Nasser Ali is a master musician, but when his wife breaks his tar in a fight and he's unable to find another that sounds the same, he determines to die. He lies down in his bed and waits for death to claim him.
Eight days later, it does, and Satrapi then jumps backward to show us those eight days in great detail.
Like the saintly star of Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony, a classic from Satrapi's adopted home of France, Nasser Ali undergoes a semi-mythic passion of challenges and temptations, as he's visited by family members real and imagined, hallucinations of Sophia Loren and the angel of death, and his story flashes forward and backward.
Satrapi's smooth, flat art style hasn't changed from her previous works—it's still bold black and white with a woodcut-like simplicity—but her storytelling chops have changed a bit, and for the better. Chicken With Plums may not feel as revelatory and important as Persepolis, but it's certainly more powerful and affecting.
Kuro Gane Vols. 1-2
Del Rey
Jintetsu was a young boy who was seeking vengeance for his father at the end of a sword, until a pack of wild dogs tore him to pieces. Luckily for him (and us, or this would have been one short manga), an outcast scientist found his body, and put him back together using iron and steel pieces (the title means "Black Steel"). The resurrected "Jintetsu of the Steel" can no longer speak, but he's picked up some other useful features, like a Swiss Army knife-style elbow. Becoming a pint-size mechanical samurai, he wanders Edo-period Japan and gets involved in episodic adventures. His only companions are a talking sword created by the same scientist who rebuilt him, and a flock of menacing crows who follow him everywhere he goes (a side effect of being dead, I suppose).
Creator Kei Toume's story offers many of the same pleasures of the best-known manga from the samurai genre (Think Lone Wolf and Cub, Blade of the Immortal, etc.), with just a touch of Astro Boy thrown in. It's fun stuff and, best of all, it's just getting started. Del Rey has at least three more volumes of the series planned.
Q-Ko-Chan Vols. 1-2
Del Rey
Connoisseurs of Japanese pop culture who've seen anime FLCL (or Fooly Cooly, as it's pronounced stateside) would be forgiven for getting quite excited about seeing the words "From the creator of FLCL" on the cover of this weird little two-volume manga series. After all, FLCL was a downright brilliant little genre-buster of a series. Well, don't get too excited. Q-Ko-Chan comes courtesy of Ueda Hajime, who handled the comic adaptation of FLCL, not the show itself. His new series smashes up some pretty standard manga conventions—post-apocalyptic future, giant robots piloted by children, government conspiracy—and doesn't really add much to it, beyond making everything extremely cute (his giant robots, referred to as dolls, are so damn darling they make the Powerpuff Girls look like wrinkly old ladies, and a fascist organization uses a black bunny head for its symbol rather than, say, a swastika).
The story is awfully confused and hard to follow, but Hajime's art is at least worth a look, as he strips his simplified style down so far that his scratchily drawn characters approach calligraphy in their simplicity.