Rare Bits

Beanworld Volume #3: Remember Here When You Are There!

Author: Larry Marder

Publisher: Dark Horse      Price: 19.95 US

Few comics I have read completely engross me in their world to the point where I have dreams about the environments and characters. Larry Marder’s Beanworld is one of those. Last year I first discovered the joys of Beanworld when I picked up Volumes 1 and 2, both published by Dark Horse. Having vaguely remembered hype about this comic in pages of Wizard magazine as a youth, I was interested in finding out what this comic had in store.

I was happily surprised to find that Beanworld was better than any hype I had heard or read. Try reading the first comic and not want to follow the adventures of the beans into the next volumes. It’s impossible.

Very few indie comics have an all ages appeal like Beanworld. It’s absolutely accessible for kids from age 5 to senior citizens, a very rare thing. While this is a review of Volume 3, I would recommend first buying and reading the first two volumes, it will help you enter into the unique and dream-like world of the beans.

Volume 3 is the first Beanworld story to be told in over 15 years (volumes 1 and 2 reprint the original run of the comic from 1985 to 1993), and it doesn’t disappoint. The transition from volume 2 to volume 3 happens so seamlessly you wouldn’t notice that a bean’s age has passed since the last comic was sold in the early 1990’s. It’s pages are full of fun and magic. Larry Marder’s bold minimalism allows room for the reader to fill in the gaps.

Larry Marder in his afterward, mentions how this volume ends the “spring time” cycle of the Beanworld cosmos. It’s a delightful thought that we have three more seasons of Beanworld tales coming down the pike. While it would be hard for me to give an accurate account of what the Beanworld story is about, it’s best that you experience it for yourself.

If you enjoy comics that transport you to a new world and characters you will come to love. I cannot recommend all three volumes of the Beanworld story highly enough.

Skyscrapers of the Midwest

Author: Joshua W. Cotter

Publisher: Adhouse Books      Price: $19.95

From a world of fantasy, to another kind of creature all together. Skyscrapers of the Midwest, is a beautifully bound book filled with imaginative nightmares and banal moments of childhood in the American midwest. Like Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Joshua Cotter takes on how it feels to grow up in an evangelical Christian community, one that takes no account for the suffering and death that happen all around those who ignore it. Unlike many “graphic novels” that have come out lately, Skyscrapers of the Midwest doesn’t hold its punches when depicting rough subjects with an imaginative clarity usually saved for the fictions of Michael Chabon or Chris Adrian.

It does take some time to get into the world Cotter shows us, getting past the anthropomorphic feline humanoids and learning the cosmic language of robots and cicadas. Perhaps this is the main structural problem I find with Skyscrapers of the Midwest, that the choice to use non-human characters can be off putting for the otherwise seriously well-thought out images and stories.

Most haunting is the moment of baptism that occurs in the second part of the book. The struggle between childhood belief and adult doubt are mixed in a terrifying vision of toy backpacks accusing a miss-baptism on account of non-belief. For those who have never undergone the existential grief of being a Christian teenager fearing hell at every turn, this section may be lost; but, for this reviewer, it made my spine tingle.

While Skyscrapers of the Midwest is not for everyone, it is worth it for the art alone. Beautifully executed hatching have rarely been so lovingly placed on the page. Many slow panels of landscapes and robots (even one mimicking the Genesis creation story) are not meant to show off Cotter’s ability (like some cartoonists do often) but give gravity to emotional spirit of the story.