Torn About the Eisners, and a Bookstore Appearance

The new Eisner Nominations for “Best Publication for Kids (ages 8-12)” present me with a dilemma:

• Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)
• Amulet Book 5: Prince of the Elves, by Kazu Kibuishi (Scholastic)
• Cow Boy: A Boy and His Horse, by Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos (Archaia)
• Crogan’s Loyalty, by Chris Schweizer (Oni)
• Hilda and the Midnight Giant, by Luke Pearson (Nobrow)
• Road to Oz, by L. Frank Baum, adapted by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young (Marvel)

Braden Lamb generously collaborated with me on “The Greatest Spy Ever,” our contribution to The Greatest Comics Anthology of All Time.

Eric Shanower gently gave me my first tips on writing for comics, and less gently the valuable encouragement to just get started: “Page One, Panel 1….” Years back, he illustrated my short story “Jack Pumpkinhead’s Day in Court.”

I even owe Chris Schweizer for reacting so politely to my worry about his eighteenth-century characters, as in Crogan’s Loyalty, having facial hair—which would be all wrong for the eighteenth-century British Empire.

So I don’t know whom to root for. But tomorrow afternoon Braden and I, along with his partner in all things, Shelli Paroline; our publisher, Dan Mazur; and Fletcher Hanks successor Joey Peters, will be selling and signing books at Comicopia in Boston’s Kenmore Square neighborhood. Braden and Shelli will be there from noon to three; Dan, Joey, and I have the three-to-six shift. This is one of the short-notice events that popped up after this spring’s Boston Comic Con had to be indefinitely postponed because, you may have heard, the whole metro area was shut down yesterday.

Three Thieves and the Danger of Trilogic Assumptions

This weekend I read The Captive Prince, volume 3 of Scott Chantler’s Three Thieves series.

Back when I was enjoying the first volume, Tower of Treasure, I got the impression that this was a trilogy. And I wasn’t alone. At YA Books Central, editor Francesca Amendolia called that book “The first of a trilogy.” Stephen at Page 45 guessed the same. Robot 6 referred to the “Tower of Treasure trilogy” earlier this year (mixing up the series and volume titles).

Maybe the “Three” in the series title spilled over into our expectations for three volumes. Maybe the first volume announced a couple of titles ahead. Maybe a trilogy is a default setting for multi-volume fantasies. I note that even Chris Schweizer, who as creator of the Crogan Adventures series is certainly not wedded to three volumes, assumed back in 2009 that Chantler’s upcoming project would be “an adventure trilogy.”

That wouldn’t matter except for the expectations that assumption set up as I read The Captive Prince. The overarching plot of the series involves teen-aged acrobat Dessa’s search for her brother, kidnapped years before. In or just before the last volume, we can assume, she’ll discover her brother’s fate; odds are 99-1 that she’ll rescue him in some way.

This volume showed Dessa meeting a slightly smaller boy—the captive prince, oddly named Paladin. Naturally I expected that he’d turn out to be Dessa’s brother, adopted by childless royals. Or perhaps Dessa and her brother were royal all along. We’ve all seen that happen, right?

But instead The Captive Prince kept setting up Dessa and Paladin as a young romantic couple. And as the story moved closer and closer to the volume’s final pages, I started feeling like Han Solo in this viral video.

But it turned out that this wasn’t the series’s last volume. As Chantler assured me on Twitter, and as he assured Schweizer years back, he planned Three Thieves to fill seven volumes. So Dessa has plenty of time to find her brother and return to this prince. But first I need to reread The Captive Prince with an open mind. It’ll be much less creepy that way.

Crogan’s Moral Uncertainty

Crogan’s Vengeance, by Chris Schweizer, is a nicely told pirate comic. I especially liked the panels’ timing. There’s a moment on page 56 when I lost the narrative logic, but the other 184 pages sailed by.

Schweizer draws in a “cartoony” style and offers lots of visual humor. His lettering is thick, usually leaving space for only one character to speak per panel. That overall look makes for a curious mix with characters who take themselves very seriously and a story with a high body count.

The main story includes no female characters with dialogue, but it is set on a pirate ship, after all. There’s an important female character in the framing story, but she’s the antagonist, an elderly lady who wants kids to stay off her lawn.

That narrative frame for Crogan’s Vengeance raises the biggest questions in my mind. In the first six comics pages and the last three, young Eric Crogan’s father sets up the story of their pirate ancestor as a lesson in dealing with “a situation of moral uncertainty.”

So what do we learn from the pirate yarn in between? Like most pirate tales, it’s full of attacks, counterattacks, subterfuges, mutinies, storms, shipwrecks, strandings, brawls, whippings, and duels. There’s also a treasure, though we hear about it more than we see it.

Also like most pirate tales, the story is close to amoral. Readers root for one greedy, sneaky group instead of another because:

• The first group is slightly less ruthless than the second, and/or
• The narrative point of view forces our hand.

Both factors apply in Crogan’s Vengeance.

In the end Catfoot halts a particularly bullying pirate from sacking a port on a English-speaking Caribbean island. To me that would come across as more heroic if the story hadn’t established that Catfoot has several selfish reasons for doing what he does: personal revenge, winning back treasure, keeping the region safe for pirates, simple survival.

As a reward Catfoot receives a British letter of marque—a license to commit piracy on other empires for the duration of whatever war has just broken out. Of course, the British officials we’ve seen are craven incompetents, not worthy of such protection. This simply extends how Crogan’s Vengeance depicts all life at sea as an unjust struggle to survive. The reward thus comes across not as Crogan’s redemption in a “situation of moral uncertainty” but as another excuse for amoral behavior.

Or, as Eric’s dad explains, “Catfoot was given free rein to plunder…provided he kept to a set of rules.” How’s that for a valuable lesson about life?

(Here's a glimpse of Catfoot Crogan later in life, imparting a valuable lesson to his own son.)