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CATALOGUE BABY: A MEMOIR OF INFERTILITY by Myriam Steinberg, reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 14, 2021 by thwackJune 14, 2021

CATALOGUE BABY: A MEMOIR OF INFERTILITY
by Myriam Steinberg; illustrations by Christache
Page Two, 304 pages
reviewed by Brian Burmeister

The graphic memoir Catalogue Baby shares the deeply personal fertility journey of Myriam Steinberg. Compelled to leave her career, passion, and life as a festival organizer to pursue motherhood as a single 40-year-old, Steinberg’s immensely honest memoir chronicles the intense challenges she faced getting pregnant and carrying to term.

Throughout the five years of her life covered in the book, Steinberg skillfully navigates shame, guilt, and loss in ways that help us understand the pain and frustration she was experiencing while balancing those brutal realities with humor. Among other amusements, we are welcomed to the literal “Carnival of Dreams Brought to You by I.V.F” where at the egg-shot carnival game you are given “10 shots for the price of your dignity and patience.”

Myriam Steinberg

One of Steinberg’s many strengths is making her journey accessible through playfulness. In addition, her narrative is clear and relatable—even though her story is very much uniquely her own. Her desire for a baby and the difficulties she faced along the way are shared by many, and she welcomes us into her life through carefully and regularly integrating humor and hope along the way.

Illustrator Cristache’s wonderfully expressive art perfectly complements the mood of the narrative—from the ten-gallon hat-wearing, shot-gun toting biological clock that stalks Steinberg throughout the memoir to the 8-bit video game depictions of the ups and downs of her health journey. Steinberg’s powerful and compelling saga is wonderfully brought to life through Cristache’s gift of visual storytelling. He helps us feel Steinberg’s highs and lows as she holds firm to her dream of motherhood and struggles through cycle after cycle of in vitro fertilization and weighs her shrinking options.

Within the Preface, Steinberg makes clear her hope is the memoir “will help de-stigmatize a terribly lonely experience and address a void in materials that cover not only these issues but also the devastating decision-making process around fetal genetic anomalies.” Steinberg’s tale is an important reminder for those on similar paths to her own that they are not alone. She stands—and stands tall—with them in solidarity. And it is the hope of this reviewer that those who read Catalogue Baby come away from the experience knowing that community and compassion exist.


Brian Burmeister is a writer, educator, and cat cuddler. He can be followed on Twitter @bdburmeister.

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Published on June 14, 2021 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE BOOK OF SARAH, a graphic memoir by Sarah Lightman, reviewed by Emily Steinberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 23, 2019 by thwackJuly 7, 2020

THE BOOK OF SARAH
by Sarah Lightman
The Pennsylvania University Press, 237 pages
reviewed by Emily Steinberg

The Book of SarahSarah Lightman’s poignant, engrossing and poetic graphic memoir, The Book of Sarah , leads the reader on an epic odyssey, moving back and forth in time, from the author’s early twenties as an uncertain, dependent, and depressed young artist to a confident forty-five-year-old woman who is finally the architect of her own life.

Raised in England in a traditional Jewish family, Lightman perfectly plays the role of the sheltered, good daughter, but is squelched, suffocated and empty inside. She became more Orthodox as a way to feel part of something larger. She wrote to me in an email,  “I had great feelings of inadequacy and no idea about how to navigate life. I think religion can tell you how to live and it is easier than that long, painful journey of working out who you are and making up your own mind about things.” A late bloomer, she eventually discovered she no longer needed the architecture of orthodoxy and began building a “scaffolding of self” with permission to live her own life.

The heart of Lightman’s book is her art, and the black and white graphite drawings of architecture and often overlooked everyday objects are particularly forceful and beautiful. Intensely drawn, with energetic, almost obsessive marks and stark contrast of dark and light, we view sides of buildings with fire escapes, exteriors of family homes and dining-room table and chairs, interiors and exteriors of her boarding school outside London, her books, her therapist’s office, chairs and shoes.

line drawing of fire escapes

Lightman writes and draws about being a young artist, anxiously uncertain of her abilities.

 

line drawing of a bag of salad

“I worked through a salad as I waited for a rejection from a gallery.”

She writes beautifully of the overlapping of life events , or as she puts it, “The maths of life. A birth. A death. A Marriage. A death. Someone’s happiness. Someone else’s tears.”  She seeks love and relationship, but doesn’t know herself and so can’t know another.

line drawing of a toothbrush

“I had a toothbrush next to mine, so did that mean I was your girlfriend?”

Life evolves. She finds Charlie and has a Traditional Jewish Wedding. Then, her Grandfather is in Hospital and “we visit him everyday and read him psalms.”  She muses about motherhood at thirty-six, describing her son Harry’s arrival and what was like to be a new mom.

Life isn’t perfect for Lightman, but she finds a place of contentment that is enough. While searching for a scaffolding to build her life on, we see it was there all along in her art and in The Book of Sarah, Lightman leads us to a place that is both gorgeous and profound.

line drawing of a baby's head

“Oh my little Love.”


Sarah Lightman author headshotSarah Lightman is an artist who writes, draws and paints about her life experiences. She is co-founder of ​“Laydeez do Comics,” an international forum for women comics artists and editor of the incredible Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews, (2014), a collection of the work of eighteen international Jewish female auto-bio comics artists. She earned a PhD from The University of Glasgow in the field of Women’s Autobiographical Comics.

.

◊◊

Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, she has been named Humanities Scholar in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine where she will teach medical students how to draw their own stories in words and images. Her visual narratives No Collusion! (2018), Paused (2018), Berlin Story: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins). She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State Abington. You can see more of her work at emilysteinberg.com. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].

 

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Published on November 23, 2019 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

PASSING FOR HUMAN: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR by Liana Finck reviewed by Alexandra Kanovsky

Cleaver Magazine Posted on July 28, 2019 by thwackJuly 8, 2020

PASSING FOR HUMAN: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR
by Liana Finck
Random House, 222 pages
reviewed by Alexandra Kanovsky

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Passing for Human cover art

Click here to purchase this book

Liana Finck wants to be seen. In creating Passing for Human, a graphic memoir and her second full-length work, she constructs her life story as Leola, and in doing so fantastically reimagines her youth and early adulthood in a quest to be seen and heard—by peers, by readers, and by herself.

Over the course of the novel Finck not only passes for human, but her work dissects what it means to be human. She ponders how to describe this sensation and ultimately realizes that “a human is someone who can see humanity in things”; the work is dedicated to exploring this experience and expression of humanity.

In creating Passing For Human Finck has tapped into the potential of the graphic medium to convey personal histories and memoirs. This is particularly true of Finck’s use of an animate shadow to represent her creativity and strangeness. (“Once upon a time, I lost something. Let’s call it ‘my shadow,’” she writes on the first page.) The shadow is clarified and strengthened by its visual representation, leading the reader to look forward to the moment when Leola and her shadow are finally reunited. The text also invites the reader to question their own personal definition of humanity and how it’s expressed in their lives. Passing for Human ultimately succeeds as a gorgeous tale about the trials and intricacies of anxiety, self-discovery, and the quirks of humanity.

Echoing Peter Pan, Passing for Human chronicles Leola’s quest to recover her shadow, a dark mirror of herself that offers companionship as a child and grows to represent her creativity and uniqueness. Leola thinks of her shadow as human, which is a testament to her own humanity. Finck’s drawings are particularly effective in detailing Leola’s introspection and tender relationship with her shadow and herself.

In a fit of insecurity at age eleven, Leola sends her shadow away and thus loses part of herself. This loss of her shadow signals a decline in her childhood creative freedom; Finck writes that “I was a real artist until I turned 11.” Of this point in her life, Finck describes how “I got my wish. I became someone else. Whatever happened over the course of the next ten years—did not happen to me.” Regardless of Finck’s disownership of her experiences, Leola’s story continues.

Leola and her shadow image

Leola and her shadow

 

The small and spritely illustrated Leola flits through her memories, both honest and anxious in her storytelling. She juxtaposes chapters describing her lonely childhood at a Montessori school run by nuns with anecdotes about a confused and undefined romantic relationship with “Mr. Neutral,” a comic artist who she classifies as her soulmate but who fails to be a reliable presence in her life.

Finck honors the parts of herself she inherited from her mother and father by devoting chapters to their individual and collective stories. Her mother, the bright and ambitious Bess, gives Leola the gift of the shadow. Bess’s shadow is a constant companion and friend, guiding her in her choices and encouraging her creativity, but as Bess’s early marriage implodes and she returns home, away from her abusive partner, she cuts her shadow free. Bess continues her schooling and becomes a brilliant architect, designing a perfect house for her new husband, Shamai, and their infant daughter Leola. This home is a repeated image throughout the text; a curved building shrouded in shade from the mountain behind it, the house is the essence of Leola’s close-knit home life and her childhood solidarity.

Childhood home image

Childhood home

Shortly afterwards, anxious Leola changes tactics and restarts her memoir with the story of her father, the affectionate doctor Shamai, who shares his otherness with his daughter. Finck writes that Shamai is “secretly a huge weirdo;” he is “a stranger […] somehow zipped into a human body,” and he imbues the same sense of outsiderness in his child, a fact that concerns him deeply. Only later in her life Leola will acutely feel this otherness bestowed upon her by her father; she feels as if both of them are “passing for human,” just as she classifies her shadow. Here again, the concept of defining humanity is explored; Leola describes her father as not fully human to indicate not only his outsider status but his sense of discomfort with the world around him.

The penultimate chapter recounts Leola’s childhood from her shadow’s perspective; readers are meant to assume that Leola finally triumphs in reconciling with her other self and childhood creativity. This climax is visibly different than the rest of the work; the background is the inky black of Leola’s shadow and Finck’s lines are light scorings on this dark background, but her scratchy and doodly style are consistent. This chapter draws the reader into the world of otherness that Leola struggles with throughout the text.

Reunion with shadow image

Reunion with shadow

 

Liana Finck author photo

Liana Finck

The narrative is peppered with interludes: short chapters detailing Finck’s interpretation of the story of creation, whimsically designed tessellations, and detailed and colorful chapter and cover pages. These constant restarts and intermittent doodles create the essence of the artist’s space and mind. Instead of presenting an unrealistically tidy retelling of life, Finck’s work mirrors the ephemeral haze of memory. Her assured and scrawling line drawings of animals and humans, sometimes featuring comically intense expressions of joy or despair, lend the text the quality of a childhood dreamscape that is not fully understood until adulthood.

Passing for Human chronicles not only the story of Finck’s parents and her own childhood, but the process of her creating her graphic memoir. She is plagued by anxiety in the face of detailing her personal history; these gnawing worries take the form of rats, sitting on her shoulders and nibbling at her graphic form.

Leola's worries image

Leola’s worries

Finck does not suppress any of her apprehension in her writing, and allows the rats to convince her to continually restart her story; thus, every chapter features a cover page and is titled “Chapter 1.” The repeated image of adult Leola pulling a blank sheet of paper towards her and doodling the heading Passing for Human is a merry-go-round of anxiety; the reader’s experience is akin to consuming the first chapters of several books in a series, randomized in sequence and abandoned shortly after commencing. Finck views the process of creating Passing for Human as not only producing a product for the reader, but an experiment in self-discovery. The heart of the work, with all its cyclical thoughts and false starts, is the process of Leola, and thus Liana, finding her lost shadow, her talent, her strangeness.

Restarting her work image

Restarting her work


◊◊

Alexandra Kanovsky headshotAlexandra Kanovsky is an avid reader and editor and a recent graduate of Kenyon College, where she majored in English and completed her thesis on girlhood in graphic novels. She has interned and worked for a variety of literary locales including Restless Books, Lime Books, and Impress Books. She also served as the Editor-in-Chief of HIKA Literary Magazine, Kenyon’s oldest literary publication. Alexandra can be reached at [email protected].

 

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Published on July 28, 2019 in graphic narrative reviews, nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

CARTOON DIALECTICS, a series by Tom Kaczynski, reviewed by Julia Alekseyeva

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 4, 2018 by thwackJanuary 5, 2019

CARTOON DIALECTICS
by Tom Kaczynski
Uncivilized Books
Vol. 1 (24 pages, 2010)
Vol 2 (32 pages, 2011)
Vol 3 (32 pages, 2018)

reviewed by Julia Alekseyeva

The Cartoon Dialectics series collects work that Tom Kaczynski has published in anthologies since 2005. Kaczynski is perhaps best known for being the publisher of comics imprint Uncivilized Books, an independent press that has published works by Gabrielle Bell, David B., and Noah Van Sciver. As the title Cartoon Dialectics suggests, Kaczynski’s own work straddles the line between comics and philosophy; he weaves together reflections on culture and critical theory with memoir and memory. Succinct and meditative, the short works address themes which continue to be relevant almost fifteen years after they were first written.

The three volumes include works first published in different sources, and drawn in a variety of styles, with a proclivity towards thick ink lines, monochrome, and realism. Cartoon Dialectics includes a number of Easter Eggs for the philosophy-obsessed, as he casually refers to Guy Debord, Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, and Svetlana Boym. Critical theory is the backbone to Cartoon Dialectics but its inclusion does not keep the work from being approachable; nor is the political import sacrificed in favor of a more palatable message. Cartoon Dialectics toes the line between heady theoretical ideas and commonplace, everyday speech with grace and poise.

A frequent character in these volumes is “Ransom Strange,” an “immaterialist psychonaut” who travels into the minds of others. In Volume 1, he cures a man suffering from a “conspicuous consumption curse” with obsolete technology: a five-year-old cell phone. In Volume 2, as he introduces himself (thus breaking the fourth wall), he promises to the reader: “I can only guarantee one thing / You’ll never see the world in the same way again!” In this way, he becomes a guide who leads the reader to critically examine her world.

In the volumes, Kaczynski frequently returns to a critique of modern life. In the tradition of theorists such as aesthetic philosopher Walter Benjamin and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, Kaczynski considers both the wonders of modernity and the despair of late capitalism. Subjects in Cartoon Dialectics are frequently isolated from others, trapped in a metaphorical (or literal) dystopia. It takes a glitch in the system—an ecological catastrophe, a blackout—for them to find meaning.

Frequently, this meaning is found in an escape from the alienation characteristic of life lived in large cities. Volume 2 begins with a parable in which citizens of a city can only find connection during a blackout. Suddenly the title of his publishing imprint, Uncivilized Books, begins to make a great deal of sense: Kaczynski’s comics, and philosophy, reflect a yearning for a return to pre-civilization, or perhaps pre-modernity—a world of open fields, darkness, fireflies, and stars.

Volume 2 includes an insert from a comic Kaczynski drew at age twenty-three—ten years before the volume’s publication date. In this stream-of-consciousness memoir, which he claims “contain[s] all the elements of my future (now) comics,” he remembers blackouts in his native communist Poland with a wistful nostalgia. This short segment, drawn sketchily by pen, and in styles both cartoonish and hyper-realistic, describes how he would draw by candlelight during blackouts. Upon immigration to the U.S., he became an “electric kid,” for whom television was a drug. It was only when he finally snapped out of his obsession with screens that he noticed things he had never seen before. For Kaczynski, a return to drawing, darkness, and candlelight also becomes a return to mystery and creativity. To be “uncivilized” is, oxymoronically, a way to return to the creative and artistic roots of human civilization.

Similarly, in Volume 1, a comic called “World 2.0” presents an ironic critique of technological futurists such as Jeff Jarvis, Marvin Minsky, and Ray Kurzweil. They are presented as proponents of the death of print, the posthuman “digeratti.” Almost ironically, Kurzweil—father of (print) cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (Black Balloon, 2016)—is mentioned in several instances throughout the volumes. Yet the tone of Cartoon Dialectics is unapologetically anti-capitalist. Technological innovation is equated to the Moai of Easter Island: massive statues built during a period of extreme ecological decline.

The solution, again, is a return to what Kaczynski, riffing on cyberpunk, deems “meatspace”—“ancient, slow, awkward, ugly, beautiful, sublime, human.” The solution is also a return to print—to books, comics, and zines which afford the reader freedom to read it where she may, even through spilled coffee stains. Print is resilient, as Kaczynski notes in the comic “The Unbearable Lightness of Digital”: “once a book enters the world, it is surprisingly difficult to destroy.” By contrast, an e-book loaded onto a tablet will only work when its battery is charged. What, then, will happen when power supplies run out? Tablets do not work without power, but any work of print can be read by candlelight, regardless of our ever-dwindling power supply.

There is an eschatological strain to Kaczynski’s work; the apocalypse is frequently referenced. In Cartoon Dialectics (and, one can argue, in our own extra-diegetic world), we are living through the apocalypse. As Random Strange notes in Volume 2: “It’s here. Now. Welcome to the end of the world.”

Indeed, in Volume 3 the age of Trump looms overhead (literally, as the back of Trump’s head is on one of the volume’s covers). This volume returns to a theme woven throughout Kaczynski’s work: nostalgia. Kaczynski uses concepts from Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2002) to explain both the horrifying return of nationalism and the far more benign addiction to all things retro, from vinyl to vintage clothing. Boym presents two types of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia, which seeks to “make __ great again” with a return to the past, and reflective nostalgia, which, while longing for something lost, still understands the impossibility of its return. The former is at the root of fascistic terror, while the latter can be inspiration for poetry, art, and music. As Kaczynski shows, it can inspire comics as well. The past cannot return, the present cannot be “great again,” but, with a critical mindset and a healthy dash of reflective nostalgia, it can help soothe the alienation of our increasingly alienated lives.


Julia Alekseyeva is a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute at Harvard. She researches global media (including film, television, and comics) and radical leftwing activism. She is also an author-illustrator whose debut graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (Microcosm, 2017) recently won the VLA Diversity Award.

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Published on September 4, 2018 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE BEST WE COULD DO: AN ILLUSTRATED MEMOIR by Thi Bui reviewed by Jenny Blair

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 27, 2017 by thwackSeptember 27, 2017

THE BEST WE COULD DO: AN ILLUSTRATED MEMOIR
by Thi Bui
Abrams ComicArts, 330 pages

reviewed by Jenny Blair

The Best We Could Do begins with birth. Thi Bui is a first-time mother in California, and her own mother–despite having flown across the country to be there–has quietly excused herself from the delivery room.

Má has her reasons, as it happens. Their names are Quyên and Thảo, and they haunt mother and daughter in this wistful, level-headed masterpiece of a family memoir. The Best We Could Do traces the journey of Bui’s family, escapees from South Vietnam and migrants to the United States.

It’s an important book. As Thu-Huong Ha points out, 1970s US opposition to Vietnamese refugees rivaled the opposition to Syrian refugees today, of whom there are five million and counting. And then there are South Sudanese, Somalis, Afghans, Houstonians, Puerto Ricans, and countless more. It has never been more crucial to understand and join in solidarity with people driven from their homes, perhaps never to return.

Broken in many ways long before they arrive in their new country, Bui’s family stoops under the weight of memory as they build new lives. As the heavy responsibility for her new son hits Bui, “a wave of empathy for my mother washes over me.” She rides that wave across the Pacific and back to her parents’ own childhoods, and comes full circle to acceptance of her family’s pain and to hope for her own son.

Thi Bui

As Bui teeters between child- and motherhood, she decides to try to get closer to her parents. But that is no easy task. There persists between the generations “a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.” Its depths lie in the Việt Nam the family left in 1978. Through her parents’ memories and stories, and with every elegant accent and circumflex of her family’s mother tongue fully respected, Bui goes “seeking an origin story that will set everything right.”

Why does her father, Bố, raise his children at home in San Diego, jobless, a silent, brooding figure smoking a cigarette, occasionally exploding in anger, telling the children terrifying ghost stories? His “wounds beneath wounds,” she later learns, include famine in 1940s Indochina, a sucker-kick by his own father, hiding alone as the French massacre his village in a dugout accessible only by diving underwater. All this before the age of 8.

“Afraid of my father, craving safety and comfort, I had no idea that the terror I felt was only the long shadow of his own,” Bui writes.

Her mother, on the other hand, had a privileged childhood as the daughter of an engineer, attending French schools and attended by servants. She has a gradual nationalist awakening, teaching herself to read Vietnamese, visiting a servant’s family in the country, then learning about her country’s recent history under the French and eventually refusing to speak French outside of school. In the US, it is she who takes the low-paid job on offer, and she who eventually leaves her husband.

The book is a gripping pocket history of the Vietnam War and the French colonial exploitation that preceded it–the reader learns, among other things, the backstory behind Eddie Adams’ famous photo of a street execution–but also a rare glimpse at the country itself in the decades before and during. Young Bố teaches himself to swim in a human-made neighborhood pond brimming with fish and shrimp, eats French baguettes and chocolate ice cream and eventually studies French literature. Then he witnesses the brutality and mass killings of the 1950s regime in the communist north before escaping to Sài Gòn. There, he does his best James Dean imitation as he dreams of a new life in Paris. Bố and Má meet in teachers’ college there; she marries him, thinking he is about to die of what is probably tuberculosis. But he survives.

Bui’s art is gorgeous. Her line work is simple and utterly expressive, and with simple black-and-white washes accented by a pale orange, she conveys every emotion with understated power, from Bố’s sadness and shame when a San Diego bigot spits in his face, to Bui’s own nervousness and hope when she dares to tell Má she’s living with her boyfriend.

Each sibling’s birth story is honored in the telling. Má gives birth to her son Tâm in a Malaysian refugee camp. We see Thảo’s death before birth and Quyên’s from what may have been malnutrition. Sister Bích arrives in Sài Gòn two weeks before the Tet Offensive, and Bui herself just three months before South Vietnam lost the war.

Then, after years of fear, deprivation, and surveillance, comes the family’s escape, to which no summary can do justice. Statistics can’t, either. An initial wave of 130,000 mostly educated and connected asylum-seekers left Vietnam for the US in 1975, and another, 2 million strong, in 1978. Many of the latter were “boat people” like Bui’s family, and hundreds of thousands ended up in the United States, where they often met with xenophobia, as did Bui’s family.

The experience makes up part of Bui’s inheritance, what she calls her refugee reflex–“the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to RUN when the shit hits the fan.” As, one night in their apartment complex, thanks to cigarettes and oxygen tanks, it did.

For those who lose a country, the disorientation and the tiring need to balance on a new edge never quite recedes. The task of starting over is in some ways impossible. But Bui comes to feel boundless gratitude to her family. For her own son, “a new life, bound with mine quite by coincidence,” Bui sees freedom ahead. May he be as rooted as he wishes to be.


Jenny Blair writes about science, medicine, and other neat things. Formerly an emergency physician, she practiced in ERs large and small and taught young physicians with an NGO in Indonesia before switching to full-time writing and editing. Her passions include cartooning and graphic novels, permaculture, and improv comedy, as well as the importance of place. She is a fan of alternative housing and kinship models, and makes her home in the Northeast

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Published on September 27, 2017 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS, a graphic novel by Kristen Radtke, reviewed by Jenny Blair

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 23, 2017 by thwackAugust 23, 2017

IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS
by Kristen Radtke
Pantheon Books, 288 pages

reviewed by Jenny Blair

If we felt attached to and invested in the ground beneath our feet, how would the world be different? What’s the difference between feeling rooted in a place and feeling stuck there? And how is one to face the facts of geographic and human impermanence?

These are among the questions Kristen Radtke explores in her lonely, restless memoir Imagine Wanting Only This. The book blends stories of abandoned ruins and disaster locations with personal memories of death in the family, inherited heart disease, and the author’s search for love and belonging. It is an attempt to come to terms with the impermanence of human works, and of humans themselves.

Though the book is inviting, its wealth of detail and many digressions sometimes illustrate and sometimes crowd out larger themes. The author never fully comes to terms with her own obsessions, making the reader wish she had marinated her ideas a little longer. The drawing is skillful but flat. And the language is sometimes confusing. Despite these frustrations, Imagine Wanting Only This remains compelling and sometimes transcendent.

Ruined places make up the backbone of the book. Radtke is fascinated by them, as are many of us. We’ve all clicked on “ruin porn”: photographs of Chernobyl, Detroit, ghost towns of the West. Decaying buildings are a potent metaphor of death—and attachment to place as well as grief at the loss of place are deeply felt needs we scarcely have language for. Radtke is at her best when she explores those needs, when she delves into what it means to really be somewhere, and how a specific place—especially if it’s abandoned—can make us feel a specific way.

Early in the book, we visit Gary, Indiana, where the awed author and her boyfriend explore the crumbling city center as young Chicago art students. (I bristled when Radtke’s younger self calls the city “almost completely abandoned,” a description Gary’s eighty-plus thousand residents would dispute.) Next come reminiscences of art school and a carefree existence in a shabby Chicago apartment. A series of near-compulsive travels bring Radtke to military ruins in the Philippines, a series of Southeast Asian countries, Italy, Iowa, Iceland, Kentucky, and, at last, New York City. She is fearful of getting stuck in place, yet the reader senses a longing to be rooted, too.
“It felt like I had to see everything, as if it was the only way my life would count or matter. I didn’t care where we were going as long as it was someplace new,” she writes.

Clicking on photos of ruined places, Radtke muses, “It was just unreal that so much of the world could be empty like that….Since Gary I’d been consumed by the question of how something that is can become, very quickly, something that isn’t.

In Louisville, Kentucky, Radtke gets at something interesting—placelessness—when she describes the state as “full of interstates where I took exit after exit to get to more interstate.” Hinting at the unnameable pain many of us feel upon seeing desecrated nature, she describes not wanting the Ohio River even to exist because it is “brown and thick and full of trash.”

Radtke discovers she has an ancestor who played a role in the horrific Peshtigo, Wisconsin firestorm of 1871. She follows a fascinating history and analysis of the fire with an account of  how World War II tacticians worked to reproduce its conditions in firebombing Germany and Japan. Then it’s on to the Dugway sheep incident, in which thousands of sheep lay down and died on an army proving ground. Once again, she is fascinated with physical ruins, detailing the buildings the Army built for test-bombing: their dormered attics, their lack of plumbing, their tongue-and-groove floors, and their 18 pieces of furniture each.

She herself wonders why this research matters to her.

The fire happened, and the bombs that made more fire happened, too….And when you love and then cannot continue that loving? And when the walls of a heart designed for protection turn in on themselves? What can be made of the spaces that we cannot witness?

Radtke has a better reason than many of us to dwell on the riddle of destruction and decay. A genetic form of heart disease kills Radtke’s beloved young uncle. She appears to have inherited it as well, and she frequently treats the disease and ruined places as metaphors for each other. Yet it’s never very clear how she feels about the condition, nor how it turns out for her; nor whether her reticence is related to self-neglect, a desire for privacy, or perhaps a mild version of the disease.

The book’s most hair-raising and powerful moment comes as Radtke visits Iceland, led there by a documentary about the island of Heimaey, whose residents evacuated in 1973 during a volcanic eruption. She ponders the Icelandic filmmaker, who left Heimaey and returned forty years later. She ponders a photographer back in Gary who died, hit by a train, as he captured it on film, part of a long-term project to photograph the struggling town. And she considers how some people wander restlessly, others move when necessary, and still others remain in one place without ever feeling stuck.

It is then that she looks around Iceland and thinks, Imagine wanting only this. What does it mean to be so rooted to a place, even if that place is troubled, decaying Gary, Indiana, or volcano-stricken Heimaey? How might that feel? If we knew, we might take better care of our lands, our cities, our rivers. It may be the question of our time.


Jenny Blair writes about science, medicine, and other neat things. Formerly an emergency physician, she practiced in ERs large and small and taught young physicians with an NGO in Indonesia before switching to full-time writing and editing. Her passions include cartooning and graphic novels, permaculture, and improv comedy, as well as the importance of place. As a fan of alternative housing and kinship models, she makes her home in Michigan with several friends.

 

 

You may also like:

AS IF IT ACTUALLY LOOKED THAT BLUE. by Gary Lundy

SOVIET DAUGHTER: A GRAPHIC REVOLUTION by Julia Alekseyeva reviewed by Jenny Blair

WAYWARD HEROES, a novel by Halldór Laxness, reviewed by Tyson Duffy

 

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Published on August 23, 2017 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

MOONCOP, a graphic novel by Tom Gauld, reviewed by Ansel Shipley

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 13, 2017 by thwackMarch 13, 2017

MOONCOP
by Tom Gauld
Drawn and Quarterly, 96 pages

review by Ansel Shipley

Melancholy can be a difficult tone for authors to elicit. Paired with too much unwarranted levity, or depicted as flat sadness without the requisite quiet contemplation, it can easily shift to the maudlin. Tom Gauld’s graphic novel, Mooncop, manages to delicately balance the emptiness of outer space with the intimacy of solitude, a tone which stayed with me days after putting the book down. Gauld packs an impressive amount of feeling into a tiny package—Mooncop is less than a hundred pages long and takes a maximum of thirty minutes to finish. I never felt overwhelmed by any single emotion, however, as a thin layer of meditative calm acts as a barrier between the potentially crushing despair of loneliness.

Mooncop traces the life of the sole police officer in a shrinking lunar colony. He follows a simple routine, buying the same order (a coffee and glazed donut) every morning at a “Lunar Donuts” stand, responding to the few calls he might receive, and then repeating everything over again. There is no change in his day-to-day life. The closest he comes to experiencing excitement is when the computer controlling the Lunar Donuts stand malfunctions and attempts to charge him for 1,728 cups of coffee and 20,736 glazed donuts. The officer watches as the few remaining residents pack up and leave for Earth one at a time,  his modular apartment building has its empty rooms removed, and, much to his confusion, the Lunar Donuts stand is upgraded to a human-operated Lunar Donuts restaurant.

The art of Mooncop is simple, incorporating a minimal palette; with just black, white, and blue, Gauld manages to communicate the bleak vastness of outer space and the quiet intimacy of repetition. His art focuses on scale, evoking the tiny, mostly negligible impact humanity has had on the massive expanse of the moon. Gauld constantly shifts from the large-scale (images of the moon or the officer’s car against the backdrop of a vast nothingness) to extreme close-ups (of conversations between individuals or mundane action). Mooncop is all about relativism, like how little humanity’s actions matter on the grand scale; but it also manages to simultaneously reveal the vital importance of small kindnesses.

Gauld’s Mooncop functions as a tale of ennui, the setting of an emptying lunar colony only a metaphor for any place arrived at too late. The officer remarks to the woman manning the newly upgraded Lunar Donuts—the only new person on the moon—“Since I was a boy I’ve dreamed about being a cop and living on the moon. But now I’m here, it seems like the party’s over and everybody’s going home” . The sentiment that the world has moved on while you weren’t looking haunts nearly everyone. Many young adults feel like the opportunities they learned about when they were children just don’t exist anymore, and they’re left questioning where to go from here.

Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld

The woman who mans the newly established Lunar Donuts restaurant is the first person to have set foot on the moon in a long time, and after a few days the officer realizes they are the last two people on the moon. The officer and the woman quickly become close; after only a few days, the officer admits that he may be depressed; his superiors on Earth won’t let him return, and he feels as though he has been forgotten. The woman responds, “I’d never thought much about the moon before I got this job. But I love it here. I can spend hours just looking at the stars and the rocks. It makes me feel very peaceful.”

This exchange is the only true human connection the officer experiences throughout Mooncop. The tender intimacy this scene exhibits, reinforced via Gauld’s visual sparseness and linguistic brevity, encapsulates the most lasting aspect of Mooncop. Gauld shows how human contact, even if you are literally the last two people on the surface of the moon, can nonetheless, if we are open to it, sustain us.


Ansel Shipley is soon to be a graduate of SUNY Purchase College with a degree in literature. He is the senior literary editor of the student-run art and literature publication Submissions Magazine. 

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Published on March 13, 2017 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

SOVIET DAUGHTER: A GRAPHIC REVOLUTION by Julia Alekseyeva reviewed by Jenny Blair

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 10, 2017 by thwackAugust 23, 2017

SOVIET DAUGHTER: A GRAPHIC REVOLUTION
by Julia Alekseyeva
Microcosm Publishing, 191 pp.
reviewed by Jenny Blair

Julia Alekseyeva’s Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution could hardly have come at a better time. A Soviet-born woman who emigrated with her multigenerational Jewish family to the U.S. in 1992, the author entwines her great-grandmother Lola’s life story with her own, translating Lola’s own written memoir into part of a double narrative. As we all struggle to make sense of the Trump era, Alekseyeva has written and drawn a story of autocracy, revolution, and the refugee experience–and of how history affects the private lives not just of its eyewitnesses, but of many subsequent generations.

Born in 1910, Lola was seven when the 1917 Russian Revolution began. What happened next was epic. Not long after leaving school as a child to do the family’s housework, she survived a typhus epidemic and a pogrom. And then her troubles began. She coped with unheated dwellings; bouts of near-starvation; and the loss of the love of her life, her parents, and several siblings in World War II. Even the better times seem incomprehensible: One job, with the KGB’s predecessor agency, had her typing 9 am to 5 pm, then 9 pm to 2 am. What with the wages, Lola said, “For once, we lived well.”

Likable, curious, and stoic, Lola tells her story with a steadiness that conceals tidal emotions, the kind that might kill someone with the leisure to face them. Alekseyeva’s sometimes startlingly expressive drawings hint at her great-grandmother’s burden. (One image of a childhood thousand-yard stare is especially chilling.) Lola survived a full century, quite possibly too busy to grieve along the way.

Yet amid the disasters, Lola savored her leisure. She recalled sprinting in the local stadium, attending operettas, and organizing dances for fellow workers–anecdotes that offer a glimpse of the richness as well as the deprivations of early Soviet life.

Generations later, as a four-year-old refugee, Alekseyeva experiences the US as a “land of monsters,” full of mocking peers and unintelligible language. She grows close to her great-grandmother as the intervening generations absent themselves at jobs and English classes.

Adventurous and progressive, Alekseyeva and Lola have much in common. By contrast, Alekseyeva’s obedient, conservative mother and grandmother don’t understand her in the least. “It is said that Lola’s generation–called the ‘G.I. Generation’–is closest to Generation Y (‘millennials’) in sentiment and personality. Nowhere was this more evident than in my four-generation family,” she writes. In fact, Alekseyeva’s mother treats her with a cruelty born of bewilderment, or perhaps of her own generational traumas. Fulfilling a lifelong fantasy of escape, Alekseyeva finally leaves for Columbia University. Soon she becomes an activist, not unlike Lola was in her time.

Alekseyeva inadvertently reenacts darker family history as well. In particular, the Holocaust and Chernobyl haunt the narrator long after her family settles in the US.

Julia Alekseyeva

For all our talk of trigger warnings and safe spaces, we often fail to understand one of trauma’s central truths: that its roots may precede the sufferer’s birth. So much of what troubles and haunts us–self-loathing, resentment, a feeling of hollowness or inefficacy or of being fatally flawed, even physical illness–is rooted in our parents’, our grandparents’, our great-grandparents’ life experiences, in how those experiences changed them, their epigenetics, and their child-rearing practices. Soviet Daughter’s two echoing first-person accounts make this unusually clear.

Nonfiction books that explore the transmission of familial trauma include It Didn’t Start With You, by Mark Wolynn, who built in part upon the work of Bessel van den Kolk, author of The Body Keeps The Score. On the graphic side, Art Spiegelman’s post-Holocaust masterpiece Maus is built on his father’s memories and the way they haunt Spiegelman himself. In Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, in contrast, Alison Bechdel makes only brief references to her parents’ back stories to hint at the roots of her own psychic injuries. Brilliant though her books are, one wishes she’d delved as deeply into her ancestors’ lives as Spiegelman and Alekseyeva have. To understand the present, we need more stories from our families’ pasts.


Jenny Blair writes about science, medicine, and other neat things. Formerly an emergency physician, she practiced in ERs large and small and taught young physicians with an NGO in Indonesia before switching to full-time writing and editing. Her passions include cartooning and graphic novels, permaculture, and improv comedy, as well as the importance of place. As a fan of alternative housing and kinship models, she makes her home in Michigan with several friends.

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Published on March 10, 2017 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

ROLLING BLACKOUTS: DISPATCHES FROM TURKEY, SYRIA, AND IRAQ, a work of graphic journalism by Sarah Glidden, reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 1, 2017 by thwackFebruary 1, 2017

ROLLING BLACKOUTS: DISPATCHES FROM TURKEY, SYRIA, AND IRAQ
by Sarah Glidden
Drawn and Quarterly, 304 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

“They forget that refugees are people. When people think of refugees, they think of people with dirty clothes. But refugees can be wealthy, Einstein was a refugee. They have skills; they have ideas.”—Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts

We live in a global society, something that has been reinforced repeatedly in the weeks since President Trump took his oath of office. As we hear of changes to our immigration policies and watch footage of subsequent protests at airports nationwide, we are reminded of the value of a full and informed understanding of the world, its citizens, and our relationships with each other.

That’s where a text like Rolling Blackouts comes into play. Driving this work of graphic journalism is the protagonist’s quest for understanding the perspectives of those living in different parts of the world. Author/artist Sarah Glidden, along with two of her friends from The Seattle Globalist and former Iraq War Veteran Dan O’Brien, spent two months travelling through the Middle East, speaking with anyone and everyone they could.

As Glidden describes in the book’s preface, this resulted in hundreds of hours of recorded conversations. Glidden made painstaking efforts to accurately portray those they met and the words spoken. Each conversation they had with the people of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq aimed to overcome Dan’s admission, which appears early in the text: “I don’t have much of an idea of who they are, what they’re like.” And with this statement, perhaps, Dan speaks for many of us.

Throughout its 300-plus pages, Rolling Blackouts provides valuable historical contexts and multiple viewpoints to help any reader better understand the region and its people. Glidden incorporates the voices of government officials, aid workers, refugees—even a former terror suspect, among many others, in order to showcase the complicated realities of life in those countries. We meet those whose lives were improved from the Iraq War as well as those whose lives were destroyed. We meet those who love the United States, and those who say, “I don’t want to bring children into a country that could be bombed by America.” As Glidden writes: “I think sometimes journalists get caught up in the hard news part, in investigating an unknown angle. But they forget that for most of our audiences, it’s all an unknown angle.” Incorporating a large chorus of voices, Glidden hopes to inform and challenge her readers.

The focus on issues and worldviews provides a valuable, enjoyable, but very different experience from many graphic texts. Rolling Blackouts delivers almost none of the “action” that one might come to expect from the graphic medium. But what it lacks in action it more than makes up for by asking and hoping to answer difficult and significant questions—“No matter what we do, can you bring someone back from the dead?” and “What is journalism FOR? What’s the point?” – forcing readers to think, and in many cases grapple with, our own beliefs.  Its skillful search for answers makes the dialogue-heavy Rolling Blackouts well worth a reader’s time.

The graphic medium is a perfect fit for Rolling Blackouts, due in large part to its focus on dialogue. As with her first book, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, Glidden’s simple but beautiful water-color drawings pull readers into each scene, conveying a strong sense of the locations and people depicted while also highlighting the words on the page. Rolling Blackouts is about granting admission into the thoughts and feelings of others.

Glidden has created an ambitious and powerful work capable of broadening its readers’ horizons. As one character says, “It’s a shame that politics get in the way of people.” Works like Rolling Blackouts are necessary reminders of our shared humanity. While some in power might try to divide us, a little understanding and empathy, based directly in listening to individual stories, can go a long way. Helping others achieve that, I hope, will become Glidden’s legacy.


Brian Burmeister teaches writing and communication at Iowa State University. He co-wrote the nonfiction play, Farmscape: The Changing Rural Environment, and his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. He can be followed on Twitter @bdburmeister.

 

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Published on February 1, 2017 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S KINDRED: A GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION by Damian Duffy and John Jennings reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 16, 2017 by thwackJanuary 16, 2017

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S KINDRED: A GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION
by Damian Duffy and John Jennings
Abrams Comicarts, 240 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Crowned the “grand dame of science fiction” by Essence, Octavia Butler was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed science fiction writers of the 20th century. Her career spanned over a dozen novels and, among her many awards and honors,  Butler was the first science fiction writer to win a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, before being cut short. In 2006, she  tragically passed away at the age of fifty-eight.

Thirty-eight years after its original publication, Butler’s best-selling novel, Kindred, and by extension Butler’s own voice and vision, has been given new life. Considered by many to be her most accessible work, the novel has been adapted into a graphic novel by cartoonist/writer Damian Duffy and editor/artist John Jennings.

Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, like the history it shares, is haunting. At its core, it is a story of pain, a tale of survival. A twenty-something writer from the year 1976, living in California, is mysteriously and repeatedly pulled through time and space to early 1800s Maryland. This protagonist, Dana Franklin, an African American, is thrust into the all-too-real, all-too-horrifying realities of the world of slavery.

The initial confusion Dana experiences is well felt by the reader. How did she get there? Why is this happening? As Kindred unfolds, Dana’s sanity and her very life are challenged.

The art of Kindred reinforces the terror and panic often felt by the narrator. The sometimes dark, often gritty images set a serious tone and an intensity that the story demands. Discomfort, frustration, and anger radiate from the book’s pages: the physical, often sexual violence is not just spoken of, but frequently shown. The art and story work collaboratively to make sure the reader is not okay with what is taking place.

Chiefly, Kindred is an ever-important reminder of how we think of and treat each other. The story explores not just the attitudes and actions of slave-owners and other whites towards their black slaves, and vice versa, but of slaves towards the educated black protagonist. The dynamics of these mindsets and the book’s events show the devastation that ignorance, jealousy, and sheer hatred can cause in the lives of many.

As Dana says at one point, “People don’t learn everything about the times that came before them.” We know slavery happened. But we don’t feel it. And, I suspect for many of us, we don’t like to think about it. To assist with the lessons Butler wants us to learn, Dana, who is very much her own character, functions in part as a proxy of the reader. Butler could have simply written a story set in 1800s Maryland, but by having the realities of slavery not just witnessed but lived by a protagonist from the modern era, we are forced to feel and think about that tragic era of our history as though it were happening to us.

Kindred does not ease that pain. Throughout its pages, the reader is confronted with brutal scenes. Whippings. Sexual assault. Rape. The violence depicted in Kindred is a necessary reminder of humanity at its worst. And the acceptance of these actions as “normal” by most of the characters is as troubling as the events themselves. One of the most haunting moments of the book shows two young child slaves playing pretend: these children—for fun—act out a slave auction. The buying and selling of humans is so normalized by these children that they even assign dollar values to their worth. A few pages later, Dana’s inner monologue addresses this horrifying scene poignantly: “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

Nearly four decades after its original printing, Kindred remains a valuable story and teaching tool. From its pages, we are reminded of the destructive consequences of prejudice.


Brian Burmeister teaches writing and communication at Iowa State University. He co-wrote the nonfiction play, Farmscape: The Changing Rural Environment, and his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. He can be followed on Twitter @bdburmeister.

 

 

 

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Published on January 16, 2017 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

MARCH, a graphic narrative by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell reviewed, by Brian Burmeister

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 29, 2016 by thwackSeptember 30, 2016

march-trilogy-300MARCH
by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
Top Shelf Productions, 560 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Sometimes, it takes a tragedy to open our eyes. The events in Selma, Alabama on “Bloody Sunday” in March of 1965 became such a moment, when, in a mass gathering of civil rights, demonstrators were violently attacked with billy clubs and tear gas as they attempted to march to the state capitol in Montgomery. News crews filmed the violence as state troopers beat the peaceful, unarmed protestors.

For millions of Americans who would see those images, there was no denying what had occurred. Or that it was wrong.

That shocking attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge forced many of its viewers to grapple with the brutal realities of police responses to protesters. Political will to support the American Civil Rights movement grew in ways not previously seen in this country, and in the months that followed that attack the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would be signed into law. Today, as depicted in the opening scene of the graphic narrative March, “Bloody Sunday” serves as a harrowing  reminder of our history but also as encouragement that despite its painful origins, large-scale civic activism can lead to large-scale change.

march-1

Co-written by Congressman John Lewis and his Digital Director/Policy Advisor, Andrew Aydin, and illustrated by Eisner Award-winning graphic novelist Nate Powell, March tells the powerful, unforgettable story of the major moments that made up the American Civil Rights Movement.

Spanning three volumes, which are available separately or as a single collection, March covers key years of civil rights leader Lewis’s life and the battles for justice he experienced firsthand. The writers skillfully frame the overarching narrative of all three books as Rep. Lewis reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement during President Barack Obama’s historic inauguration in 2009.

march-2

Presenting his upbringing in deeply segregated Alabama, Book One traces the forces that compelled and inspired Rep. Lewis to join the Movement. Through a juxtaposition of his life as a boy in rural Alabama with the realities he saw and felt during a childhood trip to Ohio, we see a young Lewis awaken to his standing as a second-class citizen. This storyline serves as a foundation for the impact that hearing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “social gospel” on the radio would have on him as a teenager.  Inspired, a young Lewis participates in the fight for integrated colleges and equality at lunch counters; it is a fight that requires patience and self-restraint in the face of degradation and violence.

march-3

In Book Two, that violence escalates. As the Movement changes its sights to discrimination on buses and at bus terminals, the Freedom Rides begin. Testing the strength of a Supreme Court decision that banned such discrimination, Lewis and other activists ride buses throughout the South. One of March’s most haunting moments is in a depiction of the Freedom Riders fleeing from a fire-bombed bus as an angry mob armed with baseball bats, tire irons, and other makeshift weapons approaches. This visual captures the overwhelming panic, urgency, and threat of the moment. Here, as in much of Book Two, the Movement’s efforts are truly challenged. But their endurance and unending faith in a better tomorrow serve them well. Book Two also offers some of the most beautiful and uplifting moments of the trilogy, such as Dr. King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Seeing Dr. King’s speech come to life through Powell’s illustrations reinforces the passion, optimism, and love behind his words.

Book Three sees the narrative arc come full circle. The final act focuses on the march from Selma and the events that surround it. The Movement and the viciousness of its opposition hit a boiling point, forcing President Johnson to take actions to bring justice to millions who had been denied it.

march-4

While Rep. Lewis’s life is incredible, the events of March never feel self-aggrandizing. He and Aydin regularly credit the work and sacrifices of the Movement’s most famous leaders (such as Dr. King and Malcolm X) and cast a spotlight on many of the activists often less remembered by history, including women critical to the movement such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Annie Lee Cooper. The books provide a reminder that only when people work together can we begin to face our most overwhelming struggles.

march-5In telling the stories, Powell’s beautiful black and white illustrations expertly utilize white and dark space to convey affect. In the most violent, atrocious, and tragic of moments, such as the shooting of 26-year old activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper, the dark of the ink envelops the page, injecting the scene with a powerful, insidious tone. At other times, such as in the representation of President Obama’s inauguration, a true lightness takes form, and the joy of celebrating an event that almost certainly seemed impossible up until this point erupts off each page.

john-lewis-marching-over-edmund-pettus-bridge

John Lewis in 1965

March is an emotional, often disturbing ride. At times, Rep. Lewis’s story will inspire profound sadness. Throughout these pages, we are reminded that so many lives were lost on the road to justice. Among those remembered are four young girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—murdered by a bomb while at their Birmingham church. At other times, such as when Governor George Wallace proclaims that “What this country needs is a few first class funerals,” March will make you fume with anger for the minds and actions of those fueled by deep hate and ignorance. But ultimately, March will make you feel hope. From integrated schools and lunch counters to the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, justice is real. Each step of that great march matters, however much there is still work to be done.

John Lewis today

John Lewis today

Rep. Lewis dedicates each book of the trilogy “To the past and future leaders of the movement…” While the overarching narrative of these books comes to a close with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the hope of March is that readers will recognize how the work of Dr. King and so many others didn’t end with them. Nor did it end with the inauguration of President Barack Obama. From the use of lethal police force to the effort of states to deny voting rights, systemic racism continues to plague this nation. Wherever, whenever, there is injustice, the march must continue.


Brian-BurmeisterBrian Burmeister teaches writing and communication at Iowa State University. He co-wrote the nonfiction play, Farmscape: The Changing Rural Environment, published by Ice Cube Press, and his writing has appeared in The Feminst Wire and Thin Air Magazine. He can be followed on Twitter @bdburmeister.

 

 

 

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Published on September 29, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

COSPLAYERS, a graphic narrative by Dash Shaw, reviewed by Helen Chazan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 15, 2016 by thwackDecember 17, 2022

Cosplayers-300-pxCOSPLAYERS
by Dash Shaw
FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS, 116 pages

reviewed by Helen Chazan

Throughout the pages of Cosplayers, the new book by noted cartoonist Dash Shaw, the narrative presents a series of illustrations of the titular subject: people dressed in costumes based on favorite characters from popular fandom—comics, television, video games, all the things that we like to call “geek culture.” Set against increasingly baroque pop-art patterns, Shaw’s cosplayers will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever perused photos of a comic convention—dynamic figures from popular culture evoked by the mundane reality of fans in uncomfortable outfits under the harsh lighting of the convention floor.

However, Shaw’s illustrations flatten the distance between reality and fantasy, using simple, thick outlines and bright colors which blur the distinction of costume and persona. In one of the stories, a character states that she loves “that cosplayers don’t look like their characters. [She] love[s] it that their costumes and bodies are slightly ‘wrong’ or ‘off-model.’” Cosplayers is a book about that fascination, a space where idealized images are corrupted by banal reality and normal people aspire to the greatness of symbols.

Subtitled “Perfect Collection” in a cheeky nod to anime box sets, Cosplayers is a collection of short stories about two young women, Annie and Verti, who make cosplay videos for YouTube in their spare time. Their stories chart experiences that should be familiar to anyone who has grown up adjacent to a nerd subculture, at times painfully so, as in the longest story in the collection depicting a weekend at an anime con. The story functions as a microcosm of the desires and anxieties of nerds and obsessives. While teenage girls and young women struggle to succeed in a blatantly sexist competition, their male counterparts grapple with emotional isolation and young lust. Meanwhile, the older “expert” fan, hoping to be taken seriously as a scholar, is undermined by the same familiar social misanthropy.

cosplayers-fantagraphics-1A deft humorist, Shaw has a knack for timing and observation reminiscent of Daniel Clowes, although his dialogue is more naturalistic than Clowes’s heavily verbal narration. The people in Cosplayers will remind many readers of situations they have been in and people they have known, depicted empathetically yet unflinchingly in all their awkward glory.

In one touching flight of fancy, a comic book that has just been cut to shreds for a collage speaks to the reader, proclaiming that it always “wanted to be destroyed and reborn.” The Cosplayers collection itself can be seen as a sort of collage, a number of the stories heavily redrawn from an earlier serialization—in particular, the first story, which now features a few panels cut and pasted from shojo manga and Chinese kung fu comics.

cosplayers-page-109

On their own, these simpler stories seemed like a departure from Shaw’s high concept, visually experimental works such as BodyWorld and New School, but Shaw has achieved a new level of literary depth in these smaller, more focused stories, and has created striking images through the use of digital patterns and washes of color. Cosplayers reminds you how good a comic can be, telling human, emotionally resonant stories through powerful pictures.


Helen Chazan is an archival assistant and comics critic. Her writing has appeared in The Comics Journal, SOLRAD, and Cleaver Magazine. She lives in Toronto.

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Published on August 15, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

HOT DOG TASTE TEST, a graphic narrative, by Lisa Hanawalt reviewed by Matthew Horowitz

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 29, 2016 by thwackJune 29, 2016

Hot-Dog-Taste-TestHOT DOG TASTE TEST
by Lisa Hanawalt 
Drawn & Quarterly, 176 pages

reviewed by Matthew Horowitz

Purists beware: this book contains very little analysis and comparison of actual hot dogs. Perhaps best known as the designer of Bojack Horseman, Lisa Hanawalt draws the way children laugh. In Hot Dog Taste Test, she brings haphazard looking outlines to life with vivid watercolors to depict an exploration of sensory staples. Breakfast is moralized, street food is ranked and deconstructed, horses are ridden, otters are swum with, birds are everywhere—some with exaggerated human genitalia, some with understated human anxieties.

 

This graphic narrative uses the form of a visual diary to lead the reader down the garden path of Hanawalt’s gustatory journeys via back alleys of idle thoughts and fears. The result is at once fascinating and comforting. Animal human hybrids are her known specialty, but Hanawalt demonstrates that her flair for surreal normalcy is limitless. She selects colors with boldness not seen since the end of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, contributing to the overreaching caricature of the seriousness of personhood. This theme emerges from the juxtaposition of childlike wonder and mundane struggles, creating concepts like the Menstrual Hut, Snack Realism, the Bug Train, the Meat Hat, and my favorite, an unadorned page encouraging the reader to leave a food stain on it.

impressive

Lisa Hanawalt

Lisa Hanawalt

In addition to her enjoyable abstract pages, Hanawalt’s autobiographical stories, which strike a conversational, meandering tone, are deceptively well crafted. When she spends a day shadowing renowned chef and food scientist Wylie Dufresne, Hanawalt spends as much time on his physical therapy appointment as his kitchen manner. She has a habit of describing the meals she has rather than identifying them. Part of this is owed to the Molecular Gastronomy that Dufresne is so renowned for, but part of it serves to facilitate the feeling of wonder.

In what I suspect might be the most honest account of a trip to Las Vegas ever published, a buffet is the only glamorous strip that Hanawalt idealizes, and the cost of too many crab legs is paid. A trip through Argentina seems to swing wildly between delicious and terrifying, but our heroine powers through. It must have taken as much bravery for the author to document her anxieties and insecurities in these pages as it took to watch fans crush each other in a football match, or brave public bathrooms, or kiss her way through airplane turbulence.

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As surreal images weave in with semi-meticulous accounts of personal adventure, there is little reason but a great deal of rhyme. Although Hot Dog Taste Test contains no single continuous story, a narrative reveals itself in Hanawalt’s mind’s wanderings just as it does in a person’s life. Continuous throughout the work is an evocation of freedom. Freedom to eat everything that looks good, freedom to wear a swimsuit, freedom to talk about bodily functions, freedom to ride horses, freedom to feast on life. The human experience is one long hot dog taste test: take a bite.


Matthew-HorowitzMatthew Horowitz is a group home worker with delusions of eloquence. He acts on whatever stage will permit him, and holds a bachelor’s degree in theater and psychology from Southern Connecticut State University. His area of study involves the creation and manipulation of the human psyche through performative action and ritual.

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Published on June 29, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

PEPLUM, a graphic narrative by Blutch, reviewed by Helen Chazan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 23, 2016 by thwackDecember 17, 2022

PeplumPEPLUM
by Blutch
translated by Edward Gauvin
New York Review Books

reviewed by Helen Chazan

“There is little point in expecting much of your own projects, when fate has projects of her own”
–The Satyricon

“The nostalgia for purity, the ghost of perfect love – these are a drunkard’s despair.”
–Peplum

The French cartoonist Blutch is known for creating beautifully illustrated graphic novels in response to great works of art and literature, and Peplum is one of his finest. The comic is a postmodern refashioning of Petronius’s mid-first century proto-novel The Satyricon, which ditches the original’s gluttonous decadence under Nero’s reign in favor of the chaotic end of the Late Roman Republic.

In many ways The Satyricon is an alien work of literature, composed of lengthy fragments of some sort of mock epic that parodies in extremity social norms which no longer exist: the surviving version ends mid sentence in the middle of a discussion of cannibalism. The difficulty of grasping the meaning of or “propererly” responding to The Satyricon has fueled surreal contemporary interpretations, most notably Fellini’s 1969 “science fiction of the past,” and this same attitude of both estrangement and fascination pervades Peplum.

Blutch’s Satyricon takes place in a Roman Empire of “lean and hungry look[s]” (to borrow from Shakespeare), desperate wretches at the fringes of a schizophrenic nation longing for pleasure in the midst of declining ideals. Peplum is not so much a work of historical fiction as it is a pastiche of classical imagery and signifiers, not unlike the classically-derived pulp film genre alluded to in the title.  Blutch’s work both evokes and confuses masterpieces of antiquity as it explores the sense of beauty and loss we experience in the midst of these ancient achievements.

In Peplum, Blutch’s Enclopius assumes the identity of the exiled patrician Publius Cimber, a name which may be familiar to those who have read Julius Ceasar (those in need of a reminder will benefit from the lengthy quotation of the assassination scene from that play included in the first chapter), after slaying him. As Cimber, Enclopius becomes enamored with a woman frozen in ice, modeled after a Kourai sculpture from Crete currently on display at the Louvre. Protecting, losing, searching for, and recovering the woman repeatedly throughout the text, Enclopius/Cimber stumbles his way through surreal distortions of familiar fragments, failing his young lover Giton and squabbling with the bumbling poet Eumolpus.

The Roman world, which this desperate Enclopius scavenges, is desolate and decaying, filled with leering rogues in grimy spaces aching with malnourishment.  Fittingly, the iconic “Dinner with Trimalchio” story, a satire of a wealthy freedman’s vanity and overindulgence that comprises nearly half of the surviving text of The Satyricon, is completely absent in this version.

P-lum_10_misenenpagePeplum reads as character-driven fiction, but upon closer scrutiny the work is actually quite similar in approach to Blutch’s later, essayistic graphic narrative So Long, Silver Screen. As in Silver Screen, Blutch works through his artistic obsessions by means of quotation — most of the dialogue in Peplum directly excerpts the original text of The Satyricon, spoken by different characters and in varying contexts. With this in mind, the comic’s presentation is actually quite experimental, page upon page of figures contorted in agony and lust while spewing jokes at each other, each passage less coherent the more its context is considered.

Many of the quotations in Peplum come from one section of The Satyricon, an episode in which Enclopius tries and fails on multiple occasions to successfully ravish the noblewoman Circe, his attempts to cure his impotence escalating to the point of literally shouting insults at his flaccid member. Aside from a few superficial changes, this story is presented relatively faithfully in Peplum, but it is reimagined as tragedy, a traumatic fall from grace at the heart of a story of failure and decrepitude. Enclopius’s comedic inadequacy becomes a symbol of the loss of youth and the fundamental separation from real experiences that an image of sublime beauty seems to point to.

2-Peplum_2048x2048

The pleasure of reading Peplum is more visceral than simply encountering a commentary on earlier work. Blutch is a master craftsman of powerful images, and every line of impressive mark making conveys emotion and terror. Much has been said about Blutch’s extraordinary skill in depicting gestural movement and expression, but I was particularly struck by the stark compositions in this book. A favorite image of mine is on page 35, where he depicts the overcrowded hold of a merchant ship using smeary, scratchy whites on a dark background to evoke paranoia and stench; this deathly image  would fit in with some of Goya’s scarier prints.

In the midst of the high concept energy and artistry of Peplum, Enclopius’s futile search for love and meaning is deeply moving and genuine, the final pages legitimately heartbreaking. For lovers of comics, Peplum is an essential, vital work, and it is also a must-read for anyone with an interest in modern interpretations of antiquity.


Helen Chazan is an archival assistant and comics critic. Her writing has appeared in The Comics Journal, SOLRAD, and Cleaver Magazine. She lives in Toronto.

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Published on June 23, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

OPERATION NEMESIS, a graphic narrative by Josh Baylock reviewed by Jesse Allen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 18, 2016 by thwackApril 17, 2016

Operation-NemesisOPERATION NEMESIS
text by Josh Baylock
illustrations by Hoyt Silva
Devil’s Due Entertainment, 144 pages

reviewed by Jesse Allen

Written by Josh Baylock, drawn by Hoyt Silva, and produced by David H. Krikorian, Operation Nemesis is the story of the early 20th century Armenian genocide and the tale of the eventual murder of that genocide’s architect. While this is a tale of Turkey’s then leader and dictator Talaat Pasha’s annihilation of over one million Armenians during World War I, the story of that atrocity unfolds through the trial and eventual acquittal of the assassin, Soghomon Tehlirsan. Historically rich, this graphic novel reads like a storyboard to a cinematic rendering of this tragic narrative. Each panel is vivid in its noir presentation: dark but flush with rich tones, stark and at times brutal, but firmly recounting an important story.

Rich with symbolic elements, Operation Nemesis features key allusions that gesture to the weight of justice and retribution. Panels that display swords and pistols on the scales of justice, dealings with dignitaries with a chess board in the foreground, and the ever-present newspaper (that eventually becomes the reader’s timeline to events within the story) present a genocide that went largely unnoticed and presumably served as a precursor to events in Nazi Germany. Baylock splices events from Tehlirsan’s recounting of how and why he sought out Pasha to the events that justified him and his supporters. Tehlirsan attributes the assassination of Pasha by his hand to visions of his loved ones in the spiritual realm. However, Tehlirsan’s narration of the atrocities and callousness of Turkish forces paired with Silva’s unrelenting panels of gruesome and numbing murders of men, women, and unborn children counterbalance the morality of his actions.

Operation-nemsis-

This recounting of events provides a window into the rise of authoritarian leaders and the devastation that is left in their wake. Tehlirsan’s acquittal by jury is an important factor into how societies assess the morality of one inconceivable event with another. Operation Nemesis rises above being a polemic or tale of revenge. It is a story that throws a pebble in the pond of the collective consciousness of human history and forces us to examine genocidal events.


Jesse-AllenJesse Allen lives graduated from Cuny’s Graduate Center with a masters in Arts and Liberal Studies with a focus on New York Studies. He is a life long fan of comics, graffiti, and space operas and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Published on April 18, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

PATIENCE, a graphic narrative by Daniel Clowes reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 7, 2016 by thwackApril 7, 2016

PatiencePATIENCE
by Daniel Clowes
Fantagraphics, 180 pages

reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

There are many reasons to read a book twice. Perhaps the book is complicated—the story reveals itself at the close and demands that we begin again. Maybe the story is so familiar that we read it over and over for the healing powers of its constancy; some books, quite simply, become friends. And of course, there’s the language itself. The words alone could be so fretfully beautiful that they foster our obsessive nature—our need to read them and memorize them and say them out loud (to ourselves and to others).

Patience demands to be read twice: first, as a who-done-it, and second, as a who-are-you. On the surface, Daniel Clowes has written a murder mystery. When newlywed Jack Barlow finds his pregnant wife, Patience, dead in their apartment, he begins an obsessive hunt to identify her killer. He hires a private investigator. He time travels into her past, attempting to understand who could enact such violence. He begins a journey into the wide expanse of what he never knew about his wife—a terrain that expands for years. This is a story about meeting the person you love much later than you’ve started to love them, and that is the energy that propels the reader forward—hunting for Patience’s killer, yes, but digging for something much deeper.

Patience-1

Patience, as a name, possesses a Latin root meaning to suffer. Nothing could be more appropriate for Patience the character, who endures abuse in adolescence and a traumatic silence that follows her throughout her adult life, a hush in which “every little thing seems like a horrible omen”. We find her staring out into a dark bedroom, unable to sleep while her thoughts are so loud. In thought bubbles distinct from Jack’s, we witness those that keep her most awake. Patience’s thoughts are pale yellow—as if growing from her blonde hair.

Patience-2

Clowes’s decision to integrate Patience into the text prevents the work from reducing her to the object of Jack’s furious quest. She is not the end goal; she is not a puzzle waiting to be put together. In fact, the more Jack travels through time to understand her, the more her story shifts; with the addition of his presence, the pieces change.

Amid futuristic concepts, Patience possesses the endearing nostalgia of a Choose Your Own Adventure. We can wander inside of it and contemplate the infinite arrangements of interactions. We can apply the same thought experiment to our own relationships and wander even longer. With Patience, Clowes presents a new tenet of physics: time collapses and expands in proportion to how much we know about one another. It’s an equation we know well—and one we too often forget.

Patience-3


Amy-Victoria-BlakemoreAmy Victoria Blakemore is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, where she served for three years as a writing tutor. She earned honors for her senior thesis on contemporary iterations of Superman in comics and graphic literature, and she also was awarded an Academy of American Poetry Prize. Her work appears in the The Kenyon Review, [PANK], and The Susquehanna Review.

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Published on April 7, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE OVEN, a graphic narrative by Sophie Goldstein, reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 23, 2016 by thwackMarch 23, 2016

The-OvenTHE OVEN
by Sophie Goldstein
AdHouse Books, 80 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Recently nominated for the Cartoonist Studio’s Prize for Best Print Comic of the Year, The Oven is a wonderful example of character-driven science fiction. In what might take a typical reader less than one minute, author/illustrator Sophie Goldstein quickly, yet carefully, establishes both the setting and a compelling story.

From the very first page, Goldstein introduces the reader to a dystopian world in which futuristic cities are shielded from an ultra-lethal sun by protective domes. On the same page, one sees the protagonists, Syd and Eric, a young couple, leave that society for the communal, technology-free living of “the Oven, AKA ‘Babyville,’” a small settlement far from government’s reach—a community of people hoping to find simple pleasure from simple living.

The-Oven-1

 

With displays of daily life in the Oven, Goldstein focuses her narrative around themes of family and freedom. The couple’s reasons for leaving their lives in the city quickly emerge and their quest for the life they have dreamed of is swiftly met with unforeseen obstacles. Life in the new world of the Oven isn’t easy. Syd and Eric find that “freedom isn’t free”—that, whether raising children or farming for sustenance, it requires hard work and commitment.

The-Oven-2

Both worlds of The Oven are fascinating—a futuristic world dominated by technological convenience and government regulation contrasted with a world committed to living as people once did: off the land and with no laws beyond common decency. These exaggerated versions of our own society and history touch upon important issues, and, fortunately, The Oven never feels preachy.

The-Oven-3

The book strikes a balance between highlighting the benefits and downfalls of technology, and Goldstein effectively displays the juggling act of personal, familial, and social responsibilities. In these moments, Goldstein raises valuable questions and resists forcing answers. As one will see in the characters themselves, one-size thinking does not fit all. A character says, “When I was young I had that ambition disease. I had an apartment, more square feet than God. Now I live in a ten by ten shack, but it feels bigger.” Another: “You really buying into all that ‘back to the land bullshit?’” The readers, like the protagonists, must make up their own minds.

The-Oven-4

The cartoony art of The Oven skillfully conveys the harsh realities of life outside the protective bubbles of the cities. Orange hues dominate most of the panels, and the readers learn, as Syd and Eric do, that when one ventures from their homes during the day, every inch of skin must be covered. To be in the unprotected sun in the Oven, one literally risks death, and Goldstein’s art won’t let you forget that.

For anyone who loves thought-provoking science fiction, The Oven is a tremendous, fast-paced read. The issues and challenges that Syd and Eric grapple with are relatable and relevant. While the future they find themselves in is unlikely to be one many readers would desire, the questions the protagonists search for answers to—such as what constitutes a life worth living—are unavoidable in our own lives as well.


Brian-Burmeister

Brian Burmeister is Program Chair of English and Communication at Ashford University. He co-wrote the nonfiction play, Farmscape The Changing Rural Environment, published by Ice Cube Press, and his poetry and fiction has appeared in such publications as The Feminist Wire and Thin Air Magazine. He can be followed on Twitter @bdburmeister.

 

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Published on March 23, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

AGONY, a graphic narrative by Mark Beyer reviewed by Helen Chazan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 21, 2016 by thwackDecember 17, 2022

AgonyAGONY
by Mark Beyer
New York Review of Books, 173 pages

reviewed by Helen Chazan

It’s difficult to write about any individual Mark Beyer comic. His works return to the same characters, motifs and events, so particular to his voice that a broad description of a Beyer comic can just as easily describe his entire oeuvre. Beyer draws nihilistic stories about life going from bad to worse, usually focusing on Amy and Jordan, a couple whose life is beyond bleak. His art is childlike and dementedly unreal; bizarre forms and wonky perspectives, complemented by obsessive, handmade stippling, create an atmosphere of fanatical intensity. The language of Amy and Jordan stories are almost drab in their bluntness, adding to the overall sense of unreality. It’s a world of disaster that is both terrifying and hilarious at once. A typical Amy and Jordan panel shows the two menaced by some strange-looking knife-wielding monstrosity, arms in the air, flatly screaming “aaaahhhhh!”

aaaah

First and foremost, Agony is a long Amy and Jordan story. Presented in a squat, square paperback that can fit in your coat pocket, Agony is a descent into the mad, sad logic of Beyer’s universe – there are a number of scenes in which Amy and Jordan fall, into fish tanks, ranches, and apartments, under floorboards, and generally into situations of increasing danger and dismay. The two lose their jobs, are attacked by ghouls, are exploited and unjustly punished, witness murder, and are betrayed by just about everyone they meet. At several points in the book, Amy’s body shrivels, grows, deforms, and is hospitalized, leaving Jordan impotent in his failure to protect her. Perhaps the definitive scene of this book is one in which Amy throws the unfairly earned money Jordan has obtained to pay her medical bills into the street in an attempt to rid herself of the guilt. The next day, Amy reads in the paper that three people died fighting over the money, and muses, “What’s the use Jordan we’re not capable of doing anything right ever!”

bleak

There’s a strange delight that can be found in reading Agony. Amid the hyperbolic strife is a great deal of humor and powerful imagery. Beyer’s art holds an iconographic weight and involves the sort of imagery that will stay in the reader’s mind well after reading (an image on page 85 depicting Jordan in prison studying Latin should be perversely resonant to anyone with any experience in higher education). Beyer’s major artistic precedent is Rory Hayes, whose Pooh Rass stories tread similar ground in cartoon nightmares. However, there’s an intensity and focus to Beyer’s work that arguably eclipses Hayes’s drug-fueled freakouts. Beyer is an unusual artist, but more than that he is an obsessive one, and the effect of reading such obsessed work is a sense of elation and invigoration that works in tandem with the frightening content of his tales – in other words, reading Agony is deeply cathartic.

dirt

The new edition of Agony from New York Review Book’s nascent, impressive comics imprint is more or less an identical facsimile of the old Raw paperback from 1987, aside from some new ad copy and an excellent introduction by Colson Whitehead. The artwork is beautifully reproduced, and possibly looks better than ever. The New York Review ought to be commended for giving such an essential and overlooked work archival context in this new edition, although first-time readers might want to wait to read Mr. Whitehead’s introduction until after the first read through. Much as he does an exceptional, artful job discussing the work in his essay, the power of Agony comes in part from diving right in.


Helen Chazan is an archival assistant and comics critic. Her writing has appeared in The Comics Journal, SOLRAD, and Cleaver Magazine. She lives in Toronto.

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Published on March 21, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE ETERNAUT, a graphic narrative by Héctor Germán Oesterheld reviewed by Natalie Pendergast

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 29, 2016 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

The-EternautTHE ETERNAUT
text by Héctor Germán Oesterheld
translated by Erica Mena
illustrations by Francisco Solano López
362 pages, Fantagraphics.

reviewed by Natalie Pendergast

Deadly, beautiful “flakes” falling gently, the bodies they touch folding neatly to the ground. The light thrower, a powerful weapon that spotlights your death, as though stage fright wasn’t real enough. Sinister devices “plugged in” to the necks of robot men, long before The Matrix was even a twinkle in the Wachowski Brothers’ eye.

All of these: combining to form layers of artful threats to your well-being, like different sections of an orchestra imbricated and inter-punctuated to form a unified song. This is the world we enter upon reading the Eternaut’s, also known as Juan Salvo’s, recounted story. More: hallucinogenic, mind-controlling biological warfare, the telecommunication gadgets that dreams are made of, fifth column military pursuits by alien “hands,” enraged “gurbos” and an enemy automaton disguised as an attractive woman. A faraway extraterrestrial empire has designs on colonizing not only as many planets as possible, but also on pillaging the galaxy’s resources by picking pockets of time throughout eternity. Navigating this same eternity is the Eternaut. A displaced person in space, he borrows somewhere to sit from other slots in time, so as not to allow for his own vanishing. Set in “today”—or late 1950s Buenos Aires—The Eternaut, both man and story, arrives like a hologram in the office chair facing writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld. Together with Oesterheld, we are just one stop among many on his sempiternal journey.

The latest installment of The Eternaut predates Gene Roddenberry’s earliest inkling of Star Trek by five years and is most often commercially and critically classified as the epitome of science fiction. Newly translated into English, the famous comic book that was first published serially in the Argentine periodical comics of Suplemento seminal Hora Cero from 1957 to 1959 has now been made accessible to a whole new demographic of readers.

Eternaut

click for higher resolution

Like most sophisticated works of science fiction, The Eternaut mingles tropes from many a genre, as well as devices from many a medium. Although Oesterheld and even his—dare I say—alter ego, Juan Salvo, cite Daniel Defoe’s classic adventure novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a central inspiration, the comic is so infused with Oesterheld’s post-world war world view as well as his actual Argentine political context (namely Juan Perón’s controversial government) that any parallels to 18th century explorer/castaway stories are whittled down to the basic human feelings of loss and the need to survive that find their way into most great pieces of literature. The inventive and believable plot twists, the alternate dimensions and endless permutations of exciting cosmic “gear”—gismos, doodads, contraptions—delightfully remind us that there are no limits to… well, period. There are just no limits in Oesterheld’s imagination. And this is why The Eternaut is, quintessentially, sci-fi.

Héctor Germán Oesterheld

Héctor Germán Oesterheld

López’s non-cartoons remain true to the realism of the narrative, and pay homage to Defoe’s markedly—for his time—realistic fiction writing. Like Robinson Crusoe, The Eternaut presents itself as a passed down story, a memoir within a memoir, in which the author himself makes cameo. Comics fans, you may be gobsmacked by the proportional and ordinary-looking characters. But then, this is the comic’s hook: it introduces us to a reality that mirrors our own, even features the author himself as conduit, only to catapult us out of comfort. Still immersed, we confront the same horrors as the characters, and our emotions are very real. The story is riveting, and terror is deliberately cultivated in us by the author’s and illustrator’s stark realism that at first feels so homey and secure.

In this sense, The Eternaut is also psychologically thrilling. We follow the characters in attack after attack. It’s “kill or be killed,” they constantly remind themselves. But the fact that they have to keep telling themselves to kill, to expect the worst from desperate people, is perhaps the most prominent comment about humanity. The Eternaut reveals that we don’t just protect lands and people when we go to war, we protect security itself—the feeling of not having to worry, the luxury of naïveté, the privilege of having enough humanity left over after taking care of oneself to care also for others.

Francisco Solano López

Francisco Solano López

These feelings, the absence of fear that most of us take for granted, is what Juan misses most at the outset of the invasion. Though he adapts to the new demands of his spirit, exclaiming, “…I was ready for anything. Life, madness, death, it was all familiar now” (153), he never forgets the psychological shifting and discomfort of fearing fear itself. This theme is then compounded and substantiated by the alien “hands” whose bodies secrete a deadly substance when they are afraid, so that they literally die of fear.

The Eternaut plays with perspectives, especially the viewpoints of different characters that Osterheld and Lopez themselves inhabited throughout the story’s creation. The villains are complex and offer a mix of relatable motivations behind their evil actions. The heroes likewise reveal weaknesses and flaws that make them feel a lot like us. All are pensive, vulnerable, and nervous, second-guessing themselves and narrowly escaping the darkness of their own inner doom prophets. And beyond deliberate POV genuflection is a fairly plain demonstration of Oesterheld’s unselfconscious and unchecked sexism. The three female characters who are spotted throughout The Eternaut all tend to cry and give meaning to the lives of men by virtue of their need for rescue.

You can hardly blame Oesterheld, as the comics and other cultural material of the day likewise portrayed women as one-dimensional damsels (a favorite fact of mine is Michelle Nolan’s observation that the image of women in tears was so soothing, so gender-affirming to people in the 1950s that it became a paradigm of romance comics, featured on 18 out of 39 covers of a certain popular series from 1955-1958). The Eternaut classically portrays women as either helpless—“surprisingly” still able to prepare chicken in the midst of crisis—or cunning, seductive mirages designed to lure men into traps. Reading the comic from a contemporary vantage point, its treatment of women becomes a primary source of the insidious sexism that prevailed across media in that decade.

Travelling without moving sums up the experience of reading and escaping into The Eternaut. At first, the characters are not transported, but find their world is transformed. The earth no longer provides an environment that is safe for humans, so people must walk its surface like astronauts, alienated, in protective suits. Inner and outer realities succumb to respective rumblings. The Eternaut himself develops as a character in due time, but the stages of his growth are also simultaneously embodied by other characters at all times present, either a few steps ahead or behind him. Time becomes a virus that passes through each of us; such is the not-so-prosaic metaphor that The Eternaut presents.


Natalie Prendergast

Natalie Pendergast recently earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She specializes in American, Canadian and French graphic novels and bande dessinée. She is active in creative circles that dabble in various media such as prose writing, drawing, beat poetry, video-making and theatre. She is also the communications officer for the nonprofit Acadian organizations of Prince Edward Island.

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Published on February 29, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

A GIRL ON THE SHORE, a graphic narrative by Inio Asano, reviewed by Helen Chazan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 28, 2016 by thwackDecember 17, 2022

A-Girl-on-the-ShoreA GIRL ON THE SHORE
by Inio Asano
Vertical Comics, 406 pages

reviewed by Helen Chazan

In a 2013 interview, Inio Asano cites learning the phrase “chunibyo” as an inspiration for A Girl on the Shore. A Japanese meme, “chunibyo” translates roughly to “Eighth Grader Syndrome,” and describes an early adolescent’s tendency to aspire to and imitate the adult behaviors that she is too young to understand. The comic, a direct and emotionally intense story about two early adolescents who enter a sexual relationship, functions as a parable of “chunibyo,” exploring this youthful desire to seem more mature as well as its consequences. In contrast to this motif, A Girl on the Shore is a deceptively mature accomplishment, employing the techniques of commercial manga to the greatest level of sophistication to convey the searing anxieties of adolescence.

This is a graphic novel about two teenagers, Koume and Keisuke, who decide to start having sex when they are very young. Both are haunted by recent trauma: Koume by her rape at the hands of a popular kid named Misaki, and Keisuke by the death of his older brother. They enter the relationship believing it will be strictly sexual, an escape from normal life without emotional baggage. However, no relationship can really be casual at such a young age, and they soon must deal with the feelings brought out by their connection. It’s a relationship that is never romantic until its very end, a relationship Asano describes as “a love story in reverse.”

A Girl on the Shore 4

The reader of A Girl on the Shore might be shocked by the work’s graphic sexual content. The depictions of teenage sex are explicit, bluntly depicted, and emotionally fraught. However, what makes these scenes truly shocking is not their presence nor even the age of the characters but their realism. These are scenes of human interaction and intimacy, presented honestly and without judgment. The scenes are not fetishized, but instead are composed of beautiful images, the emotional turmoil of our protagonists made physical.

A-Girl-On-The-Shore-3The power of A Girl on the Shore is rooted in the emotional realism of its characters. Although the story of sex and trauma is (one hopes) not a universal experience, the concerns and anxieties, the precociousness and emotional need depicted through these characters is painfully real. Asano is able to capture how young people who have trouble expressing themselves try to discuss, or talk around, their feelings. The dialogue is written in the language of melodrama, but it is not so much that this is a melodramatic story as it is a story about people who try to understand their difficult world in melodramatic terms, and the conflict results from the dissonance between melodrama and reality. We see this conflict, for example, in a climactic scene where Koume believes she has to save Keisuke, a third act crisis straight out of your favorite romantic comedy. But Keisuke doesn’t need saving, which leaves Koume alone to be confronted with her own fears and the needs she mistakenly projected onto another person’s situation.

Inio Asano

Inio Asano

What really makes A Girl on the Shore stand out is Asano’s excellence as a cartoonist. Every panel is carefully rendered, as he employs screen tone to each image in a manner that is both artful and precise and obsessively utilizes photo-referenced backgrounds in the tradition of Shigeru Mizuki. Asano has a knack for capturing emotion through posture and expression, and in this work he manages to capture impressively the subtle changes that emerge over the years of adolescence. It’s a cliché to refer to manga as cinematic, but this is very true of what Asano accomplishes in this work, and not only in the film-strip vertical format of many sequences. One crucial moment is even given a soundtrack, the panels captioned with the lyrics of “Gather the Wind” by Happy End, previously used in the Sofia Coppola film Lost in Translation. It’s interesting to track Asano’s growth as an artist over the course of his works; beginning from a fairly traditional style somewhere between Naoki Urasawa and contemporary anime, Asano’s approach to his craft has become unique in its own right and stronger than ever, in tandem with the strength of his storytelling.

A Girl on the Shore is peppered with references to Japanese pop music – names like Bump of Chicken, Happy End, and AKB48 are casually dropped at various points in the book. This is the kind of music that teenagers listen to, music that becomes charged with the feelings projected onto it and experienced alongside it. In one revealing moment, Koume asks Keisuke what the lyrics to Happy End’s songs mean, to which he responds, “Someone like you’d never get it. To be honest, I don’t totally get them myself.” A Girl on the Shore is about the sort of intense feelings that come with growing up, those that—as Keisuke feels about Happy End—are as powerful as they are difficult to understand in the moment.


Helen Chazan is an archival assistant and comics critic. Her writing has appeared in The Comics Journal, SOLRAD, and Cleaver Magazine. She lives in Toronto.

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Published on January 28, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE, a graphic narrative by Riad Sattouf, reviewed by Jesse Allen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 5, 2016 by thwackFebruary 27, 2016

The-Arab-of-the-FutureTHE ARAB OF THE FUTURE
by Riad Sattouf
Metropolitan Books, 160 pages

reviewed by Jesse Allen

As a memoir of childhood, color plays a prominent role in Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future. Different locations and environments take on a range of hues, beginning with the blunt red-black-and-green cover. On it, Gaddafi’s handsome and commanding image on a billboard salutes Riad’s parents as they walk past while he, uncolored, rides his father’s shoulders. He looks to the salute as if it were another adult doting on him, a golden haired child. Over the course of the memoir, scenes that take place in France are colored in blue, while those in Libya and Syria are colored in yellow and red respectively.

Reds and greens also offset memories when contrast is needed to elicit a moment of childhood awareness: the red of Riad’s father Abdel’s radio announcing the political news that directs Abdel and his family’s life, green signaling a televised broadcast of Gaddafi’s state speech in Libya as well as the angry words of a Libyan waiting in line for state rationed bananas, which, too, are colored green, and red for Syrian army berets and broadcasts of Hafez al-Assad’s state propaganda. These seemingly minor details are key signifiers to what is remembered in sentiment even as they recount a larger reality and history.

While chronicling his “childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984,” Sattouf builds his story around his father Abdel’s journey as an academic and a family man. Abdel’s pride in his Syrian roots and in the Arab world in general is emblematic “of Syrians of his generation,” yet his ideals are often challenged by the realities of the Arab world. In Libya, Riad recalls the socialist vision of Gaddafi and how “housing for all citizens” meant that any apartment was free to commandeer if no one was home or locked inside. Abdel finds this out the hard way when his family is forced to look for a new flat immediately after another has settled into their space.

1978-was-the-year

The daily trips to get rationed food or scenes depicting Riad and his father watching state speeches by Gaddafi and American shows like “Planet of the Apes” evoke an intimacy that offsets his father’s growing narrow mindedness, which arises out of pride and adherence to tradition. For Riad, the adult frustrations of having rationed food and state housing are a mere addition to the everyday stimuli of childhood. Waiting in line for bananas and Tang, his observations of people and their appearances feed his curiosity, as does playing with a toy gun with other kids in the halls of his family’s apartment building. Sattouf renders a Libya that, like his young life, is constantly under construction.

Riad Sattouf

Riad Sattouf

Moving to France after his father’s career takes a turn, Riad is catapulted into another world, with odd people and different kinds of strangeness. Now with his mother, Clementine’s, family, he is treated to a different set of cultural expectations. Clementine from the very beginning seems to be suckered into a relationship with the persistent Abdel. She speaks rarely but, when she does, it’s to set straight Abdel’s inanity. Yet she goes along with Abdel and ventures into a foreign and, to her, bizarre culture. Abdel presents what seems to be abnormal as normal, and he does not apologize for events that could be seen as upsetting to someone not familiar with such a situation and environment. After Riad and his family move from France to Syria, again they are presented with a radically different set of circumstances. Abdel claims he has land, housing, and family that he can rely on and that will make them happy.

While this is partly true, Abdel glosses over the poverty, chauvinism, and harsh realities of living in Syria. Sattouf masterfully presents this contradiction by showing, for example, in one panel a man on the roadside selling Korans wrapped in plastic so as to protect them from any impurities, while on the following page Riad’s family walks past the swinging bodies of the recently executed. Riad observes the hustle and bustle of Syrian daily life as well as the quiet moments that seem at once loving and backwards.

It-was-my-father's-hand

Recalling life in Libya, France, and Syria, Sattouf is able, without judgment, to relay odd situations that are fear inducing, amusing, or whimsical. As a child, his relationships with adults and kids are relatively the same in these different environments—adults give him attention but the kids are weird and he just wants to fit in. Abdel’s guidance is often contradictory and while he insists that Riad will be an “Arab of the Future,” his father falls back into old familial and gender roles that he once proclaimed he would change.

What’s interesting is that the reader witnesses Riad’s fascination, amusement, and confusion while interacting with or observing his father. Sattouf is able to place his memories within a historical context that gives the reader a wider range of understanding as to how his childhood and family dynamics played out in these environments. Drawn simply like Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” characters, Sattouf conveys childhood innocence and emotion, as well as adult life, in a larger social context, juxtapozing his daily experiences with slices of the politics omnipresent in the Middle East during this time.

While we are centrally reading about a wide eyed, golden haired boy who is in awe of turtles and guns, we are also reading about Abdel and his proclamations, and Clementine experiencing unfamiliar environments with an increasingly unfamiliar husband.


Jesse-Allen

Jesse Allen lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He has a MLA with a focus on New York Studies from City College of New York. He is a life-long fan of comic books, books without pictures, art in museums, and art on the street. He teaches at Guttman Community College.

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Published on January 5, 2016 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

LOSE 7 by Michael DeForge reviewed by Helen Chazan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 29, 2015 by thwackDecember 17, 2022

lose7LOSE 7
by Michael DeForge
Koyama Press, 52 pages

reviewed by Helen Chazan

The most recent installment of Michael Deforge’s one-man anthology series Lose 7 features three new stories from the artist: two shorter pieces surrounding a longer work, which form a sort of triptych. Unlike earlier issues, Lose 7 lacks a subtitle pointing to the theme that connects the stories within (“The Fashion Issue” and “The Clubs Issue”). But if I were to choose a title for this seventh issue I might go with “The Growing Up Issue”, or perhaps “The Dysphoria Issue”. The three stories reflect how identities are constructed and the feelings of detachment and anxiety that accompany such journeys of self-definition.

The first story, untitled in this volume but previously published on Deforge’s Patreon page as “Adults”, depicts a children’s game in which a boy instructs a girl on how to pretend to be his mother. The two run through town proclaiming their false identities, fraught with the fear and excitement of fooling the outside world. The parody turns into a nightmare as the “mother’s” literally swelled head assumes and reverses the previously established power dynamic, becoming a brute force of the parental aggression the kids had been imitating.

Lose-7_one

 

With his friend, the boy creates a new version of his mother to boss around and power that he could not experience in his real family. In the hands of a child, this adult power—the very bossiness he hoped to escape—becomes terrifying. Deforge illustrates his work with garish primary colors and rough lines drawn over his minimal, schematic forms, suggesting that an actual child has traced over his artwork: every form intact, and yet ever-so-slightly off. The images in “Adults” are so loud they seem to scream. They evoke the bodily monstrosities of Deforge’s early work while keeping those eruptions contained—but just barely.

The longest and most thematically complex of the triptych, “Movie Star”, is the story of Kim, a young woman who discovers a schlocky sci-fi film featuring an actor who looks almost identical to her deadbeat dad, Louis. Her father denies the resemblance at first, but when the actor, a former professional wrestler named Gregory Tan, enters their lives, the two men become fast friends. Louis idolizes Gregory, who is revealed to be his long-lost older brother. After several strange episodes it becomes clear that the two have formed a new “whole” identity in which one man is inseparable from the other, like an actor and a stunt double in a film.

Movie-Star

Many critics categorized Deforge’s early work as “body horror.” Deforge’s work should not be constrained to this label, but “Movie Star” retains a sense of the small, real horror of losing a parent, not through tragedy but through change.“Movie Star” is Deforge at his most naturalistic. This is a family drama, with no grotesques lurking on the page. And yet, the story retains the creepiness pervasive in Deforge’s work. Despite Deforge’s clinical, Cronenbergian narrative distance, the story belongs to Kim. Louis’s changes happen off-panel, so we share her shock and confusion as the facets of his new identity are revealed. Gregory speaks about how the knowledge of having eaten his twin brother in the womb shaped him as a person, informing both his strength and his sense of absence, and the reader worries along with Kim that Gregory is repeating this process with Louis, consuming his individual identity. There is the anxiety in seeing one’s parent change so drastically.

The third story returns us to familiar terrain, introducing us to a new creature who joins the bizarre menagerie of Deforgian beasts, which includes such oddities as the Spotting Deer and the Dogs of Canada. However, the “bird-boy”, is different, because unlike the others he speaks for himself. He begins by musing on the reality of his identity, calmly explaining his unique physiology, an awkward juxtaposition of human and bird attributes.

Bird-Boy

The bird-boy pines for an ornithologist, who turns down his advances out of obligation but tells him that he is “what every ornithologist dreams of.” Unlike Deforge’s earlier pseudo-encyclopedic stories, the core of this story is neither a creepy phenomenon nor an unreliable narrator’s description, but rather a narrative of the, hopes, angers, and sorrows of a being who is struggling inside a body in which he is uncomfortable. Keeping with this feeling of dysphoria, Deforge’s always-schematic illustrations edge toward the abstract.

When read together, these three stories pose powerful questions about the way we view identity. What do the games of children have to do with the construction of self? What does it mean to assume the persona of another? Perhaps the core question of Lose 7 is one we hear throughout our early lives: what do you want to be when you grow up? Unlike many parables of identity, Deforge’s stories don’t focus on an individual’s perception, but rather the vision of self is constructed through relationships. Lose 7 is a profound exploration of these questions.


Helen Chazan is an archival assistant and comics critic. Her writing has appeared in The Comics Journal, SOLRAD, and Cleaver Magazine. She lives in Toronto.

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Published on December 29, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE DEVIL AND WINNIE FLYNN by Micol Ostow and David Ostow reviewed by Rachael Tague

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 29, 2015 by thwackOctober 29, 2015

The-Devil-and-Winnie-FlynnTHE DEVIL AND WINNIE FLYNN
by Micol Ostow
illustrated by David Ostow
Soho Teen, 326 pages

reviewed by Rachael Tague

I don’t like to be scared. I can’t stand that chill-in-the-air, breath-on-my-neck, sweat-in-my-palm terror that comes with horror stories. The last time I tried to read a scary book, I was twelve, and I flipped to the epilogue before I was halfway through to relieve the tension. That’s the only time I’ve ever read the end of a book without reading everything in between. But if I had the option to stop in the middle of The Devil and Winnie Flynn, I would have given up during the séance in the criminal ward of an abandoned insane asylum. As it was, I had to shut the book, take a breath, and reorient myself to reality before I could continue with this creepy tale.

Brother-Sister duo Micol and David Ostow (So Punk Rock (and Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother)) team up for the second time to write and illustrate The Devil and Winnie Flynn, packing the pages with ghostly spirits, exorcisms, demons, psychics, and all manner of haunted locations, its characters seeking communion with the dead and the damned. Cleverly twisting the paranormal with mystery and pop culture, the Ostows invite their readers into Winnie Flynn’s haunted adventures.

When her mother commits suicide, Winnie Flynn meets her long-lost Aunt Maggie, “the creator, director, and producer of the Fantastic, Fearsome USTM series.” Her life becomes “a family-tragedy-turned-last-minute internship in television—in reality television!—smack-dab dead center in America’s armpit.” Winnie relocates from Portland, Oregon to a shady motel in her late mother’s home state of New Jersey. From their headquarters in Asbury Park, the cast and crew are within driving distance of spirit-filled destinations like Overlook Insane Asylum, Ghost Boy Bridge, the Pine Barrens, and the Devils portal. Their goal: to hunt down the famed New Jersey Devil, a creature Winnie believes is a myth.

Micol-Ostow

Micol Ostow

The Fantastic, Fearsome team knows Winnie is not cut out to be a Production Assistant, having no experience with television or the paranormal apart from a secret obsession with horror movies, “even though that’s: 1) an acute understatement, and 2) our dirty little secret, Lu. Yours and mine, kind of our thing.” Winnie’s friend Lucia is the recipient of Winnie’s letter-style journal, where she records her intern experiences: “I brought the journal you gave me this past birthday with me…even if you won’t see these pages, at least, if I keep writing, I won’t be completely alone.”

The ongoing letter format, the snippets of the Fantastic, Fearsome script, and graphic novel-like illustrations of the crew’s storyboards and destinations lend an experimental feel to the novel, propelling the reader through the book. It’s always a bit of relief to unexpectedly come across a page with giant text or pictures, something to break the horror, look at, and enjoy. It allows the reader to watch other characters interact outside of Winnie’s thoughts and influence.

Winnie’s experiences with Fantastic, Fearsome challenge her doubts about the paranormal and make her question her own abilities and family history. Not only must she navigate typical teenage love triangles, mean girls, friendships, and jealousy, she must cope with the loss of her mother and her relocation to unfamiliar territory. There’s also the small matter of the Devil himself, who, Winnie discovers, is more closely linked with her family than she—or the reader—ever could have imagined. All the while, Winnie’s strong voice, somehow managing to remain upbeat despite her circumstances, shines through the mirk and mire of her creepy life:

See, what you have to understand about the Jersey Devil, Lu, is that it’s this weird kind of dinosaur-ish creature. At least in all the imagery I’ve seen…And while, yeah, I definitely would not want this creepy, raptor-like thing springing out at me on a dark and lonely night, it still doesn’t really hold its own. It pales in comparison to something like, you know, a zombie or a werewolf or even the ghost of someone you once knew and loved.

Bottom line: he’s kind of goofy, the Devil.

David-Ostow

David Ostow

Winnie often uses humor to counteract her fearsome environment, mocking horror clichés and comparing her experiences with ridiculous movies she’s seen, while at the same time trying and mostly failing to maintain her disbelief in the paranormal. I enjoyed her awkward humor and demeanor, made possible by the freedom she has to voice her true thoughts to Lucia in her private journal. My only complaint about Winnie’s letters is when she tells her best friend information and stories Lucia already knows. Winnie retells the history of her mother’s suicide and funeral and talks about the good ol’ times with Lucia, bookending these memories with phrases like, “you know this already, Lu.” These bits of narrative are clearly for the reader’s sake, not for Lucia’s. Also, Winnie addresses Lucia by name over and over throughout the book, each time a nudging reminder that, hey, this is a letter, this is a journal, don’t forget.

Apart from that, though, I’m glad I didn’t revert to my twelve-year-old self and stop in the middle of the book. If I had given up during that creepy séance, I would have missed Winnie’s growth as she explores this new and powerful realm. She discovers truths about her abilities and character, learns to analyze others’ actions and better understand their motives and histories. She figures out how to rely on her friends and trust her instincts when the world shakes beneath her feet (both literally and figuratively).

As someone who normally avoids everything with a potential to scare me, I probably missed half of the dozens of horror references throughout the book, but I didn’t feel like I missed the story of Winnie Flynn. Balancing somewhere between terrifying and comedic, romantic and awkward, graphic novel and epistolary tale, The Devil and Winnie Flynn lures readers into its magically haunted domain through the eyes of a girl who has experienced heart-ache and hurt, yet manages to trudge on and find the power within herself to live and thrive in a crazy world.


Rachael-TagueRachael Tague grew up in the Indianapolis area and is currently studying English and Creative Writing at Cedarville University. She is an editorial intern for Cleaver Magazine.

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Published on October 29, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews, young adult fiction reviews. (Click for permalink.)

LONG WALK TO VALHALLA by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox reviewed by Brazos Price

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 8, 2015 by thwackSeptember 8, 2015

Long-Walk-to-Valhalla-LONG WALK TO VALHALLA
by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox
Archaia, 96 pages

reviewed by Brazos Price

In Long Walk to Valhalla, a graphic novel by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox, we follow a young man named Rory as he winds his way back through memories of his childhood in rural Arkansas. Rory and Joe are brothers, but so much more. Rory is Joe’s protector. Joe has difficulty speaking and is prone to strange trances in which he sees visions of “Pretty Things,” surreal-looking creatures that are not exactly monsters but certainly not part of the normal landscape of Arkansas. Because of Joe’s peculiar malady, he is vulnerable to worlds both real and (perhaps) imagined. This is a story of growing up and the sadness that accumulates along the way.

The story begins when Rory’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. He has only three contacts, all three of whom we meet during the course of the narrative, and no money to make a call. Then Sylvia appears from within a corn field near where Joe is stranded. She claims to be a Valkyrie out of Norse mythology, sent to take Rory off to Valhalla, the land where heroes go after they die in battle.
Is-It-the-Pretty

This is a framed story that works on several levels as it moves back and forth between Rory’s present and his childhood. There is the story Rory tells himself and the story he tells Sylvia about his life. Rory and Joe’s abusive and alcoholic dad, Dwayne, looms large in the frame, the one constant that must be overcome. We get a sense of Dwayne’s character in one of the early flashback scenes, when he sends Rory and Joe out to a convenience store to buy some ephedrine so he can cook meth.

Anything-else

 

When the boys return, he spends hours haranguing Joe over some perceived slight. This short scene also defines the setting of the small rural town where Rory and Joe grow up; the store clerk is not at all surprised that Dwayne is sending his sons to do his “errands,” and when she comments that Joe “don’t talk much,” Rory simply says “Yes, ma’am,” and takes Joe’s hand as they leave, showing the protectiveness he feels for his brother. We then see the parking lot from Joe’s point of view: alive with hordes of bizarre creatures, from a dog-faced airplane to a giant sushi monster. Rory doesn’t share these visions, but he accepts that Joe sees them and doesn’t label him as crazy because of it.

road

Long Walk to Valhalla is a switchback through the worlds of visions and reality, through past and present. it wanders through memory, through nature (corn fields, water, forests) and through the human-built world (farm buildings, roads, cemeteries). The journey is rendered in a muted, dark palette of blue, black, and white, similar to the color scheme of Craig Thompson’s coming-of-age classic Blankets. Melancholy permeates the narrative and it comes out most distinctly in the art, punctuated by the narrative happenings.

shoesThe “pretty things” are where Fox’s art really shines. It is their inclusion that gives more breadth to the story being told. The artwork portrays these beings as vividly as a young boy’s visions, stretching them into the absurd as well as the terrifying. Perhaps Joe’s monsters are metaphorical, perhaps not. The true monster, for Rory at least, is his father, Dwayne. Dwayne reappears toward the end of the narrative, shoes first, looming menacingly, just as he did when Rory was a child.

Only now, Rory has grown up. He no longer has to be intimidated by his father’s threats of violence, nor does he have to respond in kind. He can choose to walk away–a different kind of victory.

tractor

This is a small story, the antithesis of most superhero comics, yet one whose emotional impact ripples out from small gestures and memories. The author took the title from a Kurt Vonnegut short story, “A Long Walk to Forever,” and told an interviewer he admired the way Vonnegut was able to convey so much in a single scene of two characters talking. It’s a tale in which the real and surreal exist side by side, filled with a quiet nostalgia, yet also charged with the tension that comes from Sylvia’s pronouncement that she has come to escort Rory to Valhalla. This melancholy, memorable graphic novel is the story of a childhood remembered and the echoes of childhood in the lives of men who have grown and changed: a story well worth reading.


Brazos-PriceBrazos Price is from Austin, Texas where he served as an inaugural member of the Texas Library Association’s Maverick Graphic Novel Reading List. He has also reviewed comics for the librarian-focused website No Flying, No Tights. He now works as a librarian in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

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Published on September 8, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

DOCTORS by Dash Shaw reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Cleaver Magazine Posted on July 30, 2015 by thwackApril 7, 2016

DoctorsDOCTORS
by Dash Shaw
Fantagraphics Books, 96 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

What is it that awaits us after death? In his graphic novel, Doctors, artist/writer Dash Shaw creates a world in which each afterlife is unique, generated from one’s own memories with assistance from a newly-invented medical device, the Charon.

Throughout Doctors, Shaw showcases skillful storytelling. The world he creates is inventive and fascinating. From the beginning, he successfully pulls in the reader with the story’s sense of mystery. One quickly wonders what is real as the initial central character of Miss Bell struggles to make sense of a series of confusing events in her life.

As the story surrounding Miss Bell unfolds, we learn that doctors have created (through the Charon) a way to prolong life after death, allowing one’s consciousness to live on temporarily in a joyous modern-day Elysium. Within the afterlife, doctors are able to communicate with the deceased and, when successful, are able to compel the person to return to the land of the living, at least for a limited time.

Doctors-1The happiness Miss Bell feels in the afterlife never seems to be replicated in real life, and the ethics of the Charon project are called into question by some of those carrying it out. As one gets midway through the book, the central focus shifts from Miss Bell to the doctors themselves. Conflicts arise between the father-daughter duo of doctors who run the Charon program, with tensions running high and no consensus ever reached. This father-daughter pair discuss, debate, and fight. Does the Charon help or hurt people? Should it be available to everyone or just the exceptionally wealthy? Does its very use cross the line into playing God?

Doctors-2

Ultimately, Shaw supplies no easy answers to these questions. His intentions are not heavy-handed, and his message never feels preachy. The conclusions readers will draw may vary wildly and the experience of grappling with the philosophical quandaries presented in Doctors is not likely to be a simple affair. This graphic novel will be most appreciated by readers who enjoy uncertainty and the challenge of making meaning for themselves.

Doctors-3

Dash Shaw

Dash Shaw

While I hesitate to call Shaw’s cartoonish art in Doctors remarkable in and of itself, his simple, clean style allows the focus to be on the story itself, which is ultimately the most compelling aspect of Doctors. The panels and pages are typically simplified by having Shaw’s illustrations appear transparent (they simply rest atop the ever-changing background color).

To suggest the evolving story’s mood, Shaw often changes colors from page to page and occasionally within select, especially meaningful panels. The effect is subtle but well done: Shaw conveys a wide variety of emotions at appropriate intervals through his selection of background colors and limited moments of additional, contrasting colors within panels. The only catch—and one that I suspect was unintentional—is that on some of the darker pages, such as those with a deep purple background, there is little contrast between the black of the text and the color of the page itself. This issue of literally making the story hard to read arises infrequently, and results in minor, but unfortunately real, interferences in the story’s forward progress.

Doctors-4

On the whole, Shaw creates a memorable world with deep, compelling conflicts for his characters. Simply put: Doctors will make you think. For anyone interested in speculative fiction or examinations into the meaning of death and what comes after, Doctors is a fascinating and entertaining quick read.


 

Brian-BurmeisterBrian Burmeister is Program Chair of English and Communication at Ashford University He co-wrote the nonfiction play, Farmscape: The Changing Rural Environment, published by Ice Cube Press, and his writing has appeared in 50-Word Stories, Eunoia Review, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He can be followed @bdburmeister.

 

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Published on July 30, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

YOU DON’T SAY by Nate Powell reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on July 25, 2015 by thwackJuly 25, 2015

You-Don't-SayYOU DON’T SAY
by Nate Powell
Top Shelf Productions, 176 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Given ten years, an artist can undergo a series of personal evolutions that may come to mark them as a master. Among these seasoned individuals sits Nate Powell, a graphic novelist who has been writing and self-publishing since the age of fourteen. His most recent collection, You Don’t Say, presents seventeen short stories written over the course of a decade that celebrate the range of realizations that contribute to our inevitable maturation.

Targeting a young adult audience, these narratives are relatable to all who are in or beyond those infamous teenage years. From nights spent idling in barren parking lots to the realization that we will not forever willingly stay up past 3 A.M., Powell captures the a-ha! moments that come to define us as adults in the face of calendar rotations. Each installment features a brief text-based introduction that both describes the inspiration for the following piece and explains the comic in relation to the artist. Powell also includes suggestions as to how certain pieces should be read, asking the reader to consume several in one go or to allow features to work as singular entities. He shows the reader respect, and we in turn follow him down a psychological rabbit hole into a shaded world of self-doubt, superiority complexes, and good but misplaced intentions. Among these well-laid plans is the narrative “Cakewalk,” a non-fiction account in which a young white girl dresses in blackface as Aunt Jemima for Halloween. Forced by a teacher to remove the meticulously applied charcoal, we learn that the girl deeply wishes to embody the person she imagines the iconic matriarch to be: “I imagined that everybody liked Aunt Jemima. And that they stared at her face like I did when I ate pancakes in the morning.”

 SomebodyElse

These moments where the veil of childhood naïveté is lifted track through each of Powell’s stories, acting as a common thread that binds imagined instances with recollections of moments within the author’s own life. In the early 2000s, Powell worked as a full-time care provider for adults with developmental disabilities; he recalls in “The Phantom Form” his last workday at a facility, delving into the observance of personal boundaries and attempting to see his position as “a tool to help another live out her life more fully.” While this comic relates directly to ableism, authority, and disability, he meditates on the repetition of entrustment that happens over the course of one’s life. There are countless instances of unplanned absence and discord, and we are expected to keep marching along as best as possible to the same beat. This proves to be easier for some individuals than others, given various states of experience and ability; in choosing to trust someone, we are also making it possible for that bond to either systematically or spontaneously disappear.

WhatIsTrust

Beyond these pivotal experiences, Powell considers the half-life of ancestral memory and the ways in which the particular actions of generations past are played out in our contemporary day-to-day existence. We seek specific forms of happiness that are inherent to our bloodlines, as the female protagonist in “Conjurers” encounters during an evening of preparing her great-grandmother’s fried chicken recipe. “Sometimes it seems that the act of re-creating a recipe of the deceased is a magic of sorts,” writes Powell in the story’s preface. “It’s the closest we can come to summoning their distinct, intangible properties, and does seem to truly carry magical properties allowing us to transcend the limitations of our existence.”

Inspired by Ray Bradbury’s short story “Powerhouse,” Powell unites three generations as they prepare meals in times of electrical and familial expansion; beautifully illustrated, these women remind us that we should always use everything that we are lucky enough to have—whether it be chicken giblets and wishbones or a night to gather, bodily or spiritually, with those we love.

FarApart

You Don’t Say is a marvelous collection of moral vignettes that profile the moments swept under the rug that we seem to keep tripping over. Powell guides readers into exploring our own opinions of what should and should not be deemed failure or success, baring in mind the fact that we were all once unscathed in our own age of innocence. “Hail those things that make us walk possessed as children, the earliest semblance any young person has to a real passion,” he pens in the final comic, “Havens Have Not,” which depicts a young boy as he peruses art supplies and explores an interest in drawing. A decade is enough to make or break the crazed obsessions that blip across the radar of our youth. Thank goodness the craft of comics has continued to be a steady signal through the years for Nate Powell.


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B. A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. 

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Published on July 25, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND by Box Brown reviewed by Brian Burmeister

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 16, 2015 by thwackJune 16, 2015

Andre-tthe-GiantANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND
by Box Brown
First Second Books, 240 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

For a generation of professional wrestling fans, Andre Roussimoff was a giant, both as a man (he stood seven-feet, four-inches tall and weighed 500 pounds) and as an icon (he was one of the most successful and beloved wrestlers of all time).

In telling Andre’s story, author/illustrator Box Brown did his homework. A life-long fan of professional wrestling, Brown draws upon interviews with those who personally knew Andre as well archival footage in an effort to show a complete and accurate portrayal of Andre’s life in and out of the ring. Throughout Andre the Giant’s pages we see Andre as a young boy growing up in the French countryside, Andre as an up-and-comer in the professional wrestling circuit, and finally Andre the globe-trekking celebrity. Along the way, Brown gives life to dozens of anecdotes about the wrestler, moments ranging from playful to painful but always compelling and curious.

For those less familiar with professional wrestling, Brown takes pains to make the material accessible. Throughout the course of the narrative, he includes a preface in which he imparts to the reader a useful description of wrestling as business, explains all necessary terminology in text and within a glossary in the back of the book, and walks the reader through the context and culture of professional wrestling fandom during the 1970s and 80s.

Brown’s visual style is simple and fun, much like professional wrestling itself. While a more superhero-y sort of approach might have been equally fitting, Brown draws each moment in a very comic way, giving a light-hearted feel to the entirety of the work. Andre’s size lends itself well to this cartoonish format, allowing Brown to exaggerate Andre’s hugeness even further for effect, a move which lets Brown take the Giant’s legacy and spin it into the stuff of legend.

Brown’s storytelling proves both interesting and entertaining. Told as a chronological series of moments from Andre’s life, including small, often humorous moments such as clowning around with his buddies and altercations in bars and larger, more iconic ones such as his match against Hulk Hogan at Wrestlemania III (arguably the most important match in wrestling history) or his role in the film, The Princess Bride, Brown hopes to show his reader a balance of Andre the man and Andre the icon.
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This balance doesn’t always work. Brown almost exclusively moves the narrative along at a reckless, breakneck pace. He never really settles into any scene for more than a few pages before moving on to the next one—which works very well throughout the action sequences set during wrestling matches and in cute moments such as Andre’s appearances on TV shows like The Tonight Show, but less well when attempting to bestow upon the reader insight into Andre’s true character. Aside from some of the wrestler’s quirks (for instance, he called everyone “boss”) and his hobbies (we learn that his favorite pastime was playing cards), I never really felt like I came to know the man. Perhaps because they are unheroic, the most human parts of Andre’s life get glossed over—including the most complicated and perhaps interesting parts of his reality outside of the ring, which involved his daughter.

Born to a woman Andre barely even knows, his daughter comes to know her father only through what she sees on TV. His absence in her life is as large as he is—one of the few items Brown lets us know about their relationship (or lack thereof) is that Andre’s daughter only ever meets him on four occasions, two of which she would have been old enough to remember. The entirety of this situation is granted roughly six pages of the 240-page text. At the conclusion of the book, I felt that I knew a lot about wrestling and about the famous moments in Andre’s life, but far less about what truly motivated him. I wanted more.

Box-BrownWhat I can say after reading this graphic biography is that Andre’s life was both fantastic and flawed. He was adored by millions of fans while making millions of dollars. Yet everywhere he went people stared, and as he aged every step he took was accompanied by pain. Andre’s size and the condition which contributed to it (acromegaly) condemned him, as Brown writes in his introduction, “to a death sentence.” Andre’s enormity, the very aspect of his being which helped make him famous, also ensured his health would deteriorate rapidly and at a young age.

This book is a wonderfully illustrated, easy, entertaining read for anyone with even a slight interest in the Golden Age of professional wrestling. Andre’s career is truly fascinating: his journey from small-town, small-time shows to one of wrestling’s biggest stars is a compelling, satisfying story arc. Just expect to walk away knowing more about the Giant and less about the man.


Brian-BurmeisterBrian Burmeister is Program Chair of English and Communication at Ashford University and an on-going contributor to the Sport Literature Association. He co-wrote the nonfiction play, Farmscape: The Changing Rural Environment, published by Ice Cube Press, and his poetry and fiction has appeared in such publications as 50-Word Stories, Blue Hour Magazine, and Eunoia Review.

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Published on June 16, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

BLACK RIVER by Josh Simmons reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 15, 2015 by thwackApril 7, 2016

black_river-simmonsBLACK RIVER
by Josh Simmons
Fantagraphics Books, 110 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Despite society’s wonderment over advances of the human race, we are nonetheless fascinated by hypotheses of how the world may one day cease to exist. And while prophecies of rapture have yet to prove veritable, there exist countless fictional renderings of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The medium of graphic narrative has long played host to such tales, from the teenage plague that dominates Charles Burns’s iconic Black Hole to the psychedelic stylings of anarchist rebel Tank Girl. In this spirit comes Josh Simmons’s Black River, which follows a gang of five women and one man as they traverse a dormant planet void of laws and warmth.

Led by the experienced Seka over the course of more than a decade, the group searches in hopes of locating the fabled city of Gattenberg—“walled in and completely self-sufficient, protected by sharp-shooters all around the city.” They are survivalists to the Nth degree, employing stockpiled supplies unused by those now deceased; their camaraderie is strong (as they quite literally sleep together in an attempt to stay warm through the night) and extends both to preserving life and taking it when necessary. The reader does not receive much exposition regarding life before the present day, save for a wavering account of how every possible proposition of world’s end contributed to humanity’s current state of being.

DyingWorld

Josh Simmons

Josh Simmons

Traversing Simmons’s polarized world, the group seeks pleasure by imbibing in booze and a fictional drug dubbed Gum Drop to temporarily depart from the horrifying dredges of what has become day-to-day life. There is no room for ambiguity or respite from vigilance, and complacency proves to be near lethal on more than one occasion. Anarchy reigns supreme, as arguments are settled by individuals with quicker draws on their ever-ready guns. Even the threat of insanity is too great, as we learn through the multi-party shootout at a decrepit comedy club. One wrong move, whether it be sleeping too close to the edge of a lake or disagreeing with a zombified stand-up comic, and you’re permanently out.

Simmons relies heavily on sound to create atmosphere, forging familiarity between the world of the reader and this fantastical frozen tundra. He is imaginative in assigning kak-kak-kraaacks and skutches as humanity splits at the seams. Time becomes further skewed as the group continues traveling and begins to wonder just what it is they are searching for: when there is no real world left to enjoy, there remains little to live for. We witness this most strongly in the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of Suzie, who, in the midst of a psychological break in which she shears her tri-pointed coif, airs her desire to vanish completely from the world.

 

Ridiculous

Death runs through the brigade, as rival villainous groups murder some and others choose to either abruptly end their lives or wander off to a more gradual and solitary demise. Although the general populous is waning, the natural world continues to spin onward toward some unknown existence. Inevitably, those who occupy this planet of unending terrors will one day cease to exist. It’s this molasses drip of eventuality that Simmons hooks us on, demonstrating that humanity may morph into its simplest and truest form when the darkest of hours is upon us.

In their trials, the inhabitants of Black River are transformed to the barest versions of themselves and exist past their mortal breath to coax the living to rejoin them in death. Seka explains this somewhat supernatural phenomenon to a comrade as she recounts a sighting of Caramel, the wayward traveler who is raped and murdered during the group’s temporary capture by a misogynistic group of men. Caramel lives on at the bottom of a lake, having turned from her happy-go-lucky self to a literal man-eater.

Caramel

Appetite

Appropriately anticlimactic, the closing panels of Black River perpetuate the hopelessness felt by Simmons’s characters as they continue to forge onward. Focusing on a single figure walking through a snow-laden landscape, we pan out and away from the cloaked entity and into a whitewashed page. Readers are pulled away from this world just as abruptly as they enter it, given little to no sense of satisfaction—a state that they have by now learned is long extinct. It is unknown whether one day this earth will turn warm and the population will again become stable. “It could always be worse,” some have been known to say. Here in the realm of Black River, that is precisely what continues to happen.

ThingsGetWorse


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B. A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. 

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Published on June 15, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

FIRST YEAR HEALTHY by Michael DeForge reviewed by Travis DuBose

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 22, 2015 by thwackMay 22, 2015

First-Year-HealthyFIRST YEAR HEALTHY
by Michael DeForge
Drawn and Quarterly, 48 pages

reviewed by Travis DuBose

In Michael DeForge’s short, gnomic First Year Healthy, terse declarative prose is set alongside hallucinatory artwork to create a sense of unease and unreality that deepens over the course of the narrative. First Year Healthy is the illustrated monologue of an unnamed young woman describing her life after being released from psychiatric care for an unspecified “public outburst.” The details of the story are delivered flatly, no matter how outrageous or impossible, casting each new revelation in the same terms as the last. In fact, more emotional heft is given to the description of the narrator’s job gutting and packing fish than to her first bizarre sexual experiences with “the Turk,” the man she eventually moves in with.

In contrast to the prose, the artwork is vibrant and varied, with the open space of the backgrounds often patterned in abstract shapes and curlicues. It’s increasingly unclear as the story progresses whether what we’re seeing is simply stylized or a representation of the way the world actually looks to the narrator. A Christmas tree bears more resemblance to a haphazard pile of seaweed than to a real spruce, and it is decorated with the same pustule-like baubles that frame the introduction of the Turk’s son. The book’s most frequently repeated image, the “sacred cat” that graces its cover, silently haunts the pages, stalking through backgrounds and peeking in windows. The construction of the characters’ bodies is squat, exaggerating their heads, and the narrator’s body is dwarfed by two massive tufts of hair that cover her eyes and swing out to either side of her.

fyh-2

The perspective of the pages is often partially flattened, giving a curious layered feeling to the composition; the ground beneath the figures’ feet is sometimes peeled back to reveal what’s pulsing underneath the asphalt. Several of the drawings gave me the sense of looking at a diagram of skin in a textbook, the kind that shows the subcutaneous layer in pink, puffy rows. The book’s design, with its bright pink hardcover, wouldn’t look out of place on a children’s bookshelf, but the glowering pink fetus-like baby on the cover would, hopefully, ward away any children.

At first, I thought my job in reading First Year Healthy was to solve its puzzle: to comb through it for clues that would signal when the narrator’s break from reality begins. Is it the first time the “sacred cat” is mentioned and pictured blessing the house? Is it when the narrator attempts to breastfeed the Turk’s abandoned son? Perhaps the entire thing doesn’t happen, and she never leaves the hospital. But the more I tried to find the seams, the more I realized that the tale is not a puzzle to be solved. Or, if it is, it’s the kind of puzzle where the pleasure is in turning gears rather than finding the solution. After spending time with it, First Year Healthy feels like a rejoinder to a trope that’s common in fiction: mental illness as a “gotcha” plot point. DeForge doesn’t flinch away from his narrator’s illness and instead adheres to her shifting reality, even when stepping back from it might give a more traditionally satisfying ending.

fyh-3

 

Rather than analyzing and putting her on display, First Year Healthy showcases its narrator’s idiosyncrasies and leaves it up to the reader to find meaning in the shifting narrative. Though if told from any other character’s perspective the arc of the story would almost certainly be tragic, its effect as written is instead melancholic and perversely hopeful. In the end, we’re left with a few deliberately unpoetic lines and the image of the sacred cat, padding through the snow in charge of the growing, happy baby. It’s certainly an impossible outcome, but it’s no less welcome than the probable squalid reality, lit by pulsing ambulance lights.


travis-duboseTravis DuBose’s fiction has appeared in Apiary and Petrichor Machine, and he was the recent recipient of a Jan-Ai Scholarship Foundation award. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife.

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Published on May 22, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

SUPERMUTANT MAGIC ACADEMY by Jillian Tamaki reviewed by Jesse Allen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 18, 2015 by thwackMay 18, 2015

SuperMutant-Magic-AcademySUPERMUTANT MAGIC ACADEMY
by Jillian Tamaki
Drawn & Quarterly, 2015

reviewed by Jesse Allen

Awkwardness is the hallmark of adolescence. Teenagers going off to boarding school or college find themselves entering a particularly unstable social realm for the first time. Having mutant superpowers or knowing the secrets of magic can help overcome this awkwardness—or it can exacerbate it. Part Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and part Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters, SuperMutant Magic Academy paints a whimsical, snarky, and heartwarming picture of this period of youth.

The cover of SuperMutant Magic Academy features Marsha, bored and surrounded by the detritus of teenager-dom: her homework, notes, and of course a magic wand, no more special than the pencil she writes with. Characters walk through the halls of S.M.A. hypersensitive or oblivious to dolphin-headed Trixie, super-logical hunk Cheddar, cute and fox-eared Marsha, as well as the performance art antics of Frances or the annoying ploys for acceptance by laser-eyed Trevor. Like many an institutional bubble for gifted youth, S.M.A. is a parallel society where issues of identity, gender, sexual orientation, race, and how-is-everyone-going-to-live-in-the-real-world are played out in between magic classes, football games, regular classes, pranks, and protests. Contemporary youth are immersed in a technological world that renders their attitudes with a seemingly ironic blasé, yet they still play D & D with zeal.

SMMA.interior31

Simply drawn while accurately rendering drama, dialogue, and action, each page is satisfying in its sometimes dark portrayal of adolescence and its conflicts. Marsha, a female nod to Harry Potter, joins an all-male Dungeons and Dragon’s role-playing game. She cannot convince the others to change their chauvinistic ways and only later realizes that they consider her “one of the guys.” Frances, whose rebellious performance art calls into question social norms, admittedly partakes in vice herself simply for the pleasure of it. Trixie destroys her room, quipping, “I believe it’s called containing multitudes, mother.” This juxtaposition of youth and intellectualism drives S.M.A.

SMMA.interior109

Six-panels-per-page long vignettes operate as their own stories, factoring into the larger world of S.M.A. Relationship drama is broken up by the existentialist scenes of Everlasting Boy, whose power is timelessness and puts existence into perspective; he smiles at petty teenage concerns. As the reader progresses, a larger framework carries through each character’s trials, tribulations, fantasies, and pranks. Tamaki beautifully succeeds in capturing the very essence of being a teenager in today’s world, even while being set apart from it. Magic and mutant powers serve as catalysts for the humor of embarrassment and discovery in the teenage years. Sarcasm is a power, denial a spell, and the true test is discovering who you are when the mundane aspects of life are just as traumatizing as the supernatural and magical.

SMMA.interior149


Jesse-Allen

Jesse Allen lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He has a MLA with a focus on New York Studies from City College of New York. He is a life-long fan of comic books, books without pictures, art in museums, and art on the street. He teaches at Guttman Community College.

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Published on May 18, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

BORB by Jason Little reviewed by Jesse Allen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 14, 2015 by thwackMay 14, 2015

Borb
BORB
by Jason Little
Uncivilized Books, 96 pages
reviewed by Jesse Allen

Is Borb a graphic novel or comic strip? Packaged as both, the reader is treated to various juxtapositions that jar as well as entertain and enlighten. Illustrated in a style reminiscent of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, Borb’s main character is out of time. Homeless and alcoholic, he constantly stumbles into mishaps, finding resolutions that quickly fall apart and lead him into more desperate circumstances. But what we know and learn about him is very little, as alcoholism is the main character throughout this tale. He is able to make gains, such as finding food and a place to eat, and yet he sabotages himself through his addictive imbibing. As the story progresses, it is hard to muster pity for the main character.

borb-02

Rendered in classic Sunday comics’ style, the horrors of alcoholism are accompanied by the bumbling antics of the everyday life of this man. Rarely does he speak, and yet Little is able to capture the humor and sadness in his alcohol-fueled survival and fall. While never pretending to be a “feel good” read, Borb doesn’t come across as a cautionary tale either. Our man finds himself surrounded by bits of chicken bone, pizza boxes, half eaten Styrofoam containers of whatever, and stained cardboard boxes strewn across the ground. While this might appear to be “rock bottom,” his alcoholism causes him to sink lower when his descent moves underground.

borb-03

This is not an homage to the homeless in modern times but it is a recognition of existence in the face of a world and city where ignoring homelessness is the norm. The list of names for the homeless that society uses to dehumanize are spelled out in Borb before the story begins as a precursor to a tale one might otherwise ignore (and often does in life), forgetting that everyone has a story of value. While this series of vignettes often portrays bumbling antics with dismal results, the specter of addiction and its consequences is explored in a very human way. Even if you can’t relate to Borb, you can see how the spiral perpetuates this character’s condition.

borb-03

Borb is rich in the way that Little is able to present shocking and dark themes in short, light spurts to give the reader an overall greater depth. While Borb is a comic strip, its impact is novelistic in every sense.


Jesse-Allen

Jesse Allen lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He has a MLA with a focus on New York Studies from City College of New York. He is a life-long fan of comic books, books without pictures, art in museums, and art on the street. He teaches at Guttman Community College.

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Published on May 14, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

DISPLACEMENT by Lucy Knisley reviewed by Travis DuBose

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 30, 2015 by thwackJune 15, 2015

displacement-coverDISPLACEMENT
by Lucy Knisley
Fantagraphics, 168 pages

reviewed by Travis DuBose

Lucy Knisley’s Displacement follows her previous graphic travelogues focused on carefree adventures in Europe with a diary about aging and constriction. In the winter of 2012 Knisley accompanied her elderly grandparents on a cruise through the Caribbean, a vacation that, given her grandparents’ condition—her grandmother was suffering from advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and her grandfather was mentally sharp but physically frail—was, by her own admission, ill-advised and possibly dangerous. As she recounts the difficulties of caring for her grandparents, Knisley ruminates on the role they’ve played in the life of her family. In particular, she quotes from and illustrates selections from her grandfather’s memoirs of the second world war.

The illustrations of her grandfather’s war experiences are the most compelling element of the narrative. I found myself excited when I turned the page to see stories of the war, accompanied by Knisley’s keen eye for color and layout. Her grandfather’s war recollections are all the more fascinating because he eschews easy patriotism for a soldier’s realism, saying directly that he cared much more about surviving than being a hero.

displacement-6

 

By comparison, Knisley’s experiences accompanying her grandparents on the ship seem less substantial, and not just because she isn’t taking enemy fire. The narrative continually raises issues—for example, Knisley’s difficulty grappling with her father’s post-divorce relationships—only to sweep them aside to take up the next issue without ever returning to the previous. In this way, a narrative about old age and mortality ends up feeling strangely breezy, which, I suppose, could be argued is appropriate for a book set on a cruise ship. But, by the end of the book, when Knisley describes the unbelievable stress of the experience, I realized that I hadn’t often felt that same stress alongside her, even as she was describing the harrowing experience of coming back from a snorkeling trip to find her grandparents missing. She’d find them, I’d known all along, and then the fact that they’d temporarily gone missing would be lost to the breeze.

Lucy Knisley

Lucy Knisley

Potential power is lost in an attempt to encapsulate so much of her grandparents’ lives in a slim volume based on a weeklong vacation. Part of the difficulty in exploring the depth of the story comes from the book’s structure, which is signaled early on, before setting sail, when Knisley delineates potential themes the trip might evoke. In her attempt to impose all these meanings on a weeklong trip, she never has the time to truly explore any one of them. As a reader, I found myself wanting either more or less authorial intrusion: either a restructuring of the trajectory to fit her personal conclusion about connection across generations, or a pulling back, to allow readers to reach their own conclusions.

Though the narrative sometimes lacks heft, the artwork throughout Displacement is enjoyable cover to cover. As mentioned, Knisley’s eye for color and design is so impeccable that the result often seemed to me more like an illustrated book than a graphic narrative. Take, for instance, the passage excerpted below: the framing of the central drawing with ribbons is charming, and the deflation of the bottom caption is made all the funnier by its also being enclosed, ceremoniously, in a ribbon.

displacement-5

 

Knisley’s sense of color and scale is often sublime, as when she illustrates the depth of dark water on her snorkeling tip:
displacement1

Even if the individual parts of the narrative are less than a whole, each of the individual episodes is itself either poignant or harrowing. Knisley’s illustrations and prose work together to capture the horror of a plane ride during which Knisley’s grandmother gets sick. The caption “HORK,” outlined in sickly pea green, is, for me, the new high water mark of illustrating the repugnance of someone vomiting in an enclosed space. And the image of Knisley’s taciturn and often confused grandmother kicking peacefully in a shallow pool while her husband looks on is moving and beautifully illustrated, even if its effect might have been stronger had we been able to linger there and contemplate through narrative.


travis-duboseTravis DuBose’s fiction has appeared in Apiary and Petrichor Machine, and he was the recent recipient of a Jan-Ai Scholarship Foundation award. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife.

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Published on April 30, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE SCULPTOR by Scott McCloud reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 22, 2015 by thwackApril 7, 2016

The-SculptorTHE SCULPTOR
by Scott McCloud
First Second Books, 488 pages

reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

Scott McCloud is a mentor. Most first meet him in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, where he instantly disarms with his bespectacled, plaid glory, celebrating and clarifying the medium for readers. Witnessing McCloud usher original characters into the world with the same warmth and care in The Sculptor, his new graphic novel, is nothing short of a privilege. Rarely do we find characters presented in a manner I am compelled to call gentle: set down on the page as if being laid into bed, allowed to speak their dreamlike thoughts before sleep. And, like a dream, The Sculptor is equal parts muted and epic: you will notice it in your waking life—you will experience an eerie hum at the resemblance.

McCloud introduces David Smith: a character written in the legacy of Doctor Faustus, here reincarnated in modern day New York as a struggling artist who agrees to shorten his time on earth for fantastic sculpting abilities. With a common name, David offers a relatable face for individuals dying for creative breakthrough, a cliché McCloud literalizes by instituting life and death stakes.

floatThe Sculptor could have easily thrilled with its grand narrative scale alone—its panels are charged with the same energy as recent action movies highlighting comic greats. And David Smith could have easily slid into the heroic tradition of struggling yet gifted men, offering a focused desire to create rather than disassemble. But McCloud implodes our expectations and instead writes the veritable textbook on misdirection. The Sculptor is not about a deal with death; The Sculptor is about falling in love when the stakes are viciously high. A forecast is spelled, and then quieted: because there is a girl, and she is beautiful, and that observance is an art form unto itself.

surroundedMeg, the “object” of David’s affections, challenges his predominantly tactile relationship with the world. He cannot mold her, only model after her. He studies her face with his hands, creates busts after every one of her expressions. And Meg has many expressions: she is no smooth screen built to receive the projection of his fantasies. She ripples, she rips, and she creases.

meg-face
Inked entirely in black and blue, The Sculptor is a mesmerizing bruise you find yourself reaching to touch over and over. It will make you ache. In fact, it should. This story compels you to wonder: what if I had such little time? How could I possibly choose between what I love to create, and what was created while I wasn’t paying attention—this love, this human, this a priori sculpture?


Amy-Victoria-BlakemoreAmy Victoria Blakemore is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, where she served for three years as a writing tutor. She earned honors for her senior thesis on contemporary iterations of Superman in comics and graphic literature, and she also was awarded an Academy of American Poetry Prize. Her work appears in the The Kenyon Review, [PANK], and The Susquehanna Review.

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Published on April 22, 2015 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE DEATH OF ARCHIE: A LIFE CELEBRATED by Paul Kupperberg et al reviewed by Natalie Pendergast

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 13, 2014 by thwackOctober 13, 2014

The-Death-of-Archie-coverTHE DEATH OF ARCHIE: A LIFE CELEBRATED
Text by Paul Kupperberg; Illustrations by Pat Kennedy, Paul Kennedy and Fernando Ruiz
Archie Comic Publications, Inc., 113 pages

reviewed by Natalie Pendergast

The Death of Archie: A Life Celebrated is the long-awaited two-part finale of the Life with Archie series, the most recent incarnation of which began in 2010. The series is a revival of the original Life with Archie comics that, along with spin-offs like Pals ‘n’ Gals and Betty and Veronica, began in the ’50s, spanned several decades, and consisted of hundreds of issues. Unlike the other variant series, however, the early Life With Archie comics were characterized by generic shifts from romantic comedy to drama and fantasy, as well as experimental alternate universes.

strange_framingNow, the latest Life With Archie comics have surpassed all others by dismantling the romance genre that promised a life of wedlock and nuclear family values, in favor of tragedy in the form of the untimely death of a hero. Victor Gorelick, The Death of Archie Editor-in-Chief, anticipates the obvious question on everybody’s mind, writing, in the forward to #36, “[s]o, why does Archie have to die?” Quickly, he answers, “[i]t’s not because Riverdale has changed, or that the fundamental basics of what made Archie great have been altered—what’s changed is reality.”

Archie has grown up, and his fans have grown up (and old), it’s true. But The Death of Archie not altering “the fundamental basics of what made Archie great” has definitely not been my reality in reading the comics.

Archie’s greatness was constantly being altered from the beginning. He was probably at his all-time greatest while Dan DeCarlo was drawing him, and he seems to be at his least great in these comics. The reasons for my criticism are threefold.

extra_cheeseFirst, the comics are cheesy, and not in the good, campy, retro, pie-in-the-face-humor sort of way. The switch to drama has changed Archie from an impulsive guy to a virtuous, introspective one, but worse—it has the distinct feeling of being prescribed drama, with predictable lines about life’s milestones. We are being asked to take a clown seriously; well, that is just not fun.

Let me explain by way of comparison. Tom Hanks used to be an Archie. Back when he was a goofy guy in movies like Splash and Big, I was really into him. So I didn’t appreciate it when Tom Hanks became a primarily dramatic actor back in the early ‘90s, and I don’t appreciate my Archie Comics being drama-by-numbers now.

Kevin_KellerWe are also being asked to take Kevin Keller, who personifies political correctness—he is a politician who is not-so-incidentally gay—seriously. But he is not realistic. He is more of a description of what soccer moms want gay men to be than any gay man I’ve come across. He’s a Christian singer/song-writer, the kind that performs with an acoustic guitar during song circle, and someone has convinced him to go to Riverdale and pretend to be a gay man.

Archie doesn’t need to have wholesome values; all he needs to be is our forever clumsy, all-American “waffle head,” to use Adam Hughes’ term of endearment.

Second, Archie didn’t have to grow up for his character to continue developing. Since the dawn of the Life with Archie series, Archie has been steadily checking off his “normal guy” to-do list. He has blossomed into a starkly sober, completely socialized, self-aware, mildly depressed, and utterly boring adult. Yes, the every-boy has turned into the every-man and the series message has unwittingly remained a scowling “grown-ups suck!”

The beauty of Archie comics has always been the way we develop Archie in our imaginations. He is built on error-upon-error in judgment, red cheeks, bleary-eyed “va-va-va-vooms,” and teenage tomfoolery.

Third, the death of Archie does not feel tragic. In tragedy, the hero’s flaw is the cause of his death. Archie thus should have gotten shot by Betty as she caught him in bed with Veronica. In the penultimate issue, Archie’s death registers as Christ-like and he is heralded as a very (un-Archie-like) martyr. He is not tortured enough by his longstanding inner conflict to befit the tragic hero archetype. In fact, I don’t know that Archie even realizes he is in a love triangle or that it may be socially unacceptable to have two wives.

spilt_sodaI do like some things about The Death of Archie. The story is quick-paced and has clever transitions. There is graphic rhyming (Archie’s pooling blood recalls a spilt chocolate soda, for example). The Betty or Veronica enigma —which one did he choose?— is consistent and riveting throughout. The paratextual notes and collectable covers drawn by various artists at the end are a treat for fans.

Fear not fellow Archie fans—this “ending” is most certainly not the end. We fans have an understanding with the industry: our heroes can die or get married once in a while, but they will always return to the pages of future issues, restored to their original bachelor status, unscathed from battle. Gorelick even confirms this reader-publisher agreement before we get to a single speech balloon: “It’s a sad ending, but comic books are still here and Archie will live on in our comics, digests, graphic novels, digitally and in the not too distant future, TV and the movies. So wipe away your tears, Archie’s still here and will be here for years to come.”


Natalie PrendergastNatalie Pendergast is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She specializes in American, Canadian and French graphic novels and bande dessinée. She is active in creative circles that dabble in various media such as prose writing, drawing, beat poetry, video-making and theatre. She is also the communications officer for the nonprofit Acadian organizations of Prince Edward Island.

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Published on October 13, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

CELEBRATED SUMMER by Charles Forsman reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 4, 2014 by thwackJune 15, 2015
Celebrated Summer

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CELEBRATED SUMMER
by Charles Forsman
Fantagraphics Books, 67 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

For the first potion of one’s life, summer is a welcome three-month respite from the seemingly stressful remainder of the year. Like the buds of a flower, it is a period of joy in the face of few commitments and responsibilities. But somewhere, as those flowers begin to fade and adolescence sets in, we become forlornly reminiscent of those times as we’re caught in-between one concrete stage of life and another. Charles Forsman’s Celebrated Summer tells of one such swan song, recalling the alternating experiences of two teens as they trip both literally and figuratively in the midst of one teenage summer.

Told through the perspective of Wolf, whose gentle nature is masked by his large frame and sprout-like mohawk, we join a transient trip from the suburbs to the shore. Wolf’s partner in crime, Mike, is a sassy-mouthed wisp of a teenage boy who initiates both trips, leading Wolf down the rabbit hole with two tabs of LSD and on an unnecessarily elongated drive. Mike is clearly the alpha-male in this friendship, though Wolf—who describes himself as “a pretty nervous guy on the inside”—does not seem to object. Rather, he willingly goes along with Mike’s dominant nature as a directionless passenger of his own fortune.

Walking on Trail

Forsman captures the simplicity of youth in Mike and Wolf’s interactions, as they freely flee and are more drawn to boardwalk video games than of the region’s infamous sinful escapes. The shore, through Forsman’s eye, is gritty and has seen better days; the same goes for the souls that dwell its worn wooden boardwalk, a true menagerie of balding ghoul-eyed men and a leather-clad gang of “Freek Angels.” They are country mice transplanted to the big bad city, surrounded by a bevy of opportunities to indulge in the darker realms of adulthood.

Swimming against the grain of those who tread along the promenade, the two boys retreat to the isolation of the beach and share a joint. Wolf stars out into the cross-hatched blackness and reflects privately upon his social introversion while Mike continues to amble along. He has enough life experience to understand that the past mistakes can never be amended, but lacks the foresight necessary to see that he holds the ability to shed this numbed façade of a teenage tough-guy in favor of the conscious, introspective being we see glimmers of within.

Nervous

The physical presentation of Celebrated Summer calls to mind the pasty gray scratch paper utilized by countless grade-school teachers to pacify the pens of budding artists and writers. The black-and-white laden pages only intensify this notion, opposing the technicolor trappings of our protagonist’s LSD tour and enhancing the readers’ recollection of their own youth. Though the majority of Forsman’s tale portrays Mike and Wolf externally, there are several moments when we see through their own eyes. Together we witness the dancing skyline of Philadelphia and the reflections of their own disfigured faces as they peer into the mirrors of roadside rest stops during their impromptu beach trip. They are reflected in the arcade games that they each retreat to and melt into their respective situations, Wolf finding himself in the blinking amorphous displays and Mike retreating wordlessly from an intimate offer made by a rather bold young woman.

Mike and Wolf’s friendship, like many that are forged early in life, appears to be one founded by location rather than true similarities. Whereas Mike taps guiltlessly into self-indulgence and gets a rise out of putting down his friend, Wolf’s personality is porous. He has certainly absorbed some of Mike’s one-sided perspective, but he shows moments of true reflection and sympathy. There is an undercurrent of pensiveness and regret, the kind that comes as we grow from children to adults. Summer, a time of long carefree days for children, has for Wolf become a season of aimless wandering that causes him to turn inward upon himself.

Turning Inward

Wolf is the adolescent that Charles Schultz’s beloved Charlie Brown may have grown into: a pudgy-faced boy who displays outward skepticism on the threshold of adulthood. He cannot justify to his concerned grandmother, who questions him authoritatively the next morning. She fuels his youth, making him a sandwich and checking to make sure that the pair of shoes she’s buying him fit properly.

Wolf’s solitary reflections are echoes of most any adult’s thoughts on their own youth and are fitting as the seasons slide from the glories of summer into its inevitable fall. Forsman reaches deep into the cupboards of human emotion and dips into our personal reservoir of childhood memories, bringing them to life in the wanderings of the lone Wolf. “I do still lie awake at night,” Wolf thinks while sitting alone on a bench in the beginnings of a rainstorm. “Strangled with nostalgia. How can those days be so far away? Carelessly passed.”

Scared

 


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B. A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. 

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Published on September 4, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THIS ONE SUMMER by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki reviewed by Natalie Pendergast

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 11, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
This One Summer

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THIS ONE SUMMER
text by Mariko Tamaki
illustrations by Jillian Tamaki
First Second Books, 320 pages,

reviewed by Natalie Pendergast

Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s 2014 graphic novel This One Summer follows the lives of two summer cottage friends in their early teens. Rose and Windy spend this last summer of innocence testing the proverbial waters of adolescence as well as the actual waters of the Awago Beach where their families summer.

The girls have heard things over the years, things about miscarriages and abortions, but this one summer, they experience the emotions of women and girls who are actually entangled in such adult problems. What Rose and Windy thought were simply mistakes to be avoided become a complicated mix of desire, pain and decision-making. Jillian Tamaki’s navy-violet-grey art expresses movement by way of diversified frame angles covering a single scene and comfortably suturing earlier panels with later ones. Often de-centering the frame’s focus from a character’s face to the side nape of her neck or a close-up of a portion of her hand, Tamaki calls upon us to see through the panels as one would a small hole in a fence. This act of peeping further connects us to the girls throughout their much relished eavesdropping and spying activities.

this-one-summer-4

Although This One Summer delivers frequent helpings of obligatory, and obligatorily delicious, YA themes of drugs, sex, R-rated films and complicated relationships, the Tamakis do a brilliant job of keeping all that serious stuff on the fringe of the girls’ official business of having fun, being lazy and goofing around. Rather than administer the story through a typical teen drama formula, this pair of cartooning cousins casually weave layers of heavy subject-matter into a kind of serialized championing of idle summer loafing. What would normally be the gratuitous adventures of adolescents is the central and ongoing narrative, while the more enigmatic plot threads dangle imprudently, as though incidental to their lives. This subversive storytelling style has the effect of developing characters with exceptional depth and dimensions in lieu of the perhaps less-fulfilling though oft-craved action-packed, plot-thickening, pace-quickening scenarios oh so characteristic of teenager literature.

this-one-summer-2

This One Summer thus has staying power. It conveys the universal scariness of closing one chapter in life only to face the next (unknown) one. For Rose and Windy, however, the experience is ever more frightening because they are closing chapter one, Childhood.

Jillian and Mariko Tamaki

Jillian and Mariko Tamaki

This graphic novel captures the precise coming-of-age dialogue that only two girls about to venture beyond the parental boundaries of good behavior can have. Only, like their words, which never quite work perfectly to describe their thoughts, they never seem to reach the other side of their curiosity into adult matters. Hanging perpetually in that anterior space of hesitation, Rose and Windy become as invested in the lives of older teens and adults as they are in the tragic victims of their horror movies. Always peering into the dramas of others’ keeps the girls at a safe distance, but this becomes their story: watching and absorbing in silence, only to discuss the actions and motives of others in confidence with each other, they learn to empathize with others going through hard times.

this-one-summer-3

It is easy to relate to the characters in this book. Rose and Windy personify each of our private and eternal quests for self-discovery. They respond to that little ’teen buried deeply inside all of us. And we delight in watching the girls cross each symbolic threshold into maturity, traversing frontiers into forbidden territory.

The Tamakis, however, refreshingly sidestep the clichéd event of virginity loss that traditionally transforms girls into women in coming of age stories. They rather have the main characters sublimate desire, holding it at its biggest bloat, never letting it burst.


Natalie PrendergastNatalie Pendergast is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She specializes in American, Canadian and French graphic novels and bande dessinée. She is active in creative circles that dabble in various media such as prose writing, drawing, beat poetry, video-making and theatre. She is also the communications officer for the nonprofit Acadian organizations of Prince Edward Island.

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Published on August 11, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE FORGOTTEN MAN: A New History of the Great Depression Graphic Edition reviewed by Jesse Allen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on July 24, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
forgotten-man-300-px

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THE FORGOTTEN MAN: A New History of the Great Depression
Graphic Edition
text by Amity Shlaes
illustrations by Paul Rivoche

320 pages, Harper Perennial

reviewed by Jesse Allen

The new graphic novel edition of Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man, illustrated by Paul Rivoche, is a thorough historical account of America during the Great Depression years. From the starkly illustrated cover of the masses—grim faced men with shadows for eyes, in a sea of Stetson wearing unfortunates—to the beautifully rendered illustrative black and white style on each page, this book is a visual treat. Spanning from 1927 to 1940, Shlaes is able to cover a wide swath of economic and cultural changes. While the crux of the book is “the Forgotten Man,”  the working class men and women who thrive or suffer depending on how the government is able to deal with the economy in light of recent disasters, this book is about historical change and how the U.S. ultimately gets out of the Depression.

Roosevelt

Rivoche’s panels are drawn with simple yet carefully detailed scenes. His characters either evoke this general period of history or are specifically recognizable for their significance in this era. Narrated by Wendell Lewis Willkie, The Forgotten Man begins with his excited foray into the utilities industry and the optimistic attitude that electricity would “energize” the country. The opportunities of America as presented to the workingman—native and immigrant alike—often differ from the realities that they face on a daily basis. Willkie tells the tale with the Forgotten Man as the fulcrum of the drama that unfolds on a local and international level. Politicians, bankers, professors, dictators, and revolutionaries all feature as characters in the greater story of how the U.S. recovered from the Depression.

Amity-Shlaes

Author Amity Shlaes

Shlaes does a beautiful job of weaving an overarching political narrative with what is happening on the ground. Scenes of conversations with the president and labor leaders are interspersed with scenes depicting how people are affected by these decisions. The Forgotten Man—“The man who pays, the man who prays, the man who is never thought of”—is the fodder that keeps both the government in business and business afloat.  This a progressive tale that operates on a linear time line and, as graphic narrative, succeeds in articulating a series of events that are precipitated by or engaged with other events. The opening pages show the stark conditions of men starving in city streets “four years into the New Deal,” in 1932. Henry Willkie sets up the story by asking how America got to that point of struggle. Each chapter is marked with a yearly date, the unemployment rate of that period, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The audience witnesses the desperation of the average American, a general disillusionment with the current capitalist system, and a serious inquiry into Soviet communism as it develops in Russia. And while the economy and society are not at their most robust in America, drawing a comparison to Russia and Germany highlights the privilege America still enjoys and the character it possesses that propels it as a nation into World War II.

Paul Rivoche

Illustrator Paul Rivoche

Throughout The Forgotten Man, major events are illustrated and retold with their players, both high and low, featured. When Shlaes outlines the flood of 1927 or the Stock Market crash of 1929, he shows how the people affected by those events fare, while politicians and businessmen fight to either restructure and fix these issues for their people’s benefit or for their own survival. As a graphic narrative and essential historical read, The Forgotten Man succeeds. The look and feel of the art compliments the text as a tour of America during the Great Depression. Shlaes has done her homework – the addendum includes a comprehensive timeline spanning the Hoover, Coolidge, and Roosevelt presidencies, as well as a cast of characters with biographical info. The Forgotten Man is a thoroughly enjoyable read and stands out as a graphic triumph in history.


Jesse-Allen

Jesse Allen lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He has a MLA with a focus on New York Studies from City College of New York. He is a life-long fan of comic books, books without pictures, art in museums, and art on the street. He teaches at Guttman Community College.

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Published on July 24, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by Liana Finck reviewed by Ana Schwartz

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 9, 2014 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016

A-Bintel-BriefA BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK
by Liana Finck
Ecco Press, 128 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

There’s a new sort of fiction circulating, stories of young people, by young people, for young people. This isn’t YA lit. These stories range across genres, even mediums, but they all describe the ambivalence of maturing in post-post-modernity. These narratives share a sense of lostness and reflective self-estrangement. The authors are smart and the narratives are smartly-dressed. They usually take place in New York. Think Frances Ha or Tai Pei or Girls. And if, as one well-respected author of such fictions has recently described them, they at times seem “cold, lazy, [and] artificial,” they also exhibit “extreme honesty and thoroughness of […] self scrutiny.”

Liana Finck’s new graphic novel, A Bintel Brief features one such young me-person; but, although the story mines her development as an artist, it does so by digging into the past. With the distance afforded by history, and supported by the graphic novel’s relatively diffuse gaze, Finck offers a warmer, and more engaged account of a remarkably persistent theme: how one comes to feel that they belong to a community.

Liana Finck

Liana Finck

Finck foregrounds this theme early as her narrator inherits a book of newspaper clippings from her grandmother, old cut-outs of the “Bintel Brief,” an advice column authored at the turn of the 20th century by Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Yiddish newspaper The Forward. The clippings scrapbook turns out to be a magic artifact of sorts when it brings to life a phantom Cahan himself. He becomes the narrator and guide, explaining and fleshing out the lives preserved in each letter. The book proceeds as a sequence of vignettes, mostly black-and-white panels, Finck listening inquisitively to Cahan’s stories.

The time-traveler Cahan is out of place in contemporary New York. His arrival here brings forward the historical experiences of immigrant Jews—the readers of his newspaper—who came to America to find their family and friends, and found them changed from when they knew them in Europe. Subtending these threads is the delicate matter of absorption into “American” culture, a theme Finck treats with judicious subtlety. In some sense, the theme of belonging comes with the territory: New York is a city of plurivocality, an ideal that Finck enthusiastically invokes through the English literary tradition when she paints Cahan quoting Shakespeare on the diverse beauty of man as they walk through Times Square. Even voiced by a time-traveler, it resounds from the heart of her text with remarkable sincerity.

Each story recounts the predicament of a single letter, which is a great formal device since each missive bears with it an urgently felt and discrete plot. The form allows Finck, through Cahan, to gently resist narrating solutions. The advice Cahan offers only ever appears as text, and never comes to visible results. The invisibility of resolutions comprises the great empathy of Finck’s book—there may not be any thoroughly satisfying solution to these problems.

barber

The thematic contrast between advised action and represented life gets at the most powerful formal element of the graphic novel, its fusion of image and text. Finck’s images vividly and gratifyingly give flesh to a world intently concerned with reconciling two tense imperatives: on one hand, there’s the necessary struggle to make ends meet in a new land; on the other, there’s a struggle to keep faith in what can’t be materially guaranteed—the affection of a lover, for instance, or the closeness of distant family, or a felt religious belief. Finck’s graphic style emphasizes their more intense, though varied experience in earlier times. In the black and white episodes, she frequently uses a heavy line to give a sense of shadow and darkness. Yet often, her objects, particularly the human bodies, appear pliant and fluid. For example, in the first chapter, “The Watch,” she begins the story of a frustrated mother by using strong lines and sharp objects: a pencil, a sword, the eponymous timepiece. By contrast, the eleventh chapter, “A Faithful Reader,” represents a story of unassimilated melancholy and trauma with phantom-like shapes and strangely-placed items in Sarah, the letter-writer’s room. The shlemazl, the oppressive spirit, an encephalitic stick-like figure, is rendered with only slightly less solidity than Sarah. These vividly represented problems might long for resolution—the narrator/artist pleads with Cahan to tell her how they ended—but to offer such closure in the text would compromise their emotional integrity.

I'm a girl

The strongest stylistic connection between these sections—the stories of the past and the story of how we come to know the past—is water, as both motif and medium: the line-drawing waves on the title page represent the same waves that bear immigrants to New York; water reappears as the tears that fall down faces throughout the book, indicating strong feelings that persist through history; it’s transformed into the soup that Cahan longs for and that Finck learns to make. Most importantly it is the medium of choice—the watercolors—of the sections of the present. It is the substance of the conversations between Cahan and the protagonist. It is the medium in which Cahan becomes modern—shaving, putting on modern clothing, walking through the city—and it is the medium in which the artist grows more historically aware, eventually initiating her own proper research into her family and her city’s history. The liquid blue of these sections quietly carries through each of the black and white episodes, highlighting an emblematic object of struggle or anxiety.

mad barber

It’s easy to want to over-interpret these blue objects—a hat, a tangle of yarn, a singing bird—as they progress through each chapter. Finck recurrently illustrates dreams in these episodes, and that dense nexus of narrative and symbol isn’t neutralized by the fact that Cahan, until he decides to get a modernizing shave, looks suspiciously like Sigmund Freud. The chapter in which Finck illustrates Cahan discarding that self-presentation is itself one of the most politically unsettling dreams of the book. In that chapter, “The Mad(?) Barber,” the letter writer, a barber, describes dozing off at work, and dreaming about cutting off the head of a disrespectful customer—but that customer is George Washington! He is so disturbed by the dream that he’s tempted to murder his real-life customers. The political implications of such a dream echo in the scene when Cahan, walking through Times Square, chooses to quote Shakespeare (“O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!”) to express desire for expansive community rather than, say, Whitman, the more locally famous bard of social sentiment (“I loved well the stately and rapid river;” he writes, for example, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “The men and women I saw were all near to me”). These passages indicate justifiable skepticism toward the promise of the American dream through history. The format here is especially powerful in framing that skepticism historically: it is a dream that haunts a man, who narrates it in a letter that is then published in a paper, and here drawn in a graphic novel. There is no singular voice expressing a grievance at America, but a collective, through dream-work. Here, Finck is at her best, most dynamically participating in a historical community.

adoption

Cahan’s advice columns show off his commitment to close listening and observation, but he does not aim to interpret dreams, despite the implicit desire of those letters. Instead, he’s more concerned with the urgent pragmatism of lived life: “The writer of this letter,” he responds to the mad barber, “must simply laugh off the dream and drive the whole matter out of his head…he himself must be strong and overcome his impulse.” And to some extent, the protagonist of the novel takes up a contemporary version of that advice when her spirit friend leaves her, lonely, to get to the work of the present. And this is the singular weakness of the book: the delicacy of the present never rises to the challenging boldness of the past. The last pages thematize her personal development, and represent it as a problem comparable to those that came before: (“Editor, my spirit has left me and I don’t know who I am anymore”). But the novel is reluctant to clearly describe the struggles of the contemporary artist, how she got there and what symptoms she sees. She appears therefore distinctly immune from the urgently felt struggles of her community’s history. It has the effect, at least, in the text, of holding her apart from affective belonging to the historical community she so sympathetically represents. In the final panel, she claims that “some things can’t be put into words.”
Cleveland
There is much to honor about the ineffable, and much to value in the unique potential of images, certainly. But if the blues of the present permeate the strong monochrome of the past, certainly the present too, can benefit from the past’s bold line. This is less a failing than an opportunity for a certainly flexible author like Finck. Her scrupulous and sensitive readings of the past, of the historical experience of lostness and estrangement can only strengthen her intuitive, if, here, vague representation of the contemporary youthful search for love and belonging in New York. Indeed, her work, in its anachronism, points to what might be missing in this crop of recent works: attention to the affinities with the experiences of the past. We can trust that she’ll continue to develop this cross-historical connection with no lack of subtlety or style.


ana-schwartz

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

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Published on June 9, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS by Hillary L. Chute reviewed by Seamus O’Malley

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 21, 2014 by thwackJune 18, 2020
Outside-the-Box book jacket

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OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS
By Hillary L. Chute
University of Chicago Press, 272 Pages

reviewed by Seamus O’Malley

Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists by Hillary Chute contains interviews with Scott McCloud, Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, Françoise Mouly, Adrian Tomine, Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware. If you know comics you’ll recognize this as the auteur scene, and if you don’t you’ve just been given your starter syllabus. Many of these interviews appeared before, especially in Believer magazine, but those have been expanded, and several others are appearing for the first time in print. It is a valuable record of some of the industry’s greatest talents contemplating their work, their influences, and comics culture at large.

There is some precedent for such a collection, such as Todd Hignite’s In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (2007), which interviewed many of the same artists. That work, as its title suggests, was more about the creative process, and Hignite was mostly interested in the physical details of draftsmanship. Chute, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, is possibly the world’s only full-time graphic novel scholar, so approaches her interviewees with a wider range of subjects. The result is a less focused volume than Hignite’s but allows for, say, Tomine’s interesting accounts of dealing with race in his work, or the inclusion of Mouly, who, while not a creator of comics, has been central to the growth of comics culture over the past generation.

No one is better poised for such a project than Chute. She edited Spiegelman’s MetaMaus, and co-taught a course on comics and autobiography with Bechdel. But more importantly, Chute is one of the best writers we have on comics. Her first book, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), as well as articles in academic journals like PMLA and Modern Fiction Studies, are models of comics reading and criticism.

Chute is unobstrusive with her questions, and often the simplest ones lead to the richest (and longest) meditations. Lynda Barry delivers a wonderful, Gertrude Stein-esque ramble on what numbers look like, all prompted by Chute’s short remark, “Yes, the book has a questioning mode.”  It helps that most of these artists are veterans who have had ample time to contemplate their medium.

Headshot of Hillary Chute

Hillary Chute

One theme that many artists return to is that of physicality and print culture. (Kinko’s gets its own line in the index.) Several interviewees speculate that the increase in serious attention given to comics is the result of the virtualization of so much of today’s media, so that a heavy, thick-papered book cuts against the grain of contemporary culture and compensates for a lost connection to physical objects. While McCloud is bullish on web comics and dismisses the paper attachment as a “fetish,” most of the other artists relate their unwillingness to imagine their work independent of paper. This inevitably leads to a culture of nostalgia, visible in the work of Barry and Ware (and if we draw farther afield, artists like Ben Katchor or Seth). And while Tomine laments that “there’s almost a cultural stereotype of the nostalgic cartoonist guy, and you don’t want to play into it too much,” he must know he is doing a poor job of it during his interview, where he defends his decision, unique amongst the interviewees, to put out his work as separate issues initially available only at comic book stores. Clowes, by contrast, regrets publishing his great work The Death Ray as a comic and now only does work straight to book form.

A related issue is the long and painstaking process of creating a comic that is so out of step with the instantaneousness of social media. Sacco, a comics journalist, is the most salient example here: he went to Bosnia in 1995, and the result was the impressive Safe Area Gorazde…published in 2000. For a culture habituated to a continuous feed of information, his creative process reads like a geeky form of sadomasochism. But Sacco’s work—he signs and dates every page—never lets us forget how his source material has been manipulated and formed, and reminds us that we misuse the term “immediate” to refer to the fast speed of new kinds of mediation.

With the exception of Mouly, all of these interviewees are artists who write, or writers who draw. This is auteur tradition, as opposed to the collaborative work that is standard at Marvel or D.C. It’s this attention to literary, often autobiographical work that has drawn some negative attention to Chute, since it taps into some unease over what the comics canon is going to look like. Chute’s success has made her a target for critics—mostly male—who accuse her of snubbing genre comics, especially superhero comics. Some of the comments you can find on academic chat boards are so strident in their misogyny you wonder if it’s parody—one poster lists his favorite critics and writes, “No Chute here!” Does he know he’s supposed to be writing academic discourse and not a sign for his boys club that meets in a treehouse? The fact that a woman has earned alpha dog status is not sitting well with an audience who turned to comics in the first place because of their issues with girls. (I speak from personal authority.)

Sexism aside, Chute takes seriously the issue of canon creation, and even includes, in her introduction, some passages verbatim from an exchange she had in PMLA, in which she defended her work against charges of elitism. While it may seem like a paradox to be an elitist comics scholar, Chute has displayed little interest in superheroes throughout her career, and Outside the Box has no Alan Moore, Frank Miller or Grant Morrison. Chute makes clear her preferred genealogy: “The underground comics community of artists and publishers was, in large part, the genesis of contemporary comics,” and “I am more interested…in the single vision of the auteur of fiction or nonfiction comics.” However, this is not to preclude or circumscribe what scholars should be writing about: she states her desire “for more, not fewer, conversations about comics…with many kinds of perspectives and objects of analysis.” Most scholars do not have to defend themselves like this—if you write on James Joyce, no one asks what you have against crime fiction—but such debates are inevitable as comics scholarship grows up (even as some individual scholars refuse to do so). Quality works like this will ultimately be to everyone’s benefit—readers, scholars and artists alike.


Author Photo of Seamus-OMalley

Seamus O’Malley is an English Lecturer at Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University. He received his Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published on W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frank McGuinness, Edmund Wilson, and Alan Moore. His book Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative will be published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2014.

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Published on May 21, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK reviewed by Tahneer Oksman

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 7, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK

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MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK
Curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M.V. David
Edited by Leonard S. Marcus
Harry N. Abrams Press, 224 pages

reviewed by Tahneer Oksman

In a collaborative comic strip published in The New Yorker in 1993, cartoon versions of Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak amble through a forest littered with their own creations peeking out at them from the background. Sendak’s character wisely pontificates, “Childhood is deep and rich. It’s vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly…” In the final panel, he adds, “I knew terrible things. But I knew I musn’t let adults know I knew.”

sendak2Those of us who grew up reading Sendak’s beloved children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are—which is to say, very many of us—undoubtedly recognize in those words the strange and titillating worldview that belonged to the wolf-suit wearing Max. In a gorgeous 200-plus page coffee table book recently published by Abrams and in conjunction with a 2013 Sendak retrospective, Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, readers can immerse themselves in this vivid worldview. The book is broken up into eleven chapters, each focused on a different theme relating to Sendak’s life and work. There’s a chapter dedicated to the posters Sendak designed (“Sendak used the extra space to stretch out with his favored characters,” explains Steven Heller in the accompanying essay); another chapter tracks Sendak’s work on stage, including his opera design (“Oy gevalt!!” the children’s book author exclaimed when first contacted by the opera director Frank Corsaro, who asked if he’d be interested in collaborating on The Magic Flute); and still another is devoted to his work as an educator (“If you’re going to steal, steal good,” he once told a member of his 1971 Children’s Books course at Yale).

Sendak3These amusing tidbits help us get to know the man who stumbled into the world of children’s literature just before the market for such works exploded in the postwar 1950’s. Born in 1928 to Polish immigrant parents, Maurice, or Moishe, got his start as the assistant window director of FAO Schwartz. Soon he was noticed by Ursula Nordstrom, a woman whom Leonard S. Marcus describes as “America’s most daring publisher of books for young people” at the time. Sendak had already fixed on the object of his artistic explorations. As his cherished works repeatedly reflect, he was fixated on the question of “how children survive in a world largely indifferent to their fate.” In Chapter X, titled Where the Wild Things Are (though wild things manage to show up in almost every Sendak-related project after their 1963 debut), curator Patrick Rodgers has an essay on three preliminary drawings from the children’s book. Comparing early watercolor drawings to the final product, Rodgers shows how Sendak carefully toiled to condense details in order to convey the force of Max’s emotions. Through Sendak5changes in posture, expression, and movement, for instance, he transformed the wild things into the objects of Max’s active imagination to emphasize the young boy “as the author of his own cathartic fantasy.” As a teacher, Sendak explained this process of condensation as an attendance to rhythm – how a book could, as Sendak’s student Paul O. Zelinsky recalls, “become music.”

And the rhythms that can be traced in Sendak’s stories are, certainly, a central aspect of what makes them so memorable and appealing. Children’s books are meant to be read again and again, like lyrical poetry. But they are also meant to be looked at, fondled, and, dare I say, torn. In Sendak we find an author keyed into “the young child’s natural impulse to improvisation and self-reinvention,” as Leonard S. Marcus so beautifully explains. That impulse—to favor words alongside pictures, sense as well as nonsense, the fantastical and the real—may be latent in the adult reader, but it is always there in the background, lurking and even beckoning, like one of Sendak’s wild things.

Sendak4


oksman imageTahneer Oksman recently completed her Ph.D. in English Literature at the Graduate Center at CUNY. Her articles on women’s visual culture have been published or are forthcoming in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Studies in Comics, and several upcoming anthologies. She has taught at NYU-Gallatin, Brooklyn College, and Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript on Jewish women’s identity in contemporary graphic memoirs. She is on faculty at Marymount Manhattan College as Assistant Professor of Writing and Director of the Writing Seminar Program.

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Published on April 7, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

ON LOVING WOMEN by Diane Obomsawin reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 26, 2014 by thwackApril 7, 2016
on-loving-women

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ON LOVING WOMEN
by Diane Obomsawin
Drawn & Quarterly, 94 pages

reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

“On Loving Women”: it sounds like a treatise. But Diane Obomsawin does not deliver the usual tome with this intimately illustrated collection of coming out stories, nor does she intend to. In contrast to similarly named philosophical texts such as Aristotle’s On the Soul or Arthur Schopenhaur’s infamous On Women, On Loving Women presents ten vignettes of first love without explanation or elaboration: they are whole ideas, answers unto themselves. And they are utterly delightful to read.

DianeObomsawin2014_creditRehabNazal

Diane Obomsawin

Obomsawin begins each short narrative in On Loving Women with the speaker’s name and a single- or double-panel snapshot of her in her natural habitat: in a chair with a drink or dressed as Zorro, sword and all. For one speaker, Catherine, Obomsawin forgoes props to highlight her big, awkward eyes. These introductions could have easily verged into the expected, but Obomsawin ensures that her readers have an added layer of complexity to work through: all of her speakers, from start to end, are animals. Mice, birds, bulls, pigs – at times, discerning one breed from another proves difficult. Obomsawin’s minimal lines accommodate similarities between the speakers as opposed to singularities. Even readers can project themselves into their knee-less legs, rectangular torsos, and elbow-less arms.

fishnetsobomsawin

This invitation to identify, powerful in many mediums, strikes an especially tender note in the context of what many might consider a realm of sexual difference. Never does Obomsawin exclude a reader who might not participate in loving women; ultimately, the text is as much about loving as it is about women. Just as readers are welcomed to occupy each speaker’s body, they are welcomed to experience the pain, the thrill, and the vulnerability of first love with them. “Candid” does not properly characterize the language of On Loving Women; each narration has the texture of a night at the bar with friends: deliciously unapologetic, a little bit gritty, and, at times, peaked with unspoken sadness. We swing from learning about Marie, who had to move away and sell her horse after her parents discovered her sexuality, to the endearingly sentimental Diane, who is always in love because “it gave [her] a reason to go to school.” And, like a rowdy night with friends, we are privy to details of sexual encounters – some in the key of “making love,” others beginning: “We got seriously wasted.”

wonderwomanobomsawinimage

Most striking, Obomsawin decidedly invokes a risky medium to enrich the honesty of her narrators’ voices: the cliché. And even more, she does so un-ironically. Phrases such as “It was love at first sight” and “It hit me like a thunderbolt” stand alone without the usual protective coating of self-deprecation. Obomsawin resists the urge to portray romantic euphoria as an object to be broken down and studied. Her treatment is anti-philosophical: she gives young love the space to breathe its long, dramatic sighs. Each individual story is numbered with its own set of pages, raising its contents to the status of a novella. Obomsawin’s On Loving Women, in all of its empathy and vulnerability, is a solvent against sarcasm. To every reader who has been in love, if even for a moment, her work confirms this: if it meant the world at the time, it should mean the world in your memory.

horsesceneobomsawin


Amy-Victoria-BlakemoreAmy Victoria Blakemore is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, where she served for three years as a writing tutor. She earned honors for her senior thesis on contemporary iterations of Superman in comics and graphic literature, and she also was awarded an Academy of American Poetry Prize. Her work appears in the The Kenyon Review, [PANK], and The Susquehanna Review.

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Published on March 26, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARLY EARTH by Isabel Greenberg reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 3, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
Encyclopedia of Early Earth

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THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARLY EARTH
by Isabel Greenberg
Little, Brown and Company, 176 Pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

There is no sole way to tell the story of our planet. Whether one chooses to uphold a belief rooted in science, religion, or some amalgamation of the two, our interpretation of man’s early days will never be a precise match to that of our neighbor. Many origin stories regarding that ancient spark of life cross cultures that span the globe, each holding vaguely similar elements and lessons with the introduction of new heroes, heroines, beasts, and locations.

Isabel Greenberg has taken this philosophy into account in her graphic novel The Encyclopedia of Early Earth. Though not a non-fictional encyclopedia, Greenberg has reinterpreted familiar childhood stories of valiant journeys, jealous siblings, and—of course—the gravitational pull we call love. Her tales, which are framed as the life story of a nameless Nord man, are set in a much earlier and much colder time. Following the Nord man as he journeys beyond the horizon, we learn that a soul can indeed be split into three separate human bodies and returned again into one, that elderly women will go to murderous lengths just to ensure their right to an afternoon nap, and that our world may have once rested in the twisted tendrils of an avian demigod.

I Call Them Humans

Early Earth is divided into four segments, each based in a new land and progressively traveling from the Land of the Nord to the South Pole. The stories follow the epic transecting journey of the Nord man as he searches for the missing piece of his soul; traveling with the company of a canine companion, he paddles from his northern-lying home to the arboreal settings of Britanitarka and Migdal Bavel. The Nord man encounters a cast of characters that is both familiar and strange: lurching giants, fickle rulers, and a mischievous band of moneys (alas, sans wings) each impact the Nord man’s soul search and are woven into his story’s tapestry.

Overseeing the earthly actions are three gods: the Eagle god Birdman and his children, The Ravens Kidd and Kiddo. The home dwelling, the Cloud Castle, is described by Greenberg as lying “beyond the Aurora in the forth (or maybe fifth) dimension” and contains the littered debris of innumerable intricate bathtubs, toilets, and chamber pots. While Birdman is less than thrilled by the epic journey of our mortal protagonist, Kiddo harbors a somewhat maternal protection for him and ensures that her cynical father causes the Nord man no harm.

The text’s narration takes a formal tone, while the internal and external character dialogue is conversational and often satirical, with many tongue-in-cheek interactions.

I Like Your Mittens

Transcending the written text is language communicated through the presence of color; the majority of this text is completed in matte black and white, though each page features complementary colors based upon the setting of its events. The panels are colored as though the reader is looking at a photograph that appears to be monochromatic, though it   is actually pigmented: shady greys are heavily present in the zones where mercury hibernates well beneath the 32° F mark. As the tales accumulate, warmer shades of apricot, buttercup, and crimson are brushed throughout the scenery of more temperate climates.

Stylistically, human bodies are depicted as they exist in reality: flawed and slightly disproportionate, each holds small morsels of beauty and defies the highly feminized and masculinized characters within traditional fairy tales. The South Pole woman, for example, is adored by the Nord man immediately upon Early Earth’s opening panels not because of her overall beauty but because of one small feature: her ears. Other characters—with missing teeth, bald heads, and wrinkles as deep as mountain gorges—remind the reader of the frailty that lies within our own mortal existence.

You Will Like This Story

 

Greenberg pays respect to oral storytelling through Early Earth, which reads as though it were a verbalized collection of tales rather than one communicated through paper and ink. While each installment builds upon the last, individually they stand thoroughly sound and have morals presented upon their conclusion.

As with many folk stories and fairy tales, Early Earth faces an unfortunately quick ending with little wiggle room for questions from the reader. While somewhat abrupt, answers to any earlier questions realized by readers will most likely be found in the book’s Appendices. Here, Greenberg pays respect to the technical step of omniscient explanation in the dance of storytelling and takes care to explain more about the mystical lands we have traveled to, the people who inhabit them, and even additional stories.

Whether read in installments over the course of dark winter nights or in its entirety during a late winter snow squall, Greenberg’s The Encyclopedia of Early Earth contains a multitude of cultural references that will undoubtedly strike as familiar with any reader. This comedic and captivating collection offers a creative account of what life on our Blue Planet may have been like for the earliest of humans, introducing us to a bevy of original stories while respectfully reaffirming the well-worn tales of old.

Land of the Nord


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

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Published on February 3, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR by Ramsey Beyer reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 5, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
Little-Fish-Cover

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LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR
by Ramsey Beyer
Zest Books, 272 pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

It’s a familiar notion, the sense of being a little fish in a big pond. This awareness may arrive at an early age for some, while running inexplicably late for others. But for eighteen-year-old Ramsey Beyer, a lover of lists, lakes, and bonfires, this epiphany arrives with a traditional right-of-passage: the start of college.

Ramsey Beyer –  Photo by Michael Cantor

Beyer, now ten years beyond this awakening, chronicles her transition from Midwest high school senior to city-savvy first year art student in her debut memoir, Little Fish: A Memoir of a Different Kind of Year. Like many pre-undergrads, she precariously balances on the teeter-totter of change and consistency that comes with college acceptances, graduation, and the unstoppable arrival of the first autumn away from home. Beyer demonstrates maturity and insight when constructing a list of what her home environment lacks and what the prospect of life in a more populated setting might bring, highlighting both the positive and negative possibilities. After one final evening together with her “oldest and best friends,” the author even wonders while on the edge of slumber whether a part of her might actually like being Midwestern. But the thought is fleeting as she and her mother embark the next morning on a 600-mile journey from Paw Paw, Michigan to Baltimore, Maryland. The learning curve is steep, as any former collegiate will recall, and Beyer doesn’t shy away from noting even the smallest of challenges. 

Conquer-the-Bus

While the first few weeks present obstacles that range from completing two weekly six-hour classes to learning and debating the differences between direct and passive political action, Beyer successfully settles into the new pace of her life as “a little fish in a big pond for the first time ever.” We share in alternating monumental and miniscule moments, which she artistically weaves throughout her black and white narrative while painting a complete account of this yearlong rite of passage. Surrounded by a buffet of like-minded, artistic individuals, Beyer firmly grasps the identity of her twin golden braids, which she has worn daily since middle school, and flirts sporadically with the idea of loping them off in exchange for a shorter ’do. Her growth appears largely internal, as she celebrates small events like the challenge of peer critiques and the expansion of her new friend group. She is not immune to homesickness, however, and often ponders the wellness and whereabouts of her Michigan friends as she anticipates their correspondences.

Week1-Week-3

Beyer is quietly rebellious and leads an enviably creative life sprinkled with solitary wanderings around Baltimore’s inner harbor, a growing presence in the city’s punk scene, and her first relationship. She is ever optimistic but immensely grounded, remaining rooted in her identity while still receptive to change. 

Little Fish is sprinkled with lists, many of them copied from Beyer’s first zine—“a cut-and-paste independent magazine that is filled with whatever you want,” explains the author. Oftentimes Beyer’s lists are presented in tandem with graphics and highlight the contrasting norms of the past with changes occurring within the present. These creative catalogs read like poetry and cover a range of both serious and silly topics, from “recent best feelings ever” to a deeply honest look at personal downfalls.

List- 

Also included as textual components are Beyer’s journal entries, which detail her demanding schedule, desire to return to her friends back in Paw Paw, and humble appreciation for the luck that she has experienced in life thus far. It is clear that she appreciates her parents and brothers, whom we are introduced to at the commencement of her memoir through a pen-and-ink annotated photo album. “I’m so lucky to have such a good home life and such a good school life,” Beyer writes while flying back to school after a one-week autumnal recess. “I wish everyone did. It’s weird how the instant I step off the plane, I’ll be in a totally different universe/mind-set/routine.”

Perhaps one of the most poignant themes of Little Fish is the initial recognition of being a stranger in a once-familiar locale: for Beyer, this knowledge comes during the aforementioned trip home during a break from classes. During this time, Beyer checks off the majority of items from a to-do list and pens her thoughts on both the good and bizarre aspects of returning to Paw Paw.  Being that this is her first experience living away from her life-long home, she experiences epiphanies of magnetic proportion, such as recognizing the presence of sexist and racist language utilized by those in her hometown and the varying levels of freedom that come from living in a city versus a rural setting.

Beyer checks in with the reader and lets us into her psyche through the constant presence of thought bubbles, which appear in a variety of social situations. She thinks for the everyman, whether by recalling her desire to eat one of the donuts in a somewhat outlandishly peculiar student art project or by asking her solitary questions regarding changes in her friend group as the academic year concludes.

 Thought-Bubbles

We are left upon the conclusion of Little Fish with illustrations of the items left in Beyer’s shared apartment, an insightful list of what she hopes to learn in the next year, and well-placed anticipation for the next chapter. While the story closes with the completion of the young artist’s first year of college (and the potential modification of hair length), readers may continue devouring her present adventures online through comics, zines, and photographs at EverydayPants.com.

Jumping-Fish


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

 

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Published on December 5, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

MY DIRTY DUMB EYES by Lisa Hanawalt reviewed by Margaret Galvan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 2, 2013 by thwackMay 18, 2015
My Dirty Dumb Eyes

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MY DIRTY DUMB EYES
by Lisa Hanawalt
Drawn and Quarterly, 120 pages

Reviewed by Margaret Galvan

My Dirty Dumb Eyes, released last May, may be comic artist Lisa Hanawalt’s debut text with a major publisher, but it highlights her preexisting popularity. Indeed, Hanawalt’s text shows its chops through its diverse array of humorous comic vignettes often originally commissioned for well-known print and internet periodicals—from New York Magazine to The Hairpin. A few months prior to its release, one of these comics, “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” first printed in the pages of Lucky Peach—a magazine co-created by Momofuku-founder, David Chang—was nominated for a James Beard, the preeminent award in the culinary world.

In addition to “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” where Hanawalt creatively imagines bizarre skeletons in the closet out of the public personas of renown restauranteurs, she weighs in on the world of fashion and film in other comics. Her eyes certainly are not dumb—she can speak knowledgeably about a vast swath of culture in order to poke fun at it.  But, dirty is an apt descriptor for much of her work where genitalia and evocations of sex predominate.

Even in a multi-page comics review of the New York Toy Fair, she admits her libidinal impulses by the seventh page, making the “uncomfortable observation [that her] attraction to certain toys feels kind of… sexual?” Following this observation, she contends that one toy is dildo-like and another cries semen-like tears. After voicing these thoughts, she moves into a more serious discussion of the role of toys in childhood nostalgia, yet, at the comic’s end, she illustrates herself in a wedding dress smooching the dildo-like toy. She refuses to leave the sexual behind or silent on the page.

Hanawalt-Moosefingers1

Hanawalt-Moosefingers2

Across her oeuvre, Hanawalt often depicts her sentient beings as animals, but her embrace of the animalistic does not build on the visceral, sexual energy, but departs from it. These very-human animals, rendered in Technicolor, sometimes discuss more poignant topics, regularly reaching existential impasses and unearthly conclusions. Following from an unresolved argument about driving style, the cat in “Control” unrealistically and successfully propels the car into the air by driving over a car, leaving the horse passenger in tears over the multi-car heap of twisted metal behind them. In “Moosefingers,” a horse questions her artistic decision to make idiomatic finger sculptures, wondering at the worth of the “pile of weird fingers” and tossing and turning in bed without resolution.  On the next page following this conclusion, we see a photograph of some of these sculptures, suggesting that the horse’s artistic angst is Hanawalt’s own. In the comic as a whole, these tonally serious comics are interspersed among the lighter fare.

Hanawalt-Fashion-Week-Hat-Animals1

Hanawalt-Fashion-Week-Hat-Animals2

Hanawalt’s embrace of the vulgar alongside a more serious register aligns with the blithe irreverence that she calls upon for so much of her humor. Take an off-kilter observation and run with it for comedic effect, and that’s how you end up with the six pages of photorealistic animal faces donning surreal headgear that is “Fashion Week Animals in Hats” and “North American Wildlife and Hats.” These visual indices, which are so emblematic of her work, resonate with the feel of today’s Internet, where so many of these works first appeared. Her catalogues seem very reminiscent of our BuzzFeed culture of endless lists of humorous sound bytes. My Dirty Dumb Eyes may not be a cohesive narrative, but her comics are no less engrossing than an afternoon spent surfing through cat videos on YouTube.


Margaret-GalvanMargaret Galvan is a PhD candidate in English and a film studies certificate candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is writing a dissertation entitled “Archiving the ’80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture” that traces a genealogy of queer theory in 1980s feminism through representations of sexuality in visual culture. Her academic writings, which explore the intersection of critical theory and visual representation of female bodies, can be found in publications like the Graphic Novels (Salem Press, 2012) reference work and in the forthcoming book, The Ages of The X-Men (McFarland, 2013). She teaches in the Gallatin Writing Program at New York University and works as an Instructional Technology Fellow at Brooklyn College. See margaretgalvan.org for further information.

 

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Published on December 2, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

PACHYDERME by Frederik Peeters reviewed by Brazos Price

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 11, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

Pachyderme

 

 

PACHYDERME
by Frederik Peeters
translated from the French by Edward Gauvin
Harry N. Abrams Press
SelfMadeHero imprint, 88 pages

Reviewed by Brazos Price 

A cinematic opening: a woman’s heeled boot, a 1950’s traffic jam in bucolic Romandie, a downed elephant.  

Pachyderme-1

Carice Sorrel, a woman who “simply must get to the hospital,” to see her husband who has been in an accident, heads into the woods rather than wait for the elephant to be removed.  In Pachyderme, by Frederik Peeters, this transition from the road – through the woods – and into the hospital, quickly feels like a trip into the subconscious.  When Carice first sees the hospital, the reader sees her have something of an out of body experience.

Pachyderme-2

Ultimately, the image seems to suggest that she is replaying, reinterpreting, and reworking recent events while asleep or unconscious or insane or dead.

She wanders through the hospital and her memories. Moments of unreality are interspersed in the story and generally taken with aplomb by Carice, which further suggests that she is in a dreamlike state. This, coupled with frequent jump cuts in the narrative to places without context, adds to the overall unsteadiness of any direct interpretation of what is happening. The feel of the story is what seems to matter.

Take the decidedly Freudian stretch that finds Carice trailing her hands across a hospital wall , one that suddenly extrudes a nipple.  Carice is surprised to find her hand there, and yet once she does, she begins to caress and stimulate the nipple. Flowers come out of the wall in great numbers, and form a vagina-like opening.

 Pachyderme-3

Carice walks inside and finds herself in a verdant grove, fecund with infant-like creatures that have appeared periodically up to this point. It comes across like a waking dream:  unsettling, influenced from life, but lacking clear meaning or resolution.

Pachyderme-4

Carice cannot have children.  This fact is implied earlier when she first meets the infants in the woods, but it is revealed to the reader definitively while Carice is having a conversation with a corpse in the morgue.

Pachyderme-5

This corpse may or may not be her future-self post-mortem. She is discussing her life, and her marriage, with her corpse. That certainly lends credence to a reading that Carice is going through some internal processing of her life up to the present.

It would be a shame, though, to read Peeters work just through that specific lens.  There is much here that is ripe for exploration.  Take the lowercase i in the lettering. Peeters uses lowercase i exclusively, as compared to all caps for nearly everything else (except the letter t).  Does the lowercase i imply that the characters lack agency?  Real egos? It is heavily implied that Carice had, for years in her marriage, suppressed her own desires. She confides as much to one of her young piano students, the same one who gives her an elephant necklace and appears occasionally just out of reach in the hospital.

Other aspects of the story feel less true.  There is an ever-present feeling of Post WWII paranoia, primarily manifested and expressed by an ominous and strange stuttering secret policeman.  The policeman is wearing a trench coat and can appear from nearly anywhere.

Pachyderme-6He is after some documents, and enlists Carice’s help to retrieve them, or at a minimum to convince doctor Barrymore in the hospital to return them. This other character, the doctor, has his own depthand it almost rivals Carice’s, though he appears in fewer pages. He is an enigma, a dancing alcoholic seducer of women who seemingly likens his craft to performance.  His is another path with which to read and analyze the comic.

So, Pachyderme is clearly about one woman coming to grips with her life.  Or it is a Freudian look at the sublimation of desire. Or it is a treatise on post WWII paranoia. Or it is the exorcism of guilt. Really, though, what this comic is about is not important. Pachyderme is dense. It is cinematic. It sticks with you, it makes you think about it long after you’ve read/watched it. You may want to re-read it, to re-interpret it. Perhaps you will even dream on it.


Brazos-PriceBrazos Price is from Austin, Texas where he served as an inaugural member of the Texas Library Association’s Maverick Graphic Novel Reading List. He has also reviewed comics for the librarian focused website No Flying, No Tights. He now works as a Librarian in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Published on November 11, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ By Jérémie Dres reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 11, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
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WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ
by Jérémie Dres
SelfMadeHero, 199 pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Everyone has a story, a collection of historical inner workings and familial memories that makes us who we are. But not all desire or are able to physically retrace the steps of those who laid our ancestral foundation. In We Won’t See Auschwitz, author Jérémie Dres does precisely that: embarking on a pilgrimage to Poland in search of the “drop of cool water from a spring” that he likens to his Grandma Thérèse, Dres winds his way through the history of the country and retraces his grandmother’s steps while simultaneously forging his own.

IncredibleThing

The reader is dropped immediately into the action, rendezvousing with Dres in Warsaw’s historic Old Town as he searches for his grandmother’s original home on an unseasonably warm June afternoon. Together we search with him through the clouded eyes of the past for the buildings and neighborhoods his grandmother once recalled perfectly from memory, only to find that they either no longer exist or have been altered beyond recognition. Dres, eager to learn from those currently dwelling within the city walls, next meets two “young, Jewish, Polish, and hip” Varsovians who advise and answer his questions about the current sentiments of Poland toward Jews. He is amazed to find that there are still Jews in Poland, his own family having long since departed for France. Dres continues to meet both older and younger Polish residents, conducting a series of informational interviews and receiving in return detailed contemporary history lessons. The week becomes one where movement is somewhat determined by conversation, the destinations lingering on the horizon like doors begging to be opened. We tumble into this rabbit-hole expedition like Alice through the looking glass, as the present becomes a vehicle for gaining access to the past.

As is the case of any well-planned personal journey, though, Dres’s trip is full of both surprise and disappointment at the deviation of continuity between the past and present. Roadblocks are strewn throughout, ranging from unfamiliar Polish vernacular to the pestering presence of a dybbuk, a demon that “possesses people with any sort of tie to Yiddish culture,” that plagues Dres’s brother and travel companion Martin. We follow the brothers through Warsaw and into the country, silently peering over maps while invisibly crammed in the back of their compact European rental car on a journey to the decrepit Jewish cemetery in Żelechów. Dres is careful not to sugar-coat his fears, explaining in detail the plan he and his brother devise to tell people that they are “guys some Jewish billionaire’s hired to take pictures of his ancestral village” and chronicling his brother’s anxiety in the odd looks thrown to them from local citizens as they wander.

NotOurFamily

Lest the reader be weighed down underneath the somber conversations with government officials and trips through the crooked-toothed graves of deserted burial grounds, Dres is careful to include cultural highlights between the heaviest of chapters. We are with him on his first night at the Oki Doki Youth Hostel, where he opts for an early bedtime instead of chatting with others at the bar, and we share in his amused disappointment in a Polish meal. He is ever conscious of the reader, providing a perfect balance between solemnity, cheer, and historical background.

Dres chooses to illustrate his graphic memoir entirely in black and white drawings, complementing the collection of family photos found in the book’s appendix and allowing the reader to decipher the complete story in the barest possible way. In the absence of color, we are shown the texture and depth of scenery, specific facial details of those met by the brothers, and this allows us the opportunity to absorb the situation in a somber manner. From panel to panel, there are small differences to Dres’s drawings that illustrate well the true humanity he experiences—no two drawings are completely identical, just as no two moments perfectly mirror one another.

Dres looks at the scarred stories of his family as a guide, one that not only looks back into his unchangeable heritage but also pushes himself toward his own malleable future. “Perhaps this story will help put things back in order,” he writes upon the conclusion of his memoir. And while the “right order” of one’s life is indeterminable, Dres successfully reorganizes the abstract memories ingrained deep within himself while subconsciously weaving a tangible chapter into his own story.

InTheEnd


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

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Published on October 11, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

The Property by Rutu Modan reviewed by Amelia Moulis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 10, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018
PROPERTY

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THE PROPERTY
by Rutu Modan
Drawn and Quarterly, 222 pages

reviewed by Amelia Moulis

A family secret.  A tragic love affair.  This could well be any book of the last millennia, and yet in Rutu Modan’s latest graphic novel, The Property, fresh life is given to these age-old tropes.  After receiving the 2008 Eisner for her first foray into adult graphic novels with Exit Wounds, Modan’s second novel further cements her talent in exploiting the subtleties of the medium. Where Exit Wounds is a fast-paced and chaotic adventure, The Property follows similar themes in a calmer setting as a grandmother and granddaughter travel from Tel Aviv to Warsaw ostensibly to reclaim a property they lost in World War II.

From the outset, grandmother Regina is established as a quick-tempered, strong-minded and endlessly stubborn character in direct opposition to the temperament of her granddaughter, Mica, who is practical and level-headed.

p8-Regina-fighting-with-airport-security

As their personalities collide and the cracks of their relationship grow deeper, both characters find themselves steeped in a wealth of age-old grief.  Mica finds herself driven by emotion, calling her new yet ‘untrustworthy’ Polish lover (deemed untrustworthy primarily due to his heritage) when her grandmother is unwell, and Regina becomes weakened by memories she cannot silence or defend. It is only once Mica and Regina connect with the climate of grief, and the legacy it entails, that they are truly able to connect with one another and reconcile the past.

P221-Regina-and-Mica-examining-bread-rolls

Gracefully plotted and ripe with suspense, Modan’s gentle pace evokes the tragic eternal echoes of the Holocaust while exploring Warsaw as a real place where real people lived as opposed to the stale and dehumanized pitch presented to tourists: “Personally, I prefer Majdanek to Auschwitz” comments a schoolteacher taking his class to Poland.  Modan alleviates the solemnity of the atmosphere with a subplot of skulduggery and the workings of precise wit and satire, for instance in the change of attitude of a class of school children on a Yad Vashem trip from the flight over to the flight back.

p-10-plane-shots-with-the-children

p220-plane-shots-with-the-children

These moments of humour, and in fact the entire plot, unravel without the aid of a narrator. Modan relies on her ability to convey deep emotion through Tintin-esque linge claire in a matte color scheme, generating pain and suspense through the astute application of panelling and the most minute manipulation of a single line.

P47-Regina-putting-her-lipstick-on

It is difficult to find fault in The Property, yet possibly Modan’s weakest moments arise from statements or reactions that seem melodramatic or over-sensationalized. But the dynamics of these moments often reveal themselves later in the piece and thus in retrospect serve to further underline the author’s careful observation of the idiosyncrasies of everyday life: halting conversations, miscommunications, faltering pauses, awkward poses and bizarre actions.

P197-Regina-putting-the-doughnuts-over-her-eyes

Her strict adherence to a realistic portrayal of human interaction is further enhanced by the trilingual communications – different tongues lettered in different fonts for intelligibility between specific characters – and the precision of body language. This precision is heightened by Modan’s use of actors to play out each scene before she drew the book.

P38-Mica-hiding-behind-the-bush

In The Property, Rutu Modan examines memory and history: how actions reverberate through time and suffuse into later generations, how grief is assuaged or left to canker, and how peace can be sought in the manifold plexus of love.  The Property is rich with subtle satirical nuance in contrast to moments of clarity depicted in beautiful detail.  Rutu Modan’s latest work is a tribute to her breathtaking talent as a cartoonist.

P203-song

–October 10, 2013


Amelia Moulis

Amelia Moulis

Amelia Moulis is from Canberra, Australia, but was living in New York for the past year, fulfilling her Creative Writing major at Columbia University. She recently returned to Australia in order to graduate from Monash University in Melbourne, but spends her spare time planning her return to New York.

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Published on October 10, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

RELISH: MY LIFE IN THE KITCHEN By Lucy Knisley reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 21, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
relish

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RELISH: MY LIFE IN THE KITCHEN
by Lucy Knisley
First Second Books, 173 pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Never crowd the mushrooms.

It’s a mantra recited time and time again in cookbooks, culinary shows, and even some Hollywood films. But without understanding what this actually means, as one’s interpretation will invariably differ from another’s, the only result is a disappointingly inconsistent sauté. In the absence of visual representation, one may interpret crowding as tight as a tin of sardines or as light as a bag of fluffy marshmallows.

Mushrooms

Enter Lucy Knisley and her graphic memoir Relish: My Life In the Kitchen, a bright collection of stories and memories centered on food, her family, and her upbringing. Following Knisley from the countertops of her childhood apartment in downtown Manhattan to early mornings at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her homemade meals and grocery lists guide the reader through a childhood of bustling movement and taste exploration. Not one to shy away from the use of color, Knisley portrays hand-drawn interpretations of dishes long since consumed, as though they lay perfectly preserved in her mind.

A self-described puppeteer, ukulele player and food/travel writer, Knisley grew up in a world surrounded by a family of foodies: her mother, a former Dean & Deluca employee who formed her own farmer’s market stands in upstate New York, and her father, a refined eater who prefers to savor taste through dining out in search of the perfect meal. Her parents, who she likens to Zeus and Demeter, each independently accompany her on culinary journeys spanning the globe, plopping her everywhere from Japan to Canada —with every imaginable nourishment and delicacy waiting for us to optically feast. Like a time-traveling stowaway, we simultaneously indulge in Roman hot chocolate, roadside tamales with hot sauce and lime in San Miguel, and five apricot-jam croissants on the banks of a Venetian canal.

Croissant

Wafting among the paneled stories like the sweet smell of those hot croissants lies the notion of food as a signal of place, specifically that of home. After a long trip with her father, the two embark back to Knisley’s home to find stacked enchiladas made by the author’s mother. This notion of repast as a portal to the familiar resurfaces again at the conclusion of Knisley’s undergraduate years, when she is struck with a bout of homesickness. “I wanted to discover New York like I’d done with Chicago,” she writes. “A new and old place at once, different from the perspective of adulthood.”

MomsCooking

Perhaps in an attempt to jog the culinary childhood memory of the reader or just to share specific kitchen advice, Knisley has peppered recipes, tips, and guides at the end of each Relish chapter. She instructs in the voice of a master, one with humble expertise and patience that explains everything from how to make your own pickles and a cheese cheat sheet to the best way to roll your own sushi. Where words can only convey so much information, Knisley is there to provide the reader with an optical feast of color, texture, and just how a meal is supposed to look as it comes together. She allows her comedic voice to shine through, suggesting not to let butterflies anywhere near a butterflied leg of lamb and jovially recalling the juvenile misadventures she and a friend experienced in Mexico.

A regular renaissance woman, Knisley demonstrates with precision that she is an artist: both in the kitchen and on the page, her craft is polished, playful, and relatable to both young and seasoned readers. Whether read as a memoir about growing up, kitchen escapades, or tried and true recipes, Knisley’s Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is delicious.


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

 

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Published on September 21, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

CALLING DR LAURA By Nicole J Georges reviewed by Amelia Moulis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on August 20, 2013 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016
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CALLING DR LAURA
By Nicole J Georges
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 260 pages

reviewed by Amelia Moulis

Nicole J Georges’ Calling Dr Laura, is an acerbic and intelligent addition to the graphic memoirs of 2013. It catalogues Georges’ troubled upbringing and her subsequent quest for love and stability in her relationships, and indeed her life at large. Georges enters this story through her first girlfriend, who takes Georges to a psychic, inadvertently uncovering a deep family secret: the psychic insists that Georges’ father – whom she was told died of colon cancer when she was a baby – is in fact alive. Although this is the ‘hook’ of the story, it is important to emphasize that this is actually not the driving force behind the storyline. It takes many years for Georges to share this information with anyone, let alone confront her mom about it. In the meantime, Georges meanders between cross-sections of her mom’s abusive relationships, the string of ‘father figures’ shaping her upbringing, Georges’ own inability to process stress and emotion, her struggle to establish a family, and the faulty dynamics of her lesbian relationships. But underneath this is the constant tension of when, or if, Georges can confront her mother about her sexuality and the circumstances of her father’s absence from her life.

what-happened

It is both fascinating and frustrating that the book is only tangentially about Georges’ father and the fleeting Dr Laura – a radio talk show host who joins an orchestra of people unloading bad advice onto Georges. Partly due to these tangential undertones, the links between themes can often be vague. There remains the feeling that Georges’ tendency to ‘check out’ like a fainting goat in real life has translated onto the page, obscuring her capacity to connect herself more deeply to how she’s telling her story, and thus draw clearer connections for the reader. Another consideration here is that the episodes in this book began as shorter comic strips, possibly contributing to the undertone of disconnection. That said, themes of love and belonging are undeniably present. Each scene builds well upon the last to paint a landscape of Georges’ repressed character and warped notion of family, and the aforementioned vagueness can often become an intriguing coercion, driving the reader onto the next page. Certainly this makes Calling Dr Laura rewarding on subsequent reads.

goats

Regardless of any struggles to connect different storylines, when Georges delves into memories of her childhood, the pages come alive. Georges is able to pare down the genre’s susceptibility to stories of self-absorption as she gazes unflinchingly at episodes of intense trauma. Georges truly utilizes the form’s potential here, drawing scenes from her childhood in fairly simplistic, stark black and white lines as opposed to the grey wash of contemporary scenes.

childhood-v-adulthood

Georges’ lettering is also a visual spectacle whereby different techniques of writing provide aesthetic wonderment and further compliment the main ideas presented. She uses calligraphy on scrolls when introducing people or situations, childlike printing during flashbacks, aureate swirls for flowery speech, and textbook extracts to impart background information.