We recently had lunch with a friend who seems to attract odd happenstance. Some of his stories suggested comics to me. Here's one about laundry.



( big comic under the cut )

page twelve

...and that's the end! Goodbye, Cat and Ghost. May you have many exciting adventures.

It hasn't all been slap chopping and History Channel around here. Back in art school, one of the exercises we used to do was a page-a-day (or panel-a-day) comic. I recently purchased an extremely small Moleskine notebook, and it seemed like the perfect vehicle for one of these comics.

Part of the fun of these comics is not knowing how they end ahead of time. So! Tiny comics:




page one

Beautiful watercolor comic by Ray Fawkes up over at Tor.com:

First page here.

The King of Persia, by Walt Holcombe, is no longer in print, but it's been collected, along with some of his other work, in Things Just Get Away from You. (The serial Poot, also collected there, is worth looking at as well.)





Faisal, the titular king, falls in love from afar with Ayyala, a peasant who speaks the language of animals (as does the king.) She dreams of an emerald and falls ill, telling the king that she will marry him if he brings it to her. Faisal and his love-struck camel, Jamila, seek the emerald on the advice of a djinn that lives in the desert. In the course of their search, they find a magical kingdom far from Persia.





The King of Persia is a gem of a book. The black and white artwork is whimsical and lush, with lovely crosshatching. The dialogue ranges from lyrical to comical within the same page, or even the same panel. There are wordless sequences in which the strength of the artwork shines.

The story is bittersweet. Faisal says, "I pray my emptiness has not deformed me." Instead, his emptiness deforms those around him. Although a slight book, it's packed full of humor and melancholy, each strengthened by its juxtaposition with the other.

Linda Medley's Castle Waiting collects her first two graphic novels (The Curse of Brambly Hedge and The Lucky Road into one beautifully designed volume. It's a hardcover with a ribbon bookmark and 457 pages of glorious black and white illustration. The individual issues that make up this book ran over ten years and several different publishers.

The Brambly Hedge section is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty. What happens to all the rest of the inhabitants of the castle when the princess takes off to marry the prince? In this case, they turn the castle into a sanctuary, the eponymous Castle Waiting. Medley is more interested in exploring what happens after the fairy tales are over. (The three little pigs open the Wolf's Head Inn, for example.)

The next section introduces Jain, who has heard of Castle Waiting from her late father, a merchant, and sets off to find it. She's pregnant and on the run from her abusive husband. When she gets to the castle, she meets its eccentric inhabitants, including the steward, Adjutant Rackham, and a nun from the Order of Solicitines (motto: "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof"), Sister Peace. The story of how she became a nun makes up the third section, told to Jain on a rainy day.

The artwork is absolutely charming, hearkening back to older pen-and-ink styles, but with a cartoony touch to it. The characters are individually realized, both by the art and the writing. The characters drive the story. The story doesn't, however, wrap up in this one volume; Fantagraphics is publishing volume 2 as individual issues. I hope they collect it in a single book like this one at the end of this run, as it is both lovely and convenient.

This would be a good comic book to give to younger people, perhaps especially if you know a girl who likes comics but is turned off by more mainstream fare. There are a few scenes of violence, but most of it occurs offstage. The twining of th fairy tales with the story is deftly and delightfully done.

I love this series. I have read and re-read it over the years. (The book came out in 2006, but I have the previous graphic novels, and a few of the individual issues, too.) It's one that I come back to every few years because I love the characters and the world, and want to visit them again. I hadn't been following volume 2, but I see that Fantagraphic has a bundle of the first ten issues, so I probably won't wait for the collection to come out before catching up.