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Wednesday, April 07, 2010 ( 4/07/2010 06:35:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: A classic bit of Brit (Isles) pop, Travis' "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" # | Sunday, April 04, 2010 ( 4/04/2010 10:05:00 AM ) Bill S.  “CURSE YOU AND YOUR UNICORN ALLY!” A rollicking graphic novel about a girl and her Easter Bunny, Brooke A. Allen’s A Home for Mr. Easter (NBM) got me thinking of the days when comic book creators thought nothing of doing books about fat girls (Little Lotta) or big dumb diaper-clad ducks (Baby Huey) or anything else they thought kids might find amusing. Tesana, the big girl heroine of Home, though rendered by newcomer Allen in a looser more alt-comics style, could have easily palled around with Little Lotta in Foodland: the two share the same strength and propensity for active fantasizing, after all.An imaginative, if somewhat childlike teen with a history of getting into fights with school bullies, Tesana is a high school outsider who, while attempting to ingratiate herself with the school elite as they prepare for a pep rally, discovers that one of the rabbits being used in a date auction has the ability to lay colored eggs. After “going 2012” on the entire football team, she takes the rabbit to return him to his home. In her quest to do so, she runs into a sleazy pet shop owner, cosmetics testers, animal rights activists and charlatan magician, all of which want to get a hold of Mr. Easter. The book climaxes in a frantic chase wherein our heroine (who we earlier see dreaming of riding atop a unicorn) gets to race through the woods on a galloping horse. “This is the best day ever!” our heroine thinks. Both comic and bittersweet, A Home for Mr. Easter takes what could easily be an overly sentimental premise and invests it with an anxious energy. If at times, our heroine comes across maybe a little bit too comically dim (after hulking out on the football team, you half expect her to ask George to start telling her again about the rabbits), she ultimately proves a likable and appealing figure. Allen has a knack for rendering visually expressive moments (there’s a one-page segment on a city bus, for instance, where our heroine learns her rabbit can talk that’s particularly priceless) and a facility with black-and-white brushwork that ‘s particularly impressive in the crowded action scenes. NBM is promoting this release -- initially set for June, though apparently moved to the more appropriate Easter season -- as the launch of a new talent in the graphic novel field. That it is, and it also serves as the debut of an engaging comic heroine, too. I’d definitely like to read another book about Tesana -- with or without the magical egg-laying rabbit. Labels: modern comics # |Saturday, April 03, 2010 ( 4/03/2010 08:36:00 AM ) Bill S.  “HE’S A PERV AND A RABBIT!” Now that Tim Burton has had his way with Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, what better than a modernized manga-sized take on this much retweaked classic? Alice in the Country of Hearts by Quinrose and Soumei Hoshino (Tokyopop) is an “older teen” series centered on a young girl’s kidnapping down the rabbit hole into a Wonderland caught in bloody war between its three territories. Our heroine is carried into this landscape and “brought into the game” by a bespectacled rabbit-eared human named Peter White. Peter, like the rest of the male inhabitants of Wonderland, has fallen in love with Alice and schemes to make her his.But the stalker-esque rabbit/man isn’t the only pointy-chinned male with a disturbing amorous interest in our gal. There’s the mafioso Hatter, who resembles an old flame of Alice’s, and Julius, the longhaired overseer of the clock tower set in Wonderland’s center. Thinking that she’s in a dream, our heroine wonders what it is about her subconscious that inspires her to imagine every male is pursuing her (“I guess my subconscious is as stupid as this world,” she tells a blood-coughing dream demon): not the kind of question that the younger Victorian Alice would’ve considered, but, then, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was a good 35 years away when the original children’s book was released. Adapted from a romantic sim game entitled Wonderful Wonder World, Alice in the Country of Hearts takes the original memorable cast of caricatured John Tenniel grotesques and transforms most of ‘em into besotted bishonen prettyboys. Though characters regularly stop to deliver intentionally confusing exposition about the territorial conflict, in the first volume, at least, the focus is on “outsider” Alice’s growing awareness of her power as an object of desire and the nature of the game going on all around her. Forced to consume a vial of “medicine of the heart,” she is unable to leave Wonderland until the vial itself is refilled: which she can only do by meeting and interacting with more of the love-maddened inhabitants of her dream world. As in the original Alice, each character pronounces their own nonsensical take on the rules of the world, but since this version of the character is older, they don’t do so with the same air of infuriating adult condescension. There’s still a level of casually threatened violence (“To the inhabitants of this world, ‘death’ isn’t particularly important,” Peter White says at one point), but in the first volume, at least, it’s treated more as an afterthought than an actual threat. What mainly matters is romance in this Country of Hearts, where even the formerly gargoyle-faced Queen of Hearts is rendered as a sinisterly sexy vamp. As a lover of the original Charles Dodgson books that sparked this manga series, I can’t help wishing that it featured more Carroll-ian nonsense. During some of the opening volume’s more talky sequences, in particular, the manga can feel hemmed in by its own rules. Still, there are enough fantastic details in this first book to have me curious about what happens in the second, which promises to open with a tea party at the Hatter’s Castle. “I’d like to have an outsider, someone unusual on my arm,” the sinister Hatter says. “If I get bored with her, I can just kill her.” Makes you wonder what kind of relationship dreaming Alice had with her old boyfriend, doesn’t it? Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Friday, April 02, 2010 ( 4/02/2010 07:11:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: S'been an exhausting, busy week, but to show we're still around, here's a pic of Willow Cat:  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Thursday, April 01, 2010 ( 4/01/2010 09:10:00 PM ) Bill S. DEAR GOVT.: I’m not a right wing crank or anything, so I don’t want to take this too far, but . . . My wife and I received, filled out and returned the new U.S. census form last week. So why did we get another ‘un in the mail today? Sincerely, A Puzzled Citizen # | |
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