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BY CHRIS GAVALER
CHRIS GAVALER is an English professor at W&L University where he serves as comics editor of Shenandoah. He has published two novels and four books of comics scholarship, and his visual work appears in the North American Review, Ilanot Review, Aquifer, and other journals.
comiXology Originals (2019)
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REVIEW BY JOHN VERCHER
If you had told me that I was going to love a new comic that was Lisbeth Salander meets The Spirit; that was a dash of Dick Tracy, a smattering of Stumptown, and a sprinkle of Alias; that had elements of Eisner and Rucka, a little bit of Luna Brothers, and even a hint of George R.R. Martin? I’d have laughed in your face and told you that sounded like a derivative mess. And I’d have been dead wrong. You, of course, would have been talking about the fantastic series, Black Ghost, written by Alex Segura and Monica Gallagher.
Instead of some seasonless word-and-picture potato salad made up of disparate elements that don’t belong together (raisins, anyone?), this collaboration from two gifted comic book veterans feels more like a comfortable homemade recipe where all the ingredients come together—the influences from great writers and artists of the past and present blending perfectly. Instead of copying their inspirations, they pay homage to them while creating something wholly unique and original.
Black Ghost follows the travails of Lara Dominguez (a Latina heroine who’s the lead in her own title? Don’t mind if I do!), a reporter/teacher/vigilante on the come up. We’re dropped into her story in medias res—and she’s immediately kicking ass. The writing from the get-go is crisp and economical, abandoning the exposition and introducing us immediately to our heroine who’s got heart and snark to spare.
Lara has been obsessed with tracking down a vigilante dubbed The Black Ghost—a modern-day version of Eisner’s The Spirit—and that singular focus has brought her dangerously close to losing her job, as she’s passed up the stories her boss actually wants her to work on. Adding to her compulsion for the Ghost is an Anonymous-type entity, Lone, who contacts her through her computer, giving her clues about criminal goings-on where the Ghost might appear—or where she might have a chance to hone her burgeoning fighting skills.
Segura seamlessly infuses his noir roots into the story—simmering beneath this drama, Lara is dealing with the unsolved murder of her brother, Tomas, a community organizer in Miami. It is the motivation behind her drive to bring other criminals to justice—but his death also triggered the contact from Lone. She is not oblivious to the coincidence, and the mystery deepens.
Issue #1 takes a George R.R. Martin-esque turn on the final page—that’s right! Someone you thought was indispensable gets Red Wedding-ed (no spoilers here)! The savvy of Segura and Gallagher’s writing chops make the event feel natural and not done simply for shock value. It’s a compelling end to a riveting first issue that manages to give us an origin story without talking down to the reader.
Issue #2 is where things get a little darker and a little grittier where Lara is concerned. There’s nothing more compelling than a character in trouble, and, man, Lara is in some shit of her own making. The second chapter dives deeper into Lara’s internal torment, and how she quiets it—or attempts to—with booze and other people’s warm beds. The Bendis/Alias influence is apparent here, but unlike Jessica Jones, Lara is hindered by her reliance on alcohol, not enhanced by it. It becomes quite clear in this issue that it is a kryptonite she can’t resist—as much as we want her to.
While she clears the cobwebs, Lara discovers that the mugging she saved her student from in the last issue is more complicated than she first suspected—a lot more so. If only she had time to deal with that instead of clinging to the last threads of her job before she’s fired. Did I mention Lone is getting a bit more aggressive in his encouragement of her vigilante activities, and that’s she having an increasingly difficult time with Tomas’s death and what it might mean?
This is to say that if you think chapter two slows down for you to catch your breath—think again. While Lara’s story gets more textured and layered, it only adds to the emotional heft and propels the narrative instead of turning it into a slog.
This is to say nothing of the art of George Kambadais and the coloring by Ellie Wright. The cartoonish style recalls the art present in the Luna brothers’ works (The Sword, Ultra, Girls), while the bright primary colors harken back to the era of Dick Tracy. While these styles might seem out of place in a noir-influenced comic that doesn’t shy away from profanity and violence, Kambadais renders facial expressions, body language, and action in a way that, in combination with Segura and Gallagher’s script, conveys the gravitas in every scene.
If the first two issues are any indication, comic fans are in for one hell of a series. I can’t wait to see what this team does next.
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JOHN VERCHER is a writer currently living in the Philadelphia area with his wife and two sons. He holds a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Mountainview Master of Fine Arts program. His fiction has appeared on Akashic Books’ Mondays are Murder and Fri-SciFi. and he is a contributing writer for Cognoscenti, the thoughts and opinions page of WBUR Boston. Two of his essays published there on race, identity, and parenting were picked up by NPR, and he has appeared on WBUR’s Weekend Edition. His non-fiction has also appeared in Entropy Magazine. You can find him on his website www.johnvercherauthor.com and on Twitter at @jverch75.
–Interview by Rachel Mennies
Rachel Mennies: We’ve talked a lot about you seeing yourself as both a visual artist and a writer—I was curious if you could talk a little bit about a “hybrid novel,” the term you use to describe A Film About Billy?
Daniel McCloskey: I call my book a hybrid novel because it’s a novel that has comics in it. The book has 250 pages and about 80 of those are comics pages, but that term could apply to a broad range of longish narratives that integrate non-traditional elements.
RM: Okay—so that’s one way to distinguish it from, say, a more traditional graphic novel?
DM: Yes. A Film About Billy is more of a true prose book that has chunks of comics in it. It’s a novel about a kid filming a documentary about his dead friend during an international suicide epidemic—so it was important for me to have this character show part of his documentary. [My original] screenplay format wasn’t working, so I decided the text needed comics to give that glimpse. Continue reading
Six Gallery Press (distributed by Birdcage Bottom Books; reprint distributed by Small Press Distribution)
248 pages, $12
Review by Rachel Mennies
Collin, the teenage protagonist in Daniel McCloskey’s comics-prose hybrid novel A Film About Billy, has a movie to make about his dead friend William, and a seven thousand dollar grant from the enigmatic Mint Foundation to complete it. Billy jumped in front of the train tracks near a military base in Canyon City, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh; his body takes the blow so hard that his friends find pieces of him for miles up and down the tracks—a piece of his long black hair, a discernable shard of his skull. McCloskey’s first book follows Collin, the narrator of the book’s prose sections and the creator of the documentary film represented in the book’s comics frames, through what first appears to be the ordinary process of mourning a sudden loss, and later manifests as a wildly dystopian tale of an international suicide epidemic and a government plot far more bizarre than anything Collin—or the world—could have imagined.
At the center of this book live teenagers: artists and filmmakers and gamers, agents of action, prey to depression and drugs and ennui and suicide, and—most emphatically—the book’s emotional and intellectual centers of integrity. Many of the enduring adults in A Film About Billy—warped scientists, corrupt military personnel, and absent (or present, sometimes for the worse) parents—perpetrate most of the book’s evil. Collin and his friends first unite in the wake of Billy’s death, only to splinter apart as suicide and unrest overtakes Pittsburgh. McCloskey renders these protagonists most thoroughly and tenderly as the book opens and the story of Billy’s suicide unfolds—as we “watch” the first few frames of Collin’s documentary, where Billy lives, as teenager, forever. Continue reading
On the embodied poetics of making comics.
-by Jarod Roselló
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Jarod Roselló is a Cuban-American teacher, cartoonist, and writer, from Miami, Florida. He is currently a doctoral student (A.B.D.) completing a comic-as-dissertation in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at Pennsylvania State University. His comics, fiction, and research have been published in various journals and magazines. On nights and weekends he runs Bien Vestido Press, a small press for hand-made books, out of his living room. You can read more of Jarod’s work online at www.jarodrosello.com.
