Lumberjanes, Vol 1 "Beware The Kitten Holy"--Noelle Stevenson & Grace Ellis

Did you go to summer camp? Did you read books about summer camp? Did you wish you could go?

Lumberjanes is a happy little comic about 5 friends at a Girl Scouts style summer camp. The central tenet of the Lumberjane code is friendship. April, Jo, Molly, Mal, and Ripley are residents of Roanoke cabin, headed by by-the-books counselor Jen. The girls are busy earning their badges (The Robyn Hood Badge, The Up All Night Badge, Naval Gauging Badge) and bonding though adventure and ritual.

However, the Miss Quinella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet's Camp For Girls Hardcore Lady-Types is a little different. Let's just say that it's kind of got a very "Welcome To Night Vale" feel to it. The local fauna tend to have three eyes or belong to myth, and the camp director is awfully unfazed by reports of a bear woman. What is "The Kitten Holy?" And why are there these glowing gems in odd places?

I'm a little over the Night Vale weirdness (it's starting to look like "Lost" to me, which I thought was just random and grasping for ideas and pretending to be going for a greater big, important reveal--ha ha ha). But while I am not totally into Lumberjanes, I still like the emphasis on female friendship, bravery and problem solving. The use of famous female role model names as an interjection gets a little old, and in some ways it's just aggressively twee. But you know what? Who cares? This comic is fantastic for teens and hardcore lady types. I just wish Peaches were about 5 years older to share this with her.

I first heard about Lumberjanes last summer when it was published. I'm not into comics anymore, so I put the collection on my list of titles to add to my ever-growing library list. I pulled the trigger and ordered it when I heard it had been optioned for a movie. Issues with it aside, I am looking forward to reading and seeing more about the adventures of April, Jo, Mel, Molly and Ripley in the future. Additionally, with the new fiscal year on July 1st, Phoenix Public Library's subscription to Hoopla includes comics and all issues of Lumberjanes are included.

Want my used copy? Let me know.

What I've Been Reading--Adult Edition

The Thousand--Kevin Guilfoile

This is an odd hybrid of mystery, thriller and science fiction that centers on Canada Gold, a pro gambler with a neurotransmitter implant to control her severe ADHD. The implant, or "spider" as she calls it, allows her to focus and process minute changes in the environment and gives her near superhuman powers of observation. (Yes, in case you hadn't thought of it, she's a veritable Lisbeth Salander clone.) Anyway, so there's a lot about her father the composer/murderer, the murder of her friends, a mysterious job she's given, a schizophrenic artist, and a giant society dedicated to mathematical secrets of the universe that's fighting amongst its two branches. Crazy. There's some interesting stuff here, but any time you've got some sort of gigantic secret society fighting over the mystical secrets of the universe, I snort and grow bored.

Guilfoile did write a hilarious series of stories about atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair as a detective in hell.

Gunshot Road--Adrian Hyland

I reviewed the first book in this series back in 2008, and this is a worthy sequel. Emily Tempest has a new job with the police as an aboriginal community police officer, but on her first day of training the superior who hired her and likes her winds up injured and off the job. So Emily has to face racism, sexism, assholism, and the death of an old friend of her dad's, a miner who was also a passionate philosopher. Her digging into the case leads her across the outback, into tiny towns and roadhouses, and into a ton of danger. It's a hard read, but has beautiful language and an economy of description that really gets the feel of Australia across with lines like "I threw a scrap of turkey, a lump of roo-tail and an orange in my little saddlebag and headed for the track to town."(5)

Tooth And Claw--Jo Walton

I first found Jo Walton through her Small Changes trilogy. Check it out, it's an awesome read. It's a fantasy series with aspects of mystery and thrillers. The story takes place in a Great Britain that made its peace with Hitler after the Battle of Dunkirk. But this book is even trippier. It's a Victorian novel in spirit and themes--but with dragons. The central conflict is the aftereffects of the death of a patriarch. He left clear instructions on the dispersal of his gold amongst his two sons, married daughter, and two unmarried daughters, but his intent for the dispersal of his body was less clear. (Yes, dragons eat their dead and their weak--this detail lends a great fraught quality to the story). His louish son-in-law eats more than is fair, and one of the sons decides to sue. Throw into the plot other wickedness of the son-in-law, the marital prospects of the daughters, the attempts of the son to rise in the legal ranks, and a Catholic-Protestant simile, and still more plot and excellent characters in this detailed world. A great read!

Knowle's Passing--Edith Forbes

I read her novel Alma Rose back in 2006 and recently decided to finish up reading her novels. Bless you, Phoenix Public Library for your interlibrary loan services! This is an interesting meditation/mystery looking at the after effects and cause of Vernon Knowle's death by gunshot in his Vermont farmhouse.

Stumptown--Greg Rucka

A graphic novel set in Portland about a PI with a gambling problem. So I've been really interested in this but it was $30 for a 159 page hardback. Thank you, ILL because this really was not worth the money. Dex Parios is set up to be a classic noir badass detective with her own code and a heart of gold, but she leaves me cold. I just didn't find the character interesting or sympathetic, even with the brother with Down Syndrome and the gambling problem. Too much action and not enough character-building. And the artwork is all hard edges and gray and blue and makes Portland look really ugly and kind of like Cleveland or Detroit. And the ridiculously leg-humping fanboy introduction doesn't help.

What's next--

We Need To Talk About Kevin--Lionel Shriver

I was on the reserve list for this book for 3 months. Since it's publication in 2003, it's been a perennial book club read because of its polarizing narrator, and the essential question of whether a psychopathic school shooter is born or created. It's now a film with Tilda Swanson. I've read about 10 pages and it floors me with its intensity.

Blitzkreig Book Reviews: The MINX Stinks Edition

I've written about DC Comics' Minx line before. I am mostly unimpressed by its offerings, but figured that I should take advantage of the Cleveland Public Library while I can to check out the rest of the line before I move.

If you haven't heard, Minx was a line pitched to teen girls, not a traditionally big audience for comic book readership, but one that's become major consumers of manga. Why will girls read manga and not comic books? Both capitalize on a love of serialized stories, the ability to pay attention to nuance and wait for a payoff, and the general push towards alternate media format for storytelling. But here's the rub--not everyone has a Carol & John's in their neighborhood. Manga gets sold at the big box bookstores, and YA librarians buy it. You don't have to brave the boy's club atmosphere at the comics shop, the often unreliable publishing schedules, and comics can be intimidating with their inner workings of artists, lines and who does what. Despite fertile areas of cross platform adaptation of intellectual property in using characters and stories in tv and film, comics themselves are suffering from a lack of readership and shrinking long term business prospects.* So Minx is an idea to serve as a gateway to comics and open up new readership to the industry. There's been criticism about the ghettoization of girls implicit in this approach, but I'm okay with that. Face it, men and women sometimes want different things in their reading material. Everyone wants a good read, it's just what may be satisfying to them that differs. Even keeping that in mind, I'm frustrated with Minx Books. I love the ideas, but the execution is mostly crap. And I fear that it may be too late to make improvements, since there's no information on 2008 releases or any information on any new titles available from Minx at the website or mentioned in any of the press releases I saw.

Here's a roundup of thoughts on the last three books published in 2007:

Good As Lily by Derek Kirk Kim & Jesse Hamm: This book is just a mess. The title refers to the protagonist's older sister, who died at the age of 6. However, this bit of information is imparted and the importance of which is resolved in approximately 4 pages, which leaves us with 140 pages of plot about something else entirely. Hint for writers--your title should be related to the plot of the book in some way. This plot is about Grace Kwon, who gets hit on the head by a stubborn pinata at her 18th birthday party, and later that night runs into her 5 year old, 29 year old and 70 year old self. So she hides them from her parents in her bedroom and proceeds to live her normal life, which involves her crush on the drama teacher, ignoring the friend with the hots for her and something about the school play. The plot's an incomprehensible mess, the characters are paper thin, there's no logic or motivation to the story, and as a reader I felt cheated and irritated.

Confessions of A Blabbermouth by Mike & Louise Carey, illustrated by Aaron Alexovich: Mike Carey wrote The Re-Gifters which is the one Minx product that I thought really knocked it out of the park. This book is less emotionally engaging and rather predictable, but a good effort. Teenage Tasha's a blogger extraordinaire, but her home life gets messy when her mom gets serious with her asshole boyfriend J.D. , who comes complete with an annoying daughter Chloe. Both seem to be weirdly threatened by Tasha's writing, and share a secret of their own. A tightly plotted story that is tissue thin on development, but Tasha's got a well-written narrative voice. Alexovich's illustrations are enjoyably energetic and spiky.

Kimmie66 by Aaron Alexovich: Set in the future, this story is a cautionary tale of where too much dependence on online personas and too little human interaction will lead us. I should be all over this, right? Except that the telling is a little ham handed. Anyway, Telly is a teenage girl who spends most of her life online in a Goth lair. She starts to question reality and online life when her best friend online, Kimmie66, commits suicide. This leads her to investigate Kimmie's offline life and seek connection to other people. I had problems getting into the story and connecting with the characters, but it's certainly a better written tale than some of the others and would provoke discussion about online life and behavior.

*So I'm thinking of writing a comic publishing industry analysis for my professional portfolio. Any interest in reading it?

Blitzkreig Book Review, Part 2

Clubbing--Andi Watson & Josh Howard: And Minx Books is now 1::2 in the decent to crap ratio. Somebody have a word with the editor of that line, please. This book starts out with the interesting premise of Goth club girl Charlotte "Lottie" Brook getting caught with a fake id and being sent to spend 3 months with her grandparents working at their golf club in the Lake District, where she finds a little romance and a murder mystery to investigate. And then it suddenly turns into a ripoff of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode. Yes, really. I'm done with this line.

However, note to Genevieve--there is one very funny bit, a "country Goth" vs "city Goth" pissing match.

Girl Most Likely To--Poonam Sharma: This is a book that sent me on a weeklong rampage of asking the question "Do you think I'm retarded?" Because this book insults the reader by feeding her a drippy heroine, a plot that rampages through everything but the kitchen sink with the search for true love, gay friends finding love, straight friends getting a clue, thinking your one night stand taped your sex to sell on the internet, insider trading, a yoga retreat, meddling Indian parents, and a deus ex machina arrival of a career change from banking to writing. Hi, I'm the author and I'm going to distract you from the lameness and unrealistic plot of my tale and paper thin characters you care nothing about by throwing EVERYTHING at you. Then I can cross "wrote a novel" off my life to do list.

Honey, it's okay to be an underachiever if you do it well.

How Nancy Drew Saved My Life--Lauren Baratz-Logsted: Another book that insults the reader's intelligence, this time by giving us paper thin characters and a plot stolen directly from Jane Eyre. And no wink-nudge-nudge to let us know the author is doing something deft with that stolen plot. Nope, it's a lame naive heroine with a habit of sleeping with her employer, which is tragically trite when you're the nanny and a former child actress with AWOL parents and minimal education. Well, that explains her stupidity at least. And why she doesn't realize she's playing Jane Eyre.

And that title? Total bait and switch. Nancy Drew, her awesomeness and the real life lessons you can pick up from her books barely figure into the story. It's a case of a catchy title duping you into picking up the book, only to find there are barely words to describe its awfulness. Non-scatalogical words at least.

I realize not everything can be great, but there's no shame in being just good. This is just crap. I got the feeling Baratz-Logsted owed the publisher a book and just churned this puppy out to meet the deadline. If I had paid money for it, I do not know what I would have done. Thank you, CPL!

Re-Gifters--Mike Carey, Sonny Liew & Marc Hempel

This offering from the DC Comics Minx line is much, much better than the The PLAIN Janes. Matter of fact, I wish I'd had this graphic novel available last week when I had a request for romantic stories, "not racy!" and suitable for a 12 year old girl. I'd of handed this over with joy, for it's such a good story.

Dik Seong Jen aka Jen Dickson aka Dixie is a Korean American teen living in South Central L.A. Her life is pretty normal--a mom, a dad, little twin brothers, a best friend, school, hapkido practice, and a crush. A huge crush that's distubing her life, especially her hapkido studies, for her crush is one Adam Heller, blond god and fellow hapkido student. Dixie's a great character--she's smart, devoted and funny but has a terrible temper and can be rash. She's got a good heart though--a fierce warrior of a girl for the modern age.

So in order to declare herself to Adam, Dixie will not only wear makeup and a short skirt to his birthday party, but she will give him an awesome present. A large heavy statue of Hwarang warrior, the purchase of which takes all her savings and the money her dad gives her to enter the hapkido tournament. It's a beautiful statue that reminds her of him and of course he will recognize that they are similar souls.

No, he doesn't get it. Adam actually regifts the statue to his own crush, who doesn't understand the meaning either.

How that statue makes its way back to Dixie, and how she gets to compete in the hapkido tournament fills the rest of the tale, with help coming from unexpected sources.

The art does a great job of conveying the story--lots of small panels and thick lines that show emotion and immediacy. The characters are easily distinguishable, and Liew and Hempel do a great job of depicting their personalities through their drawn figures.

I also love the writing. It's brisk and the story unrolls at a fast pace, but character development is nicely balanced. Carey has a good ear for teen girl dialogue and puts a lot of poetry into Dixie's narration. One of my favorite bits: "I'm not all that good at shop. I've got enthusiasm but no discrimination, Mr. Callender says. But that day I was worse than usual. I kept thinking Adam thoughts. They made me want to sing and cry at the same time. But you can't do either of those in shop." (32) There's nice description and explanation of Korean culture, hapkido and life in Dixie's neighborhood.

Read alikes for this would be author Joan Bauer, who writes about teenage girls with personal passions who are trying to figure out the world, and the great book Beetle and Me: A Love Story, about a girl fixing up her dream car, the VW Beetle of her childhood. I'm also reminded of Arsenal from Hopeless Savages , another girl martial artist with strong emotions. This would also be a good choice for a parent-daughter reading project/club/share, because there's a lot to talk about and examine and the story has positive family dynamics and themes.

The Plain Janes--Cecil Castellucci & Jim Rugg

I bought this last week over at Carol & John's Comic Shop. Carol was doing a handsell to another customer and I picked it up too. If you ever think that just talking about books loudly in public doesn't lead to impulse purchases, you are wrong. (By the way, Carol & John's is the best Cleveland area comic shop--how can you resist a family business run by a geek mom and her firefighter son, a store that is friendly, clean, bright and organized, had a shop kitty until his tragic death from a stroke, and tends to have cookies on the counter? You can't. I'm going to miss them when I go.)

Right--so Jane was a Metro City girl until a terrorist attack left her with a case of PTSD and a fixation on the John Doe beside her on the street. He's lying in a coma in a hospital, and she's writing him letters, since her parents packed up and moved to the safer suburbs. Despite the flee to an illusion of safety, they've become extremely overprotective. Jane misses her old life and is walking around in a fog. She attempts to befriend a pack of fellow Janes--Drama Jane, the character actress wasted in the high school drama club, Brain Jayne, a science geek (and proud!), and Polly Jane, star athlete. Ha, ha, they want nothing to do with Jane until she intrigues them with an idea: P.L.A.I.N.--People Loving Art In Neighborhoods. A series of installations of ordinary objects to shake things up a little. No one gets hurt, and it's easily changed back. Just an attempt to get people to think and feel--it's all good, right? But the Janes learn that sometimes ordinary actions have big consequences as their installations affect people in myriad ways.

I thought the plot and characters were a bit underdeveloped and light, but I thought the artwork looked good. It was worth a read, but not a keeper for me. No emotional impact, and not really character driven. They're all stereotypes! But that's okay within the scope of the book. I saw a book by Castellucci on the YA shelf at work, so I'm going to check out more of her stuff.

This is the first release from the new imprint Minx Books out of DC Comics. Upcoming titles look good--Andi Watson has a lighthearted tale London punk girl solving a mystery in the country on a visit to the grandparents, I like the looks of Good As Lily in which a girl gets a crack on the head from a birthday pinata and is joined by herself at ages 6, 29 and 70, all existing on one plane/timestream/whatever, and a romance n' family tale about a Korean American girl.

I might be getting to buy some graphic novels & manga for the part-time job. Keep those fingers crossed!