They can't all be gems, I guess

Part of the intent for the inventory of The Last Shortbox that inspired this blog was to gain some understanding into my relationship with comics. I reckoned that looking at what from my once-extensive collection I had felt was worth keeping would give me some insight. With this title, all I got is "What was I thinking?"


Dino Island, 1 and 2 (of two), Feb-Mar 1993
by Jim Lawson; Mirage Publishing

I think I originally picked this up as part of my interest in non-superhero genre comics that were being published in the nineties with some frequency (things like Topps's Zorro series and Rascals in Paradise also come to mind).

The story begins in what I presume is some alternate 1942; our plucky heroine, Amelia (no last name given) is "attempting a trans-Atlantic speed record" in her P51-D Allison (a Mustang fighter) when she flies into the Bermuda Triangle.



In short order, she lands safely on an island, finds dinosaurs, stampedes a herd of triceratops to save them from some velociraptors, adopts one of the triceratopses as a kind of horse, and finds a community of other lost travellers based around the battleship Sturgis, which is moored on the coast. Along the way, she encounters a heart-of-gold resident (who acts as bartender), the hard-as-nails battleship captain (who runs the community), and the requisite professor-who-explains-stuff (who is, of course, short and bespectacled).

The comic does have some neat Dinotopia-style visuals of tame dinosaurs, like this scene of the community salvaging Amelia's plane:



In the second issue, Amelia and the professor investigate a massive monolith in the desert and an alien is captured near town. Amelia enters the monolith in a Heavy Metal-esque sequence illustrated by this (partially cropped) two-page sequence:



Amelia discovers another alien, who reveals that they are on an artificial planet (explained as a competing technology to terraforming) which is generated and maintained by the monolith as a kind of "model home" for prospective buyers. When Amelia returns to town with this news, she finds the alien has been accidentally killed and a flying saucer is attacking. She downs the saucer with her Mustang (although why she took a fully-armed plane on a speed-record flight is beyond me) but the community is practically destroyed. She checks out the monolith; it is sort of melting and not working anymore, and it is starting to get hot on the island.

The end.

That's it: the story doesn't conclude; it just stops. I had to check the issues themselves to see it was a mini-series and that I hadn't just stopped buying it. Maybe it was set-up for a project that never happened.

I don't know why this is in the Shortbox, actually. Unless it's here to show that the spirit of Bob Kanigher was passed on to some indy projects, there's really not a whole lot to recommend it. The art is pretty cool, with a cartoony funk to it, and some of the dinosaur scenes are engaging, but the story is ragged and desultory while the characters are unoriginal (even the aliens are uninspired).

It was probably just that the heroine is an aviator named Amelia.

No April's Fools

So I was in a different LCS than usual the other day (I am lucky to have at least three comic shops within walking distance and another not too much further) and my eye fell on a graphic novel that I had never seen before:


Jar of Fools: A Picture Story
by Jason Lutes; Drawn & Quarterly, 2003

I picked it up and flipped though the pages; I liked the art and had an impulse to buy it.

Then I glanced at the prose introduction and saw the first sentence: "Okay, so five or six years ago, I impulsively picked up Jason Lutes' Jar of Fools in a local Seattle comic book store, flipped though the pages, liked the art, bought it for a few bucks, and took it home." That synchronicity was enough to persuade me; any shadows of hesitation were dispelled when I saw that the introduction had been written by Sherman Alexie.

I did buy it and take it home (for more than a few bucks, though). I occasionally like to read a book or see a movie about which I know almost nothing; I had gotten lucky with my last "blind" graphic novel, Daisy Kutter, and the serendipity came though again. Jar of Fools is an excellent book that tells a complex story in a compelling manner.

Lutes chronicles a brief period in which several lives intersect: an alcoholic stage magician, his estranged girlfriend, his rapidly-becoming-senile mentor, and a small-time con-man and his daughter; in addition, there are "appearances" by the magician's dead, escape-artist brother. All of the characters have to come to grips with the gap that exists between what they want and what they can get and learn to do the best with what they have.

A story such as this one, concerned with desperation, depression, and struggle, could easily descend into bathos, but Lutes fills his characters with so much humanity and his plot with so much wit, humor, and detail that we are engaged, captivated, and, in the end, just a little bit hopeful.

What impressed me the most was Lutes's command of graphic storytelling. Working in a ligne claire style (or close enough to it to make no nevermind), Lutes masterfully uses all the techniques and elements particular to comics to bring his story to life: the page layouts and panel transitions build the narrative as effectively as the expressions and body language, and Lutes is not afraid to use emanata and graphic balloons. In short, Lutes knows that he's creating a comic, not an illustrated story or a static movie, and that's the understanding that moves a creator into Eisner territory. That he has fashioned what would be a wonderful tale in any medium makes it so much better.



Jar of Fools is simply a great book. I've read it twice now already, and I'm sure there are plenty more reads left in it.