First Second Fall, part 1

Someone was kind enough to send review copies of First Second’s fall 2006 releases, so I sat down and started reading them. I’ll cover them in two parts, as I haven’t read them all yet.

So far, I’m quite disappointed. I had fairly high expectations when I first learned about FIrst Second. Here was a publisher in the book market taking on graphic novels. Another chance to bring greater exposure to the great things comics can do. While I wasn’t expecting a lineup like Pantheon has, I was hoping for some quality work, particularly when I saw the spring season included Eddie Campbell and Lewis Trondheim.

I didn’t read all of the spring releases. I’ve paged through them all and read three: ALIEEN, Fate of the Artist, and Lost Colony. ALIEEN is more of a kids book and sub-par Trondheim. Lost Colony was a mess. I’m still undecided on Fate of the Artist after reading it twice (it’s at least good enough that I read it twice to try to figure it out). The rest of the line did not look appealing. So, I did enter reading the fall season of releases with some trepidation.

First up, Missouri Boy by Leland Myrick, a series of vignettes about his life growing up in Missouri. It’s a fast read and for the most part, empty. The descriptive narration is excessive and often trying too hard to be “poetic” in some way. It does a lot of work trying to make up for the lack of storytelling power in the drawings. So much so, that much of the time the images are superfluous. And the drawings themselves are simple and unremarkable. The coloring is quite nice though. The whole thing reads like less assured, less insightful, overproduced John Porcellino work.

I followed it with Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, another growing up story this time about being Chinese-American in a mostly white school. The book begins with a folk tale story about a monkey king who tries real hard to be something other than a monkey (after he gets made fun of for being one). He of course fails and thus we have the completely obvious theme of the comic. The protagonist tries hard not to be too Chinese so people will like him. Surprise, he fails too. It takes 240 pages to get this across. Once again the art is simple and unremarkable.

The third strike was George O’Connor’s adaption of the Dutch explorer H.M. van den Bogaert’s Journey into Mohawk Country, which takes place in the 1600’s as Bogaert travels to a few Indian villages in what is now New York. O’Connor uses the text from Bogaert’s journals and unlike Myrick manages to complement his text and images. His adaption of the journal adds to the story, including a background romance and numerous attempts at visual humor (most of which aren’t really funny). The art is well done, but the style is not at all to my taste. In the end, the story itself feels lacking. Shorn of context and historical detail the explorer’s journey is quite flat and uneventful. It would have been much more interesting with a greater documentary bent.

These three books all read like young adult books to me. There is a lack of depth that I would expect from works aimed at older readers. I’m not clear what the audience is intended to be, but First Second’s line in general seems much more aimed at a younger audience. All the books were quick reads, so I don’t feel too cheated (and I didn’t pay for them at least), but I really expected more. I guess I should have known better.

Each book is softcover, full-color. The first two are $16.95, the last is $17.95 (odd, since it is much smaller than Yang’s book).

I cover the other three books in the fall line in this post.

Related posts

• No related posts.