Review: "To the Heart of the Storm"

Strangely enough, that title has nothing to do with the foot of snow that fell last night. "To the Heart of the Storm" is a graphic novel by Will Eisner, an autobiographical account of growing up Jewish in New York City. It's the only book I've ever successfully gotten the BF to read.

I don't mean to imply that he doesn't read, it's just that he tends to read non-fiction, mostly for his own edification, writing supplemental notes in the margins that bug the hell out of me when I borrow his books. He doesn't read like I do, constantly, compulsively, sometimes painfully, to the exclusion of all other activities. For a while, I had a half-hearted campaign to turn him into me. I gave him books to read, fantasy and horror and superhero, thinking that he surely must be bored with those film and architecture books, and just needed the right piece of fiction to awaken the true book addict that lurks inside everyone. As you might expect, the whole thing went about as well as his attempts to get me interested in classic episodes of "The Twilight Zone." You just can't force your passions on your partner.

You wait to force them on your children.

He's never going to come to ComicCon with me, and I'm never going to get that excited about spending the afternoon in a museum. (It's cold, you can't touch anything without him scolding you, and there's no place to sit down unless you're cheek by jowl with sticky Midwesterners. I don't understand the appeal.) So imagine my surprise when I handed him "To the Heart of the Storm" and he sat down and read the whole thing in an afternoon. I think I've cracked the code: the BF likes Will Eisner.

A note about Eisner: he was a cartoonist and writer, and one of the inventors of the American comic book, creating titles like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and The Spirit, the latter of which has never been out of print. In World War II, he pioneered the genre of "instructional comic," producing booklets for the Army during the war, and for private companies and schools in peacetime. The comic book industry awards are called the Eisners (and Will Eisner actually won several Eisners in his lifetime, which pleases me greatly for reasons difficult to articulate).

This was actually the first work by Eisner that I've read. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that as a comic book fan, because it's like being a film buff without ever having watched "The Godfather." As far as introductions go, "To the Heart of the Storm" is one of the best graphic novels I've ever read, and completely explains why Eisner gets to have the industry awards named after him. It's a deeply personal work that showcases his extraordinary talent for sequential art and writing. It's also a deeply political work about Eisner's experiences with racism and antisemitism as a child, told from the point of view of Eisner as young man on his way to fight in a war that's been brewing his entire life.

What I find fascinating about this book is that Eisner wrote it in 1991, when he was in his seventies.  He'd already lived a lifetime between the events of the book and the time of its creation, and yet "To the Heart of the Storm" feels so immediate and raw, like it all happened to him yesterday. I was struck in particular to the detail he put into his mothers and aunts shoes in flashbacks to their childhoods on the Lower East Side in the late 1890s and early 1900s. And there is such an overall feeling of sadness and anger over the whole work, a helpless and confused kind of anger that only children, with their limited understanding of the world, are capable of feeling. This enormously successful man, having proved all detractors and tormentors wrong decades before, still felt the pain of being called "kike"; of pretending to be gentile so he could go to parties in middle school; of hearing his so-called friends supporting Hitler's actions against the Jews. It never stopped hurting.

I would recommend this book to--well, anyone. It's suitable for children as young as ten or twelve, no swearing or nudity. Even people who don't normally read comic books will appreciate the work of this master of the form. And if being racist knocks you down a full letter grade in my system, creating a thoughtful and biting anti-racist and pro-humanity piece must get you bumped to the top in Big Island Rachel's world.

Final Grade: A+. It gets the + because the BF liked it, too.

Review: "This Book Is Full Of Spiders, Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It"

I called it!

Last week, I wrote about the joys of other people's bookshelves and said I would find my next book to read on R's shelves. And sure enough, this week we're looking at David Wong's "This Book Is Full Of Spiders, Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It" (2012).

David Wong is the pseudonym of Jason Pargin, a senior editor and columnist for the  humor website Cracked.com. Go there now if you want to never get anything done, ever again. I have a feeling that Cracked is responsible for more lost productivity than Lolcats and pornography combined, at least in my own experience. It has a seemingly endless archive of funny columns and lists on any number of topics, updated every day,  and it's affect is best described by this xkcd comic:

This book is actually a sequel to Wong's "John Dies At The End" (which was made into a movie this year). Both are set in a Midwestern town only identified as Undisclosed, an area known to the Iroquois as Seriously, Fuck That Place. It's poor, boring, and quite possibly the portal to Hell, or at least to another dimension of shadow men and monsters. David Wong, both narrator and author, and his best friend John are life-long inhabitants of Undisclosed and self-appointed monster-hunters and protectors of the town. They are also complete drunken fuck-ups. This is a difficult enough situation when they're just trying to save their own skins in "John Dies At The End, " but when they're called on to save their entire town and possible the world from evil brain parasites in "This Book Is Full Of Spiders," they have to somehow rise above their own jackassery  and become heroes after a lifetime of being losers.

It's rare that a book can both make me laugh out loud and have to sleep with the light on. "Spiders" is hilarious, especially in the first third (it gets less funny and more action-oriented toward the end), but it's also terrifying. The humor is in the words, the horror in the situations, and it works surprisingly well. The genre of horror humor is pretty sparse to begin with, but books like this one show that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive. Both humor and fear draw their impact from surprise. We laugh more at jokes when we don't know the punchline ahead of time; we don't fear the monster we see as much as the monster we don't see. Wong the author understands the similarities between the two states and takes us on a wild ride to the end of the world and back again.

At the risk of big ole SPOILERS:

"Spiders" is a book about zombies. The brain parasites that begin multiplying through the town can reanimate their dead hosts, exist only to expand their numbers, and can only be stopped by removing the head of the host or destroying the brain. The twist on these zombies is that the parasites change the physical make-up of their hosts, much like the alien in John Carpenter's "The Thing." The world reacts to the news of the zombie apocalypse much like you'd expect them too: by setting up anti-zombie militias and Tweeting.

I have to confess that as much as I enjoyed "Spiders," which is a more technically accomplished work than its predecessor, on the whole I prefer "John Dies At The End." I'm just not that into zombies, and we've reached such a pop-culture saturation point with them that I've lost whatever small interest I may have had with them (and it was a very small interest, because as we've established, I'm a massive pansy). 

As far as zombie apocalypses go, "Spiders" is fairly standard, from the shady government goons who may hold the key to the cure, right up to the stirring action movie climax. And if you like that sort of thing, you'll love this book. Wong is clearly versed in the tropes of the zombie genre (zomb-re?) and his love and appreciation for his source material shines through in this well-crafted addition to the cannon. It's done well. It's just been done.

Final Grade: B. Recommended for zombie fans, horror fans, readers of Cracked, and people who like dick-jokes.