COMICS: A must-read Ivory Coast comic

Aya


Drawn & Quarterly

Genocide, AIDS, poverty, warlords, marathon runners, civil war, starvation and lions—does that pretty much sum up the first things that come to mind when you hear the word "Africa"? If so, blame the media. The entertainment media tends to accentuate the negative, and the news media tends not to cover the continent at all. All of which makes Aya seem all the more unique and refreshing. Author Marguerite Abouet was born in the Ivory Coast's capital city of Abidjan in 1971 before moving to France in the '80s, and her graphic novel is set during the late '70s' so-called "Ivorian miracle," when the West African nation initially flourished shortly after gaining its independence from France.

The Abidjan of Abouet's youth isn't really there any more, as political upheaval and economic turnaround has since struck, but she and her artistic collaborator Clement Oubrerie bring it back to vivid life in this lighthearted French import. Their characters all seem so familiar that you might mistake them for your own neighbors, were it not for all the immersive regional slang.

The title of the book is also the name of the studious, levelheaded main character, but it's the romantic misadventures of her two best friends, unrepentant party girls Adjoua and Bintou, that actually drive the plot. Abouet's story reads like a multigenerational ensemble romantic comedy, and its familiarity despite its faraway setting makes it seem all the more exotic. It's easily the first absolute must-read of 2007.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Soul's Winter


Mirage Publishing

Readers' interest in their characters seems to have exceeded Eastman and Laird's, however, and they gradually abdicated the creation of the comics to rotating artists, each of whom offered their own completely different versions of the characters.

No artist's vision was as radical a departure as that of Michael Zulli, whose three-part Soul's Winter story gets collected in this beautiful graphic novel. Zulli is an artist of immense illustrative ability, a magician with pen, brush and ink. Before this story, he distinguished himself on environmental epic Puma Blues, and afterward he hit the big time, drawing the final volume of Neil Gaiman's seminal Sandman series for DC.

In his version of the Turtles-verse, their master Splinter and their enemy Shredder are dueling Asian wizards battling one another from afar using strange magical rituals. The Turtles themselves are all indistinguishable from one another—they don't seem to have different names, nor different weapons or color-coded masks by which to tell them apart. Zulli draws them as fairly disturbing looking monsters—they're slow-moving reptilian hominids.

Zulli's strange character design and brilliant line work are just this side of breathtaking, somewhere between arty samurai manga and a naturalist's sketchbook. This is a Ninja Turtle book for people with no interest in the Ninja Turtles.

Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil No. 1


DC Comics

His long awaited, first post-Bone project is this month's Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil, a four-part series that reintroduces Golden Age superhero Captain Marvel (who has, over the years, become better known by his catchphrase than his actual name).

The first issue proves to be just as charming and new-reader friendly as Smith's previous work was, and sees Smith capturing the sense of fun and adventure of the original 1940s stories, while delivering something that feels more current than nostalgic.