The Rabbi's Cat

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of The Rabbi's Cat (Pantheon, 2007).



I've noticed so many glowing reviews of The Rabbi's Cat by the French cartoonist Joann Sfar that I finally started looking out for a copy, finding a discounted one in one of Nashville's Great Escape locations earlier in the summer. I didn't know anything about it, but I'm mercurial enough that sometimes a little critical praise is enough to make me want to check something out sight otherwise unseen, but, y'know, as cheaply as possible.

At any rate, I found a completely delightful little story set in prewar French Algeria, where an elderly rabbi lives with his lovely daughter Zlabya, and one weird-looking, truth-telling cat, who gains the power of speech after eating a parakeet and stealing its ability to talk. The cat immediately makes a nuisance of itself, upsetting the household to the point that the rabbi has to question whether it might not be a good idea for the cat to have a bar mitzvah after all.

Over the course of the three stories reprinted here - they originally appeared in the 48-page annual "albums" common to France - the cat gains and loses his speech, debates the importance of family and culture with a lion, and accompanies Zlabya and her father on Zlabya's honeymoon trip to Paris to meet her new in-laws. This ill-timed trip coincides with Shabbat, and the rabbi's inability and refusal to spend any money for a hotel room.

I enjoyed the heck out of all three stories. I love Sfar's style, with so much expression and humor wrought from minimal linework. The story's extremely witty, with the grouchy rabbi suggesting offense can be taken from everybody's well-meaning actions. It's hugely charming from start to finish. There are two further Rabbi's Cat stories. These are available in a second compiled edition for the US market, and I'll have to track that down soon. Highly recommended.

The Rubber Band

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of The Rubber Band (Farrar & Rinehart, 1936).



Bantam has begun reissuing the Nero Wolfe novels of Rex Stout in omnibus editions, two a book. This is the first one I've needed to pick up, as The Rubber Band, the third Wolfe novel, was absent from my wife's large collection. It's a terrific story in which Wolfe declines to investigate an office robbery, as the most likely suspect of the crime is embroiled in a more unusual case. About fifty years previously, an English nobleman had promised half his wealth to some fellows in the Old West if they got him out of a certain lynching, and the most likely suspect of the office robbery just happens to be the daughter of one of those fellows, and is trying to hit the nobleman up for the old debt while he's in New York. Things get more complicated when one of the fellows who flew in for the meeting ends up dead just after leaving Wolfe's office.

It's a fun read, and it has Inspector Cramer and a host of other city officials yelling on Wolfe's doorstep, which is always a delight. I haven't a great deal more to say than that; three novels in and I haven't been even remotely disappointed yet.

You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! More Comics of Fletcher Hanks (Fantagraphics, 2009).



Let's keep it simple, shall we? You see this panel here?



The whole book's like this. Every page. It's a nutty thing of beauty. You must buy it.

Oh, you want more? Okay. The follow-up to 2007's I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets, this compiles every remaining known Fletcher Hanks comic from the 1939-41 period when he was in the business and there was a perceived market for the thrilling adventures of lumberjacks and space wizards. It's edited, again, by Paul Karasik and while the more completely insane adventures made it into part one, there are still more than enough examples here of gory punishments, fifth columnists, black market timber dealers, bizarre chants, brows furrowed in fury, floating vaults, transmitting belts, Saturnian castles and science so unbelievably whacked that the creators of freaking Buck Rogers were probably reacting against Hanks with their comparatively realistic and down-to-earth take on physics.

More than twelve pages of this and your eyeballs hurt. Every story is downright demented. You must buy it. Understand me?

O Jerusalem

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of O Jerusalem (Bantam, 1999).



This one was a bit of a challenge. After four novels in her series of revisionist Sherlock Holmes stories, Laurie King elected to use the fifth to plug an old plot hole in the first, throwing off and disappointing any reader who was hoping to see the characters grow and progress. Back in that first novel (reviewed here), Holmes and his protege Mary Russell are forced to flee England after their unseen foe proves, with a bomb attack, that she's one step ahead of them. The narrative then skips forward, noting that it was many months before they could return, and that Mycroft Holmes had found a job for them in British-occupied Palestine, among other travels.

So O Jerusalem is the story of that job, and it's a real slog to get through. I can understand why King wished to come back to it. The fourth book in her series, The Moor, vividly brings the location to life, so that it is as much a character in the story as any human, and King's lingering discussion of topography and history is as entrancing as the most satisfying backstory and character development. She clearly had developed the talent, over the course of her nineties work, to attempt the same here, with endless, detailed focus on the desert sands, the cities they visit, and the difficulties in Russell adapting to the Holy Land's culture.

Yet it doesn't work for me, not at all. You may chalk this up to personal disinterest in the region or my deficiencies as a prose reader if you like, but to be honest, the "leaving the country" material in The Beekeeper's Apprentice was easily the only skippable section of that novel for me, and in the short space of a few months between reading Apprentice and this, I had entirely forgotten that Holmes and Russell had left England at all. As a character piece, hiding Mary Russell under shoe polish and spectacles and posing as a quiet and unassuming man lost its luster almost instantly, and as an adventure story, the hundred-odd pages of running in circles, our heroes "tested" by their minders in the Holy Land before being trusted to meet the local spymaster who needs them to uncover and foil an assassination scheme, are agonizing. After a day's reading, I realized that I still had no idea what the plot of this novel was, and became frustrated and bored as King lingered on one set piece after another, looking for any kind of narrative thread to link them.

All of this compounds the basic problem going into the book in the first place. In each of the previous four novels in the series, King was able to surprise and blindside me with a new development of the characters and their relationship, and these "reveals," the understanding that what will come next, are part of the thrill of reading the stories in the first place. That's a testament to King's skill at making believable, engaging characters and more than just another dry Holmes pastiche. But we already know going in what will come next for Holmes and Russell going in to O Jerusalem: they'll go back to England and finish that more interesting adventure. Even to somebody who's begun this series, I can't recommend this book at all. I've certainly no interest in trying it again.

It's a Good Life, if You Don't Weaken

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of It's a Good Life, if You Don't Weaken (Drawn & Quarterly, 1996).



Since I've been known to rave about Seth's wonderful comics and book designs around these parts, I figured I should probably look into some of his earlier material. It's a Good Life, if You Don't Weaken was originally published in the 1990s, serialized in his occasionally-appearing comic Palookaville, and it's been whispering "buy me" for years. I finally picked up a copy in Toronto on my honeymoon earlier this summer; it sort of cries out to be bought in Canada.

It's a quasi-autobiography in which Seth lets a promising relationship with a cute student fall apart while he's focussed on an archaeological quest for an obscure gag cartoonist called Kalo. None of this really happened in the real world the way it's portrayed here - there never was a Kalo, neither in the pages of The New Yorker nor anywhere else - but it doesn't really matter. It strikes me as entirely possible that Seth's consuming desire to investigate fictional histories of might-have-beens like Kalo, Wimbledon Green and George Sprott could have cost him a present-day relationship or two over the years.

It's very interesting to see how Seth's style has developed over the years. His lines are thinner, and his anatomy is off, but the gorgeous, muted, single-color approach and his use of lengthy montages of establishing shots are present early on. It's a vibrant, sad and lovely work, and I'm glad I finally bought a copy. Recommended for older readers.

Madame Xanadu: Disenchanted

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Madame Xanadu: Disenchanted (DC/Vertigo, 2009).



Every few years, I think the lawyers at DC Comics have a minor freakout regarding trademark protection, and realize they're about to lose some characters unless they use them. If the characters are more known for sorcery than spandex, they'll let some writer pitch an idea and publish the result under their Vertigo imprint. So for the last twentyish years, the magic users of the DC Universe have all been isolated in one little ghetto where they won't bother the mainstream continuity much.

Don't get me wrong, Matt Wagner does this sort of thing better than just about anybody, and if you've got a little background in the universe that Neil Gaiman built in The Sandman and The Books of Magic, then nothing here will be lost on you. "Disenchanted" collects the first ten issues of Madame Xanadu, five two-part stories, at the incredibly nice price of $13. In it, we learn about the centuries-old conflict between the titular character, a Tarot-reading sorceress who was called Nimue in Arthurian times, and the Phantom Stranger, a moody weirdo who might, or might not, be the Wandering Jew that spat at Christ and has been acting as an agent of unknown forces ever since. (And who doesn't make half as much sense as when Jim Aparo draws him in a turtleneck punching somebody, but that's neither here nor there.)

Xanadu and the Stranger meet up in the English forest, in Kublai Khan, in the Reign of Terror, in Whitechapel and finally in New York in the thirties, each time getting Xanadu increasingly aggravated with the Stranger's obstinate refusal to explain his place in this thousand-year narrative. Gaiman's Death shows up, as does Kirby's Demon and Zatara the sorcerer and the Spectre, much as you might expect.

In fact, absolutely nothing happens here that's very surprising at all. The stories are as good as you might expect from Wagner, and the artwork by Amy Reeder Hadley is quite good, but it is a stubbornly inconsequential book, ending with the stage finally set for Madame Xanadu to become the Greenwich village fortune teller that she was when she was first introduced in comics thirty years ago, and, presumably, start some new adventures in the eleventh issue of her new Vertigo title. All this backstory is pleasant enough, but had I known that was all I'd be getting in volume one, I would have waited for volume two to start reading. It's a shame that Wagner and Hadley didn't actually start with Madame Xanadu's adventures in the present day, and save these little histories for interludes between the modern adventures. Recommended for Sandman fans.

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (Abrams ComicArts, 2009).



This book just screams "labor of love." Obviously ages in the making, Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle have assembled a terrific biography of Harvey Kurtzman, the great American humorist behind Mad and Humbug and so many other hilarious comics and magazines (including the short-lived Trump, the collected edition of which, wouldyabelieveit, has been postponed again, to the spring of 2010). It's another great hardcover presentation from the good folk at Abrams ComicArts, full of illustrative examples and commentary by the authors, as they retell the story of Kurtzman's life and career.

I never really know how to review a biography, so I'll just say that there's a heck of a lot of information in here that's new to me, and it's presented in such a vibrant and fun way that it will make any reader want to know even more about Kurtzman's work. For me, it's definitely Help, a magazine that I desperately want to learn more about and see more from, and this book only made me frustrated because it's not presently available.

But while Goodman Beaver might, to my mind, be underrepresented, it's more than matched by the overwhelming amount of material for Little Annie Fanny's twenty-six year run. And while here at the Boookshelf, the collected edition of that comic proved that a little Annie goes a long way, the look behind the scenes here is pretty fascinating, including a breakdown of one page's development across several overlays of tracing paper, and the book's real highlight: a never-before-printed episode which Playboy had turned down.

While the inclusion of so much Annie material registers this as a book for older readers, it's certainly one that anybody curious about Kurtzman or Mad should check out. It's definitely on my shortlist for book of the year, and strongly recommended.