatsumi would probably be it. Little known these days in Japan, and even less so here, Tatsumi’s work has nevertheless been slowly eking its way back into view, due to Drawn & Quarterly’s worthy effort to republish his shorter pieces in a series edited by Adrian Tomine. An implacably dark collection of short stories originally published in 1971 and 1972, Good-Bye has more in common with disaffected American urban novelists from the period like Bernard Malamud and John Cheever than the hyped-up sugar candy manga Japan is better known for these days. Each revolving around a different breed of lonely man (one unhealthily obsessed with the Hiroshima bombing, another anxious to enact revenge on a wife he hates), the stories are suffused with anxious, desperate sex and the dehumanizing greyness of the era’s overcrowded and ramshackle cities. While little turns out well for the men and women depicted here, there’s an appreciative humanity to Tatsumi’s work that begs attention. You can see a .pdf preview of the book here.

The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard by Eddie Campbell and Dan Best (First Second)

One has to throw at least a squib of appreciation towards a book whose first frame reads, “The amazing, remarkable LEOTARD empties his fortitudinous bowels. He combs his imposing, resplendent mustachios. And only then does he make his death-defying LEAP…” Eddie Campbell proved his mettle for dense historical graphic fiction with Alan Moore back when they were creating the masterpiece From Hell, but his sense of humor has rarely been so well displayed as in this hilarious adventure. Theoretically based on the famous acrobat who popularized the leotard, the book is really more an excuse for Campbell, and co-author Dan Best, to goof around with the increasingly outrageous and unbelievable antics that befall a fractious circus troupe trying to make its way at the end of the Victorian era. Campbell and Best rope in everything from the Titanic to Jack the Ripper, talking bears, battling dwarfs, and a giant lion-tiger hybrid called the “Ti-Lion,” blasting open the fourth wall whenever they feel like it, and generally having a blast.

Swallow Me Whole by Nate Powell (Top Shelf)

Somewhere there’s a filmmaker who could make a minor masterpiece out of Nate Powell’s suburban nightmare of a book. Equally as informed by David Lynch and Donnie Darko as it is by the darker fringes of indie graphic fiction, Swallow Me Whole initially reads as just another closely-observed mumblecore take on adolescent ennui, with its repressed family and teenage girl protagonist who can’t quite connect with anything that’s going on around her. But then she starts seeing the hordes of bugs that nobody else notices, and there’s the divine messages she starts receiving. It isn’t long before the book flies right through the looking glass into a world of drowning black terror that’s all the more frightening for how quietly and precisely Powell’s pen delivers it.

Tōnoharu: Part One by Lars Martinson (Pliant)

Everybody’s heard about those great teaching jobs one can get in Japan where local language skills are barely necessary, just the ability to stand in front of a classroom and pronounce English. Easy money, in other words. Lars Martinson’s autobiographical graphic novel shows just how wrong such assumptions can be, particularly when the protagonist is a dull-faced twenty-something slacker who doesn’t seem to have any hobbies besides sleeping, watching TV, and not learning Japanese. Martinson’s art has an exquisitely etched, woodcarved look to it that’s just a hair shy of being fussy (not surprisingly, Martinson gives thanks to Chris Ware in the acknowledgements). While the book’s style can lead to some sameness in facial expression, Martinson’s depth of perception renders the aching social awkwardness being portrayed all the more potently. And this is only part one…

—Chris Barsanti

Some might consider it a bit of a comedown: that after six books of poetry and at least one novel published by a major publisher (Knopf Canada’s Between Mountains in 2004), that Maggie Helwig has decided to publish a follow-up with a small Canadian press in Coach House Books. I was curious, so I asked the publisher about it and was told, “Maggie’s always loved what we do, and that, paired with the fact that we publish a lot of books set in or about Toronto, made us the right home for Girls Fall Down.” Fair enough. It’s still strange, though, that a novel that’s tied not only to Toronto as a setting, but has a framing device involving post-9/11 paranoia couldn’t find a home in a much bigger pond.

Girls Fall Down is about a mysterious gas or poison (or virus, take your pick) that has infiltrated the Toronto subway system in the year 2002 and is causing teenaged girls to become sick with strange rashes and vomiting. Helwig metaphorically makes reference to the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo in 1995 (and acknowledges that she was inspired by Haruki Murakami’s Underground in the Acknowledgments section), but it could be a metaphor for any random attack by plague, whether it’s anthrax or the case of SARS that Toronto was overcome with in 2003.

However, the book is really a love story about a diabetic photographer named Alex, who is slowly losing his sight from his disease, and a woman named Susie, who is on her own crusade to find her missing schizophrenic brother. The pair had briefly been lovers in the late 1980s, but that affair was shattered by Susie, who packed up and moved to Vancouver without so much in the way of a forwarding number or address. So when they meet again under coincidental circumstances, it makes for a compelling love story.

It would, perhaps, be more compelling if Helwig didn’t relegate portions of the story to flashback status, making it hard to tell at which point in the relationship the action is taking place. The framing device is annoying too, and interjects itself in weird places in the narrative; it also doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with the main action: a simple story of rekindled desire. When the loose threads of the two distinct stories tie up, at the end of the novel, it seems forced and laboured, if not padded. And the action more or less stops on a dime, leaving dear readers hanging as to what happens next. Does Alex go totally blind? Do he and Suzanne stick together in the end? Tough to say. All we get are tantalizing hints that things seem to be on the verge of going wrong.

That said, where Girls Fall Down succeeds is in the actions of its two main protagonists, both of whom might remind readers of Henry and Clare in The Time Traveler’s Wife. In fact, much of the thrill of the novel comes from the fact that Alex is diabetic and could go off into a stupor at any time, any inappropriate time, unless he’s on top of his blood sugar levels. This leads to a bit of paranoia in the narrative: that Alex is about to do (or say) the Wrong Thing at the Wrong Time. It’s like watching a train wreck about to unfold.

Overall, Girls Fall Down is a fun, quick read. But anyone expecting any profundities about terror and what it means in the nature of romance might come away from the book a bit disappointed. One could have done away with the rashes and puking, and come up with a much shorter and easier to digest story about love and its fleeting moments of panic. Helwig might be playing in the minor leagues here, but, after reading Girls this reviewer comes away with the impression that with a little more focus and an eye on the ball, she could hit the next one out of the park.

—Zachary Houle

Author Elizabeth Farrelly kicks off Blubberland with something of an extended mea culpa:

I, like you, drive too much. I buy too much—of which I keep too much and also throw too much away. I overindulge my children, and myself. Directly as well as indirectly I use too much water, energy, air, and space. My existence, in short, costs the planet more than it can afford.

Farrelly’s concerns here are spatial, aesthetic, social, political, and environmental, and the questions she delicately poses and answers at considerable length are poignant ones: Why do we First-World denizens insist on owning ugly houses and cars that we don’t really need? Similarly, why do believe that buying useless stuff will make us happy? Why won’t world leaders legislate in favor of sensible ecological co-existence with nature? Why are we so pathetically out of shape? Why are we so desperate to isolate ourselves from others, and how can we break the vicious cycle of narcissism?

Here, Farrelly, a University of Sydney adjunct architecture professor and Sydney Morning Herald columnist, supposes that , ‘Blubberland’ isn’t so much a place as it is a state of mind that champions an out-of control sense of self-entitlement. When it comes to suburban sprawl and energy conservation, she explains, governments are like overly permissive parents who allow their children (constituencies) to have whatever they want. Furthermore, she argues, this more-and-now mindset has us in a double-bind because parenting trends have followed a similar course in the last several decades:

This compulsion to desire-fulfillment has democracy in a trap. If we want to eat meat, with its huge eco-footprint, we do it. If we want to sprawl our cities across the landscape, live in a McMansion, drive an SUV, leave the lights or the hose or the TV on all night, we do exactly that. Even governments are intimidated to the point of being frightened to regulate. If it can’t be achieved by the market, they weakly presume, it can’t be achieved.

This culture of permission has spawned the notion that what’s unpleasant or painful about life can—and should be—surgically removed or made plain. Even places of worship aren’t immune, according to Farrelly: “Everywhere, under every log and rock, nice old churches are being melted down into imitation dry-cleaning shops, nightclubs, and ad agencies while the new, bursting-at-the-seams versions have the common-or-corporate look so down pat it’s hard to pick them from the general hight-street lineup.”

Farrelly envisions monotonous suburban sprawl as both key villain and deadening aftereffect here, a geographic phenomenon that encourages social disconnects by allowing us to be separate from one another and necessitating long, isolation-chamber drives to work: “Forget yoga. Forget acupuncture, hypnosis, and mindfulness therapy. Bested only by television and alcohol, the car is one of the most effective anaesthetics ever discovered.”

Drastic urban renewal, she believes, is the key to our selfish malaise, noting that life expectancy is higher in cities than suburbs and that city living encourages people to “share energy, share transport and share space to a degree that is inconceivable in any other situation”.

Blubberland‘s final chapter, however, imagines a Utopian future in which famines, oil shortages, and droughts confine masses to walled cities: everyone walks to work, on-break employees exercise on machines that help power their office buildings, everyone’s healthier because nobody can afford to drive. Farrelly may just be onto something there; whether or not world leaders will arrive at similar conclusions and act courageously before our selfishness hits a crisis point is an open question that’s almost too depressing to contemplate.

—Raymond Cummings

Robb Kendrick has a great passion for the tintype photographic process. In Still, he uses this process to document the lifestyle of authentic, modern American cowboys—those people who actually ride horses as part of their job, working the big cattle ranches. He has spent decades driving across the United States with his darkroom in tow and the result of his travels is a gorgeous, rich feast of portraiture. These are real working persons who span a wider range of nationalities, ethnicities, genders, languages, and ages than we were ever taught by Hollywood’s depiction of the Wild West. One of the cowboys even serves the photographer a meal of lamb, an unthinkable deviation in beef country! The subtle variation in costume is also well-recorded.

My beef, though, involves Kendrick’s careful posing of his subjects so as to never reveal any trace of the modern era. There is a conspicuous lack of cell phones, pick up trucks, bulldozers, Ipods and other ubiquitous tools of 21st century life. We see the occasional pair of glasses, a bottle, rifle, or contacts. The feeling is hard to shake that much like a stage set, a measure of reality and authenticity were sacrificed for aesthetic reasons. A typical city-dwelling observer glancing through Still may be hard pressed to differentiate between Kendrick’s reverential documentation of reality and a bunch of modern guys trying out for a themed Ralph Lauren commercial. Sometimes, Still‘s photographs appear more sophisticated versions of those souvenir, sepia-toned novelty photos people bring back from vacations at the dude ranch.

The number of working cowboys is unknown, but one of the subjects in the book notes they are “kind of a dying breed”. Thus, there is a tragic feel to some of the shots, that this part of history may soon be lost entirely. Despite Kendrick’s stated efforts to capture unadorned ordinariness, the pictures do have an undeniably romantic and individualistic aura. The subjects are also almost exotic in their descriptions of the joy of being outside, being cold and hungry, or perhaps smelling something nice, as opposed to being on a couch, near a television or computer, or in an air-conditioned shopping mall.

Some of the pictures appear worn and damaged. The artist obviously knows his stuff and this begs the question of whether or not deliberate scratches and scrapes were applied to artificially distress the photographs. Perhaps the marks and imperfections occurred naturally, though, because there is no reason for Kendrick to make them look older than they really are, or to suggest to the viewer that he is a less competent technician than he is. Not to be churlish, but Kendrick’s skill in presenting the subjects in an intriguing light makes me wish that the tintype camera process were able to allow him to use his considerable technical and artistic skills to document these characters doing what they really do, in an even more realistic environment: working, not standing still.

The cowboys themselves, as revealed in their clothing, the looks in their eyes, and the descriptive essays scattered throughout the book, seem genuinely interesting people. Still makes me wonder what their modern lives are really like. 

—D.M. Edwards

I love books about books. You know the ones I mean—The Western Canon, Books of the Century—those indispensable tools for bluffing my way through dinner conversations with other English majors who paid more attention and probably more money during their education than I did.

These metabooks are so authoritative, so full of imperatives: Here are the greatest novels ever written! The poems you must read before you die! The short stories that changed life for every person on the planet! If these PhD holding gentlemen—they are almost always gentlemen—are to be believed, it’s unlikely that any of the world’s civilizations would have endured without Hamlet.

1001 Books for Every Mood blows a big raspberry in the face of every other book-on-books I’ve encountered. Author Hallie Ephron has taken the unusual approach of assuming that rather than being told what to read her audience might appreciate a bit of choice in the matter. And, furthermore, sometimes her audience likes reading crap.

Ephron’s is a goofy guide to one woman’s egalitarian library, where The Da Vinci Code is just as valid a selection as Lolita. The pages are smattered, too, with occasional “quizzes” to match fictional lovers or literary siblings. From its cerise color scheme to its convoluted symbol system, the whole endeavor is a bit of a mess, albeit a well-meaning one.

Still, some of Ephron’s choices and selections leave more than a bit to be desired. One thousand and one titles was not enough space to acknowledge works by Dostoyevsky, Edith Wharton or—ouch—Shakespeare. I don’t know quite what to make of Oscar Wilde’s exclusion, especially in light of a “Revel in Wit” section. (Mark Twain isn’t in that one, either.)

For those who want to rub salt in these wounds, know that Paul Coelho gets three out of four stars for literary merit, the same as Kafka and Orwell. Poor Henry James, who only gets two, could apparently could learn a few things from Dave Eggers’ “virtuoso performance” in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

With that kind of table talk, no English major will have the appetite for a meal. 

—Monica Shores