Madame Xanadu is an ongoing Vertigo series written by Matt Wagner, who apparently knows quite a lot of my literary kinks–history, mystery, myth. Art duties have rotated among several fine artists, colourists, and letterers, but this has only increased the series’ charm to me.

It’s a solid throughout, with the first volume (Disenchanted) depicting the origins of Madame Xanadu and her exploits in several time settings–Camelot, the court of Qublai Khan, the retinue of Marie Antoinette–while showing her bumping into DC characters like the Martian Manhunter in his guise of John Jones. The second volume (Exodus Noir) is a tale of revenge, murder and the Spanish Inquisition. The third volume (Broken House of Cards) not yet in trade is sort of Mad Men meets Body Horror. But it’s the fourth that has captured my interest the most. More on that later.

From a writing perspective, the jumps in time afford an opportunity to show the world changing–or not really changing, human nature being what it is. Madame Xanadu is no stranger to violence and betrayal, but for the immortal Madame Xanadu life always goes on anyway, no matter what she loses. Marie Antoinette’s court calls her the Madame de Xanadu for her time in Qublai Khan’s court as “the Western seer.” Both these lives come crashing down, and she must start again. Wagner also has a sense of social context and sexual politics, and so his settings have a particular authenticity–and Madame Xanadu, the outsider, stumbles trying to function when she doesn’t understand the rules.

A note: I must credit the top-notch art team. Amy Reeder Hadley’s manga-influenced style in Volume 1 grew on me quickly. It is executed with exceptional skill and professionalism throughout–her very manga-inspired style does not rely on clichés or shortcuts, and is very accessible. Her character designs are distinct and quite charming, and her expressions, body language, storytelling, and layouts are superb. Getting your money’s worth, is what I’m saying–novice comic artists, get a look inside. Richard Friend’s inks work in lively harmony with her lines, having a clean but dynamic and expressive quality. And of course, Guy Major on colours shows his typical skill–I only wish the paper stock had been smoother and let his colours pop more.

Volume 2 has the excellent Mike Kaluta on art duties, with Dave Stewart on colours. It’s a credit to Kaluta and Wagner that there isn’t stylistic whiplash between stories–while Kaluta’s art is completely different from Hadley’s, it is completely capable and effective in its own right. He has a beautiful, spooky quilled style. Stewart is handled the tricky challenge of rendering Kaluta’s linework without losing the linework itself–as Kaluta’s style is quite rendered and old school, Stewart had to be subtle in his use of colour to model, but he performed admirably. And I don’t want to forget the letterer, Jared K. Fletcher. Lettering is an underappreciated part of the process, and Fletcher’s work performs admirably. I especially like how he differentiates Madame Xanadu’s fairy-tongue from regular dialogue.

My greatest interest–it’s a buy-on-sight title, but even so–has come about with the current Extra-Sensory storyline. First, it’s an anthology-style take, with Wagner writing around Madame Xanadu herself and focusing more on the problems of people who come to her for help, so there’s no continuity to worry about. Second, art duties are rotating through 5 female guest artists, whose styles are against totally different from Kaluta, Hadley and each other but nonetheless work. Third, it’s awesome. It’s like a marvellous platter of delicious story sashimi, being varied in mood, style, and subject. I have best enjoyed the most recent issue, the third in the chiefly for its art by Chrissie Zullo–it reminds me of a mix of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, except spookier and sadder.

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When Raina trips and knocks out her two front teeth, it sets off a long process of painful orthondontia and oral surgery. It couldn’t come at a worse time, since she’s just started middle school. Suddenly she’s dealing with cruel, catty friends, confusing new crushes, her own changing body, and friends who are growing up at different rates than she is – plus a mouthful of metal on top of it.

I already knew Raina did a wonderful job of depicting tweenage growing pains, thanks to her fantastic work on the Baby-sitters Club graphic novels, but this autobiographical story is where she really shines. Her anxieties and confusion are so relatable it hurts (especially if, like me, you also did severe damage to your two front teeth as a kid and had a string of painful dental procedures as a result. I realize that’s not a common affliction). Everyone who’s ever been a pre-teen girl – and probably a fair number of people who haven’t – can probably find something of themselves in Raina’s hurt at being ostracized by her friends, or her difficulty grappling with awkward crushes, both as the crusher and crushee. And on the off chance that you can’t relate to any of that – well, the writing is still compelling, funny, and heartbreaking, so it’s pretty much a win/win.

As always, I’m in love with Raina’s bright, cartoony, expressive art, which makes the gags ten times funnier while still bringing home Raina’s moments of isolation, and makes her ongoing dental nightmare horrible but not gruesome. I could look at this artwork for hours, even without dialogue.

Oh, and did I mention Raina’s circle of friends is noticeably multiethnic? Shocking but true!

Smile is a funny, painful read that really captures the angst of middle school without ever losing its optimism. I would recommend for it any girl struggling through her tween years – or anyone else.

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Kim is struggling with confusion, depression, occasional social rejection, and the exciting, frightening recognition of herself as a sexual being. Despite the many differences between myself and Skim‘s marvellous protagonist, I felt as if the book was often speaking directly to my own teenage experience.

KIMBERLY KEIKO CAMERON: This guy I don’t know suicided and everyone at my school is stupid and it’s hard to practice Wicca and I think I’m in love with my English teacher. She kissed me.
ME: Oh, honey.
KIM: Being sixteen is officially the worst thing I have ever been.
ME: God, it so was.

Kim is a pudgy Japanese-Canadian girl in a private school that, from her depressed viewpoint, appears to be overrun with popular skinny white girls. Her nickname of “Skim” is just one of the ways such girls delineate her difference from them.

Refreshingly, Kim doesn’t particularly want to be accepted by the cool kids, but she’s hardly happy to be on the outside. She’s hardly happy about anything.

After the suicide, the boy’s ex-girlfriend fell off the school roof, breaking both her arms – maybe on accident, maybe on purpose. Now the popular girls are frantically trying to pretend depression doesn’t happen, fighting back the spectre of mortality with relentless pep.

Kim is overwhelmed.

But she’s getting by.

Skim is a beautiful, beautiful book, with stark, delicate art perfectly conveying Kim’s emotional complexity and her changing relationships. The wonderful two-page spread of Kim and Ms. Archer kissing is especially good, but Tamaki’s art also conveys smaller moments of wordless action and communication with grace.

Wisely, dialogue does not overwhelm the silences which convey tension or adoration. When words do appear, the language reads as authentically teenaged, sometimes meandering inarticulately around a point, and sometimes diving to the heart of the matter with devastating directness. Kim’s thoughtful, metaphoric diary entries are a particular highlight.

For a book that deals uncompromisingly with the darkness adults would often like to pretend doesn’t genuinely afflict teenagers, Skim is also cautiously optimistic. The story doesn’t end with everything perkily fine and dandy for Kim, but offers realistic hope that, eventually, she’ll be as okay as people get.

Basically, I want to thrust this book into the hand of every teenage girl, in the hope that it might speak to them as it did to me.

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“Dumping ground for every misfit and foul-up in Mega-City One… and that’s just the Judges!” So proclaimed the cover of 2000 AD Prog 970 when the story started, and it’s a pretty good summary. Poor Dredd has been sent to take over ‘the Pit’ and clean it up, following the suspicious death of the last Sector Chief – but both the corrupt Judges and the all-powerful Frendz mob are ready to push back hard. What he needs is a few good Judges to help him out, but what he’s getting are men and women with all sorts of problems lurking just under the surface: affairs, nerves, aggression, the odd serial killer…

At the time, this was a departure for the strip. There’d been long, long stories before, but this was the first of the “mega-epics” to be a Marvel/DC style soap opera. The large supporting cast get just as much time in the spotlight as Dredd, their problems are mostly ‘domestic’ in nature, and their subplots stretch out through the story. Wagner lets us get to know his cast of Judges before, inevitably, the twists start and everything becomes extremely violent indeed. The story is extremely well structured, starting off slow and quickly escalating, juggling lots of subplots and concepts; then it slows down to set up a calmer status quo so it can blow it all up in the final, explosive siege of Traffic Substation Alamo. (“Just a minor problem,” barks Dredd as the whole building is on fire…)

This also serves as a good, entry-level story for the strip. Dredd’s first bit of dialogue is “You may have heard of me”, and if you have heard the basics – toughest cop in a dystopian future dictatorship – you don’t need to know anything else. How Dredd’s world works and the tone of the strip – quickly switching from being serious to black humour to absurdity – is fed to you.

The one problem is the art: while all four of the artists are doing good work, their styles are quite different and at times the story will switch artist between cliff-hangers. It can get jarring. This is also a story from the mid-90s, when early Photoshop effects could first be put into art, and boy are they at times. The primary artist, however, is Carlos Ezquerra and even the odd dodgy effect is not enough to stop him being a brilliant artist. His attention to detail – the scenery, the background characters with their distinctive looks and expressions – never comes at the expense of kinetic, exciting action scenes.

And if that’s not enough for you, the head of organised crime is a beatnik. (“Judges! Bummer!”) Read how we rated it >>

It may seem a little disingenuous to write a review on Girl-Wonder.org praising a book starring Stephanie Brown.  After all, Stephanie’s death was the catalyst for the founding of this whole site.  And yes, the fact that she has returned (well, been retconned) from the dead and become an accepted (well, mostly) member of the Batfamily, presumably indefinitely (well, we’ll see what Bruce says when he gets out of his timecave or whatever) does carry with it a certain note of triumph – not of “ha ha, we won,” because it shouldn’t be a battle of sides, but because protests that a female character was slaughtered to further the story of the men around her were heard and registered.  As a Steph fan (not everyone at G-W.org is!), I am especially pleased to have her back.

But more important than Girl-Wonder’s relationship to Steph is the fact that Batgirl is a really good book.

Brian Q. Miller’s writing is consistently entertaining.  His Stephanie Brown expects no support and no praise, and is gobsmacked each time she receives it, but she never loses her determination or her sense of humor, making her an endearingly bright spot in the bleakness of Gotham.  His Barbara Gordon is flawed and struggling, but still witty and scary-competent and doing her best to keep her personal issues with Batgirl separate from her work mentoring Steph.  The development of their relationship is one of the best things in the comic.

In fact, all of the relationships are handled wonderfully – Steph’s and Babs’s touchy ones with Tim and Dick respectively, Babs and her father, both women and new pretty-boy detective Nicholas “St. Nick” Gage.  One of my favorite moments in the comic came when what seemed to be building to an annoyingly cliché catfight between Steph and one of her classmates over a boy was turned on its head when the boy turned out to be gay and the female classmate just very protective.  Take that, myth of female competition!

The art is uneven, going back and forth between pages by Lee Garbett and Trevor Scott (though Scott has now been replaced by Jonathan Glapion), but none it has been actively bad or oversexualized the characters.  If Cassandra Cain would only return as a regular, as it was rumored she would when the series began, Batgirl would be just about perfect. Read how we rated it >>

The first comic of 2008 is brought by Jessica Plummer, GW Board member, and one of the writers of the new GW blog Sequential Smarts, a resource on comics used in the classroom.

Well, it’s a new year, and what better way to kick it off than with a blast from the past? January’s book of the month is The Baby-sitters Club Graphix, a series of four graphic novels based on Ann M. Martin’s hit kids’ series (specifically, Kristy’s Great Idea, The Truth About Stacey, Mary Anne Saves the Day, and Claudia and Mean Janine). Adapted and drawn by Raina Telgmeier, the books center around a group of tween girls and their babysitting business.

If you’re a typical child of the 80s and early 90s, you remember the setup of the series: when Kristy sees how hard it is for her mom to find a sitter for Kristy’s little brother, she organizes her friends Mary Anne, Claudia, and Stacey (and later Dawn) into a babysitting club to enable parents to reach a whole bunch of sitters with one phone call. Babysitting forms the background to all of the books, but these four graphic novels, taken from the earlier and less ridiculous volumes of the original series, are really about Kristy learning to deal accept her single mother dating and her family changing, Stacey coping with diabetes, Mary Anne finding her own hidden strength, Claudia forging a stronger relationship with her sister as their grandmother falls ill, and, above all, friendship.

I was a big BSC fan as a kid, and these books retain everything good about them (except, alas, for the ludicrous 80s fashions) while jettisoning some of the goofier aspects of the series. The first is rather awkwardly paced, but by the second  seems to have found her rhythm. And the art! It’s cute, and energetic, and distinctive. The characters are all easily distinguishable – a sadly rare feat in a book starring all girls! – and dress with their own distinct senses of style, which I’m sure all grown-up fans of the series remember as a major draw. Everything about it, from the expressions to the layouts, is fantastic. It takes me twice as long to read these books as it normally would because I’m spending so much time gazing rapturously at the art. All in all, these are great, fun reads for both adult fans of the old series and kids meeting the Baby-sitters Club for the first time. Read how we rated it >>

This little gem is about two girls growing up in the Ivory Coast in the 1970s.  Both are making the choice as to how they will secure their future.  Aya, who chooses education and for whom the book is named, is not the main character.  Instead the plot follows her friend Adjoua while Aya watches, sometimes criticizing, and sometimes attempting to help, from the sidelines.  Adjoua has chosen marriage to the son of a rich man as her way out.  We watch with Aya as Adjoua carefully lays a trap and snares the rich son and with Aya we are left wondering who was really caught in the trap.  This book is rich in nuances and the lives and culture of these two African girls.  It is beautiful and worth reading.

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Glister Butterworth lives a strange life. There’s a ghost in her teapot and a troll under the nearest bridge; her house takes regular holidays in foreign parts, and her bedroom shifts around when she’s not looking. But Glister takes it all in her stride. Her life in Chillblain Hall, near the village of Gravehunger Moss, Whixleyshire, may be chaotic and weird, but it’s never, ever boring.

I can’t praise Glister enough; it’s so funny, so charming, so fresh, and so individual that I want to buy truckloads of copies of it and hand them out to strangers, just to make them smile. Andi Watson has a deft touch with both humour and the serious side of life, and the sprightly, fairy-tale feel of Glister doesn’t obscure his quietly resonant insights into life’s difficulties. For all that she lives in a haunted sentient house near the borders of Faerieland, Glister feels like a real girl, and she deals with the bizarreness of her life in a refreshingly no-nonsense manner. Delightful from beginning to end.

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Rapunzel’s Revenge succeeds at everything: gorgeous, lush artwork; an imaginative and unashamedly – but not polemic – feminist take on the fairy tale; a beautifully-written script; a fictional setting that plays with all the best tropes of the Old West while acknowledging the actual ethnic composition of that West; endearing, flawed good guys; selfish, human bad guys; a controlling, horribly believable villain; and a heroine who takes care of business by using her hair to whip, lasso and acrobatically disable prison bars, evil-doers, and a huge freaking sea-serpent.

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