NPR.org on Graphic Novels
Offering a few comics and graphic novels for late summer reads, NPR.org’s reviewer Etelka Lehoczky suggests titles she says are “perfect to pore over in a patch of muggy sunlight.”
First up is Pénélope Bagieu’s English language debut, Exquisite Corpse (Macmillan/First Second). Bagieu is a French comic artist who turns her hand here to a short subversive story that has a “fiendishly unexpected denouement that combines feminist politics with a generous affection for [the] heroine.”
Bagieu’s artwork is particularly engrossing, full of wry observations and saturated colors, which Lehoczky characterizes as “eloquent” and “deceptively unsophisticated.”
Next is Little Nemo: Return to Slumberland (IDW) by Eric Shanower (writer) and Gabriel Rodriguez (artist), winner of this year’s Eisner Award for best limited series and an extension of the groundbreaking Winsor McKay original newspaper strips that began in the early 1900s.
Lehoczky does not admire it as fully. While she says “there’s much here to divert open-minded readers,” she is put off by the style “It’s utterly at odds with the original strip’s ambience, and it’s hardly narcoleptic. In fact, there’s something downright wakey-wakey about such assertive shades — they practically smack you in the eye.”
Last comes Five Ghosts vol. 3 by Frank J. Barbiere and Chris Mooneyham (Image Comics). It features “macho treasure hunter Fabian Gray [who] is possessed by five literary spirits whose abilities he can manifest: The Wizard, the Archer, the Detective, the Samurai and the Vampire.”
Calling it “adventure of the highest order” Lehoczky details Gray’s tribulations, which begins with “our hero fighting zombies in Romania and winds up with him strapped to Dr. Moreau’s operating table.”
The Syfy channel announced a deal to adapt the series last fall.