#ComicsWednesday: Atomic Blonde: The Coldest City by Antony Johnston & Sam Hart

I really enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road (a.k.a. the car chase movie with interesting female characters), so when I saw previews for Atomic Blonde, another action film starring Charlize Theron, I was excited. So before I saw the movie, I checked out the comic it was based on, The Coldest City (the library's copy is retitled Atomic Blonde: The Coldest City to tie in with the film release), and I can tell you that the comic and the movie are meant for different audiences.


The Coldest City was written by Antony Johnston and illustrated by Sam Hart. Hart's striking black and white artwork with its focus on the characters set the story's emotional tone for me as a reader. I admire Hart's use of shadows to convey the way that secrets were hidden and revealed. The plot was an unremarkable spy story with twists and double crosses I didn't find all that surprising, though the story's setting in Berlin just before the wall came down marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War was interesting.

The plot follows a hunt for a list of the true identity of all spies active in Europe (more or less a MacGuffin) and features a female character in a sea of men who underestimate her. Regardless of the book's historical setting, I expect more from a book written in 2012 than I do one written in 1989, and found this choice exhausting.

The film adaption largely removes the importance of sexism to the plot, and swaps two speaking roles from men to women. However, when you add in the film's increased emphasis on graphically violent action sequences, this change is problematic at best (spoilers). The filmmakers also place a great deal of care into the soundtrack and some strikingly colorful visuals, creating a very different tone from the comic.

The movie was okay, but I prefer action movies with an emphasis on fun over gritty (the above gif was maybe the only funny part). What I really appreciated about the film was the way it made me reexamine my experience of the comic. At first read, The Coldest City seemed bland and predictable, but the movie helped me to appreciate its comparative subtlety and how the use of an unreliable narrator creates space for ambiguity.

~Sarah, Adult Services

#ComicsWednesday: Primates: the fearless science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas by Jim Ottaviani & Maris Wicks

Jim Ottaviani has made a career of taking the lives and complex discoveries of scientists and mathematicians and translating them into accessible graphic novels (with the help of various talented artists). In Primates, Ottaviani worked with Maris Wicks to tell the story of three groundbreaking primatologists: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas.

This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in natural science, women's history, or animals, whether or not you know the difference between a chimpanzee and an orangutan. Ottaviani and Wicks captured some of the difficult realities of scientific fieldwork in remote locations, while giving the highlights of our relatively recent understanding of primate behavior.

While this comic is kept in our children's collection, I'd recommend that parents read this book along with younger readers who might have questions about such difficult topics as sexism, gorilla poaching, and Dian Fossey's death. Though Wicks's engaging, cartoon-ish art helps to keep the tone from becoming too dark, this book is probably a better fit for tweens, teens, and interested adults.

Primates serves as an excellent introduction to the lives and works of three incredible, inspiring female scientists that readers of all ages are likely to enjoy. You'll probably find yourself looking through the provided bibliography in order to learn even more!

~Sarah, Adult Services

#ComicsWednesday: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 1 by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, & Rico Renzi

I love everything about Squirrel Girl. Just getting it out of the way, this is definitely not an unbiased review. She is my favorite superhero, hands down. I want to be her best friend.

All that aside, this hardcover collection of the first eight issues of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is absolutely delightful. Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics, Romeo and/or Juliet) has created a funny, strong, smart hero in Doreen Green, a.k.a. the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. A human girl with the proportional strength and speed of a squirrel, and also a large squirrel tail that she stuffs into her pants to be less conspicuous. Armed with her wits, her kick-butt abilities, her best friend the squirrel Tippy Toe, her awesome friend and roommate Nancy, and Deadpool's Guide to Super Villain cards, Squirrel Girl can beat anyone. She's unbeatable. In addition, North adds some informational running commentary at the bottom of each page.

Erica Henderson and Rico Renzi (Spider-Gwen, Howard the Duck) give us amazing art and coloring, a fresh take on the traditional comic style. The characters look realistic, and Squirrel Girl's outfit is practical - function over fashion. There are digressions into Squirrel Girl's "past" that are presented as classic comics. These comics are illustrated in that recognizable comic style of yesteryear. They are ridiculous (in a good way), and feature Squirrel Girl meeting Iron Man for the first time, and teaming up with Captain America.


Read this if you like Lumberjanes, Bee and Puppycat, Deadpool, or any number of other irreverent and weird comics. This is a great starter for new comic readers, young and old alike.

Squirrel Girl is an awesome role model for younger readers. She's going to college for computer science, she's body-positive, she's funny and confident. She has her own theme song (which is sung to the tune of the Spider-man theme). She talks to squirrels. She's here to eat nuts and kick butts, and she's all out of nuts.

- Libby, Youth Services

#ComicsWednesday: PREZ Volume 1: Corndog-In-Chief by Mark Russell, Ben Caldwell, & Mark Morales

I don't really read a lot of DC comics. I'm more of a Marvel or BOOM! girl, myself, but sometimes a comic just calls to me. PREZ: Corndog-In-Chief was one such comic. The USA's first teenage president, elected by twitter vote in an effort from hacker group Anonymous to overthrow the status quo?

COUNT ME IN.

Beth Ross, a.k.a. the star of viral internet video Corndog Girl, is elected as the next President of the United States in 2036. This United States is a not-so-distant dystopian future, full of automated sentry drones, a wealth gap larger than any before, and an epidemic of the deadly cat flu. Corporations call the shots, and congress is full of mega-rich idiots. Poor citizens will literally shoot themselves in the leg on national television for the chance to win some money. Enter: Corndog Girl. Beth navigates the intense job of being the leader of a country everyone hates, and trying to make right the wrongs that have plagued the nation. Beth is smart and she surrounds herself with smart people, and also a sentient killer robot named Tina.

There is so much going on in this comic, that I can't even begin to describe it all. Writer Mark Russell is a newer voice in comics, and he hit this one out of the park. Ben Caldwell (Justice League Beyond) and Mark Morales (X-Force, Secret Invasion) have a unique and interesting style, perfect for the tone of the comic. PREZ: Corndog-In-Chief is a reboot of 1973 comic PREZ. 

 If you liked the dystopian aspect of The Hunger Games, but wanted a little more humor, this is for you. If you like the idea of a teenager being POTUS, this is for you. If you're sick of the news and want to laugh about politics for a change, this is for you. Basically, just read it. I promise you won't regret it.

-Libby, Youth Services

#WCW Woman Crush Wednesday: Imperator Furiosa

There are many reasons I loved Mad Max: Fury Road. I loved the guy tied to a truck with bungee cords playing a guitar that shoots flames. I love that to make this movie the director actually had an actor attached to a truck with bungee cords play a guitar that actually shot flames. I love that this movie was essentially one long, glorious car chase. But most of all, I loved Imperator Furiosa.

I love action movies: the adventure, the explosions, the lone hero (or rag tag band) fighting impossible odds to save the day. Unfortunately, your standard action movie also tend to have at most one female character, and she's generally the one who needs saving, the hero's love interest, or both. Not so with Fury Road: Imperator Furiosa is the literal driving force of the movie's story. Even with a minimum of dialogue, the movie introduces a varied cast of characters (female and male) with distinct motivations.

Bonus #wcw Melissa Jaffer as Keeper of the Seeds saying "Kaboom!"

Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is on a mission to save a group of young women imprisoned as wives to a warlord, while Mad Max (Tom Hardy) is merely carried along for the ride. I don't want to drop any big spoilers in case you're waiting for the DVD or Blu-Ray (release date: September 1st), but this was one of my favorite movies of 2015 and I highly recommend you check it out.

#WCW Woman Crush Wednesday: Tatiana Maslany

As librarians, we put the priority on what you, the members of our community, will like and not just on the things that we like. That said, when I really, really like something, it can be hard not to gush about it to everyone. So it's possible that if you've asked me for a TV recommendation in the last year that I handed you the first season of Orphan Black.

With the third season of Orphan Black coming out next week, it seemed like a good opportunity to gush about my admiration for Tatiana Maslany yet again. Tatiana Maslany is unquestionably the star of Orphan Black as she plays five of the series' central characters (in addition to several other characters who appear once or twice). That she manages to make each of these characters so distinct is nothing short of remarkable. Of course, there is a fair amount of technical wizardry to create scenes where two, three, or more of Maslany's characters interact, but the truth is Orphan Black's success comes down to Maslany's own skills as an actress. The only thing surprising about Tatiana Maslany's Emmy nomination for Best Actress in a Drama Series is that this was her first nomination.

#WCW Women Crush Wednesday- Cast of the "Ghostbusters" remake

By now, you've probably heard that Ghostbusters is being remade with the main characters as women. There have been some grumblings about this, but I can't understand how a new Ghostbusters film starring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and my favorite current Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon could possibly be a bad thing.

Accessed at: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/07/10/comic-con-2015-ghostbusters-gets-first-official-cast-photo

While we're waiting for it to come out, watch some movies starring the new Ghostbusters.

Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader are the Skeleton Twins, a brother and sister who haven't seen each other in ten years, but come together after they both suffer a tragedy.

Melissa McCarthy stars as a single mom whose 12-year old son sparks a friendship with their neighbor played by Bill Murray. (I wonder if McCarthy and Murray talked about ghostbusting while shooting St. Vincent.)

Leslie Jones is on Saturday Night Live and has a role in Chris Rock's Top Five, where Rock plays a comedian trying to become a serious actor.

Kate McKinnon is a current Saturday Night Live cast member and has done some voice work on The Venture Bros.

#WCW Woman Crush Wednesday: Ursula K. Le Guin

Photo Copyright © by Marian Wood Kolisch

When Rachel wrote her review of The Dispossessed this weekend, I was reminded of how much I love Ursula K Le Guin's writing, which made her an obvious pick for this week's #WCW

I'm not a native Dubuquer, and I attended high school in a small Wisconsin town where the public library was small enough that the entire building would've fit in Carnegie-Stout's children's department. As a teenager who loved fantasy novels, I would check out any book with a unicorn sticker on the spine, so it wasn't long before I stumbled across A Wizard of Earthsea. I liked Earthsea okay, but it was her stories of the Hainish Ekumen that I returned to again and again.

The attention and detail she put into the people and societies in her stories captured my imagination. Her writing was a significant influence in my decision to major in anthropology as an undergrad, and I was only a little surprised that the "K" in her name stands for Kroeber. Her parents, Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, were early anthropologists of some note. Alfred Kroeber was, fittingly enough, one of the topics for my senior research paper on the history of anthropological theories.

Le Guin remains the standard by which I judge science fiction to this day, even as my tastes have changed and grown over time. I suspect that I wouldn't have quite the same reaction to reading her books for the first time today as I did when I was a teen, but it's equally true that if I hadn't read her books as a teen, I would not have become the person that I am today.

~Sarah, Adult Services

#WCW WomanCrushWednesday: Cheryl Strayed

No author has affected my life in the past few years as much as Cheryl Strayed has.

Photo found at http://www.cherylstrayed.com/

I loved Strayed before I knew her name. TheRumpus.net is an online magazine whose advice column, Dear Sugar, was a favorite of mine because of its honest, humorous, and heartfelt offerings. The column was done anonymously, but a few years ago, it was revealed that Strayed was Sugar. Some of my favorite Sugar-given advice is, “Every last one of us can do better than give up”; “The only way out of a hole is to climb out”; and “Be brave enough to break your own heart”. Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of her Dear Sugar columns and I highly recommend you read it.

A few years ago, when I finished the first chapter of her memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, I put the book down and with tears in my eyes, said out loud to no one, "If the rest of the book is like that, I cannot handle it." In the book, Strayed's mom dies of cancer and at the time, my mom was four years cancer-free. I didn't want to read about a mom, anyone's mom, dying of cancer. I did get through the book and it remains a favorite of mine. I'm a person who prefers not to feel emotions and that book made me feel so immensely that I should have thrown it across the room and instead, I embraced it. I embraced it so much that when a friend told me his mom didn't like Wild because Cheryl Strayed wasn't prepared for the hike she takes in the book, I actually told him to tell his mom to come say that to my face. No one says anything bad about Cheryl Strayed around me.

When my mom was rediagnosed with cancer in mid-2013, I could not look at my copy of Wild (sometimes just a glance at the book would make me tear up), but I frequently turned to Tiny Beautiful Things and a poster with Dear Sugar quotes I had on the wall above my computer. I can't say I always took to heart sayings like "The thing about rising is we have to continue upward. The thing about going beyond is we have to keep going", "The unifying theme is resilience and faith", and the above-mentioned "Every last one of us can do better than to give up", but I wanted to. As I'm sure many other people who've read Strayed's work can attest, Strayed makes you want to hope, makes you want to try. Some days, I would see "The only way out of a hole is to climb out" and think, "Maybe today, it's okay for me to stay in my hole, but tomorrow, I'll get started on climbing out of it."

My mom died in October 2014 and again, Strayed helped me, this time with her advice of "Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start there." "Gutted" is the perfect word to describe how I felt when my mom died and one of the reasons I'm not curled up in a ball on the floor is Cheryl Strayed and her advice. For that, she's my WomanCrush.

~Aisha