ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, the film, had its debut at the Sundance Film Festival over the past couple of weeks. It will be a couple of months before it trickles into theatres, and before the screenplay hits store shelves, but there’s nothing quite like a real nice and early peek, is there?

CONFIDENTIAL is the story of a young and talented artist named Jerome. Hoping to be the one-in-a-hundred artist who can make an actual living at it, he heads off to a prestigious art school and finds himself lost amongst bitter professors, egotistical students, poseurs, incomprehensible women, and a mysterious serial killer picking off the locals. In short: he’s in way over his head. But when he catches his first glimpse of nude model Audrey, he’s too smitten to do anything but pour himself wholeheartedly into this bleak and bizarre world. Then all he has to do is figure out how to navigate himself through it and live to tell the tale.

The screenplay is meant as a satire on the art culture, and it speaks volumes to its effectiveness that you don’t have to have been anywhere near it to get the joke. No matter what sort of work you do or talents you possess, we all know the people that surround Jerome. They’re in our offices, and our schools, too. So I give high marks to Clowes for hitting his target. But that doesn’t mean that the script necessarily works as a whole.

Satire is a tricky animal. It requires that a balance be struck between the absurdity and the strength of the story actually being told within its framework, and that’s where ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL runs into some problems. The underlying serial killer plot is a perfectly bizarre piece of the puzzle, but Clowes stretches aspects of how it plays out to the point where it stops feeling like it fits in the film. That would be fine if the rest of the script was full of characters and moments that felt as stretched, but he plays most of the satirical elements so close to reality that you have trouble buying in to what Clowes’ final statement spells out in the last ten pages (I won’t spoil it for you).

Of course, that isn’t to say that it won’t all play out much better on screen. The reviews that came out of Sundance were mixed, which upon reading this didn’t surprise me, but what it boils down to is that another collaboration between Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff (after GHOST WORLD) remains a must see, simply for the sheer curiosity factor. Qualms about the script notwithstanding.

Fantagraphics’ book design also includes the original ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL cartoon strip from EIGHTBALL #7, and will have color still photos from the film, also.

LUCIFER’S GARDEN OF VERSES VOL.3
Written and Drawn by Lance Tooks
Published by NBM

Fitting in thematically this week is the third volume in Tooks’ series of graphic novels that feature Lucifer as either hero or villain in some fashion. The subtitle for the story is THE STUDENT… OR NUDE DESCENDIGN A STAIRCASE… HEAD FIRST, and focuses on a young African-American artist named Andree Baldwin who brokers his soul to the devil (disguised as an influential art critic) in exchange for mainstream artistic success and fame. But as we all know, there’s always a catch when you sign on the dotted line… especially when you do so in blood.

Like ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, Tooks’ work is a blunt satire on the art world, though this book focuses more on the actual scene that artists are faced with after they’ve done their training and thrown themselves out into the world and into the hands of the wolves. Tooks satire, however, starts in a very dark place and never really leaves, making it a more consistent take on his milieu. He also uses his pen to examine how racism and reverse racism play a role in art as well, giving you a stinging wallop in the head and trying to make you think. This is the second one of Tooks’ books I’ve read, as I reviewed volume one when it came out a while back, and I’m here to tell you: this guy is really, really good.

SPAWN: SHADOWS OF SPAWN VOL.1
Written and Drawn by Juzo Tokoro
Published by Image Comics

What is this, you ask? It’s SPAWN, manga-style, as the licensed version that ran in Japan finally makes its way to the U.S. in translated form. And like most other manga, it remains in the digest format and reads right-to-left. It also happens to be surprisingly good.

Our protagonist is a hired ass-kicker named Ken Kurosawa, who lives for really only one thing: taking care of his sick younger sister, Mariko. But when someone takes revenge upon him for his deeds and blows up his car, he fights to get back to life and take care of her, but gets the short end of the bargain when he gets back to Earth seven years later in the form of a hellspawn. As with Andree Baldwin above, you should never trust the deal you get from the devil.

The set-up is very similar to what we got with Al Simmons in the regular SPAWN title, and it is to this book’s credit that it stays within continuity and acknowledges Simmons’ character and travails. Simmons’ nemesis, The Clown, is a primary character in this book, and it would be weird if Tokoro ignored that fact. What intrigued me, though, was how much more I found that I liked Ken than I did Al when his adventures started. Simmons may have loved his wife, but he rarely has felt as accessible as Ken does, and it’s a testament to Tokoro that he found a way to make a thug so identifiable. Really, very well done stuff.

THE PROSE ALWAYS KNOWS

I’m way behind on catching up with all the prose material I’ve had sitting here, so let’s dive into the pile, shall we?

THE EDUCATION OF A COMICS ARTIST
Edited by Michael Dooley and Steven Heller
Published by Allworth Press

The press materials for this book call it “a portable comics convention,” but I’d say that it’s more of a semester-long seminar in comics creation and history. EDUCATION is a collection of essays and interviews, running the gamut from writers to artists to editors to critics. You’ll find pieces on such things as the nature of offensive cartoons, the history of KATY KEENE, the realism approach to sequential art, and mini-comics, and that’s just a start. The entire book is littered with information, and you can easily see yourself sitting in a class, listening to these creators talk in a sort of INSIDE THE ACTORS STUDIO forum, absorbing the incredible knowledge they’re bringing to the table. The book also contains one of the last interviews granted by the great Will Eisner.

The one thing I’d have liked to see a bit more of was actual art. There are many illustrations in the book, but not as many as I would have anticipated. I’m not sure if it would have been cost prohibitive, but after a while, the relatively small amount of reproduced panel work did stick out to me. That said, I still recommend the book to anyone looking for a college course that they can take wherever they go.

PHILIP MARLOWE’S GUIDE TO LIFE
Written by Raymond Chandler
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Fans of noir detective fiction will groove on this philosophy guide made of selected quotes from the great Chandler’s work. His hard-boiled, bare-knuckled style of pulp fiction set the stage for generations of imitators and wannabes, but all it takes is one look at this book to be reminded of why Chandler will always be the master.

Pick any random page and you’ll find a gem. “I drank two cups black. Then I tried a cigarette. It was all right. I still belonged to the human race.” “His long fingers made movements like dying butterflies.” “A kiss doesn’t seem to mean much nowadays.” “It was a crisp morning, with just enough snap in the air to make life seem simple and sweet, if you didn’t have too much on your mind. I did.” Zesty, tasty stuff, and to this do, no one else is doing work that even comes close.

The book is printed at pocket-size, even a bit smaller than a standard paperback, making it easily portable, and has a fantastic picture of Sunset Boulevard from 1940 adorning the cover. Sweet stuff.

GATHERING PEARLS
Written by William K. Schuh
Published by Bedside Books

PEARLS is the story of two doctors (and former friends) who find their lives re-intertwined when one’s child takes ill with leukemia. Mike Hamilton, an oncologist with a gift for magic tricks and love for kids is our hero; dealing with a lot of guilt from his childhood and over his mother’s long-term illness, he struggles to make peace with himself and live a decent life. His nemesis is former college roommate Greg Jameson, a surgeon so consumed with his own ego and his job that he has all but abandoned his alcoholic wife and their two children, even though he still lives with them in their house. He’s also a serial philanderer who may have finally gotten his comeuppance with a sexual harassment suit brought on by one of his nurses. But first, he’s going to have to deal with the fact that his oldest son is very ill, and the best doctor in the state happens to be a man he now hates.

I was deeply engaged by Schuh’s work, as he managed to make a topic I would have normally lacked interest in quite involving. Mike is a man of great feeling and heart, and Schuh does a terrific job of rounding out his past and giving depth and reason for why Mike became the man of compassion he is as the book gets underway. Each step Hamilton goes through feels earned and real. Unfortunately, as good as Schuh does with Mike, he does as poorly with Greg. The author seems so focused on making sure we know how bad Greg is that he all but twirls his moustache and ties his family to train tracks. That lessens the impact Greg’s transformations late in the story, because they feel more like the product of a deus ex machina rather than the natural progression of the story. Still, that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for Hamilton’s story. I think if Schuh gets to a point where he trusts the readers to follow his intentions at a more subtle level, he’ll be just fine.

See you in seven.

Review materials may be sent to: Marc Mason, P.O. Box 26732, Tempe, AZ 85285. You can also find me at Happy Nonsense and The Comics Waiting Room

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