The Book I Want to Buy:
Afrika
by Hermann; Dark Horse, $15.99
I’m a sucker for a good cover, and an interesting locale. I know nothing about this comic except that it was originally published in Belgium, and that it’s set in Africa. Looking at the solicitation text for Afrika, we learn:
A misanthropic European expatriate, Dario Ferrer, acts as guardian of a Tanzanian wildlife preserve. Accompanied by Charlotte, a naive European journalist, Ferrer discovers a village under fire from mysterious agents of the foreign-backed government. Ferrer and Charlotte must fight not only to protect the preserve, but to expose government corruption–and survive to see another day.
Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Dark Horse has been gathering together some really impressive stuff of late (I’m thinking of their gorgeous reprinting of the Blacksad series, the first volume of which I finally got the other day), and I’m sure this is going to be gorgeous. Factor in that I’m a big fan of African music, and loved the recent Vertigo version of the Unknown Soldier, and all signs point to this being something I want to read.
The Book I Think You Should Buy:
Torso HC
by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko; Icon/Marvel, $24.99
I read Torso (the Image trade paperback) back in August of 2010. Now Marvel is reprinting the book through their Icon line. Here’s what I thought of it when I first read it:
I find it a little hard to believe that it’s taken me this long to get around to reading Torso, Bendis and Andreyko’s historic true crime novel and love letter to Prohibition-era Cleveland.
This is quite possibly the best Bendis comic I’ve ever read (it’s definitely in my top three). In this, Bendis and Andreyko tell the story of the Torso killer, a serial killer who terrorized Cleveland at the same time that Eliot Ness took control of the police force, looking to drive out corruption and booze.
The story has been meticulously researched (as evidenced by the newspaper articles included in the backmatter), and carefully constructed. Bendis has always drawn from photos, and so the characters are very close approximations of what the actual police detectives assigned to the case looked like. As well, there has been some real thought put into the personalities and characters of the principal people involved in this case. This reads better than most true crime, because the writers decided to avoid lurid description of the mutilated bodies (the killer was called Torso for a reason – that’s usually all that was found of the victims), leaving that to the illustrations.
As usual, Bendis has a strong ear for dialogue, although I got a little tired of some of the slang from the era. If I have any complaint about this book, it’s that it seriously needed a proof-reader. I was frequently pulled out of the story as I tried to figure out which ‘there’ the authors intended to use. That’s a little shameful really – it’s a collection; there would have been plenty of opportunity to fix mistakes. This is a whole other rant though, so I’ll leave it for now…
I highly recommend this book. I think it’s probably the best thing that Bendis has ever written, and I hope that the typographical errors have been fixed…
So, what would you buy Were Money No Object?
