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Afrodisiac
by Brian Maruca and Jim Rugg
94 pages, Hardcover
AdHouse Books
Forty-Five
by Andi Ewington, various artists
132 pages, Softcover
Com.X
One of the most positive aspects about the last few decades in comics has been the explosion of the stand alone read, the one-shot graphic novel of new material that was never intended to be read in a serialized format. It's a good thing, and while that's obvious to many, "good things" merit the same number of recaps as a Realm of Kings mini-series requires. While DC, Marvel and Image are slower to embrace the format than most, choosing the safer route of repackaging their more popular titles or releasing marquee-friendly works like Brian Azzarello's
Joker, Dark Horse seems to be ramping up their output, companies like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly continue to rely on them, and some companies--like Adhouse and Com.X, the publishers responsible for
Afrodisiac and
Forty-Five, respectively--depend on original have-a-spine material almost exclusively. Of course, format aside, what matters is what's behind the design, what the guts have to tell. Are they good, that's the question, because there are a lot of them, and we still got the same amount of time we had when there were just a few.
Upon first glance,
Afrodisiac looks a lot like a professionally designed scrapbook, the found collection of a particularly fervent fan who was long tired of waiting for his dream of a
Complete Afrodisiac collection to arrive. When there were no takers, he made his own.
Forty-Five, on the other hand--well, it doesn't look like a comic book at all. The pages on the left are (for the most part), splash pages by various comic artists, including work from people like Tim Vigil, Sean Phillips, Jock, and...
a lot more. The pages on the right are raw text, the transcriptions of fictional interviews where the story's main character--a journalist soon to see the birth of his first child--quizzes various members of his world's super-powered community about their lives and the world they live in.
It would be an exaggeration to push either of these publications as being too "experimental".
Afrodisiac is a collection of story fragments culled from non-existent comics, compiled together in an intelligent, attractively designed book--but yes, it's also about a super-powered hero character fighting his way through a bunch of genre setpieces, albeit with a far more extensive love life than super-heroes usually experience.
Forty-Five ignores any sustained attempt at telling a story through the use of sequential art, choosing to focus on using super-hero character stories and a vast array of incongruent splash pages--but its mildly dystopian world of super-heroes-meet-real-people plot is as cliched a creation as any of the one-man super-hero universes that non-DC/Marvel companies have spent the last few decades producing. Bluntly put, a lot of what's available in both sounds like something you've read before, even if it doesn't look like like it.
That quality--the sense of familiarity with the rougher outlines of the subject matter--is part of what makes
Afrodisiac such a pleasure to spend time in. The book's crazy-quilt structure, leaping from story to story, interspersed with panel studies or cover layouts, occasional "revamps" of the main character's origin--all of these things ingratiate themselves into the mind, sinking the reader into a nostalgiac haze despite having no connection to an actual past.
Afrodisiac's history isn't real, but the fiction that he's born out of is, and even if your personal one doesn't include a knowledge of blaxploitation beyond watching
Superfly in a Vicodin & LSD haze after having your wisdom teeth removed, the comics here work to bring whatever
is there to light, expanding them into something that feels a lot like real memory. It's a curious experience, a wholly welcome one, and it's doubtful that it could have been achieved if the chunks of story on display had arrived in intermittent installments. It takes time, more than a comic would've been able to provide, to get as lost as this. It's worth it.
Forty-Five ends up in a different place entirely. It's a grueling read, a book that ladles out every stereotype possible, none more often than the stifling elitism of its moralistic main character. James Stanley--the interviewer whose pending status as father serves as the plot engine--never hesitates to remind the reader about the "gifted few that fly above our cities", and each of his conversations with the comic's vast array of bloodless super-types is coated in a prissy, moralistic judgment that's near impossible to stomach. Over and over, one reads of Stanley's sneering contempt for the twenty minutes of bad parenting he's walked in on, his preening self-importance over getting his wife pregnant, his coaxing advice to those who might not be using their powers to their fullest extent--he's difficult to like, impossible to comprehend.
It's hard to tell at times if he's a joke, a brutal satire on the sort of reporter who shows up at a child's funeral and shoves a microphone into the face of the grieving mother to ask if she "still believes in God". His interview subjects range a bit, and while almost all of them wouldn't be a far cry from what a room of snowed-in teenagers might create with a role-playing game and a sack of dice, there are moments of creative ingenuity that are undeniable. As with any anthology, the art is up and down--there's too much Alex Ross imitation for my taste, but it's a better than average compilation of splash work. It's not a bad comic, because it isn't really a comic. But it's not a pleasant experience, whatever one calls it.
Playing with the delivery system is something that comics can, and should, do--especially during this growing-more-popular phase, if only to keep the artform from succumbing to yet another version of its oldest mistake, the Fall from Grace when the medium all but abandoned anything that wasn't a spandex genre story. That kind of exploration isn't always going to work; if history holds, it usually won't. And with the potential for failure being higher, out there where Warren Ellis fears to tread, the success--the kind that
Afrodisiac exemplifies--is made that much sweeter.
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
