Were Money No Object on Sept. 7 Featuring iZombie

The Books I Think You Should Buy:

Cuba My Revolution

by Inverna Lockpez and Dean Haspiel; Vertigo, $17.99

I read this not too long ago in hardcover.  Here’s what I had to say about it at the time:

There aren’t enough comics like this.  The writer of Cuba: My Revolution is a Cuban-American fine artist, and this terrific graphic novel is based on her experiences as a young woman in revolutionary Cuba.  When we first meet Sonya, Lockpez’s fictional alter ego, she is 17 and getting ready to go out for New Year’s Eve with her stepfather’s thirty-five year old cousin.  Sonya is an interesting person – she’s equally adept at painting as she is with a scalpel, and she soon becomes involved with the newly victorious Fidel Castro’s militia.

What follows is a slow, excruciating process through which Sonya eventually loses all faith in Castro and his regime.  It’s fascinating to watch as this young woman struggles against all evidence to maintain her belief in the revolution.  Even when she is arrested and tortured for trying to save the life of a wounded prisoner, Sonya clings to the belief that the horrid treatment she received was simply a mistake.  Eventually, even the strongest of faiths can be eroded by a constant stream of evidence to the contrary, and as things become harder and harder for people living in Cuba, Sonya has to wake up.

The book veers a little close to the type of anti-Cuban rhetoric we are used to seeing from the United States, and I would have liked to learn a little more of what happened to Sonya upon arriving in the US, but I did enjoy this book quite a bit.  As with his other recent Vertigo book, The Alcoholic, artist Dean Haspiel does a terrific job of depicting the memoirist author’s experiences.  Good stuff.

iZombie Vol. 2: uVampire

by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred; Vertigo, $14.99

iZombie is a great little series.  It’s about Gwen, a zombie girl who has to eat human brains to maintain her memory and thought processes.  Her best friends are a ghost girl who died a long time ago, and a wereterrier who maybe has a crush on her.  They live in a town where weirdness is the norm – there is a vampire coven operating a paintball establishment, and Gwen’s met a new man, who happens to be part of an order of monster killers.  Plus, the mysterious Amon, who has explained all of these creature manifestations with one of the best explanations I’ve ever read, may be pulling Gwen’s strings.

Roberson has filled this book with interesting characters, and while checking in on each of them in the monthly comic can disrupt the flow of the action, in a trade, I’m sure the book would run much smoother.  Michael Allred’s art is always good – you could comfortably buy this book for the art alone, and then be pleasantly surprised by how well written it is.

So, what would you buy Were Money No Object?