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Blind Buys and Recommendations: Johnny Hiro

escherm — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:01:54 +0000

Probably the best part of being a comic fan is finding a diamond in the rough among trades as you’re perusing a shelf in a comic shop. It’s truly great to have the subtle enthusiasm from a shop owner over a book met with your own skeptical raised eyebrow and then be proven wrong once you get through reading it. My local comic shop owner sees me take home quite the haul over the course of a month and rarely tries to hook me up with a book he might think I haven’t heard about. Johnny Hiro, though, was one of those books. The book snuck under my radar due to the fact that it only had two issues published before being canceled and then had to be finished and resolicited as a trade paperback. The book is worth the weight. The title character is not a superhero or vigilante or warrior of any kind. No, Johnny is just your every day average busboy who is trying to make ends meet while living in New York City and running afoul of everything from rival restaurant sushi samurais or giant monsters attacking the city. At his side is his cheerful and loving girlfriend, Mayumi, who adores her boyfriend as much as she adores kittens and believing everything will work out in the end. Writer/artist Fred Chao delivers a book that’s fun and engaging and completely entertaining for all types of readers big and small. Guest-stars galore including NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg and the cast of an 80′s hit sitcom grace the same pages as Godzilla-wannabes fighting giant robots. The art is in black and white but still dynamic and full of life between the panels. The jokes come fast and furious but the humor is always overshadowed by the genuine charm of Chao’s writing of the Johnny and Mayumi. It’s their relationship that holds the book together between hilarious skits and well-drawn action. It’s like Chao knows this and makes every scene that he puts them in feel very realistic. Even when Mayumi’s broken English is played for laughs, it never feels derogatory or childish. He works it into the natural dialogue and counters it with Johnny’s own standard way of speaking. Johnny Hiro is definitely a book that I’m glad was recommended to me and I’m passing that recommendation on and hoping that others pick it up. It’s a great blind buy, I’ll tell you that.

Blind Buys and Recommendations: Sentinels: Books 1-4

escherm — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 06:54:33 +0000

One of the first comics I was exposed to as a kid was the New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Perez. I was in a small bookstore on the Oregon Coast and stumbled upon a black-and-white collection of the New Teen Titans first batch of issues reprinted in a format the size of a paperback novel. I read it cover to cover in no time flat and then continued to read it for the rest of the summer I bought it. I fell in love with these characters that I’d never heard of (except Robin, obviously). I can’t tell you what about this comic struck me as something so compelling, but I can hazard a guess: Every kid wants to be a super-hero. The Titans were different, though. They were teenagers reluctantly dealing with the legacies that were thrust upon them. In a world that naturally accepted the concept of super-human protectors, they still had to prove themselves as true heroes due to their age and inexperience and that made them twice as formidable. It’s this charming concept that infuses the pages of a little book that I ordered based solely on the cover and Previews description: ”Years ago the superhero team, SENTINELS, disappeared. Now their children have taken their place and get pulled into the mystery of what truly happened to them.” Between this and some of the posted preview pages (and a whole graphic novel packed with extras for $14.95), I placed the Diamond Order number on my list and waited the three months for it to arrive. Sentinels Book 1: Footsteps was a thrill to read not because it was the best graphic novel I’d ever read (for all its merits, it wasn’t earth-shattering), but because it reminded me of those old New Teen Titans comics I’d grown up on. That level of nostalgia alone was enough for me to keep an eye out for the subsequent books in the series. Book 2: Masks, Book 3: Echoes, and Book 4: Hope were all just as good and as the characters developed and went through the trials laid before them as legacy heroes of the greatest super-hero team of their world, I kept wanting to know what happened next for these wayward 20-somethings. Where New Teen Titans captured the angst of having to prove yourself as a teenager, Sentinels showed the “quarter life crisis” through the eyes of a super-hero. The fact that these books are completely independently published by Drumfish Productions is an even greater feat for such a title. Just like the characters they created, Rich Bernatovech and Luciano Vecchio set out a goal and met it: they brought their characters’ saga to the masses and told the complete story arc of their creations. That’s as admirable as saving the world from the forces of evil, if you ask me.

Blind Buys and Recommendations: Mister Blank by Chris Hicks

escherm — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 03:48:19 +0000

I really enjoy two things about movies and comics and the like: The blind buy and the easily recommended. The blind buy is usually fulfilling for the purposes of being in a shop and finding a book or DVD that just leaps out at you and says, “Trust me. You’ll like it.” To then turn around and pass that book or DVD on to someone else and actually be the ones to speak the words is also extremely enjoyable. Many a time, I’ve had a pretty good streak of luck with being able to not only judge a book by its cover, but also keep the trust of a friend by adding my name to the recommendations strewn over said cover.

When I was in New York City for the first time back in 2000, I stumbled upon Jim Haney’s Comic Universe over by, of all places, the Empire State Building. The friends I was on vacation with had actually found the shop a few days prior and been hiding its location from me so that I wouldn’t end up spending 5 hrs and $200 inside it. They failed. At the tail end of my cathartic shopping spree, I caught the simple cover of a rather large omnibus for a series called, “Mister Blank.” I stopped dead in my tracks. There wasn’t much the outside and I had never heard of the author, Chris Hicks. Something about the art style, though, spoke to my sensibilities. Cartoony yet expressive with layout that was extremely thoughtful and experimental. It was obvious Hicks had some formal training and being that he was also the writer of “Mister Blank” he could make every character moment work twice as well.

The story of “Mister Blank” follows everyday joe, Sam Smith, as he gets swept from his boring uneventful life into a thousand year old battle of wills against the daughter of creation and her immortal sons who have been secretly conquering the world for generations. While this all may sound “epic” and “intense,” it’s not all played that way. Sam’s every man status is played to the hilt. He’s completely unprepared for robotic assassins, shape-shifting clones, and psychic mimes. In the end, all Smith wants is to ask out Julie from his office and rescue his loyal dog, What. When it counts, though, Sam steps up and stares down Russian gods of the wind and leads the charge against the potential end of the world.

Amazing and fresh illustration that holds up years after publication, fun and familiar character driven humor and action, and an epic saga collected for reading in one sitting in one tight omnibus. “Mister Blank” is one of my all-time favorites and I highly recommend it. Trust me, you’ll like it.