Friday, February 3, 2012

Graphic novel reviews F

The Fade-Out - Ed Brubaker - three volumes, complete
In '50s Hollywood, a screenwriter with a secret (he's been relying on a blacklisted friend to ghostwrite for him) wakes up to find the ingenue star of his movie dead.  When someone makes it look like suicide, he's determined to get to the bottom of it.   Pitch-perfect Brubaker noir.  [5]

A Family Secret - Eric Heuvel
A young boy in Holland looks in his grandmother's attic for things to sell and stumbles on the history of a family split apart by the war, with one brother a collaborator and the other a Nazi, the young girl a friend of Jews and her father a policeman charged with rounding them up.  Realistic, grim, and educational. Art that owes pretty much every line to Tintin.  A character guide on the title page ruined the twist at the end.  [3.5] 

Fantastic Four: Foes - Robert Kirkman
A 6-issue miniseries.  A couple of villains come up with a plot that fools even Reed Richards.  Starts out in high gear with lots of cheery Kirkman notes, but lacking in tense drama (fights are crucial to the plot but glossed over; even when vastly outnumbered, the FF never appear to be in any danger) and ending somewhat abruptly.  Perhaps it could have stretched out to ten issues.  I sold it.  [3] 

FANTASTIC FOUR/FF - Matt Fraction
-NEW DEPARTURE, NEW ARRIVALS (#1-3/#1-3)
-FANTASTIC FAUX (FF #4-8)
Fun superhero silliness.  Fraction has a great understanding of character and he uses every bit of obscure weirdness in the MU.  His plots are over the top and sometimes goofy.  [4]

Fantastic Four - Dan Slott

FABLES - Bill Willingham
The first 10-12 volumes are superb.  [5]  After the Great Fables Crossover and the introduction of some eternal comic types, the title loses steam.  [3.5]

Fatale - Ed Brubaker
Not up to the quality of his Daredevil run or Criminal.  Whether it's the disjointed chronology or the occult-horror-noir hybrid, this isn't really my thing. [3.5]

Fibbed - Elizabeth Agyemang

The Fifth Quarter - Mike Dawson

5,000 Km Per Second - Manuele Fior


FIVE WEAPONS - Jimmie Robinson - two volumes, complete
At a school for assassins' children, the son of a living legend assassin shows up.  He chooses no school of weaponry but challenges them all with just his wits.  However, not all is what it seems. In the second volume, his best friend is also enrolled, but now apparently set against him, knowing all his secrets.  It's not as gritty as it sounds --- it's both drawn and written in a slightly jokey, childish style.  The dialogue runs from clever to stilted to just awful, and the plot has more than a few holes in it.  Pretty fun, but not for adults, I think.  Given away.  [2]

Foiled - Jane Yolen [First Second]

  • 1. Foiled - A teenage girl in New York who doesn't fit in anywhere but the fencing studio discovers that her practice foil is actually a faerie weapon that enables her to see the magic creatures all around, and the boy she was chasing is a troll in disguise, sworn to aid her.  A bit thin, from the overdone "teenage misfit becomes magic realm's protector" to the lack of any meaty conflict.  [3]
  • 2. CURSES! FOILED AGAIN - The second volume, wherein the heroine deals with whom to trust as she faces a shadowy enemy, is much better.  [3.5]  Library.

The Fox - Mark Waid

Freddy Lombard - Yves Chaland

  1. The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon - One rainy Belgian night, Freddy (who looks just like Tintin!) and his two friends come upon a wine-loving duke at an inn.  He hires the three to help him dig for treasure buried by his ancestor before the Crusades, unaware that someone is listening in on the story.  In a long dream sequence, Freddy imagines he and his friends meeting the dukes' ancestor a thousand years ago, and we see the treacherous counselor trying to get his hands on the estate back then.  Then back to the present for a bit of adventure and a rather anticlimactic, enigmatic ending.  Marvelously inventive, and just utterly gorgeous art.  [4]
  2. The Elephant Graveyard -  Containing two stories: An African Adventure, about travels to the jungles of Africa in search of a unique photographic plate for a collector. The second story, The Elephants Graveyard, involves Freddy's investigations into the murders of several ex-army gentlemen who served in Africa. Told at a frenetic pace, with some rather whiplash-inducing swerves from absurdist humor to high body count.  The three friends live like squatters, shivering in a run-down apartment and selling furniture for food, but nothing much is made of this.  [4]
  3. The Comet of Carthage - Freddy rescues a woman fleeing from her abusive sculptor lover, and also imagines her to be a queen of Carthage, and himself a Carthaginian warrior.  The woman says that her lover has killed previous models.  Dina pines for Freddy and soliloquizes about their lives in Carthage. Storms wash out the only road out of Cassis.  A comet is coming and may hit the town.  The three friends stay in a cave by the shore and search for things to eat.  Freddy befriends the sculptor.  Beautiful, just gorgeous detailed art (Chaland can draw a ruin or wind-swept cliff just as well as anyone), but the story is simply insane.  [3.5]
  4. Holiday In Budapest - In Venice, 1956, Dina is working as a Latin tutor; the boys are camping by the lake. Her pupil, an impulsive Hungarian twelve year old, runs off to join the rebellion against the Soviets.  While the boys catch up and drive him there, Dina flies to his family.  They get mixed up in the war, in firefights, scuffles, and accusations.  It's a very odd transition from the first, more goofy, style of the series.  [4]
  5. F-52 - The three friends are hired as air attendants on the new super-fast atomic plane to Australia.  In a much less convoluted adventure than the previous ones, they are embroiled in staff squabbling, some sexual harassment from Dina's supervisor, a search for a Soviet spy, and grimmest of all, an insane rich couple who scheme to kidnap a little girl from another pssenger to replace their child, who has Down Syndrome.  [4.5]

Freshman - Corinne Mucha  [Zest]
A slight book about a teen girl's first high school year.  The usual worries about changing friendships, boy troubles, popularity.  Clunky doodle-style monochromatic art.  Aimed directly at teen girls; I found it simplistic and cliched on the first reading.  But on the second reading a year later I approached it with a more open mind, and conceded the touching side; the themes of uncertainty and desire to be something more are, in fact, universal.  Read twice.  Library.  [2.5]