Dan Nadel
Like a lot of good adventure stories, Charles Burns’s graphic novel X’ed Out begins in the dark. Alternating color fields give way to black, and then our first image: the silhouetted head of Tintin, the character created by the classic cartoon artist Herge. A panel later it becomes clear that it’s not Tintin we’re looking at, but a character named Nitnit, who wakes up and follows his black cat, Inky (Tintin’s white dog was named Snowy), through more darkness: this time into a hole in a brick wall that leads to a sand-hued landscape worthy of Herge himself. A few David Mazzucchelli is not a casual cartoonist. There are no accidents in his comics world; he takes every element into account, from ink and color to paper and binding—which makes the apparent spontaneity and easy naturalism of his work both beguiling and convincing. His pictorial world has expanded over the course of two decades and across a variety of publications and genres, from the noir realism of Daredevil (1984–86) and Batman: Year One (1986–87) to the fablelike tales of Rubber Blanket (1991–93) to the epic character study that is his first graphic novel, Asterios Polyp. The key to these projects The first thing to know about Herbie Popnecker is that he’s a good-for-nothing—a fat layabout who doesn’t say much. The other thing to know is that he’s feared and respected the world over. Occasionally. He’s also basically a god. Or at least that’s how Richard Hughes (writing under the name Shane O’Shea) and Ogden Whitney depict him. Herbie first appeared in 1958 in issue 73 of Forbidden Worlds, an anthology title released by the second-tier publishing outfit American Comics Group. It was an otherwise throwaway story called “Herbie’s Quiet Saturday Afternoon,” one not much different from the whimsical fantasies ACG