Top 10 - Alan Moore

Top Ten Compendium - Alan Moore, Paul Di Filippo, Zander Cannon

This weighty tome contains Top 10 #1-12, Smax, Beyond the Furthest Precinct, Season Two, and a couple of specials.  It tells of the professional and personal lives of a super-powered police squad in a city where everyone is super-powered (except the Smax series, which in an excursion to Smax's home dimension of elves, trolls, and dragons).  At first the conceit seems pretty labored, but in Moore's capable hands it develops into a chaotic but human story that manages to be over the top, silly, witty, winking, and even poignant at times.  There are references to and cameos of every fictional character you can think of, from Captain Haddock and Pogo to Marvel characters and creators.  The writing wanes a bit in the later series, not written by Moore, even undoing some of Moore's denouement, which grated on me more than it should have.  

Motherlover - Lindsay Ishihiro

Motherlover - Lindsay Ishihiro

This bafflingly-poorly titled graphic novel tells of the friendship between Imogen, an awkward, hesitant mother of four whose husband keeps her firmly in her stay-at-home-mom identity, and Alex, a lesbian single mom of one daughter who's returned to her home town after the death of her strict parents.  Together, they bond over a shock to Imogen's marriage and Alex's own hangups.  Friendship turns to love as they realize they have come to need each other.  This is a well-crafted story, with fully fleshed-out characters and a lack of trite, quick resolutions.  The need to work on relationships and develop trust in all relationships is realistically portrayed.   The art is colorful and vibrant.  [4]

 

Night Fever - Ed Brubaker

Night Fever - Ed Brubaker

A disaffected book editor gets insomnia while at a convention in Paris.  He wanders into an underground masked ball for super-rich bored people, taking the identity of someone on the guest list.  This leads him into a dark world of drugs and murder.  Jonathan is not a hard boiled noir character, but an office guy who gets drawn into chaos and violence and finds he likes it, until it turns out he's the patsy.  This isn't Brubaker's finest work — it's not as intricately plotted as Criminal, and there are some odd plot points that don't really go anywhere (like Jonathan finding his own dream in a manuscript), but it's a fun read.  [3.5]

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees - Patrick Horvath

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees - Patrick Horvath

Sam Strong, an anthropomorphic bear and the owner of a hardware store in the tiny town of Woodbrook, has a secret.  Every now and then, she goes to the city to kill strangers.  Just to take the edge off, you know?  But she really does love her town.  So when someone else starts committing grisly (ha ha!) murders in Woodbrook, the usually serene community is thrown into chaos — and Sam needs to find the killer before the police start looking too closely at her own movements.  This is a pretty standard thriller plot with few surprises in the endgame.  It stands out in that the protagonist is also a serial killer, and the "talking animal" setting adds a novel, ironically cute layer to it.  Horvath’s illustrations reinforce this tone beautifully. His thin lines and warm, gentle colors evoke children's books and Sunday funnies, while his real strength lies in facial expressions: the animals' placid smiles, flickers of fear, and moments of barely concealed menace carry much of the emotional weight.  [4]

Shortcomings - Adrien Tomine

Shortcomings - Adrien Tomine

A black and white slice of life graphic novel set in the Bay Area.  It follows Ben Tanaka, a movie-theater manager, drifting apart from his girlfriend, Miko, who is involved in Asian-American organizations and art.  She suspects him of fetishizing blonde white girls.  He is indifferent to her flirtatious come-ons and spends his days looking at DVDs and venting to his only friend, Alice Kim, a sharp, socially confident lesbian who plays the field and occasionally punctures his self-image.  When Miko takes an internship in New York City for four months, Ben has no intention of accompanying her, and their already strained relationship threatens to break.  Tomine tells this story with his trademark minimalist precision: spare lines, controlled pacing, and a cool observational tone that lends the book a strong sense of realism.  But since Tanaka is such an unpleasant character — he is in fact all that his girlfriend accuses him of, and more, yet reacts to her suspicions, and Kim's mild criticisms, with outright hostility — I finished the story with antipathy and a shrug, not admiration.  [3]

Hakim's Odyssey - Fabien Toulmé

Hakim's Odyssey - Fabien Toulmé

1. Book One: From Syria to Turkey - With simple, two-toned line drawings, Toulmé tells the story of Hakim, a young Syrian who owns a gardening store in Damascus.  After Assad comes to power, there are protests that are put down with brutal violence.  Hakim is picked up by the state police for helping some protesters. After being interrogated and tortured, he is released, but decides he must flee his business, family, and country.  Moving from Jordan to Antalya, Turkey, he discovers that life as a refugee consist of low wages, suspicion, and anger from the locals.  In Antalya, he marries a fellow refugee, then leaves with her family for Istanbul, where the book ends.  Especially given the strongman tactics of the American wanna-be king in the 2020s, this is an important, chillingly relevant, and upsetting story.

 

Morning Glories - Nick Spencer

Morning Glories - Nick Spencer

Volume One -  The Breakfast Club, or maybe "Gossip Girl," meets Cthulhu.  The story opens in a prestigious boarding school, Morning Glory Academy, where six academically gifted but troubled teens arrive, and very quickly things seem eerie and off  The six characters find they all share the same birthday, and the teachers are adept at evading questions. Spencer leans into secrets, hidden agendas, and "something is very wrong here" energy.  The kids' cell phones lose signal, their parents claim not to remember their very existence, and the sinister teachers seem to have planned a series of deathtraps for the teens unless they toe the line.  However, I thought it was ultimately unsatisfying.  Spencer stirs a lot into the pot early on, including a set of murdered parents, with mysteries and questions building without immediate payoff.  I also found the characters thin and overly stereotyped, while the writing was of the self-conscious, quippy kind (think "Gilmore Girls" meets "West Wing") in a rapid-fire babble that doesn't match how anyone, let alone teens, talk.  "Our little suicide girl is your carrot on a stick, and they know it."  "This is Guantanamo Bay for the statutory set."  "Or we wave the white blouse and beg for clemency before these psychos get all Clockwork Orange-y with us."  Lines like that might dazzle in a writer's room, but no panicked teenager would ever say them. Joe Eisma's art is crisp and detailed, but I found it also glossy and flat, with little dynamism or depth, in that way matching the writing.  By the "shocking twist" on the final splash page, I found myself less intrigued than indifferent. The mystery may run deep, but the characters and dialogue never made me care enough to follow it further.  [2.5]