The Salon
St. Martin’s Griffin
There’s a killer roaming the streets of Paris in 1907, and her preferred prey is as peculiar as her own appearance. She’s a blue-skinned woman who tears the heads off her victims, all avant-garde painters.
This naturally worries Leo and Gertrude Stein, who have been hosting salons with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Erik Satie and Guillaume Apollinaire. Together they set out to pre-emptively strike against the killer, about whom they know quite a bit more than the gendarmes.
It seems the salon has stumbled across a fantastic blue absinthe that allows those who imbibe it to enter into the two-dimensional world of a painting, and now it seems something from inside a Gauguin has found a way to follow them out.
Writer/artist Nick Bertozzi plucks figures from art history and uses them as ready-mades, making for a fantastic cast (crass Gertrude Stein and maniac Picasso are particularly colorful), and he deftly weaves the bizarre murder mystery into a perfectly realized turn-of-the-century Paris, with stories like that of cubism’s origins, Stein and Alice Toklas’ relationship and the Picasso/Matisse rivalry seeping out the edges.
It’s the sort of huge, epic story that seems bigger and deeper the longer one spends with it, but Bertozzi deftly tells it in fewer than 200 pages, each of which is broken into a perfect four-panel grid and strikingly colored with a limited (but ever-changing) palette.
It’s a masterpiece of a graphic novel, which is quite fitting, considering the number of masterpieces the characters that star in it have turned out during their careers.
The Living and the Dead
Fantagraphics
If you think Hollywood loves zombies these days, it’s nothing compared to the comics industry’s love affair with the undead. The only thing that outnumbers walking corpses on comics shelves these days is men in tights. And, as with superheroes, to stand out as anything other than mediocre in the zombie genre, a new comic has to either have a refreshing new take on the same old genre, or be the work of an incredible, unique talent.
The Living and the Dead fits both criteria. The work of one-name-only Norwegian cartoonist Jason, this slim black and white graphic novel is a wry love story about a dishwasher and a prostitute that climaxes in the midst of an attack of the living dead.
Jason’s signature blank-faced anthropomorphic dogs and birds make up the cast, and provide a much-needed distance from the horror of the subject matter (a zombie eating a plump little baby, for example, might be a tad more unsettling if the zombie weren’t a dog and the baby a bird.)
Jason tells this particular story as if it were a silent movie (the few bits of dialogue appear on title cards between panels of the action), and the cartooning is so strong you don’t need any words to follow this engrossing comedy.
Gothic Sports Vol. 1
Tokyopop
Sixteen-year-old Anya has just transferred to Lucrece High, for one simple reason—they have the best sports teams in the city, and she dreams of playing for one of them. Unfortunately, she has more heart than experience, as she’s never actually played on a sports team of any kind.
After washing out at basketball try-outs and learning the school’s soccer team won’t let girls play, she rallies the school’s other misfits and outcasts to form her own soccer team. But to gain official recognition, they must first defeat the school’s real soccer team in a match.
German writer/artist Anike Hage’s geeks vs. jocks high school comedy isn’t terribly gothic in its storytelling or aesthetic, and gets its name instead from the team’s uniforms, stylish black and red creations designed by the team’s Gothic Lolita fashion fan Filiz.
It’s a charming enough series, even if this first volume of the story fails to live up to the promise of the intriguingly mismatched words that make up the title.