Vampire Loves
First Second
Ferdinand, the vampire protagonist of Joann Sfar's Vampire Loves, drains the fantastic eroticism typical of stories dealing with vampires, replacing it with real-world insecurity and neediness.
He's a Lithuanian vampire who likes folk music and three-piece suits, lives alone with his cat and not only never kills his victims, but in fact only bites them with one tooth, so they will think he's merely a mosquito.
No luckier in love now that he's undead than any outsider tends to be while alive, Ferdinand longs for his ex-girlfriend (an infuriating tree spirit), while stumbling through doomed flirtations and flings in these four stories.
Sfar's art recalls Charles Addams and Edward Gorey's funny goth classics, and his designs are all elegantly weird—it's best not to even imagine how exactly Ferdinand would even do it with some of the she-monsters he pursues.
For all the ghosts, gollums and mummies that populate Sfar's bittersweet stories, it's amazing how easy it is to relate to them—the characters may all be monsters, but they're as human as any of us.
52
DC Comics
Last week DC Comics kicked off what might be the most ambitious project in comic-book history, but if you missed it, don't worry—you still have 51 more chances to get onboard.
The company's flagship characters—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Justice League, the Teen Titans—all share the same fictional setting, and several thousand other characters that have been created by the company's writers and artists in the last 65 years or so.
On May 10, DC launched a new title to tell a yearlong story in real time (a la TV's 24) that will give just about all of those characters a moment in the spotlight. Each Wednesday, a new issue of the weekly series 52 will come out, focusing on the lives of the six main protagonists as they make their way through a year of cataclysmic changes.
In the spotlight are Steel, an engineer who once stood in for Superman (and who inspired a godawful 1997 movie starring Shaquille O'Neal); Renee Montoya, an alcoholic lesbian police detective; Teth-Adam, the supervillian dictator of a Middle Eastern country; The Question, the unbalanced vigilante who inspired a character in Alan Moore's classic Watchmen; Booster Gold, a corporate-sponsored superhero from the future; and Ralph Dibny, a retired superhero and recent widower.
The pace of the story—being a weekly, rather than monthly series—is demanding on readers, and will surely alienate most who don't already pick up comics on a weekly basis. But based on the first issue, it seems it will be a rewarding read—in terms of scope and detail, it may just prove to be the biggest comic book story ever told.
The Japanese Drawing Room: Victorian Travelers in Japan
Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum
The story behind this strange manga project is more fascinating than the book itself. The Russell-Cotes Arts Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth, England, houses the collection of the well-traveled couple it's named for, who visited Japan in the 1880s. Upon their return to England, they set up the Japanese Drawing room to display some of their acquisitions.
As part of the museum's 120th anniversary of the exhibit, it commissioned an original manga adaptation of the Japanese portions of Lady Russell-Cotes' journal. Which makes this the first manga commissioned by a museum and a book that takes a unique approach to edutainment: Memorializing the past cultural exchange between Japan and the West in the current medium of cultural exchange between the two.
Illustrated by Sean Michael Wilson, it certainly looks like manga but reads more like a Western comic, with its text-heavy, Victorian narration. Some passages have the feel of seeing someone else's vacation slides, but it offers a nice, easy-to-digest crash course through Japanese history and, reading between the lines, something of a history of Victorian perceptions of Japan.