Chuck Palahniuk's writing must destroy us before it can save us

Chuck Palahniuk may be our most beautiful, terrifyingly ugly fiction writer. I read Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, and Choke and, although they didn’t make my list of 60 favorite novels, they aren’t far behind. I felt it was time to revisit the Portland native’s work.

I started with an excerpt of Fight Club that appears in The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. It hails from the moment when Tyler Durden decides that fighting in a bar when away from his white-collar job isn’t enough; he needs to create Project Mayhem. This leads to a demon mask being painted and torched into a city high rise, a Jauguar being driven straight into a fountain, paint balls shot into an art museum's ceiling, and much more. Durden's aim is to destroy civilization so that the Earth can have time to repair itself. Kill the pandas and the highways. It’s not extinction; it’s downsizing. This excerpt, like the rest of the book and the David Fincher/Brad Pitt/Edward Norton movie (which had to be postponed for several months because Columbine has just ocurred), are all the places to start with Palahniuk: 5 out of 5 stars 

Next I headed from the three stories that begin his collection Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread:

“Knock-Knock” is about a little boy whose father loves to tell him heavily sexualized and racist jokes and whose mother has left the two of them for good. The boy doesn’t understand any of the jokes but knows enough that he needs to learn to laugh at them. Many years later, when his dad is dying of cancer, he tries to tell his dad the same jokes and his dad doesn’t laugh one bit. The boy (now a man) realizes that jokes are all about power. You tell a joke so you can make the other person laugh and show that you are the powerful one, the one in charge and exerting the control. It’s an offensive but pretty poignant short read. 4 out of 5 stars

“Eleanor” is a wacky little tale told from the perspective of someone who utters lots of big words that are almost all used improperly. Even so, it’s still highly readable, although I’m not entirely sure where Palahniuk was trying to go with it. Eleanor is a fast pit bull who likes to gnaw on a rubber bloody hand. His owner moves from Oregon into a house that had been used as a porno movie setting. The new owner sets up a shrine to one of the more-known porn actresses who performed some of her roles at the house, but the neighbors don’t like this and run the owner and his dog out. Perhaps it’s a sad statement on how we try to monetize anything cultural that has come into contact with even minor celebrities. 3.5 out of 5 stars

“How Monkey Got Married, Bought a House, and Found Happiness in Orlando” is a brilliant little tale about the communications profession. Monkey has a communications degree and is adept at selling anything to anyone. She gets a job that has her offering food samples in an Orlando supermarket and she gets a cheese product that begins turning all the customers away with its unbearable stench.  Getting desperate, she finally samples the cheese and realizes the taste is the best thing ever. She becomes a zealot with the first product she’s ever truly believed in. Her company is set to dispose of the cheese but she keeps trying to get someone to sample it. While being removed forcibly by her boss, Gorilla, Monkey jams a piece of cheese into his mouth and he realizes she is right. The cheese is delicious. It’s a weird tale that features only animals and doesn't appear to have anything to do with the title other than the allusions to how products help sell the American Dream. 5 out of 5 stars

Finally, I ended my Palahniuk cram session with Fight Club 2, the graphic novel telling the story of the narrator 10 years after the time of the original book/movie. He's a burned out dad married to Marla with a kid when Tyler Durden returns into his life. They need to figure out a way to destroy much of the world so that humanity can save itself from itself. The book is all over the place, which Palahniuk clearly knows and which is why he goes super-meta with some scenes portraying him and his fellow writers discussing which directions to take the plot. In Palahniuk's case, it's ok to overuse the word "brilliant." 5 out of 5 stars 

As a postscript, I ripped through the quick-read Fight Club 3 graphic novel. This 2019 release is apparently the conclusion, although it sets up Tyler to return with a new narrative to inhabit in a decade or so, if that's what Palahniuk chooses to do. The story has Tyler and his minions making sure civilization nearly wipes itself out with just enough humanity left to carry on and forward. This is a lot of fun but less essential compared to Fight Clubs 1 and 2. 4 out of 5 stars

Y: The Last Man is my favorite graphic novel of all time

It's been 10 years since I first read Y: The Last Man and it's such an absolute epic classic (I proclaim it my favorite graphic novel) that I decided to re-read it on my iPad in the library app Hoopla, which incidentally has an impressive graphic-novel collection and all of it can be borrowed in an instant.

The collection is available in five volumes (about 1,500 pages total) and it has it all: a monkey-infused plotline, lots of love triangles, globe hopping, political intrigue, examinations of major social issues, humor, and, of course, the apocalypse.

Or, rather, half an apocalypse? As the title implies, A 22-year-old man named Yorick Brown is the last man on Earth, and much of the books attempt to find out why this wiping out of all mammals with the “Y” chromosome has happened. Actually, Y’s travelling companion, Ampersand, is also a male, albeit of the monkey variety.

Yorick must travel secretly or risk the wrath of the many packs of women who are grappling with the loss of all males and, hence eventually, the end of the entire human race. Needless to say, many of these women are dangerous.

First Yorick leaves New York to get to his mother, a Congresswoman, in Washington D.C. He also meets with the new president, who assigns a beautiful dreadlocked agent, Agent 355, to protect him at all times. She takes him to Boston to meet Dr. Allison Mann, who will attempt to clone the last man. Meanwhile, his mother also tells an Israeli agent named Alter about Yorick, who continuously attempts to take him from 355’s clutches to use as leverage with her nation’s opponents.

Dr. Mann’s lab is destroyed in Boston and the three have to make their way to California to reach the backup lab. Their cross-country struggles take up a major portion of this epic.

The story goes international when a ninja named Toyota steals Ampersand and takes the monkey to Japan. Yorick, Dr. Mann, and 355 go there to retrieve him and stop along the way in Australia to look for Yorick’s beloved fiancée Beth. After many misses, they finally locate Beth in Paris and the two lovers try to get back to where they left off before the plague hit. But things are complicated when Yorick finally realizes he is deeply in love with 355.

The story unfortunately doesn’t end with quite the bang I had hoped for, but Dr. Mann’s experiments have worked, as we see in a flash-forward to 60 years in the future, when many clones of Yorick have been developed by the deceased Dr. Mann and the many clones she had successfully created of herself.

5 out of 5 stars

Because I might just make a tradition of revisiting it each decade, I’m laying out the array of main characters so I have them mapped out and don’t forget who’s who. There are spoilers, but if you've already read the series, you may want to use this as a refresher as well, because there are a healthy amount of important characters.

Yorick - The son of an Ohio politician mom, he’s never amounted to anything except being pretty good at magic tricks and making a lot of funny jokes with political and pop-culture references. 

Ampersand - His monkey. The only other male of any species still alive.

Beth - Y’s girlfriend traveling in Australia. She gets captured by an aborigine tribe. 

Hero - Y’s sister, a paramedic in Boston who cuts off a breast as part of joining in with the Amazons. She signs up to lead the search for the last man, not knowing it’s Yorick.

Dr. Mann - Boston bioengineer who studies asexual reproduction. She much later kills her father, who survived the plague and was also working on cloning, in competition with his daughter.

355 - The U.S president’s agent in Jordan trying to get an amulet necklace as part of her job in the government's secret "culper ring." Her family died in a car wreck when she was 8. She shoots the terrorists who block I-40, which allows food shipments to resume for the country.

Alter - An Israeli military woman, she is also on the trail of the last man and shows up in Boston at Dr. Mann’s lab. It later turns out the person giving her team from Tel Aviv instructions is somehow none other than Yorick’s mom, but Alter doesn’t actually plan to hand Yorick off to his mom, who she considers a terrorist. She wants to take Y back to Israel and have the U.S. start a war with her country otherwise she thinks the two countries will turn on themselves and destroy themselves. She was militarized and hates other nations from when her sister was accidentally killed by an Israeli tank when she was protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes. 

Representative Jennifer Brown - Yorick’s mom. She recruits Israel because she used to work with Alter’s predecessor who always spoke highly of her. Plus the U.S. military is still in disarray and she wanted the best to find her son. She suspects 355 is part of the culper ring, a dirty-tricks pseudo agency of the government and Brown placed a tracking device in Ampersand. Alter enters her office right after she sees the naked newspaper photo of her son and shoots her dead.

Margaret Valentine - Former agriculture secretary named as the new president by the chain of succession. She arrives at the White House to interrupt a militia of Republican congressmen’s wives who are coming in guns ablaze to demand they get their husband’s seats. But the first act of the president (who was herself a Republican) is to arrest them instead. 

Victoria - Evil red-headed leader of the Daughters of the Amazon. She is killed by Hero when Hero decides she is no longer an evil Amazon and that Y is not the enemy.

Sonia - Convicted junkie in Marrisville who falls for Yorick and shares a kiss with him while chopping wood. She kills Victoria with an ax to the head right as Victoria was about to execute Yorick. Then Hero shoots an arrow straight into her heart. 

Natalya - Blonde stowaway on Yorick’s westbound train who has come from Russia to retrieve the one Russian male left, who is on the space station. She also tells the group of a nuclear reactor in Kazakhstan that has killed tons of people and will further spread the plague.

Ciba - A femail astronaut who make it back to Earth. She has been impregnated and she doesn’t know which of the two male astronauts is the father. Both males die upon earth landing. Ciba has a baby boy, Vladimir, right as a Hero is arriving nearby in the Plains to find her brother.

Heather and Heidi Hartle - Run the top-secret government hideout in Kansas that no male politicians ever made it to. Natalya and Dr. Mann will stay with them to monitor astronaut Ciba’s pregnancy.

Cayce, Edie, and Henrietta - Actors in a touring with a theatrical troupe passing through Nebraska who write a play about women who find the last man on earth. Meta.

711 - 355’s culper ring colleague who has retired since her husband died. She lives in a cabin outside Denver and watches Yorick while Dr. Mann and 355 go to the hospital to treat Ampersand. She uses unusual methods to help Y better understand his pseudo death wish.

Leah - A 16-year-old in Arizona who swears to protect her state even if the rest of the U.S. must go down.

P.J. - A bald mechanic and former ska bassist who runs into the gang in the desert and notifies them I-40 has been cut off by a terrorist gang. She is shot while protecting Yorick. Y then shot her killer with the gun 355 let him borrow; but he told 355 and Dr. Mann that P.J. shot her.

Beth - Not Yorick’s fiancée, but another Beth he meets upon arriving in California. She’s at a church and is a former flight attendant who brought the plane she was on down during the moment all the men died. She’s the first woman Y finally sleeps with. Later on she has his baby, a girl. 

Anna Strong - Red-haired leader of the Setauket Ring, a breakaway group from the government Culper Ring. She takes Yorick’s silver and gold engagement ring, which Dr. Mann is starting to suspect has something to do with Y’s magical powers of survival. They are looking for 355’s Amulet of Helene, which they destroy at Candlestick Park the moment 355 hands it over, without exchanging Yorick’s engagement ring. 355 turns the table and breaks Anna’s neck but leaves her alive.

Toyota - Ninja who steals Ampersand and knives 355 badly. She escapes via San Diego to Yokogata, where Dr. Mann’s mother lives. We discover that Amp has been mixed up with another monkey which is why he’s been kidnapped, but he escapes upon docking.

Lieutenant Rose Copen - Mistaken as a pirate on the ship to Japan who informs Dr. Mann that the boat is smuggling tons of heroin and she wants to stop it. Turns out she’s with the Royal Australian Navy. She sleeps with Dr. Mann and they start to fall in love, then Dr. Mann’s mom stabs her. While she’s unconscious she admits she is actually a spy.

Kilina - Captain of the heroin smuggling ship and fools around with Yorick before he realizes the truth about her.

Red headed journalist who falls over a balcony with 355. Both live and then she escapes. 

Sister Lucia Ober - Kidnaps pregnant Beth and Hero. She is the highest ranking woman in the Catholic Church, from Vatican City. She wants the baby to become the Pope so he can declare women can be ordained as the church’s leaders. Turns out the baby is a girl.

The old 355 - Recruited 355 to the Culper Ring after she had killed two racist bullies as a 15-year-old.

You - Former cop and private investigator who created a male robot in Tokyo. Bartered Ampersand for a woman to spend a month with the robot.

Dr. Mann’s mom - Stabs Rose when she arrives with her daughter in Japan. Turns out she had met President Valentine before the plague and become her advisor, having set the whole thing up to get the man and the monkey to her daughter in Boston. Later, we find that Dr. Mann’s dad has also survived and has been making clones of Dr. Mann.

Key Settings

Washington D.C. is the scene of much of the action. The Washington Monument has been turned into a memorial for all the men. Women sing in worship/memory there all the time. Yorick reveals himself to a group of Amazons and 355 has to save him. 

Marrisville, Ohio is where Yorick, 355, and Dr. Mann have to leap from a train car. They end up there with an entire town of women who were let out of prison so they wouldn’t starve in their cells.

Kansas government bunker, near where spaceship returns to Earth.

Queensbrook, Arizona is where a group of women are nationalists for their, um, state. The gang was going to go through Utah but the whole state is on fire. And a group of 8 descending from Timothy McVeigh’s ideology have shut down I-40 through Arizona and cut off food and supplies to everyone out west.

San Francisco - The gang makes it here so Dr. Mann can set up her backup lab and work on her cloning project. She discovers Yorick survived the plague because he was with Ampersand and the monkey’s poop somehow shielded him.

Australia is now home to tons of heroin addicts and Japan might be next if the pirate boat shipment arrives there. 

Cooksfield, California - This is where Hero is looking for Yorick’s Beth but instead finds the former flight attendant Beth, very pregnant with Y’s baby. But then the Swiss Guard private army of Vatican City captures and takes Hero and Beth hostage. 

And that's just a little bit of the story ...

Wilson is a must-read graphic novel about a pathetic, yet perceptive, anti-hero

Wilson is a balding, bespectacled little man who walks his dog around Oakland, making observations about jerks with their ridiculously over-sized trucks, his confusion about why his parents used to often stare at the ocean for long periods of time, and jerks who don’t tell him his dog is cute.

He’s pathetic as can be, but somehow he’s relatable and funny. Definitely observant from his own perspective. I love it when he calls bullshit on equity managers and I.T. dudes who can’t seem to speak clearly about how they see and fit into the world.

Although the panels of this 2010 graphic-novel collection, beautifully illustrated with colors popping from Ghost World author Daniel Clowes, appear at first to not tell a running storyline, we learn a little ways in that they are indeed. Wilson heads by airplane and shuttle to see his dad, dying of cancer in a hospital as he is condescended to by a nurse who can’t believe he won’t eat his ice cream while Wilson informs the nurse his dad was a lit professor at Columbia.

Wilson regrets his life. He didn’t know enough about his parents. His wife left him years ago. He misses how good he had it as a child. His regrets lead him back to find his now “hooker” ex-wife Pippi. He also hires an investigator named Boggie - not Bogey - to find his given-up-for-adoption daughter.

For lovers of graphic novels, this is a must read. (It was also turned into a 2017 film with Woody Harrelson as Wilson. I don't know if that's any good but it's available on streaming services.)

5 out of 5 stars

TV Snide: For September 2021

Movie of the Month: Woodstock ‘99 (HBO Max): Part of the (big) problem was that organizers were obsessed with not letting crowds break down fences to get in, as had happened at both previous Woodstock festivals, so they located it on an abandoned air-force base, not ironically either. The lineup was another main cause of trouble. Suffering a hangover from the good glory days of Nirvana, awful stuff like Korn, Kid Rock, and Limp Bizcuit aggravated an angry mob of white boys swamping around in sewage because of the abyssmyl water and sanitation situation. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Concert of the Month: Hall and Oates/Squeeze at Merriweather Post Pavilion: My first time seeing Squeeze and they broke out about six of their 10 or so great songs. The sound was crisp and clear. Here’s the set list. The headliners continue to alter a lot of their songs to be a little jammier, which I don’t like as much as when they play them straight. The first two times I saw them, they were immaculate. The last two, just really good. How can you complain about a mega-hit set list that throws some deep tracks from War Babies and Bigger Than Both of Us in right before ending with I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do), Rich Girl, Kiss On My List, Private Eyes, and You Make My Dreams. Here’s that set list. 4 out of 5 stars

The Hardy Boys - Season 1 (Hulu): An enjoyable romp of a twist and turn mystery that has beloved Frank and Joe Hardy searching for answers to their mother’s death, navigating a strange new family life in Bridgeport, and battling all kinds of bad guys, with the tall man being a favorite of the series. The complicated story line pays off for those who pay close attention and it will be interesting to see what the show runners come up with for Season 2. The spirit of the books, which I devoured as an early teen, is captured well. 4 out of 5 stars

A Walk in the Woods (Amazon Prime): This 2015 take on Bill Bryson’s classic book is perfectly cast, with Robert Redford as the crusty old Bryson, needing to shake up life a bit. His wife won’t let him hike the Appalachian Trail alone, so he hears from an old friend, classically played by Nick Nolte, who goes along with him, rekindling their once-soured relationship along the way. It’s a minor yet touching and funny buddy movie. 4 out of 5 stars

Graphic Novel of the Month: The Beauty (Vols. 1 and 2): This is a story about what would happen if people started catching a disease that made them beautiful. The first book is gripping but I started to lose interest as the story introduced a bunch of new characters in the second issue, without any real good sense yet of knowing how they fit in. Great premise helps earn it a 3 out of 5 star rating.

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (Hulu): Despite a few humorous moments, this is mostly an awful version of one of Adam Sandler’s worse offerings. The spy plot just doesn’t work with the middle-aged ladies’ stories. 1.5 out of 5 stars

TV Snide: For June 2021

Graphic Novel of the Month: Criminal: Vol. 1, Coward: Ed Brubaker is my favorite graphic novelist that I’ve discovered this year. This is noir crime in which the antihero tries to save his girlfriend and her daughter and tries to get away with multiple scams. He’s not very good at any of it and the blood sprayed around is epic, but somehow there’s still a likable heart to the whole thing. Looking forward to reading more of this series. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Movie of the Month: Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade (Pay Per View): Somehow I never saw this, the third installment of the Indy films. With a focus on Harrison Ford’s relationship with his father, played by Sean Connery, you really can’t go wrong. The laughs and the thrills are a mile a minute, as bumbling Nazis fall rapidly by the waysides. None of these movies will ever beat the original, Raiders of the Lost Ark, but this comes as close as can be expected, with a nice added touch of medieval lore thrown in for good measure. 4.5 out of 5 stars 

Thelma and Louise (Sling TV): When Brad Pitt is the fourth or fifth best thing in a movie, you know you’ve you a good one. With the music of the Eagles leading them on a deadly girls road trip across the Southwest U.S., Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis kick some serious butt in the fight against idiot males. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Produced by George Martin (SlingTV): The story of the Beatles and the swinging 60s told through the eyes of a kid who got thrown into the role of head of Parlophone Records and really didn’t know much else but classical music is great. Martin's unique perspective was a cherry on the top (and maybe more) of the Fab Four’s cannon. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Weekend at Bernie’s (Hulu): Andrew McCarthy slums it with this nobody cast in what is actually a classic physical comedy from 1989 that I had somehow never seen. The goofiness is nonstop but it’s endearing and pretty funny. 4 out of 5 stars

All of Me (Sling TV): Steve Martin was my hero after The Jerk, his many Saturday Night Live guest appearances, his standup albums, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and The Man With Two Brains, but I never saw many of his other movies. This one is as silly and ridiculous as it gets, but Martin and Lily Tomlin have great chemistry (they better, Tomlin dies and goes into his now almost-bipolar body). 4 out of 5 stars

Lethal Weapon (Sling TV): Long before Mel Gibson was outed as an anti-Semite, he was tough guy cop Riggs, a guy with a potential death wish after his wife dies. Gibson and Danny Glover get roughed up along the way to exterminating Gary Busey and his band of heroin kingpins in some fun action-adventure. 4 out of 5 stars

Friends: The Reunion (HBO Max): Considering I’ve only seen a dozen or so episodes of this show, you may wonder why I watched this. I don’t know the answer to that, but it strikes me that this is about like the show itself: relatively mindless drivel yet still compelling because of its ridiculously likable cast and perceived voices of a generation (although who would ever take Friends over Seinfeld, it probably goes without saying). 3 out of 5 stars

The Walking Dead comics are no doubt a rollicking good-time phenomenon

I've been accused occasionally of not having a wide enough spectrum of knowledge about pop culture to be the owner of a pop-culture blog. But you try watching everything on Netflix, Amazon, and HBO, going to the movies, reading all the books on my Kindle list, going to the theater, and listening to all the new music on Spotify with a family and a full-time job.

Ahem. I do what I can. Well, after finally watching The Empire Strikes Back today (yes, it only took me 36 years; I swear I thought I had seen it multiple times already!), I also read book one of The Walking Dead. It captures the first 12 comic books and is a story of cultural significance nearing that of Star Wars.

It does not match Y: The Last Man, which I consider the greatest graphic novel and is also from the apocalyptic genre. The dialogue of Dead can be cliche and lazy and the story is fairly predictable. Or, maybe I've just heard so much about the phenomenon over the years that some of the thrill and suspense has been a bit ... suspended.

Rick stars as a cop who goes into a coma after getting hit in a shootout only to wake up in a world where most humans have been replaced by zombies. He makes his way from the country to Atlanta, where the zombie situation is extra bad. He is helped to a camp outside the city to amazingly reunite with his wife Lori and young son Carl. It's soon revealed that Lori had sex with Rick's ex-partner Shane after they thought Rick had died. This tension boils to a head when little Carl shoots and kills Shane before Shane nearly murders his dad. Turns out, Lori is pregnant, possibly with Shane's baby. Will be interesting to see how that storyline pans out.

The group meets a former NFL player named Tyreese, Carl is shot in the woods, and a man named Hershel helps save him while welcoming the RV-traveling crew to stay on his fenced-in property. This arrangement goes sour after Hershel is forced to re-kill his already-dead three children, who escape from the barn where they had been locked up. The crew leaves and soon finds an abandoned prison, which they are getting prepared to settle as this book comes to a close.

I can't wait to read the rest of the graphic-novel series, but I'm not so smitten that I feel I need to also watch the TV series. Am I wrong?

4.5 out of 5 stars

Y: The Last Man Captures All of Humanity in One Epic Graphic Novel

I still have a lot of work to do to make it through the long list of graphic novels I want to read. But Y: The Last Man, the 10 volumes of which I just completed, is the best one I’ve read and will probably be impossible to top.

It has it all: a monkey-infused plotline, lots of love triangles, globe hopping, political intrigue, examinations of major social issues, humor, and, of course, the apocalypse.

Or, rather, half an apocalypse? As the title implies, A 22-year-old man named Yorick Brown is the last man on Earth, and much of the books attempt to find out why this wiping out of all mammals with the “Y” chromosome has happened. Actually, Y’s travelling companion, Ampersand, is also a male, albeit of the monkey variety.

Yorick must travel secretly or risk the wrath of the many packs of women who are grappling with the loss of all males and, hence eventually, the end of the entire human race. Needless to say, many of these women are dangerous.

First Yorick leaves New York to get to his mother, a Congresswoman, in Washington D.C. He also meets with the new president, who assigns a beautiful dreadlocked agent, Agent 355, to protect him at all times. She takes him to Boston to meet Dr. Allison Mann, who will attempt to clone the last man. Meanwhile, his mother also tells an Israeli agent named Alter about Yorick, who continuously attempts to take him from 355’s clutches to use as leverage with her nation’s opponents.

Dr. Mann’s lab is destroyed in Boston and the three have to make their way to California to reach the backup lab. Their cross-country struggles take up a major portion of this epic.

The story goes international when a ninja named Toyota steals Ampersand and takes the monkey to Japan. Yorick, Dr. Mann, and 355 go there to retrieve him and stop along the way in Australia to look for Yorick’s beloved fiancée Beth. After many misses, they finally locate Beth in Paris and the two lovers try to get back to where they left off before the plague hit. But things are complicated when Yorick finally realizes he is deeply in love with 355.

The story unfortunately doesn’t end with quite the bang I had hoped for, but Dr. Mann’s experiments have worked, as we see in a flash-forward to 60 years in the future, when many clones of Yorick have been developed by the deceased Dr. Mann and the many clones she had successfully created of herself.

So good I want to read it again now. Apparently a TV or movie is in the works, but perhaps even better would be a new series of all the other events that have been left out of this magnum opus.

***** out of ***** stars

Batman: Year One is Essential Comic-Book Reading

As I lean more and more into the world of graphic novels (they're much quicker and more satisfying when you have a small child and not as much time to read anymore), I figured I absolutely had to dig into the best of the Dark Knight.

Batman: Year One is ranked highly on many best-of graphic novel lists, including #14 all-time by Forbidden Planet.

Created by the legendarily dark Frank Miller, with a resume that includes Sin City, Ronin, and 300, the truly mysterious origins of Batman are unraveled in this tale. It places the police investigator Gordon into the same corrupt city as Batman, who is in his first year of fighting crime in Gotham. Gordon has been transferred with his young wife from Chicago and Batman is returned from a long time away training in martial arts and science. The two men seem to be the only forces for good in the entire gangster, prostitute, and thug-filled place, and their paths cross several times. The final scene places them on a rooftop discussing someone called The Joker who may be planning to poison the city's reservoir.

This truly is a piece of art that "defines Batman for a new generation" and ensures that he will be a leading -- if not the flat-out best -- superhero for a long time to come.

***** out of ***** stars

Morning Glories Takes the Teen Mystery Graphic Novel Genre to a New Level

As I mentioned recently, I've discovered that graphic novels are the perfect answer for a person who doesn't have as much time to enjoy reading as many great stories as he used to (you know, parenthood).

Speaking of great stories, the last graphic novel I finished was Morning Glories Volume One: For a Better Future, from Image Comics. One of the first things I look for in a graphic novel is compelling cover art. This one, at first glance, looks like a simple prep-school story for adults, which in itself can often be a winning formula.

But what really got me more interested was that the characters looked slightly off, mysterious, and puzzling. The lack of description about what this story is all about added to the intrigue.

As one reviewer at Amazon notes, this is Lost meets The Breakfast Club. Six celebrated kids, who happen to all have the same birthday, arrive at a prestigious prep school. On the first day, the teachers and students set about trying to kill them and generally make their lives hell. There is also a monster that sweeps in with no rhyme or reason to stick his hands through the brains of random people at random times.

The interesting thing is that this doesn't appear to be yet-another teenage vampire tale. Through the first volume, I have no idea what it's about. But it's a page turner, and the characters are built so strongly and with just the right of scheming against each other that I'll definitely return to read subsequent volumes of this mysterious thrill ride.

**** out of ***** stars (with the right to give this more or fewer stars based on how the next chapters pan out)

Time to Take a "Stand" With Graphic Novels

Being a former English-lit undergrad and a voracious reader of novels, I never thought the day would come when it would take multiple months to get through a simple Oprah Book Club book (I may never get through Jonathan Franzen's Freedom!).

But such is fatherhood. In fact, I just canceled my New Yorker subscription after a strong 16-year run. I'll still read what I can of that magazine online. But I've really discovered the perfect format for great stories for the free-time challenged: graphic novels.

I bought a few recently. The first one I finished was one based on the first part of Stephen King's The Stand, which was probably the best novel I read before turning 16.

The Stand: Captain Trips, from the famed Marvel company, tells the tale of several Americans who mysteriously survive a killer virus, popularly referred to as "Captain Trips." While everyone else dies, they try to make sense of what is happening. The premise provides perfect drama, and I just ordered the next parts of this series.

Anyone half-way interested in a killer apocalypse tale should find this exquisitely drawn book. Better yet, read the 1,000-page-plus novel first, then read the comic (1,000 pages! That would take this proud papa half-a-year to get through).

***** out of ***** stars