Arkham Woods - Christopher Rowley

Let me start out by saying that I'm not overly fond of the manga format, especially for graphic novels that weren't published in Japan to start with. Doing a story that way strikes me as being almost as pretentious as not using quotation marks in fiction.

That said, I can get used to it once I start reading, and as a result, ARKHAM WOODS turns out to be fairly entertaining.

This graphic novel was written by Christopher Rowley, the author of a number of well-regarded science fiction and fantasy novels (none of which I've read, although I remember seeing some of them), and drawn by Jhomar Soriano, a Filipino artist with whom I'm not familiar at all. As you'd probably suspect from the title, this is straight-out Lovecraftian horror. Teenage Kirsti Rivers moves with her artist mother from L.A. to the creepy New England town of Arkham Woods, where Kirsti's mother plans to sell the even creepier old house she's inherited. Kirsti makes a few friends, outcasts like herself, and when they discover that there's a mysterious pattern etched into the floor of the house's basement, you can probably guess as well as I did what they're going to do about it. That's right, they poke around until they start a chain of events in motion that's not going to end well.

Despite the maybe a little too familiar plot, the characters are likable for the most part and the story moves along at a nice pace. Also, this may well be the only graphic novel where a tentacled monster drives a bulldozer, and you've got to like that. I don't see any reason why ARKHAM WOODS couldn't have been done in a traditional format, but you can just chalk that up to my curmudgeonly nature, I suppose. That didn't keep me from enjoying it.

Batman: Death Mask

I’m not much of a manga fan. I don’t like a lot of the artwork, and reading right to left always throws me. However, I’m willing to give one a try every now and then when it looks interesting, and as you can see from the cover, if you’re a Batman fan like me, this definitely looks interesting.

And as it turns out, BATMAN: DEATH MASK is a really good graphic novel. The story finds Bruce Wayne getting involved with a somewhat shady Japanese industrialist and winds up with Batman embroiled in an action-packed plot featuring murder victims who have their faces sliced off, a Japanese ceremonial mask with an ancient curse on it, a beautiful young woman who’s a dead ringer for one of Bruce Wayne’s old lovers, flashbacks to Bruce’s martial arts training in Japan before he becomes Batman, evil secrets from the past rising up to menace the present like something out of a Ross Macdonald novel, and a bunch of American gangsters. Whew. As you can tell, the pace in this story never slows down much. I even got used to reading backwards.

The story and art are by Yoshinori Natsume. Needless to say, I’d never read any of his work before. But I certainly would again, especially if it was another Batman graphic novel, because DEATH MASK is one of the best Batman yarns I’ve read in quite a while.