This is the first volume of what turns out to be one of the most ambitious, intelligent, hilarious children's book series ever written. Read it and keep going to get to the good stuff.
Cute story, handles the issues well and with subtlety. But Yuki-san and her boyfriend are kind of creepy, aren't they? Is that just something about Japanese culture that I'm missing where it's cool for adults to be friends with fifth graders?
Fascinating, and impossible to read.
First read February 15-17, 2010
This series is idiotic with occasional flashes of brilliance that compel me to keep going. It's a book-about-books that seems to have been written by people who don't read.
The Joyce Brabner story is by far the best; the Jeffrey Lewis one about Tuli Kupferberg is also quite well done. Everything else is so dry ("he spent two years in California but then he returned to New York in July 1958" etc., etc.) that you'd be better off reading the Wikipedia articles. Also, most of the Beats were kind of assholes.
"You know who looks a little like Audrey Hepburn?" Gil asks suddenly, catching me off guard.
The unique format - a few pages of text, alternating with a few full-page, wordless pictures that also advance the story - makes this worth reading if you have an interest in experimental storytelling methods and such. Unfortunately, the story itself is not as good as I would like it to be. The characters are fairly one-dimensional, the emotional moments don't ring true, and the plot meanders, relying heavily on coincidence. The source material is interesting on its own, but I often got the sense of the author showing off his research, like when our hero thinks about the Gare Montparnasse train accident for no good narrative reason. It happened "thirty-six years ago," twelve-year-old Hugo recalls, accurately. Come on.
Noir spy thriller with superpowered heroes and villains. The spy stuff in particular was really convincing and well done. Unfortunately there are only two female characters, both of whose plot points revolve around relationships. And there's a lot of gratuitous nudity (I mean really gratuitous - like two dudes are having a conversation about important spy matters and a naked lady just happens to be walking by, filling up the panel). It didn't seem particularly misogynist, just juvenile and clueless. I will probably read the next one, because I've never found a comic that does the noir-spy-thriller thing this well.
Meh. The historical stuff wasn't thorough enough and the author's personal "vacation" narrative wasn't well developed either. The whole book was really just a collection of scattered anecdotes. I learned a few interesting things, I just wish it had been more in-depth. For example: Charles Guiteau bought a special gun to assassinate President Garfield because "he imagined that someday, that particular weapon would look good in a museum." That's a fascinating detail, but it's not referenced so I have no idea how we know this. Annoying.
