the onion/comics

i've been enjoying the occasional comic book coverage in the onion. they mentioned a couple of my recent favorites in this latest installment: scott pilgrim and carnet de voyage.

From the decidedly un-Japanese land of Canada comes Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life Vol. 1 (Oni) (Buy It!), which suggests what might happen if Peter Bagge had transplanted his Hate slackers into a Japanese romance comic. Written and drawn by Bryan Lee O'Malley, this first installment of an ongoing series follows the eponymous wide-eyed 23-year-old as he hesitantly dates a 17-year-old Chinese-Canadian high-schooler, plays in a band, pals around with a gay roommate, and possibly finds true love in the form of a pigtailed delivery woman with seven "evil ex-boyfriends," one of whom shows up for a climactic battle. O'Malley has a crude but charming command of manga grammar, and the simplicity helps sell the story of a bunch of well-intentioned people who are too old to act like irresponsible kids, but still too young to know how to act any other way...

i think more emphasis on the endearing cuteness and fun of scott pilgrim was necessary, but otherwise they nailed it.

speaking of comics, art spiegelman's latest comes out on the 7th. i read one of these in the forward, a jewish newspaper out of new york, and was blown away, and then christina and kate and some others and i all saw him speak at duke in the spring and were pretty much all in love with him by the end. this work is really amazing--how he processed the aftermath of 9/11 is a powerful story--and it's coming out just in time for the election! i'm just wondering how the format will work--he designed these to be full-page comics in a regular-size newspaper, and the art isn't always traditionally sequential--sometimes his stories are vertical, not horizontally paneled. but no matter how it's arranged, i really expect it to be great.