Monthly archives: February, 2007

By Brian Wood (W) and Riccardo Burchielli (A)

Published in 2006, comprises issues 1-5, Vertigo. $9.99

The Plot: Matty Roth has a well connected dad who’s gotten him an internship with Liberty News, which sets him up as an assistant to a big shot journalist who’s going into Manhattan. This is newsworthy because Civil War (in the very non-Marvel sense) has erupted and the Free State army and the United States army are massed on either side of the island, rendering it a great unknown amid the warring sides. Supposedly it is a de-militarized zone, but Matty quickly learns that to be false when his crew comes under attack and he’s left behind.

This first collection follows Matty as he starts to acquaint himself with this alien version of New York, and starts to report the first news stories out of the DMZ, spreading the realities of war to the outside world.

The Good: As I read through this first volume of the series, I made it about half way through when I realized how unsettled it made me feel. It wasn’t the violence (of which there is plenty. This is war, after all) that bothered me. Instead, it was a sense that I couldn’t get a handle on where each issue was taking me, or where the series as a whole was headed. You’re thinking, “That doesn’t sound like a compliment.” Well, hold on. What I realized is that Wood crafted this first part of the series so well that I, as a reader, was feeling the instability that kept rocking Matty in the strangeness of the DMZ. It felt like falling into a war zone.

As many have pointed out before, Wood has set this battleground amid one of the most hallowed lands of America, which conveys to Americans the pain of war in a freshly familiar way. In a sad way, it’s more gripping to see an apartment-turned-ER filled with wounded American children than it is to see yet another bit of footage of an Iraq bombing or starving child in Darfur. But this book is far too complex to be a simple parable on war. It’s also, as the New York Times stated, a love letter to New York. In the DMZ, Matty sees the city responding with a desperate hope to all the atrocities. All the city’s eclectic sides shine through all the stronger when held against such a bleak background.

On that note, Burchielli deserves a hell of a lot of credit for the success of the book. He does the war scenes well, and gives plenty of uniqueness and personality to each character. For a foreigner (he’s Italian), he nails all the little details of the Big Apple. While there are some nice scenes of the familiar skylines marred with fighter jets and explosions, what Burchielli really does well are the micro scenes – street corners and alleys and tenements all recognizable behind the compost of war.

The Bad: There is very little wrong here. I could’ve used a little more background mixed in with the very personal stories, a little more building of Matty’s character. Some might complain that the trade isn’t printed on glossy paper, but personally, I almost prefer the more textured paper (it definitely doesn’t negatively impact readability). Also, it keeps the cost down, since this trade costs about half as much as similar books.

The Grade: A This is just one of those books that you should read. It’s good. It’s relevant. It’s touching. It’s painful. And, this is just the beginning.

By Brian and Philip Phillipson (W) and Alex Nino (A)

Published in 2006, originally as four issues in 2005, by Bliss on Tap Publishing. $19.95 softcover, $29.95 hardcover.

The Plot: Drop some acid, chase it with a bottle of something staunch and thumb through a pile of texts on mythology, psychology, human history and religion. Then distill it through a most simplistic pun. The resulting dream is going to approximate the experience of reading God the Dyslexic doG. The Phillipson father and son team bring a whole lot to the table, roughly following the adventures of a dog that’s been instilled with the power of God. The villain is age-old Dionysus, who seeks to destroy the world (by setting in motion the Mayan doomsday) so that he can finally die (in a nice twist, he’s one of the few fictional villains seeking to end his immortality). This is just the first part of the adventure, but manages not to leave off with a jarring cliffhanger.

The Positives: I’m a sucker for weird forays into myth, and that’s pretty much exactly the MO here. It’s pretty densely layered with ideas and ideologies, so there’s a lot to chew (metaphorically, of course). But it’s not overly high-minded, delving into plenty of silliness. The Phillipsons clearly are just having a lot of fun with the concept, and it works. (Brian Phillipson wanted to get together for a Q&A but has been too busy with his day job, working on animation for the upcoming Futurama flicks. He says they’re really funny, which is good news for a good show that’s long sat dormant.)

A lot of the book’s success owes to Alex Nino’s art. The pages are filled with these massive splashes of imagery that seems like a marriage between Salvador Dali and Dr. Seuss. There are scientific monkeys conducting experiments on crashed airplanes and weird space stations that play home to warrior turkeys. And Nino’s style fits it really well.

The Negatives: The problems with this book all come from the writing, mostly because it’s so anarchic that it’s hard as a reader to ever get much of a sense of what’s going on. I found myself vacillating between being convinced that this book existed on a plane of knowledge far above my reach and thinking it was just a rambling mess of pseudo-intellectualism all brewed together. Either way, it’s a world without structure, which means a serious lack of narrative strength. There’s a lot of potential in the storyline, but it’s not there yet. Also, and this is a decidedly minor note, but the main idea of the story (a dog that’s a god) kept me thinking back to this Kids in the Hall sketch, which was a much simpler and more effective riff on the same pun.

The Grade: B God the Dyslexic doG isn’t an overwhelmingly great book, but it is decidedly different from everything else that’s out there and it was published (quite nicely) by the creators, so it’s worth supporting (buy it here). I’d say that if you have an interest in this sort of thing (or if you have a serious drug habit), then it’s definitely a book to check out.