The Funcooker

Graphic novel of the week 4/4/2009 - Angel: After the Fall: Volume 1 and 2

Plotted by Joss Whedon

Art by Franco Urru , Nick Runge, Stephen Mooney, Tim Kane, David Messina, and John Byrne

Written by Brian Lynch

This week’s “Graphic novel of the week” pick is a very Buffy-verse centric pick. Angel: After the Fall was a series created by IDW in response to the success of Dark Horse Comic’s ‘Buffy: Season Eight’ comic series, which officially continued the story of ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ the TV series.

IDW Publishing owned the rights to the character of Angel, they set out to create a complimentary series to continue the ‘Angel’ series in comic book format. Joss Whedonwould not be a fulltime writer on ‘Angel: After the Fall’, but would plot out the series with its regular writer Brian Lynch. ‘Buffy: Season Eight’ remains the far superior series out of the two, but this doesn’t detract from the fact that ‘Angel: After the Fall’ is an enjoyable series that continues the adventures of the fan-favorite characters from the ‘Angel’ TV series.

This series starts after the events of the series finale of ‘Angel’. Large-scale events have occurred and things are now very grim and different than when we left Angel. Los Angeles has been sucked into a hell dimension, and is a full-on war zone of demon activity. Angel is in a daily struggle to save the citizens of Los Angeles and those he can save he sends to Connor, Gwen, and Nina to remain under their protection. Angel now has a dragon under his control. His headquarters is in the ruins of the Wolfram & Hart building, which is watched over by Wesley who is now back from the dead and the new representative for Wolfram & Hart. The whereabouts of the rest of Angel’s crew is revealed, and the whereabouts of Spike, Illyria, Gunn and Lorne all ended up become known to the reader. There are some very big reveals for what’s happened to Team: Angel and some very unexpected things have occurred.

Much like ‘Buffy: Season Eight’, this series gives new life to a canceled property, and tells new stories with characters people have come to know and love. Every major player of the ‘Angel’ series makes an appearance in a very fan-service type way. Brian Lynch writes these characters in a way that they sound and behave in a very familiar way. The writing never feels forced and the decisions that are made seem like choices these characters would make. The art of the first volume isn’t as strong as I would have liked it to be, but they do get the likenesses down so you recognize who the characters are based on. The art duties take dramatic shift in ‘Angel: After the Fall’ Volume 2 – First Night. The pencils get noticeably better across the board and the book becomes visually exciting by the end of the second volume.

These two series were heavily constrained by having imaginative stories that required hefty visual effects budgets. With ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’ now being ongoing comic series, they are only confined the imaginations of the writers. I hope this trend continues of canceled TV properties being given a second breath of life in comic book form.

I urge any Buffy and Angel fans to read ‘Buffy: Season Eight’ if they are not doing so already. It benefits by having a consistent artist on the pencils and a more talented writing staff that are doing what TV writers never could on the small screen. It’s a fantastic series and a perfect continuation of the ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ series. ‘Angel: After the Fall’ isn’t perfect, but it’s very entertaining, fun to read and a loyal continuation of the ‘Angel’ TV series.

Book Review: Beat the Reaper

Author: Josh Bazell

To coin a phrase from so many movie commercials, Beat the Reaper is an action packed thrill ride. I just finished the last hundred pages in under an hour. I think I had sweat on my brow and couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.

This book is pure entertainment. If it was a film it would make millions of dollars. It would grant it’s star cult status. But it’s not a movie it’s a book and I loved it.

Dr. Peter Brown aka Pietro Brnwa, aka “the Bearclaw” is the title character. He is the driving force and the narrator to this crazy odyssey. Pietro Brnwa is a doctor in the witness protection program. He has a dark past which yes, catches up with him. Pietro was a hired hand in the mob. Like most “mob stories” the character you’re pulling for has an enemy. This story is no different. Pietro’s enemy is a childhood friend. The meeting that takes place between these two characters towards the end of the book, is memorable to say the least.

This is Josh Bazell’s first book. It got some great reviews when it came out. I got interested in reading it when I read The New York times review. I know he’s working on his second book, it says so at the end of this book. I have the feeling the more people that get a chance to read this novel, the more people are going to get on “the Josh Bazell I love this writer train.” He’s a young writer who writes his stories with amazing pace. I’m looking forward to his second work. Be interesting to see if he stays within this genre of fiction.

Sharp Teeth — Toby Barlow

High gimmickry is no mean feat, and epic blank verse is exactly the dubious hook Barlow needed to propel his lean, greased story.  Yet for all that’s stripped away, Sharp Teeth is still carrying a lot of fat.  Part of that is deliberate—this softhearted love story bubbling out of hardboiled noir—and part is the digressive clutter that comes with aimless narrative.  While the first book (of five) is as tightly coiled as a werewolf-ridden Chinatown, and just as cinematic, the middle three simply add complications while exploring the ensemble and indulging in some embarrassingly flowery sex scenes.  You can sense the mess of the climax before it arrives, all uncontrolled blood and teeth and extremely unlikely action from law enforcement, and it’s a struggle to prevent this clusterfuck from coloring your enjoyment of what came before.  Because so much of it is sleek and fatal and juicily put, Sharp Teeth’s missteps fall under harsh light.  The immediate and continual dullness of the romance, for instance, is all the more unforgivable next to the lucid, burning cynicism Barlow’s voice inhabits so well.  What he hopes to expose is what we innately know: that the gritty detectives or cold dames of our best mysteries are all too human, feeling, weak.  And while the classics would leave that raw nerve expertly implied and unexposed, we’ve got an overeager surgeon at work here, ensuring Sharp Teeth doesn’t go far as a thriller.  As a meditation on human-canine symbiosis, though?  I wouldn’t be afraid to say “Jack London’s heir.”  It’ll have you watching even poodles with a wary eye.

(cross-posted at the notes)

Book Review: No One Belongs Here More Then You

Author: Miranda July

Just put this book down today. Now I may be wrong but I believe Miranda July is an artist, director, actor and author. She may be more, she may be less. But she’s one of those people who probably does everything really well. I only know her as the writer. I have to say I like what she puts down on paper. 

This is her first book I think and it’s a collection of about 16 or so short stories. Not all of the stories work. There’s a few that are unpleasant. There’s a minor flaw I found in her writing. Most of the characters are all written in the same tone. From one story to the next be it man or woman, these characters could really all be the same person. That didn’t put me off I enjoyed the tone of her work but for some it could be repetitive.

She seems to touch on characters who have one issue or another, like most of us. But in almost every story she injects something awkwardly sexual into it. It keeps you on your toes. It’s what makes her writing so fresh and intriguing.   

I really hope she continues to write. I would love to read something she does in maybe a longer format. It seems she’s a busy person with a lot on her plate. But she can write and I know she has a following, it would be nice to see her stick with it. 

The Living End — Stanley Elkin

Ellerbee, a liquor store owner whisked away by an angel of death after a trigger-happy stickup artist squeezes one off, is stunned.

“I’m dead?  But if I’m dead—you mean there’s really an afterlife?”
“Oh boy,” the angel of death said.

Pity the author who can’t be this funny and despondent at the same time, for s/he surely wants just that.  To jumble enough material for three separate novellas set in Heaven and Hell, though, as Elkin does in The Living End, goes even further than crackling black comedy.  To offer the only sane explanation for how the Bible might contain literal truth—I won’t spoil the resolution for you, but rest assured it’s the smartest metafiction in print—takes satire to dazzling, vertiginous heights that even the genre’s luminaries would have to observe from base camp.  And while satire by Swift’s design calls for an empty, hapless vessel to take it all in, Ellerbee is a realistic innocent, a heartbreaker who ends up damned for petty thoughts and words.  Elkin reverses The Divine Comedy’s savage equation of forward motion over character, lurching in all directions at once, inhabiting the denizens of Perdition and dissidents of Paradise with a vocabulary that swarms, exuberant and exact, over its users.  It at last whirls into a tight tornado of a book packed with ten times as many ideas as might ordinarily be contained in so few pages, never halting its accumulation of searing sadnesses, side-splitting despair only relieved at the last possible moment when steel jaws snap shut on the wicked coda.  This is how theology ends: not with a whimper but a slam.

(Cross-posted at the notes)