I’ve got a few comics to share this week, and one that’s more of a picture book but from a well-known comics artist.
The Mandalorian and Child by Jeffrey Brown
Out this week, The Mandalorian and Child is the latest of Jeffrey Brown’s Star Wars cartoon books (starting with Darth Vader and Son over a decade ago!), this time featuring the armored bounty hunter and the “baby Yoda” he’s taken under his wing. I know, the real name is Grogu, but the nickname is hard to shake. In previous books, we’ve seen a lot of Star Wars characters turned into kids: Luke and Leia as kids with an adult Darth Vader, along with others like Han and Chewie, Boba Fett, and Greedo. A lot of the humor there has come from the imagining of these characters interacting as kids (and what it would be like for Darth Vader to parent small children). Here, Grogu is already a kid in the TV show, so while this collection is still a lot of fun, it doesn’t quite have the same “what if” in its premise, and it feels a little more like “these are things that could have happened off-screen.” If you’re a fan of the show and you want to see Grogu getting up to more hijinks, this little book is a fun addition to the collection.
The Books of Clash Volumes 1 & 2, written by Gene Luen Yang, pencils by Les McClaine, inks by Alison Acton
Yes, this kids’ comic book series is based on the mobile games Clash of Clans and Clash Royale—if you play games on your phone, chances are that even if you haven’t played them yourself, you probably saw a lot of ads for them in years past. (I just looked it up and was surprised to find that Clash of Clans has been around over a decade now! I guess it’s been a day for being reminded that I’m old.) I haven’t played the game myself, but it’s a real-time strategy game that involves building up your villages and then battling other players, using various units like barbarians, archers, giants, and skeletons to attack your opponents and defend yourself. These comics take the game and turn it into a fantasy world where, amusingly, all of the characters of the same class look basically the same, even if they’re from different villages. But within this world, each book focuses on a single character who may be a little bit different from the rest of their class.
The writing is silly and over-the-top. For an example, the subtitle of the series is Legendary Legends of Legendarious Achievery! and the opening prologue recommends some eye protection from all of the awesomeness you’re about to witness. In the first book, the narrator makes frequent personal comments about which characters he thinks you should be following, and why you should pay no attention to the main character.
First up is Terry (short for Terrodicus) the hog rider. Terry is the smallest of the hog riders and he has trouble doing things in the proper “hog rider way” (which involves staying in formation and being macho) but he gets an opportunity to prove himself by attacking the tiny, run-down village of Jazzypickleton. But when he and the other hog riders are run out of town by the secret weapon, he goes on a spy mission to discover its weakness… and ends up meeting a lot of people who don’t behave like the hog riders (and other folks) that he’s accustomed to. Maybe their way is actually better?
The second volume (publishing tomorrow) is about Jane the archer. After discovering a mysterious scroll, Jane starts to learn the art of sneaking, which she feels will make her a better archer. She uses her newfound ability to catch enemies off-guard, but because of this the audience never sees her contributions to the Royal Arena matches. The other archers, including her best friend, ostracize her because they think she’s just hiding from battle and abandoning her teammates. When her village is invaded and she finds herself displaced, she goes searching for more information about that mysterious scroll. But in the meantime, her village may be in more danger than it realizes…
The books are amusing, but as somebody who hasn’t played the games, I think probably some of the humor is lost on me. At the end of each volume, there are some tips and tricks for the actual games from high-level players, and those go over my head entirely. Still, it’s been fun to get to know this wacky world through the comics, and there’s more to come—the third volume is expected in May 2024.
Lost Time by Tas Mukanik
Evie has somehow managed to travel 67 million years into the past, and is on her own without her parents—or any other humans, for that matter. She does find an abandoned base left behind by other time travelers, and the egg she rescued from the a hungry dinosaur hatches and turns out to be a Quetzalcoatl, a giant pterosaur that she names Ada. Together, the two of them set up a camp in the base and figure out how to survive, while Evie tries to figure out how to get back home by listening to old audio logs that were left behind.
It’s a fun adventure about a girl and her pet pterosaur—they have lots of adventures, and there’s a good mix of action and danger as well as some slapstick humor, but ultimately you do find out more about how Evie ended up there in the first place. The story doesn’t delve too deeply into the time travel (which is pretty hand-wavey), but the dinosaurs are pretty accurately drawn, which is a fun contrast to the more cartoony Evie.
Layers: A Memoir by Pénélope Bagieu
Layers is a comic-book memoir revisiting Bagieu’s childhood and teenage years, told in several vignettes that are sometimes several pages and sometimes a single page. She jumps around from topic to topic: getting a pet cat as a child, and then eventually having to let go of her as a young adult; the way she finally quit sucking on her fingers as a toddler; dealing with her dad’s estate after he passed away; paying for the coin-operated heater in her London flat as an exchange student. There are some painful stories—one titled “Deja Vu” has two side-by-side accounts, one at a childhood sleepover and one at a college party, where a boy made unwanted advances on her—followed by her later pretending that nothing happened. Another describes her crush on a guy and her attempts to get him to notice her. Some are more amusing, like her late realization that she was not actually good at sports and had never been. There’s not an overarching plotline to follow—it’s just a series of reflections about Bagieu’s life and a peek inside some of her thought processes—but it’s thought-provoking and worth a read.
How to Love: A Guide to Feelings & Relationships for Everyone by Alex Norris
How to Love is coming to stores next week; I got an early copy a little while back. It’s written and illustrated by Alex Norris, who is famous for Webcomic Name (the comic where every frame ends with “oh no”). How to Love is a guide to romantic relationships with comics that manages to be both funny and really helpful and informative. Each section asks a question, which Norris then answers with their own style of comics: the answer itself is just in prose, and if you removed all the drawings and just put them in paragraph form, they would feel pretty straightforward—perhaps still useful, but not incredibly exciting. But the words are then placed below these square comic panels, which then causes you to pause in the middle of a sentence to look at the illustration before you continue, and I found that it gave some extra time to reflect on what Norris was saying. The drawings themselves have that very simple look to them, but Norris uses them to great effect, with things like changing the shapes of the heads or bodies to illustrate different concepts or sprouting little devil horns when the character is horny.
I appreciated that the book begins with a section called “All by Myself” that asks questions about whether you’re ready for a romantic relationship at all and encourages you to figure out who you are first. Then there’s a section about feelings: why you feel so weird, what to do if you seem to fall for people with red flags, how to communicate that you like somebody (and then what to do if they say no). There are practical questions about long-distance relationships, how to make things sexy, whether it’s okay to argue, dealing with break-ups, and more. I recommended it to my teenage son, who had been having some rough relationship issues at the time, because I think it helped to set up a framework for thinking about relationships at a time when teenage hormones can make things particularly confusing. But I think it could also be quite useful for adults as well—whether you’re figuring out dating yourself, or if you want to have some useful language to talk to your kids about dating.
It’s also a pretty quick read—because of the comic book format, there’s not a ton of text but it does a lot while being concise. It’s also easy to refer to a particular section for a re-read, so this is one I will probably keep around. My youngest is only 10 and isn’t really thinking about dating at this point, but I’ll be ready to share this with her as well when the time comes.
The Mysteries by Bill Watterson and John Kascht
Okay, I mentioned one book that isn’t a comic but is from a comics artist: The Mysteries. Yes, it’s that Bill Watterson, who created one of the most beloved comic strips of all time and then retired and quietly withdrew from the world. Watterson is famously secretive, rarely doing interviews or making public appearances. So this book, a collaboration with caricaturist John Kascht, has been highly anticipated. I didn’t really know much about Kascht, but upon visiting his website I could tell that I’ve definitely seen his artwork before.
The Mysteries is a picture book: each page has a sentence or two, accompanied by a black and white illustration on the facing page. The story has the feel of a fable: people are worried about the “Mysteries” outside of the village walls. They’re suspicious and scared, and eventually they try to capture one for study. The world changes, the mysteries are no longer so mysterious … but then the pendulum swings back. It’s never entirely explained what these “mysteries” are, but you get the sense that they can stand in for any number of things.
What’s really fascinating is that the artwork in The Mysteries does not look like either Watterson’s or Kascht’s usual work. There’s a video where the two artists talk about the process of collaboration and you get to see some of the pieces take shape. What you get are images that look a bit like photographs, with some physically constructed people and foreground features, and then often with some painted backdrops that are a bit more rough and abstracted. It’s a good match-up that works really well, and the visuals have a sort of ambiguity that fits this story about vague mysteries.
If you’re looking for something that will feel like Calvin & Hobbes, then you may be disappointed. But this is a story that I could imagine Calvin & Hobbes having one of their more serious philosophical conversations about: what are the mysteries? Should we fear the unknown, or try to capture it and make it known? This is a book to read and ponder.
My Current Stack
I’ve been continuing with Thinking 101 and have found it really enlightening so far—I’ll share more about that one when I finish!
Disclosure: I received review copies of the books covered in today’s column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!
