I wish I hadn’t waited so long to read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis because it is incredible. A feminist Maus, it takes a young girl’s story as its subject to examine the broad themes of identity, empowerment, and resilience. The drawings are simple, but the impact is powerful. A must-read for all, including young people.
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I picked up a copy of Peter Kuper’s graphic novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for a few reasons. I’m a fan of Kuper’s work, which I admire for its ability to express strong emotions in a terrifying way, which seemed fitting for this project. I’ve read Conrad’s novella and appreciate many things about it, including its unique framing structure. And Apocalypse Now, which was inspired by Conrad’s book, is one of my favorite movies. I found this retelling riveting, spooky, and considered. I guess that last word is sort of a strange thing to say, but Kuper’s version brought something new to the material for me. Perhaps it was the illustrated strife between natives and invaders, or the intensity of this Kurtz’s having “gone native,” or maybe it was the monstrous depiction of what happens to one when one travels far enough up the river. Either way, I loved it.
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I read Dave Cooper’s Mudbite some years ago, lost my copy, and so I was happy to find it again and reread it. I love Dave’s work! It’s so insane. Mudbite is especially fun because it contains two stories that you read by flipping the book back and around. It’s hard to pick a favorite between “Mud River” and “Bug Bite.” The former, starring Eddy Table, who I love so much I have a figurine of him on my desk, is probably my favorite; little Eddy’s bottom ride on the lady is just so hilarious! But the latter had me literally loling, too, with its crazy twists and turns and creepy critters. Anyway, this book is a two-for-one that will make a Cooper devotee out of anyone.
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Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! is perfect for those who want to remind themselves that a masterpiece starts as something less than that. A reprint, with an expansive new introduction, of work published early in his career, this collection contains the seeds of what will become the author’s greatest work: Maus. From a one-page strip version of Maus to the arresting “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” in which he grapples with his mother’s suicide, these are the experimental steps that were required for Spiegelman to create the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize. Oversized, colorful, dazzling.
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This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In April, I read six books. (You can find all my short book reviews here.) My favorite book was Chantal Montellier’s Social Fiction, “a feminist 1984, a dark vision of the search for love in the midst of a dystopia, a collection of comics in which being human is a crime and death lurks around every corner.” My least favorite book was Tina Horn’s SFSX (Safe Sex) Volume 1: “The story lacked a central character with depth and nuance with which I could connect.”
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I’ve read the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass many times. Every time, I marvel at its simplicity, its willingness to take the narrative in daring directions, the way it makes storytelling meta.
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I hoped I’d like SFSX (Safe Sex) Volume 1 by Tina Horn because there was a lot to like here: the San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up, an exploration of a futuristic world in which kink is pathologized, a peek at what’s behind the walls of Kink.com. But the enterprise fell flat. The story lacked a central character with depth and nuance with which I could connect. I also felt like the attempts to psychoanalyze the whys behind kink were underdeveloped, as if declaring oneself pro-kink was enough. A comic should be more than a political statement; it should be a narrative into which one can get swept up. So not a hit for me.
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I loved Chantal Montellier’s Social Fiction. It’s a feminist 1984, a dark vision of the search for love in the midst of a dystopia, a collection of comics in which being human is a crime and death lurks around every corner. Despite the bleak subject matter, Montellier’s dynamic art rockets through time and captures the beauty of what perseverance looks like when independent thought and freedom have been criminalized.
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It’s probably been 25 years since I first read Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. Having recently reread his Understanding Comics, I was curious to see how the sequel read all these years later. While some of the technical references are stuck in 2000, the fundamental ideas are as invigorating and stimulating as ever. What surprised me was how little comics have evolved in the way McCloud suggested they might—at least to this point. In fact, the opposite seems to have happened. Mostly, the dynamic picturescape McCloud foresaw has been the dominion of gaming. Meanwhile, comics have been born again in a new upcropping of brick-and-mortar stores that folks like me enjoy frequenting to buy printed comics over which we pore to be transported into interactive worlds that exist only in our own minds. A thought-provoking read!
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This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In March, I read three books. (You can find all my short book reviews here.) My favorite book was Fido Nesti’s graphic novel adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. I loved the arresting art, the faithfulness to the source material, and the moving exploration of the individual’s insistent quest for self-hood and self-actualization through love. My least favorite book was Kate Beaton’s Ducks, which I found to be flat, visually uninteresting, and underdeveloped in plot and interiority.
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Fido Nesti’s graphic novel adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 is an absolute dazzler. Having recently read Manu Larcenet’s very disappointing graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road that did a disservice to the source material, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But Nesti’s masterful rendering of Orwell’s chillingly accurate foretelling of the nothink era in which we live is a brilliant homage that highlights the important ideas against a backdrop of terror, beauty, and struggle. If you don’t like to think or if you support fascism, you won’t like this book. If you have a brain and want to face the truth of today’s 1984, read it.
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I’ve read Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! before, but I wanted to read it again because I find it so inspiring. My first encounters with Barry’s work were with Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and I’ve been a fan ever since. I love One! Hundred! Demons! for a variety of reasons: the work is beautiful, the stories are moving, the message is about persevering regardless of what anyone else’s thinks or what happens to you. My favorite strips in this series are the ones focusing on her childhood, how maligned she was yet kept insisting that she might one day have something to say. I read this slowly so I could savor how precious these artworks are.
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This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In February, I read seven books. (You can find those books and my short reviews here.) My favorite book was Mimi Pond’s Over Easy, a fascinating look at a San Francisco Bay Area diner scene of days past. My least favorite was Manu Larcenet’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was a disservice to the source material and narratively disjointed.
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Alan Moore foresees the future of mobile phone pornography in 1982’s The Saga of the Swamp Thing #1, in which a man “looks at his hand” where “something shimmers” and “a blue lady is dancing just for him.”
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I can’t remember the first time I read A Child’s Life and Other Stories, but it would have been over 20 years ago. The book seared itself into my brain. The art spellbound me, the stories were set in the Bay Area where I had grown up, and the rage and pain of a young person who was neglected at home and acting out sexually and through drugs and alcohol was deeply familiar to me. I could say this book changed my life, but that sounds overdramatic and like a cliche. I will say that when I sat down to reread the book, I wondered if it would have the same effect on me all these years later. And it did. It makes me want to be braver and more reckless and more honest in my own work. And that’s invaluable. Thank you, Phoebe Gloeckner.
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After Land is an extremely strange book by Chris Taylor. I loved it for the images. It’s haunting and weird and striking. The story is elusive and slippery. If you’re looking for something that’s different, this book is that.
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I was really looking forward to reading this graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road by Manu Larcenet, and I was equally disappointed. The book looks impressive: Hardback! Generously sized! Nicely printed! But the contents amount to a grim, underwhelming, forced march (ha!) through a hellscape that reduces McCarthy’s brilliant novel into snatches of dialogue that amount to nothing. Where is the literary-ness? Where is the lyricism? Where is the new thing ideally produced when a work is adapted into another form? Not here. I’m not fundamentally opposed to graphic adaptations of literary works—I loved Brad Ricca and Courtney Sieh’s artful adaptation of Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House—but this ain’t it.
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This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In January, I read eight books. (You can find them and my short reviews here.) My favorite was Pierre Le-Tan’s A Few Collectors, a lovely, sweet, unexpected collection of small essays and delicate drawings about curious people the author knew who collected things and what happened to those collections. My least favorite was Chester Brown’s Paying for It, a sleazy, callous tour through the sex industry told by a man who sees women as cum receptacles.
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Can of Worms by Catherine Doherty is a remarkable semi-autobiographical account of the author’s attempt to track down and reconnect with her birth mother. Unflinching and insistent, it peels back the layers on what happens when the mother-daughter bond goes wrong and the devastating effects on the truth-teller.
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The first time I read Chester Brown’s Paying for It was around the time it was originally published, I believe. I decided to buy a new copy and reread it when I heard that the woman who had been Brown’s “last girlfriend” before he started paying for it had directed a movie adaptation of the book. I seem to remember liking the book more the first time I read it. This time I found it kind of grim and sort of ick. I write about a fair amount of stuff related to this subject matter, and I even ran a website for a year where I posted anonymous emails men wrote to me about paying for it, but this comic is so dark and weirdly dissociated and lacking in any kind of empathy that I read it faster than usual just to get it over with. If you don’t know anything about paying for it or why guys pay for it or the politics of paying for it (particularly in Canada, Brown’s country of origin), this book may be of interest. Also, the drawings are cool. But to the Brown on these pages, sex workers are receptacles to be judged, used, and discarded. That take is retrograde, boring, and depressing.
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