An engaging and ambitious coming-of-age graphic novel that is based on the memoirs of three girls/women, each of them Asian, at 16, tacking back and fAn engaging and ambitious coming-of-age graphic novel that is based on the memoirs of three girls/women, each of them Asian, at 16, tacking back and forth between their stories, though focused on what it might have been like for them at the iconic age of 16, one in Guangdong in 1954, one in Hong Kong in 1972 the third in Toronto in 2000. Besides facing concerns about looks, relationships, career hopes, the book also looks at how war at the time impacted the girls. Accessible, with humor and compassion. Recommended!...more
My first masterpiece graphic novel of 2024, Thomas Girtin: A Forgotten Painter (2023) by Oscar Zarate, a 384 page tome, couches a biography of a conteMy first masterpiece graphic novel of 2024, Thomas Girtin: A Forgotten Painter (2023) by Oscar Zarate, a 384 page tome, couches a biography of a contemporary of British watercolorist, J. M. W. Turner within the story of three aging painter friends who discover the work of Girtin and (perhaps in part because of their discovery) decide to make amends to their lives. A gorgeous artifact about jealousy, regrets, man’s destruction of the environment, but also art, friendship and redemption.
The three friends are taking a life drawing painting class together. They have been friends for a long time; they are good artists, not painting professionally but still passionately, and they know and love art history. Sarah is religious; she has a regret about her jealousy of a good friend who became a successful painter early on when she did not, who now wants to reconnect with her; Arturo is a cynic, an atheist, but he has a regret, too, having many years ago left a woman and her daughter in a time of complex political circumstances--should he try to reconnect? And Fred has discovered Girtin and wants to share his discovery with his friends.
Fred relates Girtin’s biography to them and us, sometimes showing us the actual work as the three of them comment insightfully about its significance. Did I know Girtin? I couldn’t recall. But I had been through the Tate Modern Turner collection. As Fred (and of course Zarate) sees it, Girtin, a contemporary, friend and rival of the famous Turner, was a genius, a visionary, though he died at 27. As Turner reportedly said, “Had Thomas lived, I would have starved.� Hyperbolic, but it was nevertheless a tribute to his rival, whom he admired, and of whom he was jealous, too.
Zarate’s work is moving on all accounts, as admirer of the role of art in shaping and sustaining human perception. I love Girtin’s visit to the north, I like it that he is politically compromised (not a saint). We learn a few things about him but it is clear that Zarate thinks the key things Girtin has to contribute to the world is through his art. As with Turner, he taps into a way of seeing and experiencing the world. They show you nature/the environment, something that will never be the same again. Maybe in the end it's less about art per se than the importance of aspiration, about finding purpose, and redemption, in life, through any means. Hopeful in a grim time.
Greg Smith says in an afterword that he feels an affinity for Fred, who has decided to write a biography of Girtin, worried that it will take over his life. Smith confirms that it will, as he has himself taken a quarter of a century compiling an online catalog of his works. Zarate himself has taken the better part of a decade on this project. Amazing, important, probably in my estimation one of the great graphic works ever.
Here is a link to Smith's website, and I can’t wait to get into it:
My second graphic novel by Tommi Parrish, after The Lie and How We Told It. Feels like a kind of similar work, or continuation of an exploration of thMy second graphic novel by Tommi Parrish, after The Lie and How We Told It. Feels like a kind of similar work, or continuation of an exploration of the complexity of contemporary relationships. The art is similar, featuring full brilliant color and large, often distorted characters. The characters seem similar, too, two people trying and generally failing to connect, trying to navigate the space between each other, the shifting ground. Faces change, in color and shape. The art for me is crucial to the basic point of understanding/not understanding, in other words. (Ugh, what I mean by this is that the artwork shifts as understanding shifts to misunderstanding, or lostness. I think that is cool. You feel off-center as the story is told).
Eliza is 32, a single mother and poet. We meet her at an AA meeting, so she's struggling with addiction, but trying to cope. As with most single mothers, she is hugely stressed. Sasha, 29, is also struggling, having just moved back in with her parents after a break-up. We learn over time she does some sex work. Both need emotional support, friendship, but are each other the ones they need? They are both so lost; can they help others if they can't help themselves? Sasha tells her parents that she is a fan of Eliza's poetry, and she moves sort of intensely forward to make connections with her. Co-dependency issues abound. I don't think either of them know what they want or need or would quite know how to get it if they did know.
And so, yeah, neither of them know what they are doing in their lives. They meet, they talk, they share their crises, they seem to connect a bit. Then Sasha invites Eliza on one of her "dates," which creates a certain level of distress for Eliza, since she had no idea that the expectation when they were meeting this guy was sex! So it's a sad story of these two kinda lost women on the the edge, told with some depth and understanding. I can't imagine lots of people loving these women and their struggles, but I kinda did, as I found them interesting, vulnerable, lost. They seem real to me, facing real issues. And the art is fascinating, shifting, distorting, garishly beautiful, disconcerting.
Oh, and who are the "men they trust"? Answer: It really seems like no one. Masculinity is not doing it for these women, seems like.
Parrish seems to me to have a unique style in comics, though it made me think of other (sad, alienated, lonely) women like this in Chris Ware (Building Stories), and in some of Nick Drnaso's work (Beverly). Portraits of precarious women's lives and the struggle to connect when they so need to do that....more
Monica is the 2023 graphic novel event by comics great Daniel Clowes, a fictional biography of a woman that is told from multiple perspectives and in Monica is the 2023 graphic novel event by comics great Daniel Clowes, a fictional biography of a woman that is told from multiple perspectives and in multiple genres, spanning much of the time in which Clowes has lived, and looking back on much about comics that he has loved: horror, pulpy sixties and seventies alt-comix. And the dark side of crazy sixties and seventies culture. It’s a sad and dark tale, where a girl, Monica, is abandoned by her mother, Penny, but manages to survive and even thrive for a time, as owner of a candle shop, though she also later joins a cult (this is one of the barely surviving parts), which is vintage wacky Clowes, and perfect for the time period he depicts, but is also about her search for her parents, her roots. Spoilers.
Foxhole is about two G.I. buddies in Nam, one guy, Johnny, with a girlfriend back home. Johnny shares a dream he has that everything eventually turns to crap. It’s an apocalyptic story, alluding to the dystopian end-of-the-world story at the very conclusion of the book, on the end paper, the zombie apocalypse. So this first one looks like fifties/sixties war comics, a staple of comics history, and the set-up for the birth of Monica, though she never sees her father until late in life, as he is just gone.
“Pretty Penny� introduces us to Monica’s mom, Penny, and her “biological father� (Krug, an artist) in bed. He’s back from Nam, ptsd-crazy; drugs may be part of it. Penny doesn’t want a baby, but has it anyway, moving in free love sixties fashion from man to disastrous man, an acid trip through hippie lala land. She dumps Monica on her own mom and dad’s doorstep. Never to be seen again. Well, like daddy dearest, one more time, near the end of this story. Childhood abandonment, painted in the glorious fifties comic strip colors Clowes most loves. Real life horror.
“The Glow Infernal� is a fantastical nightmare story of a man trying to find his parents (as with Monica doing this). Sixties cult story. A man, in the nineteenth-century, like a Lovecraft mythos trip. I was most puzzled by this one, initially, but I believe it is tied to the dystopian theme, the broader view of history as “turning to crap� that Monica’s crazy daddy has in Nam, and the ending of the book.
“Demonica� is the story of Monica getting in touch with her grandfather through an old transistor radio (like an episode of Twilight Zone!). She reads old books to him that she grew up reading. The search for some solid ground, some goodness in the past. Twilight Zone nostalgia. You look at the crazy fun art and you think: What is this stuff? But dig a little beneath the surface and the whole story is really grounded in a search for family, for stability, home.
“The Incident� is another strange story of madness, surrealism, Clowes’s cuppa.
“Success� is maybe like Clowes’s own success story, money made in Hollywood through the film version of Ghost Story, that he seemed to work against for the rest of his career. Monica makes money through a candle shop, then throws it all away to join a cult, another sixties crazy tale, but this is also a time of crazy conspiracy theories and cults just as we have today, real madness and danger. Clowes is writing about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. But this is a place where Penny had been in the cult, and Monica thought the leader might have been her father. It’s more of the search for Monica’s roots but also the roots of today’s chaos.
In “Doomsday,� Monica’s finds her actual biological father, who confesses that mental illness and acid did a lot of strange things to him and a lot of people, oops, sorry, girl. The legacy is. . . doomsday, though Monica would seem to have found love later in life. . . and she also finally finds her mom, but not with a particularly happy resolution. She goes back to dig up her Grandpa’s transistor radio; she gets instructions there from some other voice to dig in a nearby field, unleashing. . . the apocalypse we recall from the first story soldier's dream. Perfect Clowes horror story, his warmest in some ways (because you feel for the abandoned child Monica, having lived this rudderless mad life), but also ultimately his darkest.
I think a lot of people may hate this story, or series of related stories, but this is Daniel Clowes, it’s horror on the edge of madness, same as it ever was, but better comics art than ever from him, even better than Patience, with all of these genres. I call it a masterpiece of comics storytelling, his crowning achievement, eyes wide open to the legacy of the recent past from Nam on through the acid-soaked sixties and the money-making late seventies through the eighties. Coming of age, then life story of lovely lost Monica. Strange, and unique comics artist, one of the icons....more
Two friends walk into a bar, and get it ready for business.
A story of friendship by Eduardo Medeiros about Beardo and Lenny. Beardo inherits his bar fTwo friends walk into a bar, and get it ready for business.
A story of friendship by Eduardo Medeiros about Beardo and Lenny. Beardo inherits his bar from his Bad Dad, and the two losers become winners? Well, ok, but they have a past of bad mistakes themselves to work through, not the least of which involves Lenny's crazy ex Amanda, unfaithful with seven different men, who is baaaaack. And preggers.
Mostly played for laughs--including a secret ingredient for the beer they serve--but some more serious surprises happen in the end. I mean, the tone already had some darkness in it, and we should expect anything given these two goofs, but I was surprised, nevertheless.
The art is arresting, gray and orange, cartoony figures. I thought it was just okay, fine, but I give it another star for the surprise ending. ...more
"We don't need no stinking badges"--The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Brother and sister act Peter and Maria Hoey create their most conventional work he"We don't need no stinking badges"--The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Brother and sister act Peter and Maria Hoey create their most conventional work here and it--thus far--pays off in a higher collective ŷ rating. More accessible, let's say, but still interestingly weird. The Hoeys create bizarre, sort of hyper-real comics with a nod to fifties and early sixties advertising. Coin-Op and Animal Stories are more surreal and experimental than The Bend of Luck, which reads to me like a kind of fantasy/surreal homage to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, both of which are kind of anti-capitalist allegories about greed.
The story, like Treasure, is set in the west, and involves two guys panning for gold, with no luck, but then they find, in a bend in the river, something else that sparkles: Luck, in the form of little blue marbles. This would sell like crazy on the black market, they realize. What ensues is the story of a man and his father, who passes down his access to "luck" to his son, until, as we know, luck can change. So it's kind of a simple allegory, well executed, and to me somewhat less interesting to me than the more experimental Animal Stories or the Coin Op Anthology.
As with Nick Drnaso's slightly surreal world-making, there's a kind of eerie/creepy Stepford Wives feel to the artwork, a point about conformity that is good, but also can be a tad confusing in that a lot of the characters look similar and emote similarly very little. It's not about characterization, these books, but an abstract conception of the universe as sort of vapid and hollow. The Bend of Luck has a little more warmth than the previous two books, as there is a father-son connection here.
I have liked other work by Jordan Crane, very thoughtful and often moving, but this is (thus far) his biggest project, his magnum opus, taking him tweI have liked other work by Jordan Crane, very thoughtful and often moving, but this is (thus far) his biggest project, his magnum opus, taking him twenty years to complete it, and though I knew little about it (except have seen excerpts here and there), I sat down and read it in one sitting, and am the next day reading it again. It's about a familiar moment, maybe, a couple driving in stressful traffic, one irritatingly driving, the other reading a novel aloud--about a similar couple under similar stresses.
It's not clear what is happening at all times, on first read, but Crane masterfully uses the comics medium to convey past, present, imagined fears, and in the end this book becomes almost philosophical comics--lyrical abstractions, artistic representations--in an impressive examination of their relationship, loss and love.
The title is worth discussing. There seem to be two sides to the anxiety and care, the love and the struggle, and so we see things from each of their perspectives. At one point they hear of two deaths--grandma's dog, a friend--and discuss the "death happens in threes" theory. We are anxious about this in that neither of them are good drivers. We are anxious, too, as things proceed, because the woman seems to have some suicide fantasies as she thinks of what she might do if her partner ever died.
At a glance I see some people just hate this book, finding it depressing and/or confusing. It is about moments of struggle and loss in a relationship, so yeah, not always fun. I think it is one of the best comics works of the year, for sure, Crane's best work so far, both moving and impressive....more
**spoiler alert** "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players"--Jacque, in Shakespeare's As You Like It
Of course the idea that **spoiler alert** "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players"--Jacque, in Shakespeare's As You Like It
Of course the idea that we are all acting out roles is not original. The idea of performing different selves is not new. Drnaso, in his third amazing book, is at his most ambitious here in focusing on an acting class of pretty passive, working class individuals, led by a pretty charismatic leader, a guy named John Smith (I know John Smith is a common name, but his leadership here reminded me that a John Smith helped establish Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in North America).
In all of Drnaso's work the characters seem vapid, passive, flat, they all look pretty androgynous, and the worlds they live in seem increasingly eerie, twisted, almost surreal, reminding me of the work of David Lynch (and yeah, I just read Conor Stechschulte's Ultrasound, which I also said reminded me of Lynch, and--because it deals with memory--the film Memento--which features a guy with amnesia). (ŷ reviewer Rebecca interviews Drnaso--a great and informative interview--who mentions The Shining as influential, and I can see it, that slow build into a sense of hyper-reality and increasing suspense.
There's not much of a sense of empathy in either of Drnaso's first two works, Beverly and Sabrina, but in this work Drnaso helps us feel some kinship for these isolated people that bring them together in a community, to act out scenes, a process that bleeds more and more into reality, blurring the two. Not that we get some any real feeling of depth to these people--the very spare to sometimes absent backgrounds in the panels lend a sense of strangeness or surreality to the characters, and they all look pretty similar--but we feel a sense of concern for them as possible victims in this process, which kind of reminds me of Jim Jones, in another place called Jamestown, who led over 900 people to "drink the kool aid" of religious fanaticism and then actually drink poisoned kool-aid and commit suicide. In the terrifying end of the story the acting class--most of them; a couple leave the group, suspicious of Smith's intent--agrees to leave their lives and take a bus to some unknown destination.
I think, as with Sabrina, that Drnaso is writing about the increasing anxieties of contemporary life, and in this one, the ease to which many of us succumb to the powers of a fanatic leader, cult, or something like political extremism. The fact that many of these people in the class seem to be vulnerable and/or have mental illnesses, exacerbated by the conditions of the class, adds to the chilling effect. I think it is scary and amazing, one of my favorite graphic novels of the year.
J + K are two teen girls, sort of clueless, just ramblin' on. A trope, a way to cope: Friends, Laurel and Hardy, Bevis and Butthead, and now these twoJ + K are two teen girls, sort of clueless, just ramblin' on. A trope, a way to cope: Friends, Laurel and Hardy, Bevis and Butthead, and now these two slacker, clueless girlz just wandering through the world, which is very colorful. . . I'd call it tropical colored, almost neon, lime, orange, majenta. There's a prominent grannie character. I dunno, it's kinda cute.
I got this from the library, so it didn't include what it promised: Posters, stickers, a small vinyl record. . . sort of reminds me of Chris Ware multi-media packaging, which I (theoretically, since I didn't see it) like. Fake ads throughout. Collects strips from over a few years.
Let's see, and example. Well, this one isn't typical, because it has a touch of sadness in it: J + K stroll into the woods with a little guy they seem to (badly) caring for, Bacne, and they encounter some scary ghouls (who are actually just homeless guys, one of them a vet with ptsd. Since J + K are not so good at taking care of Bacne, the homeless guys agree to help. . until Bacne knocks down the ptsd guy's lean to shelter. So a mix of sweetness, whimsy, real world sadness?...more
The premise of Old Souls seems pretty promising; a happily married man with a kid and a good job discovers that he had been reincarnated—several timesThe premise of Old Souls seems pretty promising; a happily married man with a kid and a good job discovers that he had been reincarnated—several times. So, a reincarnation theme is a pretty easy allegorical source for helping readers think about the past. And the look of this book, illustrated very nicely by Les McClaine, is attractive. And I like that title; that’s a concept with which I am familiar, as sometimes you see a wise-beyond-her -years kid identified as an “old soul.� Sometimes people say it to indicate they were probably priests or shamans or Mother Earth in “past lives.�
The trouble with this story is the story. A guy we don’t really ever care about is perfectly happy until he encounters an old homeless man claiming he is the guy’s grandmother who had once abandoned him. The guy helps him meet a bunch of “grave robbers,� guys that are connected to their past lives. For Chris, his past lives include being a slave owner, and other terrible things. The scenario begins to resemble an addiction scenario as he spends all of their life savings to pay some guru to try and help him find his own past-life-abandoned son, to make restitution and resolve his guilt. But in the process all these homeless guys have destroyed their lives dwelling in the past, so this is what Chris does, too.
What’s the point of all this? To learn to live in the present and be happy with the good life you have. I say huh?! The wife, who rightfully had kicked the guy out, irrationally takes him back in tears and hugs, because, well, you know, love and living in the present and family, I guess. No matter what you have done in the past, fugheddaboutit, you get a pass if you just say you will love. I guess. The story is way confusing and you don’t care in the least about the characters. But I have a suggestion for Pixar: Don’t pick this one up for development. Bad storytelling, bad charcters, bad work with "universal themes.�
Brian McDonald, publisher First Second tells us, works for Belief Agency as its Chief Storyteller. His book, Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate is, we are told, “required reading at Pixar Animation Studio,� focusing on (it looks like, I haven’t read it) universal themes to capture audiences. ŷ reviewers seem to (based on the high rating) appreciate his “how to� books, but are not actually (also based on the ratings) big fans of his written stories. I’m reminded of Scott McCloud, who writes brilliantly about the theory and practice of making comics, but is not exactly a household name among actual comics fan as actual storyteller. Do as I say, not as I do (though McDonald, the bio says, has been working in film successfully for thirty years).
I say ugh, but give 2 stars because of the artwork, which is very good. ...more
“I wonder why other people couldn’t see the virtues of an innately democratic pictographic poetry, grounded in a transdimensional metaphysic, anyway?�“I wonder why other people couldn’t see the virtues of an innately democratic pictographic poetry, grounded in a transdimensional metaphysic, anyway?”—Chris Ware
Rusty Brown is, like Jimmy Corrigan, and Building Stories (his three main books), epic in scope and length, exhibiting astonishing technical skill, humor and empathy, largely focused on the grimly sad lives of every day people.
“Why does every ‘great book� have to always be about criminals or perverts? Can’t I just find one that’s about regular people living everyday life?”—a character in Jimmy Corrigan
Rusty Brown is really a collection of four books out of this boy’s world, written over the span of twenty years. As with his friend Seth’s Clyde Fans, which also took twenty years to accomplish and also came out in 2019, it is a comics and artistic and literary event of the year, some of which I have read over the past ten years in various forms and collections.
The tale begins in Omaha in 1975, where Ware was born and grew up and focuses on a school where a character named Chris Ware also taught. So this is autobiographical comics from Ware?! Ware says, yeah, well basically yes:
“Well, comics are the art of memory, and every word, picture, gesture, idea, aim, regret, etc. that's gone into the story has somehow filtered through my recollection and selectivity, so it's all somehow autobiographical.�
Well, that and much much more. We get a 30-page science fiction story by Rusty Brown’s almost unlikeable father Woody which. . . makes him more likeable. The Jordan Lint toxic male stoner book-within-a-book is a cradle-to-grave story that Ware refers to as about “the development of linguistic consciousness in graphically intuited form.� Okay, Chris! The Joanna Cole story, the one featuring Rusty’s (black) teacher, is the most moving part of it all.
What do we know about Rusty? Early on he is bullied as almost all of the central characters in any Ware story are bullied. They are nerds, comics readers for heaven’s sake, what would they expect?! There’s this crushing air of melancholy and loss; the lost childhood of Ware, with all its cool lunchboxes and Supergirl action figures amidst parental neglect and loneliness.
But why all this background, all these other character stories, for a title character who is largely abandoned in 356 (and with so many tiny panels I almost certainly went blinder—my main gripe with his work) pages?! Well, we can only expect in the next sections that young Rusty will play a central role, but this is a nature-nurture book. We are where we live and who surround us, for good or ill. We see people as they age and we see where they have come from and what they have experienced. Can we ever break way from where we have been?
Snowflakes figure in throughout in their literal and figurative senses (and even in the elaborately constructed dust jacket:
“Inspired by the structure of a snowflake, the six-sided shape of which is determined by the molecular structure of a water molecule, and which cannot form without a central piece of flotsam or grit.�
The four main stories are interlocking, and the last page, with just INTERMISSION written on it, let’s you know that what we have thus far read is just part of a larger story (there’s even a character from Jimmy Corrigan in it, so that novel is linked, maybe in ways we don’t yet know). I am in for the long haul, Chris. Keep working on it and you’ll have at least me here reading.
Why I love Comics by Chris Ware:
A reference on Ware to consider checking out: David M. Ball, Martha B. Kuhlman, ed. (2010). The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking.
Chris Ware talks about Rusty Brown:
“I knew it would be a long book, but as in the embarrassing cases of my other experiments, never thought it would go on as long as it has, or metastasize into such a sprawling mess. Then again, sprawling messes are what I aim for, since they most accurately reflect real life.�
I feel like I have been waiting for many years for this book to come out, and feared that like anyone might switch gears that Kevin Huizenga had just I feel like I have been waiting for many years for this book to come out, and feared that like anyone might switch gears that Kevin Huizenga had just decided to do something else with his life. But oh boy, as with other long projects that took a long time, such as Berlin and Clyde Fans, this is worth the wait. This more than 200-page book is (so far) Huizenga’s crowning achievement, his most ambitious work. What’s it about? On the simplest level, it is a series of short interconnected stories about sleep, sleeplessness, insomnia. Call it a novel, sure, but it’s not really so much about narrative. At one point, he and his wife debate how such a project about sleeplessness might end, and they both think it would be too obvious to have him fall asleep. So it doesn’t even really “end� in any really typical way.
On a larger level Glenn Ganges in The River at Night is a kind of meditation on time, the restless mind, the imagination, and (I think) cartooning itself. I mean, what is your mind like when you are awake and everyone is sleeping? Is this a topic for the arts? How can this mind be "captured"? Most novels are about something significant in a character’s life, with some rising action and dramatic conclusion. Macbeth! But Chris Ware (Building Stories) and Richard McGuire (Here) remind us that most of our lives are lived in quiet desperation, not doing anything earth-shattering.
Glenn Ganges (which is the name of a small town in western Michigan passed on the way from South Holland to Grand Rapids where he went to college [at my former college, I believe] and also the name of the title character of a series of stories Huizenga has worked on for many years) works for a time in a tech start-up, but is “let go� as the dot-com era seems to tank. What else does he do in this book? He tries and fails to sleep, as his wife obsessively works on her own art/comics/illustration projects. Publisher Drawn & Quarterly calls River at Night a “modern formalist masterpiece� and this seems right to me, though I warn you that if you are looking for a good yarn that this will be as engaging on that level as counting sheep.
I think of Proust’s opening to In Search of Long Time, where we learn of everything that goes through a kid’s mind while he is in bed, ready to sleep, for forty single-spaced pages. It’s a portrait of a young child’s mind, stream of consciousness. Or think of Joyce’s Ulysses, one day in the life of one man in the waking hours of a day in Dublin. For something like 800 pages! So River is a portrait of a mind, of a life, from one angle: Insomnia and what this is like.
So this is Huizenga’s contribution to the modernist project of Proust and Joyce, with an ounce of Bill Murray’s Groundhog’s Day humor where we relive, story after story, the nightmare of sleeplessness and mundanity. We worry about Glenn ‘s marriage as he does basically nothing, as far as we can tell, post-job. We also wonder why he can’t sleep. Well, getting fired? Financial woes? Just generalized anxiety? Too much coffee? It’s not about causation or solution, though much time is spent on how to get to sleep, all of it familiar. Glenn along the way reads a book about geologic time, listens to a TED talk on time. But the thing to focus on here is the cartooning, the way cartoons depict the passage of time. Huizenga captures Glenn, or Everyman Mind, just rambling, amusingly. Okay, it’s potentially annoying, as this man does not share Deep Thoughts. He’s not Dali (though some of this is dream-like and surreal in fantastic ways), and he’s not Einstein, or Gandhi.
So almost none of you would agree that this is great comics (boring, some may say!), but I’m calling it that. Again, it’s not a great “story� but it’s an interesting formal experiment, call it “experimental� or alternative comics gorgeously rendered, think Chris Ware or Seth, not Macbeth, but Joe Blow, he is us. We care about and laugh with him. Oh, and Huizenga’s cartooning skills, they're on a par with Seth and Ware and McGuire....more
“The seafarers tell of the Eastern Isle of Bliss, It is lost in a wilderness of misty sea waves”—Li Po, “His Dream of the Skyland�
What we have here is “The seafarers tell of the Eastern Isle of Bliss, It is lost in a wilderness of misty sea waves”—Li Po, “His Dream of the Skyland�
What we have here is an epic tome of a graphic novel, what appears to be a 2018 re-release by Top Shelf of a 2011 book, and this is just the first volume, weighing in at more than 300 pages, including a glossary of terms. It was inspired by author Anne Opotowsky’s viewing a 1920s photograph of the (demolished in 1994) Walled City of Kowloon, Hong Kong, once the densest place on the planet. Illustrator Aya Morton is a full partner on the creation/recreation of the place. The authors, using a teenager named Song Lu as their main character, with his friends Yubo and magician/acrobat Xi, creates a coming-of-age story with a sense of the place in 1925 as a rich brew made of equal parts misery and magic.
Well, maybe not equal parts. To engage you right from the beginning the authors drop you right into the exhilarating freedom of the place with all its magic and the sense of invention. It reminds me of Will Eisner’s sequential narratives of the lower east side of Manhattan. Sure, they’re all poor, but it’s a community, many of them love and depend upon each other. The suffering is there, sure, but as you enter it, the joy is the most obvious experience you sense. I suppose it’s something like going to a carnival when you are a kid; when you are young, it is all laughs; as one grows older one can see the dangers and sorrow just beneath the surface in the workers there. Which is not to say that the joy is all gone, but as one ages one can see the struggles. That’s what happens in this book; as the kids grow, they face real adult scary situations and hardships.
Because Song’s father is often in trouble with the law, he gets a job sorting “dead”—which is to say largely undeliverable—letters at the chaotic Kowloon Post Office. There are piles of these letters, comically depicted by Morton. Dead letters is a good, representative image, since so much of what we experience in the story is off the grid, lost, mysterious.
Song meets all sorts of wonderful and strange people delivering his letters, such as the egg man. But he also meets the successful and shady businessman Mr. Furnier, who attempts to entice Song to work for him, as Xi finally does. Then we see that opium is a central part of the scene, and children go missing. Sanitation? Water? Crime? Hunger? All are challenges at Kowloon and not finally ignored.
So this story is a kind of rollicking panoramic sweep of a world that is diy, without rules, so the story, the art, matches this sense of the place, more of a magical dream of invention than a tightly structured narrative. Magic turns sinister as things move along, but in the opening pages the color and sweep of the drawing is kind of breath-taking, drawing you into this world. I really like it a lot and eagerly await volume two.
Here’s Paul Gravette’s review, which features some of it:
Here’s a 20 minute documentary about the Walled City, but I encourage you to skim through it, at least, to see what Kowloon really looked like:
The whole of Li Po’s poem, “His Dream of the Skyland:�
"A vanishing act is impotent and aimless. it revels in its own futility. until the subject matter fades from view, takes with it all measure at realit"A vanishing act is impotent and aimless. it revels in its own futility. until the subject matter fades from view, takes with it all measure at reality and leaves you with a thinning thread."
Thinning thread, indeed! Not nuch thread at all, I'd say, and I'm not exactly a fan of Muradov's faceless art, either. "Impotent and aimless," I'll agree to that. Thirteen almost deliberately disconnected "acts" or anecdotes in different styles and forms that would seem to happen on the same evening. So that sounds interesting, right? But the point is a post-modern one, that all these events are random, that narrative as a sense-making tool is a myth, and so on. Possibly meant to be playfully nihilistic? Well, if you like that kinda thing, go ahead, but let the readers beware.
Muradov says, come on, lighten up, it is
"A love letter to all things avant-garde."
Another Muradov self-blurb: "A book described by its publisher as a maddeningly convoluted postmodern romp."
I'l agree to all that. Was maddened at the deliberate convolution. Romp? My rump! I was bored.
And maybe I was tired, but I wasn't amused as Muradov wanted me to be. He blurbs on the back cover: "A joke." Unfortunately, I thought the joke was on me....more
This book, Hobo Mom, was written by Charles Forsman and illustrated by Max de Radiguès (I know, what a great team, right?) and reminded me of two radiThis book, Hobo Mom, was written by Charles Forsman and illustrated by Max de Radiguès (I know, what a great team, right?) and reminded me of two radically different stories about women who needed their freedom. The first is a movie I actually saw in the movie theater in 1979 (as a lot of people did; Dustin Hoffman won the Academy Award for Best Actor that year; the mom that left him and their kid was played by Meryl Streep, who implicitly through the film was criticized for being “selfish� in her need to “find herself� on her own). Here’s a trailer; it’s a pretty good movie, as I recall.
The second story I thought about was Housekeeping, a novel by Marilyn Robinson, which features an eccentric “hobo� who leaves conventional society and rides the trains all over the country for most of her life:
The Streep character is unfortunately not complex; that’s a problem in the film; Sylvie is marvelously complex in Housekeeping.
In Hobo Mom, Tasha left Tom and daughter Sissy, and as the short novel opens, she, like Sylvie (of Housekeeping), is riding in a train boxcar, fending off a guy who is in that train car alone with her. Though it is years later, she decides to go back to her ex's home to visit and see if she can connect with her daughter, who does not know who she is at all. Which she does, and they do, a bit. We don’t know why she left, we don’t know why—beyond this exploration of her daughter and some reconnection with Tom—she would stay. But we have a few complicated and tender moments we are left to speculate about.
It’s a slight, evocative story, which leaves so much to the reader to fill in. Which can be a good thing, those silences, but this feels maybe a little too slight, underdeveloped. We need to know a bit more. But the ending was still a punch in the gut for me. These guys, Forsman and de Radiguès, know again and again, how to depict folks on the edge, creating a combination of gritty and emotionally wrenching. But maybe give it a little more space, though, guys? ...more
“I liked to watch the real salesmen--the old-time travelers. A lot could be learned from those guys. Those fellas had plenty of charm. They used to sa“I liked to watch the real salesmen--the old-time travelers. A lot could be learned from those guys. Those fellas had plenty of charm. They used to say that sincerity sells--and if you can fake that, you've got it made"--Abe, in Clyde Fans
A masterpiece, the graphic novel event of the year (well, it's early, so there may indeed be many more), a 480-page tome, gorgeously rendered by author Seth and Drawn & Quarterly. No one in comics loves the description "graphic novel," and Seth calls it a "picture novel," which I like even better, and it has been TWENTY YEARS in the making! As with the similarly decades long accomplishment of the previous year, Jason Lutes' Berlin, this book is ambitious and meticulous and moving.
But whereas Berlin, set in the Weimar Republic as the Naziis began to assume power, has this massive historical and political scope, Clyde Fans creates a much smaller world, though seen with as incisive a lens: The story of two brothers, one of them, Abe, working in his father's fan business, and his brother Simon taking care of their mother. All three of them are less than likable or admirable, they live lives of quiet desperation, they talk to themselves and/or objects in the rooms they inhabit almost exclusively alone.
But Seth has a kind of two-edged approach here to the past, to memory, that imbues the landscape of this book, that both celebrates the past and also reveals how we can sometimes be trapped in it. There's a kind of achingly loving and melancholy nostalgia that infuses everything that Seth does that is especially evident in this work. Not everyone will love it, of course, it's muted, it is so much like Chris Ware's crushingly sad and yet thrillingly executed masterpieces Jimmy Corrigan and Building Stories. Yes, this book is that good. But it is also that sad.
Seth, Abe and Simon love craft--quality fans, novelty postcards, comics--and they can't quite keep up with the present. The book tacks back and forth between 1957, 1975 and 1997 as we see the lovely and almost reverent respect Seth gives to this old, by-gone vestige of a small business world that was already in 1957 (beginning to be) eaten up by big box corporations. At least part of this book is about capitalism, I guess, but to only say that would be to ignore the respectful close look this book takes of this one working class family that was permanently damaged, never to recover when Dad Clyde left the family, never to return. It's a respectful, pained look at the death or at least struggles of the salesman. I love the wordless pages to show the Canadian small town streets and buildings, so deserted and lost. They're all losing it, Abe, Simon, and mother, in their own slowly decaying ways, but you really come to care for them because Seth does. A Canadian Winesburg, Ohio, of sorts.
So: A masterpiece, and as it goes with masterpieces, not fun for everyone, it's work you need to read closely and live into, it's work as the best literary fiction can be, it's not about people you love and admire, it's about real working-class people, not heroes, but it's an amazing accomplishment.
I reviewed Book 1 long ago, and also excerpts published in other places of this book as it developed. It's been worth the wait, and I'll read it again soon. Check out any of his work you can get your hands on....more
I'm reading so many graphic novels and reading some of them perhaps too quickly that, halfway into reading this book, I didn't know what this was. AndI'm reading so many graphic novels and reading some of them perhaps too quickly that, halfway into reading this book, I didn't know what this was. And I still am not sure, but early on, I was bored by it and this main character who provides pineapples to the town in exchange for its allowing him to live in a house in the jungle with his cat. And then there seems to be some kind of tension--people are worried there might be something wrong with the pineapples, possibly hallucinogenic? People are getting sick? Garbage bags are being left on the man’s land. People are suddenly becoming less friendly to him. Some tension emerges. But who cares?!
So I flipped the book over and read Anya Davidson's blurb in the back: "Like the work of David Lynch or Richard Brautigan, it refuses to supply easy answers. It is one of those works that trusts the reader's intelligence." Huh. So, much is left out of the story, and the reader is required to fill in the details, as in some experimental or minimalist works of art. I took a deep breath and began again, more slowly, appreciating the somewhat bizarre and slightly comical (the somewhat different pineapples are a weird touch) story infused with a kind of noir feel of dread.
There seems to be corruption in the town, some spreading pestilence, leading to some kind of madness? It’s a story that is either infuriatingly vague, if you like tightly constructed plots, or intriguing, if you like somewhat surreal mysteries. The unsaid is more important than the said. I’m going to rate this 4, though I might like it more (or less) if I read it again. It’s formally interesting. David Lynch might be a good reference point....more
After a layered and complex set-up in the first two volumes of Jeff Lemire’s Royal City, complete with the appearan“This town’s bones are loneliness.�
After a layered and complex set-up in the first two volumes of Jeff Lemire’s Royal City, complete with the appearance of ghosts with all sort of magical expectations, the resolution seems a little conventional, unsurprising, and flat. Don’t get me wrong, if you read the first two volumes you will want to read this, without question, and it is good, but in my opinion a tad disappointing. We are back in Essex County territory, in a sense, in that Royal City is a small, bleak Ontario town, with a couple of sort of mild surprises, everything resolving in a pretty satisfactory fashion. I rate this 3.5, but it is Lemire art, don’t forget, and it is better than most stuff out there, still, so I round up to 4 stars.
The story features a family falling apart, haunted by the loss of a brother and son, in a town falling apart. To recall, Dad is unconscious, with a stroke, after a fight with his long estranged wife; Patrick can’t write his novel and his actress wife is gone, on location, estranged, too; Richie is drunk, owes a gang 2K, Sis Tara is negotiating a deal to end the family biz, where her family works; she and hubby are estranged. An in the center of it is a young Tommy, gone. Family curse?
“Nothin� but the dead and dyin� in my little town�? (Paul Simon)
The second volume flashed (bleakly) (is that an oxymoron?) back to 1993, when things seemed more hopeful, though Tommy has hallucinations. We read pages of his handwritten journal. We already know from volume one that Tommy will die, so this volume basically gives you the events of the week leading up to his death.
Yeah, I won’t tell you much about th ending, no big spoilers, though a new family member emerges, and some endings are bitter, some bittersweet, and none (this is Lemire, remember?) are unqualifyingly sweet, really. I really did like this sad sack family. But I wouldn’t want to live in Royal City or have them over for Thanksgiving. ...more
"In a community like this, we are each other's business."
Nate Powell is the only comics artist that has ever won a National Book Award, for his illust"In a community like this, we are each other's business."
Nate Powell is the only comics artist that has ever won a National Book Award, for his illustration work on Sen. John Lewis’s story of his experiences with the civil rights movement in the sixties, March, adapted by Andrew Aydin, spanning three books. That and 2008's Eisner Award-winning Swallow Me Whole, are some of my favorite graphic works. The latter is one of a group of more personal works that—like Jeff Lemire’s work—focus on the struggles of a young boy growing up, dealing with darkly complicated issues.
The story is not a March social justice epic, but a smaller, more personal tale of a woman, Haluska, or Hal, who lives in a small Ozarks “intentional� community, co-parenting Jake, with her ex, Gus. Jake is not the focus of the story, but he is important, always there. He's Powell, growing up, in many ways, likely. Hal is having an affair with Adrian, or Ade, who is married to her close friend, and it has been going on for years. They meet for sex in a cave where, as it turns out, some kids also go, and where some fantastical force or creature exists, and where Ade’s son is lost for some time.
Powell’s previous works, Swallow Me Whole, Any Empire, and Sounds of Your Name, bear some resemblance to Come Again. Some aspects of all these works deal with personal isolation and the need for community/family. Nostalgia for the past, and yet regret, sorrow. Black and white, scratchy pen and ink, often without panels, the work gives a sense of the emotional possibilities of using the whole page, as a canvas where images do most of the communicating, work like Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Jillian Tamaki’s work in This One Summer. Which is to say Come Again is sort of oblique, hard to follow in places, requiring a bit of work in reading the images, feeling like poetic stream-of-consciousness, open. People talk like real people talk, not as in Henry James. They mumble, their voices trail off, and the lettering reflects that. Some pages are almost all inky black with white lettering. The feeling is often bleak, intensely reflective.
The focus of the story is not about the hippie community, which is almost dwindled out, but on these secrets that might exist in any community, that seem connected to this mountain monster. The links between all these things are not always clearly defined, it’s sort of poetic (or maddeningly vague, if you like your stories clear and precise). The struggle between the dark and light has a visual component here, in keeping with the secrecy, and damage, and guilt.
Powell says this is his favorite work so far, but I don’t think it will be his readers� favorite, though I do like it a lot, to the extent I understand it after just one reading. It feels bleak, we don’t get deep connections or feel much empathy for the characters who exist in these claustrophobic spaces, caves. Feels a little Calvinist in its exploration of secrecy and guilt. That's not a joyful affair Hal and Ade have. Feels like the end of The Age of Aquarius, most of those hippie ideals. People don't talk about the issues they have with each other, and yet in the end, we seem to move to some light, some understanding.
What may be one key to understanding this book is that Powell dedicates this book to Ursula K. Le Guin, so the dark fantasy aspects make more sense.
Powell’s book is technically awesome and has me brooding about it, and I will read it again and try to figure out more of what it is about, but this dark Ozark cave monster fantasy tale is fascinating. Because Powell is a lifelong punk musician, I like, too, the way he--as he always does—weaves music through his story. Like Lemire, I think he imagines us listening to a mix tape as we read. I’ll read this again. Like Lemire, he’s a great artist, struggling to figure out how to tell a comics tale about growing up in a small isolated town....more
Young Frances collects issues 1-5 of Lin’s much-awarded series Pope Hats, which I hadn’t read, and it is a revelation, a world I found rather unique: Young Frances collects issues 1-5 of Lin’s much-awarded series Pope Hats, which I hadn’t read, and it is a revelation, a world I found rather unique: The story of Frances, a law clerk in a big city law firm, and one of the very few genuinely nice people there. Maybe the only one not obsessed with billable hours and terrified of the axe falling or mergers and Huge Overhyped multi-million dollar Legal Events. It occurred to me as I read it that I know very little about this world, which—based on my inexperience—feels in Lin’s hands authentic, with (what feels to me to be) spot-on dialogue, informed by what I know is careful research.
I was careful to look for ways in which the people working in the firm are disrespected. This is an expected trap in a lawyer project, it seems to me (at least ones written by non-lawyers). You expect the narrative equivalent of lawyer jokes, with an undercurrent of lawyer loathing. But I think Lin passes my test and creates human beings. Even the boss, Marcel Castonguay who, though he is depicted as a Daddy Warbucks pupil-less (by which I mean his eyes are just circles, vs. all the other characters’s eyes!) automaton, he likes Frances, appreciates her. In every scene he seems to grow larger, twice as large as anyone else, so this seems like it could be a satirical dismissal, but he still seems human to me.
The Comics Alternative calls slice-of-life comics verite dessinée, or drawn truth, which I love, and this fits, most of the way, but there’re also some bizarre or surreal touches in Young Frances to keep you off guard, such as Castonguay accidentally dropping trou in an important meeting. Otherwise things are played pretty straight-up and humane, as Frances keeps connected to her rising actress friend Vicki, who lands a role in a tv series playing an attorney (Are attornies in any Corporate firm also just "playing attorney," filling a tole?). Frances also has a patient male friend who supports her and “likes� her though if you know law clerks, she rarely sees him.
Surprises happen in this tale, but the greatest surprise for me in this comics work is Lin’s accomplishment in making this strange, forbidding world come alive. I know an unhappy law clerk English undergraduate student who I am trying to persuade to teach English. I told her about this book. It’s a pretty amazing accomplishment, reminiscent of Seth’s humane work depicting similar people working alienating jobs, but also Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, which takes a hard look at the corporate world from another angle. The heart of this work is Frances’s goal to “find herself, � to find a place for her heart in this brutal legal environment. She even goes to Vicki’s spiritual advisor, without finding much help, but she is trying to find her way, to attain a kind of space for nature, running, friendship, and love, in spite of an overwhelming job.
4.5, I’ll say, though if it stays with me as I expect it will, I might bump it up to 5 stars. I highly recommend it....more
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