By David B. Olsen

The devil and I read different comics. Well, maybe not the devil, but when you are having a conversation on Halloween night, on the poorly lit porch of a house that backs up to a cemetery, with a friend in an intricately grotesque mask and studded leather jacket—well, under these conditions you tend not to make distinctions in your princes of darkness. So he was the devil in the moment, anyway, and his taste in comics is almost exactly what you might expect: savage, brutal, bloody. (It was maybe the first conversation I’ve had in which “rape” was listed as a selling point for something.) An avid devourer of The Boys and Herogasm, the devil scoffed at the so-called “purity” of most of my favorite books, in which the sex is generally consensual and the bloodshed is slight enough that it comes out with a little bleach and water. I’m no prude, but I guess I’m not all that prurient either. The book that I should have asked for his thoughts on, however, is Secret Six, but we were interrupted by the arrival of Colonel Sanders, Run DMC, and a priest.

By Jared Gardner

It is too early to make such pronouncements, of course, as the year is far from complete (and I am far from caught up on my year's reading). But I am fairly confident that even at year's end Stitches will remain the best graphic autobiography I have read in 2009, and one of the best books in any category. David Small is likely not familiar to most comics readers, doing most of his work in children's book illustration, where he has won pretty much all the honors in the field. That Stitches, despite being his first graphic narrative, is such a breathtaking masterpiece, however, reflects not only his remarkable skills as an artist but also, and perhaps even more importantly, how long he has been working on telling and retelling this story even before he first put pen to paper to begin to share it with others. Stitches is a story about the 1950s, about illness, about repression, about radiation, and arrogance—and about how those forces conspired to take away the voice of a child. But it is also the story of how art (and a very gifted therapist) collaborated to give him another voice by which to express himself, and know himself.

As our fellow geeks have no doubt heard, a beloved institution, the Comics Journal, will be undergoing a radical change of format after issue 300. For those of us who have grown up with the Journal, there are of course regrets (I for one felt compelled, misty-eyed, to revist some of my favorite issues over the years). But for those of us who have been paying attention to the world outside our library walls, this comes as little surprise. For years, TCJ was the only place to get timely and responsible news and reviews on comics and the industry. The Internet has changed all that in ways that no one has covered better than TCJ over the years, and they have been adjusting to these changes in a number of ways, first by moving more of their news coverage to Journalista! under the management of Dirk Deppey, and now by moving the vast majority of their familiar content to what will become a vastly expanded web presence, reserving their print volumes for bi-annual "coffee-table" art books.

For us here at guttergeek, this change also brings with it a great opportunity: starting at the end of this month, we will be joining TCJ.com in its new expanded web empire. The current site will continue to exist as an archive for our posts and reviews over the last few years, but our address for new posts will move to a domain within TCJ. This move will open up a range of new opportunities for us, including a chance to contribute to an exciting new venture on the part of the folks at TCJ and Fantagraphics, all of whom have been great to work with as a reviewer at guttergeek and as a contributing writer at The Comics Journal (and they have continued to be nice to us despite the occasional negative review of Fantagraphics titles). It will also introduce guttergeek to a much broader audience and a larger, more dynamic conversation. Finally, the move will allow us to do something we have been wanting to do for some time: to open up guttergeek to a wider range of comics writing beyond the review, allowing us to focus as well on our passion for comics history, soapbox speechifying, and critical analysis of the comics form. Of course, we will still continue to review regularly, and I will do so both for guttergeek and for TCJ, but within the larger confines of TCJ.com with its army of talented reviewers, we will also be freed up to focus on other issues that are keeping us up at night.

Of course, while we have been talking with the folks at The Comics Journal about these upcoming moves, we have fallen behind in our reviews of some terrific titles that have come across the threshold of our particular corner of the gutter, and we are going to scramble over the next couple of weeks to catch up as best we can with a series of shorter reviews highlighting some titles we have especially enjoyed (and one or two we didn't). And as the details of our move to TCJ.com are worked out over the next few weeks, we will keep you posted. As always, thanks for joining us in the gutter and we look forward to many years to come in the deeper and wider gutter of TCJ!

By Elizabeth Hewitt

Watching most fiction films I compulsively peek at my watch entertaining myself with meditations about why movies with gossamer plots use up 120 minutes of my valuable time. Watching a good documentary is just the reverse, and I often want the experience to last longer—to provide the permanence that a DVD pause just doesn’t offer. I want—and I recognize the absurdity of my desire—the best documentaries to be more like books. Josh Neufeld’s A.D. is my dream come true, as it combines the best features of documentary film, non-fiction prose, and comics.

By Jared Gardner

Today is opening day for the new Surrogates movie, and what better day to celebrate Venditti and Weldele's second book in the series. Flesh and Bone, a prequel to the original book upon which the film is based, fills in some of the details on how we got from here to there. (Of course, there is an equally fascinating story to tell in how Robert Venditti, working in the mail room at Top Shelf, a comics company better known for black and white meditations on bad relationships, job hunting, and other 20-something adventures, ended up publishing the company's first "mainstream" adventure comic, which ended up getting picked up by Disney and is now starring Bruce Willis... couldn't happen to a more deserving young writer, or a more deserving comics company.)

It has been a good few years for French comics in the U.S. Finally, mono-lingual American readers have had a chance to experience the work of some of the most inflluential and exciting creators in the Western country that (along with Belgium, which is really just a suburb of France, no?) first took serious comics seriously: the work of Lewis Trondheim, David B., Marjane Satrapi, Joann Sfar, Dupuy and Berberian have all been brought to the U.S. in beautiful editions. But there is so much more to discover, and the biggest loss for American readers has been accessible editions of the work of Jacques Tardi, one of the most influential and exciting French creators for the past forty years. Fantagraphics is rectifying that particular omission this fall with two editions of Tardi's work, the first of which, West Coast Blues, is coming out next month.

By Elizabeth Hewitt

When I discovered that Marvel Classics was doing a version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz I made a sacred pledge that I would renounce, boycott, and curse Marvel unless they hired Eric Shanower for the project. Shanower, after all, has for two decades devoted his considerable talents to all things Oz, including his beautiful Oz stories, which only 3 years ago, were reprinted in the exquisite book, Adventures in Oz. Thus, when I heard they had hired Skottie Young to illustrate the series, I began to haul up timber and comics for the big bonfire. Luckily before the incendiary moment began, my youngest child rushed in with the news that Shanower would be writing the comic. I still grumbled, but when we picked up the freebie comic Marvel released last year describing the project and giving glimpses of Young’s sketches as he was developing his characters, I became a believer. These sketches (and Shanower’s commentary about them) are included at the end of the beautiful hardcover edition of the whole series just released as trade hardcover. They reveal how much consideration Young put into his rendering of the archetypal four travelers to Emerald City. He did not choose to work in the style of W.W. Denslow or John R. Neill—and there is not even a hint of visual nostalgia for fin de siècle style. And, yet, thankfully, there is also nothing new-fashioned about his illustrations: he does not make Dorothy and Co. hip and happening with goth stylings. Instead he has produced the most adorable little Dorothy, the schlumpiest Scarecrow, the most fragile Tin Man, and the rolly polliest Lion. The illustrations are truly beautiful. And given the importance of palette to the tale—not only in the paradigmatic turn to Technicolor in the MGM movie, but also the book , since Baum tells us that were it not for Toto, Dorothy would grow as gray as her surroundings—the colorist, Jean-Francois Beaulieu, deserves special commendation.

By David B. Olsen

A Secret Origin Revealed!…

For me and other untold millions of Americans, there was no such thing as comic books as a kid. According to the implicit bylines of our household, comics were anathema to the proper trajectory of a mentally, emotionally, and physically mature young man. Comics, in other words, were junk, but this is not to say that our family was especially literary. There was no force-feeding of the classics or anything like that; our dinner table was always only plates, not Plato. So, for example, while many of the future Guttergeeks were having their world torn apart during Crisis, I was endlessly airballing free throws in my driveway, as though trying to trick my body into being athletic through sheer obstinacy. When Jason Todd got his ass handed to him by popular demand in A Death in the Family, I was probably watching Steve Urkel squeak and stumble his way through another excruciating half-hour of Family Matters. And Secret Wars? Apparently, everyone I knew had kept that secret.

By Alex Boney

When I reviewed David Petersen’s first volume of Mouse Guard in February 2007, I closed by writing “On the whole, though, this first Mouse Guard story is a good start to what could be an enduring series of novels.” I’m glad to see Archaia agreed. A few months ago, David Petersen wrapped up his second Mouse Guard series, entitled Mouse Guard: Winter 1152. This new book is darker and more complex than Fall 1152. But it doesn’t veer far from the strengths that made the first volume successful. Petersen is a distinctive cartoonist who plays to his strengths, and the result is another solid entry in what is shaping up to be a sustained and enjoyable series.

By Jared Gardner

I will confess I was originally a bit tepid about Jeff Lemire when the first volume of his Essex Tales came out from Top Shelf two years ago, as my review at the time made clear. But I became much more fully convinced that this was a talent of substance with the second volume, Ghost Stories, later that year. And later this month I will have a chance to engage in some revisionist history by reviewing the new, collected omnibus of Essex Tales. The volume is sitting beside me as I write, weighing in at over 500 pages. And, yet, somehow, along the way, Lemire has also found time to write a short graphic novel, The Unknown, and to launch a new series with Vertigo this month. This level production from a young cartoonist in little more than two years is impressive, to put it mildly. The fact that the work keeps getting stronger makes this (as if we needed more reasons, during what is proving to be one of the richest year in the history of the form) a great time to be a comics reader. And it must be said, to see this kind of work being published by DC is yet another sign of how the walls between mainstream and independent comics have been crumbling in recent years, ultimately for the good of all, I believe (fingers crossed).

By Hillary Chute

David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp is indubitably, truly, a graphic novel. I’m not generally a fan of the term—much of the comics work I find the most appealing and profound is nonfiction, and “graphic novel,” then, presents an awkwardly popular misnomer. But among the range of work included under the umbrella term graphic novel, Mazzucchelli’s without question represents, I believe, the possibilities that that term, however bandied about, indicates—it is a lengthy, thick, original story, rife with allusions and motifs, with a recognizable plot: boy meets girl, loses girl, possibly regains girl. In contradistinction, we have works like Art Spiegelman’s 9/11-focused In the Shadow of No Towers, which is called a graphic novel and which he mentioned at a signing for that book’s release in 2004 is more like “novel graphics” than a “graphic novel.”

By Jared Gardner

Kevin Cannon took the whole idea of 24-hour comics and expanded it into the goal of producing a chapter of a graphic novel each month for a year. The result, published last month by Top Shelf, is Far Arden, a breathless and brilliant romp through old timey serial adventure that is alternative funny, silly, spell-binding and even, most surprisingly of all, moving. The story is far too complex and absurd to attempt to paraphrase properly, but suffice it to say it involves the search for a mythical arctic land called Far Arden, which has been the obsession of a group of students and explorer for years. Our hero, Shanks, is a violent and romantic loner, who has had his share of adventure and romance when we first meet him, scruffy and cynical (albeit, of course, with a heart of gold). Everyone he comes into contact with is instantly in love with him, ready to follow him to the end of the earth, or, if need be, suck out his brains in the Death MRI to get to his inner essence. Shanks, however, doesn’t know what he wants—save for that he would like it to an honorable thing. In fact Shanks quickly makes a series of promises to a series of characters, most of whom are introduced seemingly at random by Cannon in his stream-of-consciousness approach to the novel, and all of which drag him deeper and deeper into narrative brambles that cannon possibly have a happy ending.