Category: Graphic fiction

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“The Phantom Zone and Other Stories,” by José Alaniz

“The Phantom Zone and Other Stories.” Written and illustrated by José Alaniz. San Diego State University Press: Amatl Comix Series, $18.95 direct from SDSU, January 2020. 128 pp. Adult: drug references, some depictions of violence, some sexual content.

Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review.

Check Fables out online at www.fablesbooks.com, order over the phone at 574-534-1984, or email them at fablesbooks@gmail.com.

NOTE: José and I are fellow comics academics, and he gave me a free copy of this book.

Comics “rewired my brain at a very early age,” says comics scholar and artist José Alaniz in the introduction to his retrospective comics collection, “The Phantom Zone and Other Stories.” Alaniz says that he viewed the world through comics-tinted lenses—so much so that the first time he saw the New York City skyline, he “could have sworn [he] saw caped figures flitting among the skyscrapers.”

He developed his own strip, “The Phantom Zone,” while a student at University of Texas at Austin in the early 90s. The 90s was a zeitgeist period for Austin’s campus comics: Alaniz’s strip ran alongside early work by now-superstars Chris Ware, filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, and animators Tom King and Jeanette Moreno King. The complete run of “The Phantom Zone,” which takes up about half of this book, provides a funny, dark, and fascinating alternate window back into 90s Austin. Many of us know this milieu mainly through the Richard Linklater film “Slacker,” which helped popularize Austin, and may also have helped to define Generation X (although Linklater resists that reading of the film).

In the four-panel opening strip, Chip, Alaniz’s protagonist, passes into the “phantom zone” of post-college life. His hangover is both literal and philosophical:

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“Tunnels,” by Rutu Modan

“Tunnels.” Written and illustrated by Rutu Modan. Translated from the Hebrew by Ishai Mishory. Drawn and Quarterly, $29.95. November 2021. 284 pp. Teen to adult (but my 9 and 12 year olds loved it).

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from Drawn and Quarterly.

Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review.

Check Fables out online at www.fablesbooks.com, order over the phone at 574-534-1984, or email at fablesbooks@gmail.com.

“[W]e are all stuck here in this small piece of land,” said comics artist Rutu Modan in a recent CBC interview, when asked about the fraught location of her home country Israel. “Basically, we have the same target. I believe that most of the people living here want to live happily ever after. But the interpretation of the way to go there, to get to this perfect future, the ways are really different.”

Modan has never been one to shy away from difficult questions, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously, either—keep an eye out for a cow jumping over the moon in her most recent book, “Tunnels.” The romance and intrigue that Modan works into all of her comics (such as “The Property“) are never merely superficial plot devices, but a means to delve deeper. Modan’s newest story tunnels its own elliptical, surprising, and delightful narrative path as readers follow her rich, complex characters around and within their difficult, contested setting. Continue reading ““Tunnels,” by Rutu Modan”

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“The Day the Klan Came to Town,” by Bill Campbell and Bizhan Kodabandeh

“The Day the Klan Came to Town.” Written by Bill Campbell, illustrated by Bizhan Khodabandeh. PM Press, $15.95. August 2021. 128 pp. Teen to adult. (My 9- and 12-year-olds loved it, but be aware that the book includes some violent and disturbing images.)

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book, and contributed to its Kickstarter campaign.

Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review.

Check Fables out online at www.fablesbooks.com, order over the phone at 574-534-1984, or email at fablesbooks@gmail.com.

“I’m not a big fan of writing heroic tales,” claims author and publisher Bill Campbell in a recent interview for Fanbase Press. This statement might sound odd coming from the author of “The Day the Klan Came to Town,” a fictionalized account of a historic day in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, in the early 1920s. The mixed immigrant neighborhood of this small town outside of Pittsburgh banded together to resist and expel a violent Ku Klux Klan rally. If these scrappy townspeople aren’t heroic, then who is?

Campbell adheres to the more traditional sense of the term “heroic,” however. What he rejects aren’t stories about heroes, per se, but stories about oversimplified, unrealistically independent heroes, who triumph by means of their own sheer will and determination. While Campbell’s book does follow a main protagonist, Sicilian immigrant Primo Salerno, Campbell and his illustrator, Bizhan Khodabandeh, who works under the name Mended Arrow, make it clear that the story of Carnegie in in August 1923 is a story of collective, not individual, resistance, as well as a story that refuses narratives of victimization:

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