A Man's Skin by Zanzim Hubert

Set in Renaissance Italy, an 18-year-girl is given an old family heirloom - "a man's skin," which she can inhabit and use to explore life as a fully functional male. As she does so, she learns about different aspects of sexuality and ways to assert herself. An engaging tale which I enjoyed reading.

berkley, I found some more information on that publisher I mentioned on the preceding page, Epicenter Comics - initially, it while I was digging around on a Croatian comics website, where I found a few older threads on the forum page with announcements of upcoming books in which company owner/editor-in-chief Igor Maricic was posting; of course none of that means anything to anyone who can't speak the language. However, just today, I also stumbled on to a thread at the Collected Editions forum (formerly known as the Masterworks Forum) which is specifically dedicated to Epicenter Comics (here's the link). There's about 10 pages, much of it just announcements, but again, Maricic himself occasionally posted there, providing some more information on their books. You might find it useful to peruse it.

Tex: The Man from Atlanta (not Atlantis!)
script: Claudio Nizzi, art: Jordi Bernet
Originally published in Italy in Tex Albo speciale #10: "L’uomo di Atlanta" (1996); this Cro. edition, Tex: Čovjek iz Atlante, was published in 2005

After reading the Tex story drawn by Joe Kubert, I browsed the library shelf and picked out a few other, similar books featuring work by artists whose names I recognized. This is one of them (by the way, I should say these ‘special’ books, which are only published a few times a year, always feature art by some notable artist who doesn’t normally work on the regular Tex series, while the stories are usually well over 200 pages; in Italy they’re referred to as ‘Texone’, which can be loosely translated as ‘big Tex’).
My synopsis: Tex and his frequent companion, veteran fellow ranger Kit Carson (*not* the historical figure, but based very much on him) visit a saloon in Prescott, AZ, because Tex received a mysterious letter telling him to meet someone there who has an important message from Johnny Butler – a former Confederate officer (yeesh…) who saved his life during the Civil War, even though Tex was a Union scout and courier back then. The person who delivers the message ends up being the saloon’s featured performer, a Southern belle who calls herself Lola Dixieland – and she’s also Johnny’s fiancee.

(A character conceived with the express purpose of giving Bernet the opportunity to draw a little cheesecake)
She tells Tex and Kit that Johnny has been jailed on a trumped up charge by the local sheriff and wants them to get him out. We later learn that Johnny’s in Arizona because he wants to capture a former Union colonel named Shelby who murdered his parents during Sherman’s march on Atlanta and take him back to Georgia to stand trial for his crimes. The story is pretty entertaining, with – among other things – several plot twists involving double-crosses by the various characters, because it turns out more people than Johnny are looking for Shelby, who – at the start of the story – is doing hard time under a different name for killing a prostitute. Bernet’s art, of course, is quite nice throughout – what little I’ve seen of his work previously is usually either gritty noirish or ‘good girl’ stuff (a la Clara de noche) or combinations thereof, so it was interesting seeing him tackle a Western setting.

Tex: Valley of Terror
script: Claudio Nizzi, art: Magnus (Roberto Raviola)
Tex Albo speciale #9: La Valle del Terrore (1996); this Cro. edition, Tex: Dolina terora, was published in 2005 (and then later re-issued, although the year is unclear)

Some brutal killings of mine owners in the Yuba River Valley prompt San Francisco police chief Tom Devlin to call Tex and Kit up to California to investigate.

In Sacramento, they meet a young physician named Ulrich Wincklereid, the son-in-law of John Sutter (of Sutter’s Mill fame), who fills them in on the details: a mysterious gang that calls itself the “Avengers” is doing the killings, although the motives are unclear. As they enter the valley, they stumble onto a murder in progress, which is being indeed being perpetrated by a gang of men dressed in robes, all of them either Chinese or possibly native Hawaiians (Kanakas) and armed with daggers. Tex and Kit fail to stop the murder of yet another mine owner, but they do take down three of the killers.

We the readers learn that the ‘Avengers’ are a sort of religious secret society and they’re led by a wealthy local, also a mine-owner, named Lucas Bonner – an assumed name, as his shocking true identity is later revealed.

As in the Tex specials I’ve read recently, this story is pretty solid – the use of an actual historical figure, John Sutter, is an interesting touch, although the details of his life and family are highly fictionalized here (however, he did indeed bring a number of native Hawaiian laborers to work on his estates). However, the story is not without its problems: the main one being the borderline racist way the Chinese characters are handled (esp. the ‘dragon lady’ servant working for Sutter, May Ling).

What makes this book outstanding, though, is the art – it’s by Roberto Raviola, better known by his pen-name Magnus. Previously I’d only seen his work on the popular Italian humor series Alan Ford, which I found solid but unspectacular. The art in this book, though, is next level. Every single panel is simply gorgeous, and many are no less than magnificent – both the figure work and the backgrounds are so beautifully, meticulously rendered. (That’s why this post is so image heavy.) It apparently took Magnus about 6-7 years to finish this, and it was the last work he completed just before his untimely death in early 1996 – he didn’t even live to see the actual published book (f-in cancer…).

Ken Parker: Hours of Anguish
script: Giancarlo Berardi, art: Goran Parlov, Ivo Milazzo and Pasquale Frisenda
Originally published in Italy under the title “Ore d’angoscia,” which appeared in three installments in Ken Parker Magazine #3-5 (1993); this collected Cro. edition, Ken Parker: Tjeskobni sati, published in 2008.

My little side-project of tracking down and reading Italian comics with work by creators I recognize, in this case artist Goran Parlov, continues. (Seriously, man, I may have to take a pair of scissors to my library card like they do with bad credit cards…)
First a brief introduction: Ken Parker is yet another Western character (I’m fascinated by the fascination with the Western genre not only in Italy but in much of Europe) created in Italy in the early the 1970s by writer Giancarlo Berardi and artist Ivo Milazzo. He’s loosely based (including visually) on the title character in the Robert Redford movie Jeremiah Johnson, i.e., he’s a trapper and mountain man, but also a wanderer, who moves around a lot taking various odd jobs, because he’s a fugitive from the law on a murder charge – so he spends considerable time in Canada, among other places.

In this one, Parker is living in a small town somewhere in Manitoba, renting a room from and working for a middle-aged couple who own the local general store. With Ken is a young girl named Susy, who apparently came under his care in some previous adventure. Three members of a gang who participated in a botched train robbery just outside of town make their way to the house where Ken is living. They’re looking for the town doctor, who lives nearby, because one of them them was wounded during the attempted heist. However, said doctor had to make an emergency house call pretty far from town, and is not expected back any time soon due to heavy snowfall. So the robbers take Ken, Susy and his hosts hostage – forcing them to act normal and keep the store running while they wait for the doc to return. A further complication is that a lovely young woman from back east, actually a ruthless, amoral bounty hunter, comes a calling as she wants to nab Ken to collect the reward on his head.
Not a bad story all in all, although the initial part, when the attempted train heist occurs and the young bounty huntress comes to town, is narratively a bit choppy – I had to go back a few times to figure out what’s going on and who’s who. Parlov did the art in about the first 30 or so pages, and his work here is better than in the Tex book I reviewed above. The work by all three artists in general is quite good here.

Those Tex books look great! So weird that Italians can write such good America westerns... I read a few volumes of Magic Wind a while back (there was a bunch translated) and it was really good as well.

Translation of the latest issue of Spirou came out (the main series) and the "new" creative team is Benjamin Abitan and Sophie Guerrive on writing and Olivier Schwartz on art. (I put new in brackets because Schwartz has already done three issues of Spirou's series Une Aventure de Spirou par...). Abitan and Guerrive are both new names to me. The title "The Death of Spirou" is a dark omen.

So the good: Schwartz style works great with Spirou (as we already had seen in his Spirou par.. issues and in his Atom Agency). His retro art fits the title and his design for Spirou and Fantasio's new Turbot car fits very well with both Turbot cars drawn by Franquin (it has the exact same colouring as the second Turbot, but I do think the body is different enough that it's not intended to be the same model).

The writing is not bad, but I do think that the story itself is filled with too many callbacks to other Spirou adventures. It kinda feels that the new creative team felt a need to prove that they knew Spirou. So we get the main three characters, a Turbot car, the Count, new mushroom-based inventions by the Count, Zorglub, recalls to the two Murene stories, Spirou and Fantasio working at Spirou Magazine, said Magazine being staffed with Gaston and his supporting cast and an appearance by Secotine. Apart from that as part of the story is set in a libray and part is set in the offices of Dupuis, we get nods to Dupuis titles likes the Smurfs, Lucky Luke and others, as well as nods to other comics like Akira and The Arab of the Future.
The issue also celebrates Dupuis' 100th birthday (though they kind try to pass it off as Spirou's 100th birthday and as far as I can tell both character and magazine only came about in the 1930s. The publisher itself is kinda iffy when exactly they started but their first big success was in 1922, so I think 100th birthday is fair.)

Apart from all that there is a full story here (though the ending is kinda ambiguous with a lot of room for follow-up (see spoilers below)), but that's a lot and I don't think of all that was needed. There is a lot of meta commentary at the end.

This sounds negative, but I'm not. I liked this issue quite a bit, especially for a new creative team, and I'm looking forward for the next installments.



In other news, a new issue of Ekho came out, and I discovered at my father's birthday a few weeks ago, that one of my aunts (one of the persons through who I got into comics as a kid) is also a big fan of the series and for the exact same reason that I was. She didn't notice though that our favourite thing (a small element of the main characters changing hairstyle to imply which spirit was controlling her) wasn't in the last issue. It's also not in this one. The latest issue has our heroes travel to Ekho's version of Mexico with its implied elements of gangs, spicy food, Day of the Dead imagery and a Zorro-styled character. Ekho remains light comic reading, it's funny and enjoyable, but not clever or exciting. Comicbook comfort food.