PAPER FIRES: Comics reviews. Two of ’em.

Y: The Last Man, v.1: Unmanned: So you probably know the premise already. A mysterious disease kills all the men and male beasties in the world, with the exception of this one dude and his pet monkey. Very nice concept: simple and effective. The first volume is fun, working down various rivulets of this idea (a nun alone in St. Peter’s, Republican wives staging a coup on behalf of their late husbands, former models hauling male corpses). I don’t know that it’s more than fun, though. Maybe I’m not the target audience simply because I spend my daggone working life thinking about guys vs dolls, so this comic isn’t wildly likely to tell me anything new. I don’t know. It’s competent and I enjoyed reading it, but did I take anything away from it, on a question with which I’m deeply personally concerned? No, I didn’t.

I’ll be looking to see if the DC library system (which definitely has at least one volume from this series) has the sequels. But I won’t be buying more until I’m making more money. So hey. I liked the Israeli lady.

In the Shadow of No Towers: Again, you probably already know the point of this comic: Art Spiegelman’s response to 9/11. And again, it’s kind of what I expected. There are incredibly poignant moments–esp. the page where he’s looking for his daughter at a school very near the World Trade Center. And there is dumb lefty ranting. And there are very, very brief moments of collusion between the two. This you know.

I was, in the end, convinced that the weird format of the book (thick gigantic pages–very hard to pack in one’s carryon backpack, not that reading about 9/11 on a cross-continent flight is the world’s greatest idea in the first place) was worth it: art’s necessity, rather than the artist’s self-indulgence. The big pages add a lot. I was less convinced of the need for the other conceit, the use of turn-of-the-century cartoon characters from the first moments of newspaper comics. I think that ended up being less powerful for readers (…or at least for me) than it was for Spiegelman as a creator.

To sum up: Try to score a free copy of Y: The Last Man. In the Shadow of No Towers is more important right now, but, perversely, less necessary to actually read; flip through it in your local comicopia. Read the page at the daughter’s school, seriously; also the page about the crazy anti-Semitic lady.