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Gnomes and dummies and teenage girls
August 23, 2007
by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Who says comics don't have something for everyone?
The Ride Home
AdHouse Books
Why is it that so much fantasy literature, especially that which features races of creatures like elves and dwarves, seems to be set sometime in the past, often quite far back? It’s essentially a pessimistic view, implying that while there used to be fantastic creatures sharing our world, they’re gone now.
Not this time. Joey Weiser’s charming graphic novel overlays a rich fantasy world right on top of a modern urban setting, taking imaginary creatures as a matter of fact.
His star is Nodo the van gnome, who is, as his name implies, a gnome who lives in a van. Having fallen out of his mobile home, he sets himself on an epic quest to find it again. Along the way he’s aided and abetted by another vehicular gnome and a sewer dragon (“I used to be a river dragon a few miles west of here, but ... I got transferred”) and menaced by junkyard-dwelling trolls and pointy-hatted forest gnomes who seek to convert him to traditional gnomish ways.
It’s terrific fun, whether you’re a kid who can imagine little men with beards living under your car seats or a grown-up who can appreciate a dragon practicing office politics.
Good as Lily
DC/Minx
DC’s new Minx imprint has been a source of intense industry conversation since it was announced as the company’s new, concerted effort to get girls to read comics (well, comics published by DC, rather than manga). It’s hard to evaluate how well the line does in meeting its goal as I’m not, nor have I ever been, a teenage girl.
But it certainly seems like this book should hit the target audience. The story reads like young-adult fiction with a teen-movie accent, and the art resembles something between manga (black and white, digest-sized, occasional use of the Eastern visual lexicon) and Western original graphic novels.
The story, written by Derek Kirk Kim (creator of the excellent Same Difference) and drawn by Jesse Hamm, follows high school senior Grace Kwon’s confrontation with three other versions of herself at different ages: 6-, 29- and 70-year-old Graces.
Kim and Hamm gracefully keep the focus on other conflicts—raising money for a school play, a friend with a crush, Grace’s own crush on a teacher, a rivalry with the story’s Mean Girl—with the extra Graces all helping to exacerbate them as much as solve them. There’s an awful lot going on, and not all of it comes together perfectly, but it’s a fun read that balances melodrama and a sense of humor.
But then, I’m a 30-year-old man, so what do I know?
A Dummy’s Guide to Danger Vol. 1
Viper Comics
Jason M. Burns and Ron Chan’s A Dummy’s Guide To Danger is pretty much the very definition of high concept. The protagonists are the LA-based private-investigating team of Alan Sirois and Mr. Bloomberg. The former is a man of action; the latter is a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Yes, a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Sirois is apparently a ventriloquist, but writer Burns quite cleverly plays it coy. Sirois doesn’t think he’s a ventriloquist at all. In fact, he thinks Bloomberg is paraplegic, having lost the use of his limbs when a perp shot him in the spine, which is why Sirois carries him around everywhere (putting him in a papoose in situations that require two hands).
One of the suspects refers to Sirois as “the best delusional private investigator with a ventriloquist’s dummy for a partner” that the city’s ever had.
It’s a gag that doesn’t get old throughout this graphic novel, structured as a mystery novel with elements of Hollywood-slasher-flick grand guignol and the most unusual buddy cop pairing you can imagine. Taken alone, each of the elements is fairly generic, but put together and infused with Burns’ sense of humor, it’s pretty brilliant.
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