Reviews of Trillium, Beautiful Darkness, I Was the Cat and Black Widow Vol. 1

Due to recent changes in reading and spending habits, I pick up a majority of my weekly comics reading from the Columbus Metropolitan Library. The Columbus Metropolitan Library has a surprisingly extensive collection of comics, and has been an invaluable resource for keeping up on the comics world while trying to keep my costs intact.

As part of my 2015 New Year's Resolutions, I'm trying to write more columns and features to the Outhouse to make up for my decreased presence on the news side of the site (sorry, Jude.) What better way to start that than by writing about the comics I read on a weekly basis while promoting a fantastic local resource? This column will be part review/part rambling/part documentation of what I've read this year. I'll also include my "request/to read" lists, so you can follow along at home if you'd like.

Read this week:

Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Karascoet (published in the US by Drawn & Quarterly in 2014)

Described by the publisher as an "anti-fairy tale", Beautiful Darkness is a stunning and twisted graphic novel about a group of miniscule people forced to adapt to the real world after their world (the body of a small girl) dies in the forest. While Aurora, a flighty but well-meaning princess, attempts to establish order, baser human emotions soon take over, leading to a dark survival of the fittest scenario.

Beautiful Darkness is a truly apt name for the comic, as the book is both unquestionably gorgeous and extremely dark. Karascoet's beautiful painted artwork mixes cartoonish fairy-like characters with rotting human corpses and scenes of graphic violence very well. Aurora's gradual decline into moral darkness is punctuated by small scenes of side characters getting eaten alive or horrifically maimed by the local flora and fauna, while their friends look on with seeming uncaringness. The juxtaposition of the cute and horrific helps advance the central themes of how the world harshly punishes and takes advantage of the naive, and the uselessness of societal politeness and kindness.

Beautiful Darkness appeared on a bunch of 2014 "Best Of" lists, and deservedly so. The graphic novel is a great example of how comics can express and demonstrate a theme in ways that books, television and movies can't. While the book is absolutely a must-read, I'd recommend not reading it over your morning coffee. With a dark and twisted ending, Beautiful Darkness might want to make you scrub your soul a little bit after reading.

Black Widow: The Finely Woven Thread by Nathan Edmonson and Phil Noto (published by Marvel Comics in 2014)

Black Widow was one of the first "All-New Marvel NOW!" comics to be released in 2014, and was probably one of the best examples of Marvel's 2014 publishing strategy of character focused solo series with stylized artwork. While I remember reading the first issue of the series last year, I fell off the series during my great cull of superhero titles. However, I remember thinking that the comic had very nice artwork for a superhero comic and that Edmonson, a writer known for his military and spy comics, was probably a good choice for the book.

Like other Black Widow solo series, this volume focuses on the character's spy work separate from the Avengers. A major theme of this comics is atonement, which serves as Black Widow's motivation for accepting various assassination and mercenary jobs. Not only is Black Widow trying to rid the world of bad guys, she's also using the proceeds to fund several trusts that presumably provide for the families of targets during her days working for Soviet Russia.

While Edmonson certainly tries to depict Black Widow as a "good" character trying to find righteous spy missions, I think he largely misses the mark. Too often does Black Widow readily resort to lethal means, presumably leaving more people missing family members. I think that Edmonson tried to explain this away by saying that Widow's lawyer has been vetting her missions, but twice in the first three chapters of the graphic novel is her intel outdated or straight up wrong. I also thought that Edmonson's internal dialogue was stiff and boring most of the time, but I think the stiffness was deliberate.

Noto's artwork is very nice to look at, but a bit stiff at times. However, I maintain he's a great choice for this comic, and the book stays away from the crappy cheesecake styles that other Black Widow comics have resorted to. Of the 144 pages in the collection, there's only one "sexy" depiction of Black Widow, and that's a Milo Manara variant cover displayed at the rear of the book. Otherwise, Noto portrays Black Widow as a no-nonsense spy with realistic proportions and very sad eyes.

I did really like the subplot involving Black Widow trying hard not to adopt a stray cat. Edmonson and Noto's Black Widow certainly seems like the type of person to get suckered by a cute little feline.

I Was the Cat by Paul Tobin and Benjamin Dewey (published by Oni Press in 2014)

A fantasy/historical graphic novel by Paul Tobin and Benjamin Dewey, I Was the Cat is a surprisingly straightforward graphic novel about a cat who tries to take over the world. The full length graphic novel focuses on Burma, a longhaired cat who has used up 8 of his lives trying to take over the world. Manipulating the likes of Napoleon, Teddy Roosevelt and the historical inspiration for the Sherlock Holmes villain Moriarty, Burma decides to recount his exploits to an up and coming journalist while enacting his final attempt at world domination.

While you'd expect a megalomaniacal cat comic to be a bit farcical in nature, especially when written by the writer of the Eisner winning Bandette series, it's really not at all, which I thought was simultaneously impressive and disappointing. The book's a bit plodding in nature, but is still a pretty pleasant read. Burma is a surprisingly sympathetic and morally gray character, and the journalist Allison Breaking serves as a decently naive but reasonable reader stand-in. My biggest complaint was that I Was the Cat didn't give Benjamin Dewey's artwork much room to really shine, save for the page below.

I really liked this page and feel that it represents a best case scenario for humanity's inevitable doom.

Trillium by Jeff Lemire (published by Vertigo/DC in 2014)

Trillium was another one of those comics that I tried to keep up on, but eventually dropped due to budget constraints. Lemire's one of my favorite writers in the industry, and I typically enjoy his mixed brand of melancholy and the bizarre. Trillium is both of those things, a sci-fi story that focuses on two characters connected to each other despite coming from vastly different ages and time.

At the heart of Trillium is a sweet and gentle love story between Nika, a scientist hoping to save humanity in the year 3797 from a sentient virus, and William, a British soldier recovering from WWI in the 1920s. The two are thrust together due to the effects of Trillium, a plant found both deep in the Amazon and on a distant planet on a far off solar system. By keeping focus on the two characters' discovery of one another and subsequent attempts to reunite, Lemire neatly dodges trying to explain the time travel and other bizarre elements of his book. Trillium certainly hints that there is a good explanation for all the loopy stuff that goes on in the comic, but it's never outright stated and I liked that.

The boldest aspect of Trillium is Lemire's use of inverted and upside down panels throughout the comic to help cleverly demonstrate the separation the two characters face. While the collected edition did away with the "flipped comic" trick that appeared in the first issue of the comic (Chapters 1.1 and 1.2 were originally published in a single comic, but published in such a way that the comic had to be flipped upside down and read from the back to read each chapter), it did keep other instances of "backwards" panels that appeared in the original comics. This was a nifty little trick that served to demonstrate how tangled up Nika and William's stories were with one another and really helped make the ending of the comic a little more poignant.

I enjoyed reading Trillium and I thought it was a nice romantic comic in the vein of Alex + Ada. Books like that don't appear too often in the direct market, and reading Trillium left me wanting to read more good romance comics. I guess that's what the library is for.

In the "To Read" Pile:

Hugh Howey's Wool by Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti and Jimmy Broxton

Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China by Guy Delisle

Attack on Titan Vol. 1-3 by Hajime Isayama

(Note: I actually read the first volume of Attack on Titan over the weekend, but it ended so abruptly, I felt like I needed to read a couple more volumes to really comment on the manga. This will probably be the case for a lot of manga that I pick up this year.)

Requested But Not Yet Picked Up

Soul Eater Vol. 1-3 by Atsushi Olkubo

The Wake by Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast

Thank you for reading this first column. Suggestions on how to approve it are always appreciated.