A few hours of reading last week got me through:
The new
Scott Pilgrim book (
...and the Infinite Sadness) was entertaining, but it's closely tied to the previous book, and if you don't remember exactly what happened in that book, you might be a little bit lost. There's a chart of characters and relationships, but it's in the
back of the book, not the front. The only criticism I have, aside from that, is that there are a lot of characters and some of the secondary characters are starting to look too much alike. If you're reading this one, you know what you're getting, so I don't need to get into criticism of the story. I howled over the bit about Todd going to "Vegan Academy."
How to Make A Journal of Your Life by D. Price - zinelike, and not bad, but not great. A very quick read. This book has been obviated by a few other books I've read on the same topic, with the exception of the advice on photography, which is slight but interesting. I liked both
The Decorated Journal by Gwen Diehn (whose book
The Decorated Page is also really good) and
The Creative License by Danny Gregory; I'd recommend those over this.
Castle Waiting by Linda Medley - I avoided this comic for years and years because of its apparent preciousness and the occasional anthropomorphic character. But I kept hearing good things about it, so when I had the chance to get Fantagraphics' recent hardcover collection out of the library last week, I went for it. I was pleasantly surprised.
For the most part, I liked it. I don't think it actually
is a feminist response to
Cerebus, but it does portray feminist themes in a similar setting with some similar characters. The anthropomorphics aren't intrusive (there are no "sexy cat girls," for example). The book itself is lovely, designed as a fancy storybook. There's an Ex Libris page and a ribbon marker, as well as patterned endpapers on both the book and various chapters, and a lovely deckled edge on the pages.
The art is mostly quite good, but there were times, particularly early on, when there was simply too much whitespace and line art, and not enough shading or b/w balance.
I have a problem with the story structure, and I'm not sure whether it's fair or not. If the volume I read was the entirety of the story, it has serious structural problems. The nested story within the story, where Sister Peace talks about her life as a bearded girl and how she became a Solicitine nun, takes over the second half of the volume; themes that come up in the first half are never resolved, which means that the book is basically Peace's life story and is nonlinear in a clunky way, because it didn't find its focus until Medley had been doing the book for many years. If the book as it stands is only the first portion of the story, it's probably fine. Nothing ever comes of Jain's intriguing first-half flashbacks in this volume... you never find out who she married, who fathered her child, or why she left. The trouble is that the book never says "Volume 1" anywhere on it, so I really don't know if more is coming.
What is there is interesting, but it won't appeal to everyone (a good litmus test is probably "whether or not you like
Bone" - the tone is somewhat similar, and Cartoon Books, Jeff Smith's company, published some
Castle Waiting material in the past). If it sounds interesting from what I've said, do consider checking it out. It only took me about two hours to read, and it was worth the time.
(ETA - yes, it IS just volume 1. New issues commence this summer, picking up where this volume left off.
Linda Medley's Site.)