Vertigo: Graphic Content

What are the most important days of your life?

DAYTRIPPER, the new limited comic books series by Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon coming in December, is a book like no other. It’s an amazing look at life that will stir your heart and move your spirit, but you don’t have to take my word for it.

“Beautifully written, utterly gorgeous. . . completely blew me away.” —Gerard Way (My Chemical Romance, The Umbrella Academy)

“DAYTRIPPER is a fascinating puzzle I will be contemplating for the rest of my life.” —Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise, Echo)

“This latest from the Brazilian wonder twins is surely their best looking work to date. In DAYTRIPPER, they give us a glimpse into an exotic yet believable
world. It makes you want to be there with them…!” —Paul Pope (100%, BATMAN: YEAR 100)

Here’s an extended preview:

February 2010 brings much to be excited for by Brian Wood. DMZ and NORTHLANDERS will be reaching significant milestones and DEMO Vol. 2 begins!

DMZ will be celebrating 50 with an oversized collection of short stories gathered by rookie journalist Matty Roth and illustrated by numerous, and may I say fantastic, artists, while NORTHLANDERS will be celebrating 25 with part 5 of the timely and compelling new 8 issue arc ‘The Plague Widow.’

Check out the covers:

DEMO Vol. 2 #1

DMZ #50

NORTHLANDERS #25

NORTHLANDERS Volume 3

AIR #18

CINDERELLA: From Fabletown With Love #4

FABLES #93

GREEK STREET #8

GREEK STREET Volume 1

HELLBLAZER #264

JACK OF FABLES #43

MADAME XANADU #20

SCALPED #36

SWEET TOOTH #6

TRANSMETROPOLITAN Volume 6

UNKNOWN SOLDIER #17

UNKNOWN SOLDIER Volume 2

Y: THE LAST MAN Deluxe Volume 3

IGN reviews THE UNWRITTEN #7 calling it “as engrossing and mysterious as it’s ever been.” Check out the full review here.

For those of you looking forward to what’s to come, a new storyline begins with issue #10! Tom finds himself in 1940 Stuttgart—a ghost city inhabited by the master liar of the Third Reich, Josef Goebbels.

Check out this imagery:

We all love a good story, right? The creators of THE UNWRITTEN certainly do. The series references major and minor works of literature alike. We’ve traveled across the globe from the India of the British Raj to the Villa Diodati, the Swiss Villa where John Milton penned Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein. We’ve seen cameos from famous writers (Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain) and fictional characters (Frankenstein and a character named Lizzie Hexam, from Charles Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend). It’s like a literary scavenger hunt.

Peter Gross, artist of THE UNWRITTEN has been kind enough to share his Top 5 Favorite Books with us:

Last month Mike Carey listed his top 5 favorite books and here I am a month later as the bookend to that piece! Working with Mike on THE UNWRITTEN has resulted in a lot of conversations and emails about great literary classics so it was fun for me to see what a low brow fantasy geek Mike really was underneath all that education and sophistication.

I think I look positively worldly in comparison…

1. The Oz books by L. Frank Baum.

Ok, I’m cheating right off the bat by mentioning 13 or so books in one fell swoop but I don’t really have a favorite among these (I have a least favorite—the first one, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, because it wasn’t illustrated by the brilliant John R. Neill). I first read these when I was in Catholic school (grades 2 and 3). They were probably the only books in the tiny school library that transported me out of that dreary place. And what I loved most were the drawings. I remembered them long after the stories were forgotten. They were fabulous then and they’re even better now.

About 12 years ago there was a set of hardbacks released recreating the original editions and I felt compelled to buy them even though I had no intention of reading them and only a vague recollection of enjoying them back in the day. For some reason I just needed to have them all in a row on a shelf in my house. Then, a couple years later my daughter, Alice was born and from the age of 2 on they became her religion. We’ve read them out loud, listened to them on book tape and collected old Oz toys at the San Diego con. She’s playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the piano as I write this.

Like Claude Chadron with his daughter in next month’s THE UNWRITTEN, (how’s that for a plug!) I bonded with my daughter over a series of books. But happily, we have a better relationship than poor Chadron seems to manage.

The more I’ve read them the more convinced I am that Baum was a genius. The books essentially have no plots; they’re more like travelogues through a strange world that he seemed to make up as he was going. It’s a world that can be infuriating to an adult’s logic but is absolutely in sync with a child’s.

2. Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin.

This book is about Winter and New York and the magic of bridges—but mostly it’s about the love of language. I’ve read it numerous times and loved it every time.

I recently downloaded an unabridged audiobook to listen to on those long nights when I’m inking pages and my mind is free to roam.

Some things are better read than heard…

3: The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

Best time travel book ever. Probably because that isn’t what it’s really about. It’s really about inserting a modern character into the world of 19th century literature and letting him fall into the secret history of the poets and authors of that time.

Wait a minute—that sounds vaguely familiar…

4. The Clown by Heinrich Böll.

I read this in college and was blown away by the melancholy of lost love and lost hope in post WWII Germany. And the guy can smell cabbage over the phone!

This is a great book.

5. Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge.

Another melancholy tale of doomed love and a way of life coming to an end. (Come to think of it, Winter’s Tale was about doomed love too.) LaFarge wrote this in the late 1920’s as his master’s thesis in anthropology and it won the Pulitzer Prize for novels in 1930. It’s about a Navajo Indian trying to live traditional way of life in a time when a new civilization is engulfing the old.

I loved how unexpected this book was in it’s honesty and uncompromising look at culture clash. It seemed years ahead of it’s time.

“A twisting supernatural tale that spans countries and eras,” says USA TODAY’s feature on LUNA PARK

And in case you missed them, THE ONION, IGN and UNDER THE RADAR reviewed CINDERELLA: From Fabletown with Love

Vertigo On the Ledge: with Kevin Baker, author of LUNA PARK

To quote Bruce Springsteen at the Oscars, thanks for letting me come to your party.

I’ve been a professional writer since I was thirteen years old, and since then I’ve written just about everything, but Luna Park is my first graphic novel. It was so much fun to do, I should have been paying the good people at DC (a joke).

The story is named after what was far and away the most beautiful and the weirdest of the three, original, lost amusement parks out at Coney Island—a continuing obsession of mine. It starts in the present, with the old Coney coming down—as, sadly, it is now—and a couple of Russian mobsters fighting to pick up the real estate bonanza that will remain. Alik is a shtarke for one side with a dark past from the Chechen wars, and a girlfriend who works as a fortuneteller and other things for his boss’s biggest rival. It’s a noir story, with a little time-traveling, a lot of history, and a twist at the end. (See if you can discover it; there are clues throughout the story.)

It’s also about Pushkin’s great poem The Bronze Horseman; the story of a young man in St. Petersburg in the 19th century, who loses his beloved in a great flood and goes mad. He imagines that the terrible bronze statue of Peter the Great in the main square has come to life and is chasing him through the city.

The metaphor is all about the terrible toll that Russian history takes. St. Petersburg was a beautiful, otherworldly city that cost thousands of laborers their lives to build, all for the glory of the emperor, and the state. But then, Russian history never ends well. It keeps doubling back to these awful tragedies in which ordinary people are crushed under the tyrant.

It seems like the mirror image of American history, where things always seem to end well (at least for some people). Where Russia’s great, surreal city lay on the edge of waters that regularly flooded and killed its inhabitants, Luna Park—also a surreal place, with its own, very Russian obelisks—was an amusement park by the ocean; a place of “manufactured fun” as its drunken visionary of an architect called it. Manufactured fun—an essentially American idea.

And yet, through the terrible confluence of the Cold War, the two nations’ destinies become intertwined. Hence the twist at the end. But enough words. The pictures will sell you. They’re by the fantastically talented Danijel Zezelj, whom I was privileged to work with. He alone is worth the price of admission to this funhouse. Enjoy!

—Kevin Baker

Join Kevin Baker and Danijel Zezelj
at BOOKCOURT
163 Court St, Brooklyn, NY 11201
(Between Dean St. and Pacific St.)
Thursday, November 19th
at 7:00 pm
as they discuss LUNA PARK

Favorite Coney Island Trivia
by Kevin Baker, author of the upcoming graphic novel LUNA PARK:

–Before the boardwalk was built in 1923, competing owners of Coney’s beach used to mark off their territory by rolling barbed wire across the sand and into the water.

–In 1884, one James Lafferty built an entire, 150-foot-tall, 34-room hotel on Coney…in the shape of an elephant. It even had a cigar shop in one of the legs and an observatory in the houdah.

–Both Luna Park and Dreamland, two of the three great, original amusement parks on Coney, had their own “Midget City”—enclosures built to scale for some 200 or so midgets and dwarves, who lived their year round. They had their own police and fire departments, which were supposed to be pretend, but when the great Dreamland fire broke out in 1911, the park’s midget fire company responded to the call and acquitted itself credibly.

–Not one but two infamous New York gangsters named “Kid Twist” were murdered on Coney Island, and each murder prompted one of the great sayings of gangland: “I could do that standing on my head” and “This bird could sing but he couldn’t fly.”

–The scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, in which a family lives under a roller coaster, was based on the real, Coney Island, “Thunderbolt” coaster. Until a few years ago, the ruins of the ride could still be seen next to the Keyspan Ballpark (formerly the site of Steeplechase Park). Right underneath the roller coaster was the Kensington Hotel, which later became a private residence for many years.

–Coney’s record crowd is thought to have showed up on July 4, 1947. On that day, commemorated in a memorable Weegee photograph, an estimated 1.2 million people crowded the beach and parks—better than one in every seven people living in New York City at the time.

–Early in the twentieth century, patrons enjoyed “electric bathing,” feeling their way out into the ocean at night along rope lines, tied to poles with electric lights at the top.

–Deno’s Wonder Wheel is technically the world’s only combination Ferris Wheel and roller coaster, since the cabs swing forward and backward on short rail lengths as the wheel turns.

–Patrons departing the steeplechase ride at Steeplechase Park had to exit across a stage where jet air holes blew up women’s skirts, and men and women alike were attacked by a dwarf in a harlequin’s suit wielding a cattle prod, all for the amusement of their fellow patrons watching in the “Laughing Gallery.”

–Benches on the old Coney Island were electrified, in order to give a little zetz to anyone who rested too long in between spending money.

–When Steeplechase Park, the first real amusement park, closed in 1964, it was bought by Donald Trump’s father, a developer. He decided to raze it to the ground, and held a party at which guests were given bricks to throw through the fabled glass trellis that enclosed the park.

Tom’s locked up in Donostia Prison, but death still surrounds him. Placed in solo confinement he confronts the mystery of his own nature and the significance of the epic poem “The Song of Roland.”

Preview THE UNWRITTEN #7

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