Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Review: Mourning Star, volume 1 (with added industry speculation)

Mourning Star, volume 1 (publisher's website)

Ooh, I really liked this. It immediately reminded me of Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar's Dungeon, in that they're both fantasy-type comics told with funny animal-type characters. Except that Dungeon is more of a straight-up fantasy (with wizards and whatnot), while Mourning Star is a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max kind of thing. And, actually, Kazmir Strzepek's characters aren't funny animals at all--some of them are based on his doodles of Nosferatu, while others are an "elf-alien combo," according to this Comics Reporter interview. But tonally, there's a lot in common--both series use fantastic settings and tropes as a way to examine very human characters. And they both have a sort of genial, whimsical quality. This attitude pervades all aspects of Dungeon. In Mourning Star, it's expressed mostly through scenes involving members of the Rule, an evil...clan? Invading army? It's not really clear yet.

I'd say that Strzepek takes his story a bit more seriously than Trondheim and Sfar, though. The latter two seem to be writing Dungeon by the seat of their pants; the plot serves mostly as a showcase for their characters' personalities. That's not the case for Mourning Star, at least not yet. This is not to say that Strzepek is more concerned with plot than characterization, but he seems to take his action/peril scenes a bit more seriously. He also seems especially interested in the post-apocalyptic premise itself. Dungeon, with its tripartite structure mirroring three overarching stages of life (youth, adulthood, and old age), is often concerned with the changing relationship among characters over time. Trondheim and Sfar paint with broad strokes--there's a lot about the folly of youth, the regrets of the old, and everything in between. It's a very cyclical work: as characters age, new characters are introduced, who often behave similarly to the older characters. Patterns repeat. Mourning Star is also concerned with the passage of time and memory, but the past is totally unrecoverable for its characters. History is divided very clearly between before and after the comet. Characters who try to recover aspects of their past lives appear to be deluded. One character has amnesia. Another, a sort of ghost-type thing, feeds off of other characters' dreams--he's a parasite who leeches off of others' memories. Dungeon's fantasy trappings are basically just a springboard for neat little drawings and funny bits of characterization. In Mourning Star, the post-apocalyptic premise is at the absolute center of everything Strzepek is doing.

Mourning Star is one of those books that totally absorbed me on first reading, to the point where I had to make a concerted effort to think about the book in a critical way. I mean that as a great compliment to Strzepek. Much of this is due to the appealing characters he's created, all of whom seem to breathe life into much-used archetypes (the dangerous loner, the avuncular traveling companion, the young seeker, the bumbling hanger-on, etc.). Strzepek's charming art helps--his style reminds me of James Kochalka (cute, deceptively simple), early Chester Brown (austere page compositions), and Bryan Lee O'Malley (expressive character work); if this sounds like a strange and not altogether useful description, I encourage you to check out the copiously illustrated Comics Reporter interview. My interest in these characters intensified my reaction to the excitement and mystery Strzepek injects into the proceedings. I finished the book wanting more, and soon. So when are we getting more?

It was this reaction that reminded me of the discussion of Vertigo from a couple of days ago. There are a lot of different theories I've heard for explaining Vertigo's historical success, but I would mostly attribute the imprint's longevity to its association with strong serialization. The Vertigo titles I've read all have a marked soap opera quality--issues often end in a cliffhanger, placing the principle characters in jeopardy. Combine this with a strong meta-narrative hook, as many of the most successful titles have done (Preacher, Fables, and Y the Last Man all spring to mind), and you have a highly addictive comic. Assuming you're tuned into the Vertigo aesthetic.

I never have been, personally. Fables is the only Vertigo title I've followed on a monthly basis. I think that's due to three major factors: the subject matter, Bill Willingham's breezy writing (in direct contrast to his often gruesome plots), and Mark Buckingham's terrific pencils. I haven't read the majority of Vertigo titles (as Matt Brady can attest), but those I've tried and disliked have been lacking in one of those regards. Art especially--many of the most popular Vertigo titles are drawn in a style I find tremendously dull (I'm thinking Lucifer, most of Hellblazer, and Animal Man in particular). This seems to have improved over the years; I'd certainly take Cliff Chiang, Eduardo Risso, or Jock over Chas Truog anyday. But I'd take Kazmir Strzepek over all of them.

Anyway, the growing consensus seems to be that Vertigo is moving away (but by no means has completely moved away) from the monthly pamphlet format as grows more reliant on TPB sales. A lot of people are waiting for the trade, in other words. This is interesting to me, in that I think the soap opera/cliffhanger thing is so important to Vertigo's success. If there are a lot of people waiting six months between trades, then there must be a lot of folks willing to embrace serials with large gaps between installments. Obviously North American manga publishers are aware of this; most of the series I follow only come out about four times a year.

So why aren't more publishers trying to start up lines of serialized OGNs? I think Vertigo has proven there's a niche for this kind of material, even if it only comes out about twice a year. I'd go nuts for a similar line if it were geared a bit more to my tastes. There's probably money to be made from serializing less sf/fantasy-orietnted stuff than Vertigo typically offers. Something like Berlin* would surely appeal to a fairly wide audience. Likewise, I think there are untapped readers who would gravitate toward something like Mourning Star**, just because its visuals are so inviting. Jesus, folks, what about Scott Pilgrim? What is that but a series of OGNs? In the past year, we've seen a number of new formats successfully introduced into the industry, most notably Fantagraphics' Ignatz line and Image's Slimline. If these two formats have caught on with readers, there's no reason to think that a line of serialized OGNs has no chance.

*I'm not trying to imply that Jason Lutes could be counted on for two OGNs a year, given that I have a firm, Dave Sim-like grasp on reality.

**Which is apparently a collection of Strzepek's mini comics, so it's probably not a good example either.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice review, Dick. I'll have to check Mourning Star out sometime. But as you probably expected, I'll comment on the Vertigo discussion. I mostly wanted to comment on the soap opera/cliffhanger thing. I do agree about the soap opera part, but I don't know if Vertigo is built on cliffhangers. Of the books I'm most familiar with, I think only Y does the cliffhanger thing regularly. Fables doesn't really, and it divides into nice arcs for optimum impact when collected. Jack of Fables is fairly similar. 100 Bullets is more of a story arc-oriented series. I'm not sure about Hellblazer; I've read some of it here and there, but I don't really follow the series. I've never read Lucifer, so I don't know about that one. Sandman didn't really do that, did it? Preacher might have, but it also was story arc-oriented (I read it in trades, mostly after it came out). Transmetropolitan? I'm not sure (I've only read the first three or four trades). In fact, the story arc seems to be the main Vertigo story format these days, and that's probably encouraged, for optimum impact and readability when collected.

I dunno; as you've mentioned before (I think), Vertigo doesn't have the same tight atmosphere they used to, with supernatural/horror spinoffs of DC properties (Swamp Thing, Sandman, Books of Magic, Sandman Mystery Theatre). Really, Hellblazer is the only one left from that era (unless you count Un-Men). They've kind of moved into adult drama (Y), supernatural/horror (Crossing Midnight), action (The Losers), social satire/commentary (Exterminators, Army@Love, Testament, DMZ), and fantasy, I guess (Fables, Jack of Fables). I follow a lot of their stuff, and while they can usually be relied upon to produce pretty good adult-oriented books, there isn't really a line-wide style or feel, I don't think. So yeah, I agree that they should definitely go for the serialized OGN format. They could probably do a lot to really advance the availability of that sort of material, and since their readers are already used to buying collections, they're halfway there already.

Ah, hell, I'm just repeating what you said, aren't I?

Katherine said...

I look forward to an increase in the number of comics stories serialized in OGNs. Scott Pilgrim is the obvious example; there's also Love As A Foreign Language, which is serialized in 96-page instalments. Then there was a recent floppy called Poison the Cure which was 104 pages long -- at that point you're walking the line between "OGN" and "floppy". The only reason I'm tempted to call a volume of Love As A Foreign Language an OGN whereas I'd call Poison the Cure a floppy is because LAAFL is perfect-bound while PTC is stapled.

(I wish we had more words for this thing -- you know, with the words and the pictures -- that were format-independent. It's irritatingly hard to form grammatical sentences about comics that have been produced in a number of different formats.)

Unknown said...

Wow, 104 pages is pretty big for a stapled book. It's probably not very floppy at that point. And "comic book" probably works pretty well for sequential art in any format.

Leigh Walton said...

"why aren't more publishers trying to start up lines of serialized OGNs?"

I don't quite follow your point. This has been happening for years.

A great deal of Oni's published output at this point consists of serial OGN series (Scott Pilgrim yes, but also Sharknife, Black Metal, Last Call, Love the Way You Love, Love as a Foreign Language, Borrowed Time, The Damned, etc). Top Shelf has done its fair share as well (Owly, Korgi, the Essex County trilogy, and the loosely-related works of folks like David Yurkovich, Matt Kindt, and Jeffrey Brown). Not to mention, um, Tokyopop. Even Sin City switched to this model before Frankie went to Hollywood.

The hard (or unrealistic) part is the release schedule you suggest -- 300 pages a year is just out of the question for many creators.

Am I missing the point?

Dick Hyacinth's Ghost said...

No, what Oni is doing sounds like more or less what I mean. I just kind of forgot about Last Call and Black Metal (I've been meaning to read the latter). I just wish more publishers were doing it, especially traditional book publishers with greater access to the chain stores. Those are the folks who could really do the most with this model. Actually, that's the key--big publishers could pay something approaching a living wage, which would allow cartoonists to work full-time on these hypothetical graphic novels. That was actually a point I'd meant to make, back when this post was percolating in my head.

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