Hi there, fellow lovers of the four-colour form. Another
week of comic book excellence awaits us!
Before we get going, a hearty shout out to Australian writer
Ryan K. Lindsay, whose series Headspace
jumped from the digital format at Monkeybrain to the printed format at IDW last
week. Ryan is a friend of mine, so I felt a bit odd about possibly using Headspace as the feature book, but I
will say that it’s totally well worth your time and features one of those “I
shoulda thought of that” premises with its lawman protagonist trapped inside a
serial killer’s mind. Ryan works harder than you and I combined. He’s tireless
and passionate. He’s coming into his own and, with his Negative Space arriving from Dark Horse this year, he’s someone to
watch.
Also, TCAF (Toronto
Comics Arts Festival) was last weekend and I wipe tears from my eyes because I
missed it. This year, Charles Burns, Julie Doucet, Hunt Emerson, Scott McCloud,
Noelle Stevenson, Gengoroh Tagame, Chip Zdarksy and many, many, many more were
on hand. Available to buy was hands-down the most incredible looking line up of
debuting comics I’ve seen in…. I don’t know how long. Sigh. I was at TCAF last
year, moderating a film and comics noir discussion with Ed Brubaker and Darwyn
Cooke, and in my opinion, it is the standard bearer for the future of comics
conventions – free, filled with comics of all sorts, and very friendly. It’s
seriously worth planning a trip to Canada for. In honour of the event, here’s
a great piece from Canada’s own NOW magazine on Zdarsky. If you’re a fan,
or even just a curious observer of The Rise of Chip, you should take a look.
Finally, my favourite comics columnist, Joe McCulloch, crushed
it last week with a kind of Free Comic Book Day as memoir-slash-review piece.
You really should read it.
COMIC OF THE WEEK : LIKE A SNIPER LINING UP HIS SHOT BY JACQUES TARDI FROM THE NOVEL BY JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE
Published by Fantagraphics
“Jean-Patrick
Manchette: raconteur, bon vivant, leftist militant, agent provocateur,
swinger…a decades long hurricane through the Parisian cultural scene. We must
revere him now and rediscover him this very instant.” – James Ellroy.
Hollywood. It both excites and terrifies us when it gets hold
of the things we love. Sometimes, the project turns out pretty well.
Occasionally, the right people and the right project and the universe and luck
and money and a million other things all come together and it turns out
exceptionally. Often, however, fans of the source material that Hollywood gets
its cash-filled mitts on are left at best disappointed. At worst, outraged.
Enter The Gunman
starring Sean Penn, Idris Elba and Ray Winstone. The film is an adaptation of
French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette’s 1981 novel,The Prone Gunman, one of my favourite crime novels ever. I still
haven’t seen the film and I could be wrong, but from trailers it resembles
the source material only on a base level. The germ of the plot appears to be
there, but it looks more like a Matt Damon Bourne movie rather than the grubby
little book that constantly spits out little hardboiled lines like, “I like
whiskey sours because they taste like vomit.”
But it’s okay. Good or bad, I can take a deep breath because
the novel has already been faithfully adapted. Into comics. And it’s
incredible.
Like A Sniper Lining
Up his Shot is one of three competed Manchette adaptations by the masterful
French cartoonist, Jacques Tardi (a fourth, Fatale,
was sadly never finished). In Sniper…
Martin Terrier is an ex-mercenary turned hitman who really just wants to hang
it up and retire gracefully and peacefully with an old flame. In true crime
fiction fashion, however, his employers are not happy about this decision, enemies
linked to a past hit seek vengeance, and the old flame has a life of her own
that she might not be so willing to give up.
It all sounds remarkably generic boiled down to its
essentials, but the genius of Manchette was less in his twists (of which there
are a number) but more in the clipped dryness of his delivery and the cold,
emotionally-devoid interactions of his characters. Terrier moves through the surprisingly
quirky plot like an automaton and while this archetype is not uncommon in crime
fiction, the lack of charm in Manchette’s characters or bubbliness in any plot
hijinks casts a layer of existential frostiness over all his work. Encountering
his writing is like reading Sartre or Nietzsche or Camus for the first time,
only with hitmen and vengeful fatales and mental patients and guns, so many
guns.
As Darwyn Cooke is unquestionably the artist to bring Richard
Stark into comics, so Tardi is the artist for Manchette. His rubbery,
cartoonish, unsmiling, ink-smeared figures are perfect for the amoral characters
that fill Manchette novels. His devotion to the source material, like Cooke’s,
is clear but does not shackle him slavishly to every line. His pacing is
perfect; his pages are busy but clear, cinematic in their shot choices. His
scenery is rendered intricately and realistically, his rain-washed Paris and wintery
French countryside are both grim and lively, perfect homes for these shady,
joyless killers to move about in.
The sparseness of Manchette’s prose lends itself perfectly
to comics and particularly to Tardi. In turn, Tardi, in the starkest, crispest
black and white, is able to capture all of Manchette’s traits – the increasing
oddness of the unfolding plot, the perfunctoryinteractions of these unattractive,
scowling characters, the bleak, black humour—expertly on his pages.
As with many things I try and plug here, Like A Sniper Lining Up His Shot is apparently
almost out of print. If you’re a fan of noir or hardboiled crime comics, it
doesn’t get much better than this.
WEBCOMIC OF THE WEEK : IF MY DOGS WERE A PAIR OF MIDDLE-AGED MEN
By Matthew Inman
You may have caught this already as it’s one of those things
that blew up on social media, but I had so much fun with this I just had to
include it.
Matthew Inman’s terrific little comics flip the anthropomorphic
script, showing us just how both crazy and endearing canine behaviour is by
imagining his two dogs as portly, ageing men. The result is weird, gross, but
also strangely sweet and very funny. It also made me think about just how much
I love my own dog, Bea (who once
enjoyed fleeting fame on the Fantagraphics Blog for her championing of Graeme
Chaffee’s Good Dog)and that’s never a
bad thing.
COMICS VIDEO OF THE WEEK : HARROW COUNTY PROCESS TYLER CROOK
Harrow County #1 by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook drops tomorrow! I got to read it a few weeks back and liked it a whole lot. Here’s a look at Crook’s colouring process. How deceptively easy it looks to create such gorgeous art…
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