About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Michael Deforge
Positive The New York Times Book Review A new release from Michael DeForge should be met with trumpet blasts across the length and breadth of the book world ... The first striking thing about “Birds of Maine” is DeForge’s trademark abstraction. It’s difficult to tell what any of his drawings represent without some squinting, at least until you get used to his unique style. Though his compositions nod to the work of great artists, it’s his sly, accessible sense of humor that paradoxically gives Birds of Maine its intellectual payload. Most episodes have the same rhythm as the Sunday funnies, with similarly corny punch lines. This doesn’t only prevent the reader from equating abstraction with the highbrow. It quietly compels her to ask what does, and doesn’t, count as \'serious\' art ... As DeForge’s larger story takes shape, the irony underlying his light humor becomes clear. For all its silliness, this is a tale of cataclysm and its aftermath ... DeForge doesn’t seem to have decided how he feels about conventional narrative. The astronaut plotline is one of several that he advances throughout the book, but he never weaves them together into an overarching tale. As a result, “Birds of Maine” meanders more and more in the last 100 pages or so. By the time the book reaches its close, on Page 459, it all seems frustratingly repetitive. For most of its length, though, Birds of Maine is a nicely calibrated blend of the enigmatic and the ridiculous — a blend that DeForge should, by now, be well known for.
Kate Beaton
Positive NPR It may come as a shock to find that there\'s so much darkness lurking within the mind that gave us those perky revolutionaries, feisty peasants and a roly-poly Napoleon. It\'s only now that Beaton has seen fit to tell the other side of her life story: how terribly she suffered during the two years she worked in Alberta\'s oil fields ... isn\'t drawn as engagingly as Hark! A Vagrant. That\'s understandable considering it\'s a journalistic undertaking, not a high-spirited, episodic strip. It\'s surprising to learn that it was during this period that Beaton began drawing and publishing Hark! It may be time to revisit the strip — is there a dark underbelly there? One thing\'s for sure, we can\'t take Beaton\'s unique humor for granted anymore.
Héctor Germán Oesterheld, tr. Erica Mena
Positive The New York Times Book Review Ernesto \'Che\' Guevara may be a timeless revolutionary icon, but that doesn’t mean his biography is necessarily a story for our time. If Héctor Germán Oesterheld weren’t a remarkable writer, it probably wouldn’t be ... Other biographers have grappled with Guevara’s brutality and ruthlessness, condemning or excusing him according to their own ideological predispositions. Oesterheld crafts an ode to a larger-than-life figure and the principles he believed in — even if Guevara didn’t always embody them ... This approach might seem jejune, even inhumane, were it not for Oesterheld’s own life story and the story of this book ... Alberto’s panels don’t have the propulsive \'bam, pow!\' commonly associated with comics. They’re a sequence of separate artworks, each vibrating on its own frequency ... The ferocity of the Breccias’ art serves as an ironical counterweight to Oesterheld’s and Guevara’s idealism ... Oesterheld’s depiction of Guevara is too forgiving, a hagiography rather than a proper work of history. Still, at a moment that eludes any ideology Guevara would recognize, the ideals underlying this 50-year-old book are stubbornly affecting.
Eric Orner
Rave NPR There\'s one thing that\'s unfortunate about Smahtguy, Eric Orner\'s sweeping new graphic novel about the life of former Mass. Rep. Barney Frank...It\'s this: Smahtguy\'s subject is so powerful, its story so engagingly told, that reviewers will probably concentrate on its success as a narrative...They\'ll talk about things like pacing, characterization and historical significance rather than about art...And that will be a shame..Smahtguy isn\'t just a great story, it\'s an enveloping visual experience crafted by a terrific artist with an amazing line... If Orner\'s attention to irony is among the most striking aspects of his story, his use of color is among the most striking aspects of his art. Fearlessly, he fills his panels with intense, dramatic colors without fear that they\'ll overshadow his linework...His glowing yellows, salmon pinks and electric blues blaze off the page, setting his book apart (and hopefully setting a new standard for) today\'s graphic novels...Orner may have chosen his colors to illustrate what Frank means to him, and to the world...They announce that this is a big book, an important document of an important life...But those bold colors also proclaim a confident, even cocky sense of debut...This author isn\'t going to be dwelling in the margins anymore.
Manuele Fior, trans. by Jamie Richards
Mixed NPR Just like everyone else in cli-fi\'s intended audience, I am acutely aware of the problem of climate change. But that means that I\'m also terrified down to my core ... One of the many delights of Celestiais that Fior knows how I feel—because he feels exactly the same way ... Fior even seems to have planned both books\' artistic schemas to go easy on stressed-out sensibilities. Celestia—translated into English by Jamie Richards—is remarkably beautiful considering its post-apocalyptic setting ... Fior embraces and balances all sorts of oppositions in this book ... All this thematizing bogs down the narrative, unfortunately—or maybe it would be more accurate to say it fogs it. Pierrot and Dora often seem to be traveling through the hazy realms of dream rather than the real world, an effect that\'s heightened by Dora\'s psychic visions and Pierrot\'s penchant for speaking in rhyme. As a result, even their life-and-death scrapes lack urgency. The other characters, meanwhile, are all the kind of representative \'types\' that generally figure in quest stories, and they often speak in riddles, too. It\'s hard to care about any of them. But maybe Fior means for his reader to feel this unwilling, perplexing emotional detachment.
Rebecca Hall, illus. by Hugo Martínez
Rave NPR Sprawling yet perfectly balanced, his two-page compositions wrap the reader up in Hall\'s thoughts ... Martínez\' pages can be a bit overcrowded at times, with snarls of hectic lines obscuring his clever effects. But his versatility is amazing. He draws all sorts of complex scenes—from the interior of a log cabin in Nebraska to an Ahogi cavalry charge (a frontal view, no less!)—seemingly effortlessly ... Martínez\' innovative techniques are crucial to Wake\'s success ... Hall\'s eloquence and frank emotionalism are transcendently realized in Martínez art, beckoning the reader inexorably into this story—even the parts that only take place inside Hall\'s mind. With its remarkable blend of passion and fact, action and reflection, Wake sets a new standard for illustrating history.
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams
Rave NPR With Elegy for Mary Turner, Williams joins a century-long movement of artists responding to the kind of racist violence that\'s louder than words. Elegy is a bit of a hybrid of a graphic novel and an art book. Using a mix of original illustrations, archival documents and handwritten text, Williams memorializes 10 black men and one woman, Mary Turner, who were lynched by white residents in Brooks County, Ga., in 1918 ... So how do you challenge an evil that transcends language? Williams starts by slowing down ... Mary Turner\'s killers chose a supremely ironic day for an act that was meant to foreclose the possibility of speech. Williams\' Elegy is a reminder that lynching ultimately failed to do that, and will continue to fail as long as people honor and grieve its victims. Just as importantly, though, Williams demonstrates how to fight the kind of evil that stuns you into silence. If you can\'t do it with words, go beyond them.
Sophie Yanow
Rave NPR Sophie Yanow...is humbly conscious of the limits of her experience, [and] she makes you smile and cringe and sympathize anyway. Yanow perfectly captures that early-20s state of mind where you want to have principles but don\'t know exactly what yours are, so you\'re all too inclined to embrace those of anyone who seems intriguing (or just cute) ... The journey that follows isn\'t suspenseful or surprising—it\'s not even particularly angsty as college stories go. And yet, Yanow\'s got this particular combination of astuteness and humility that makes the very lack of drama engaging. It feels nice to sit with someone who looks at the world the way she does. After a while, you start noticing all sorts of nuances within each low-key anecdote, and you\'ll wonder how much you\'re overlooking as you charge through life at your usual pace ... Her ligne claire (\'clear line\') drawings are so geometrical and spare, they could almost be ideograms ... This combination of economy and universality is at once unassuming, wry and subversive ... The apparent simplicity of her compositions is deceptive, and her message is paradoxical. Even as she strips away extraneous detail, she\'s teasing you about your own tendency to oversimplify everything. The Contradictions isn\'t just an engaging read, it\'s a warming and affirming one.
Bishakh Som
Rave NPR You might classify these comics as \'literary,\' but Som\'s approach to storytelling is as uncanny as her style and themes. Even the book\'s structure keeps the reader off-balance. Som intersperses tales of future civilizations and half-human hybrid beasts with vignettes of run-of-the-mill contemporary life, so the reader never knows if something odd is about to happen ... The cryptic, virtuosic \'Swandive\' explores trans identity, a theme Som — who is trans herself — has addressed before. But even when Som\'s not talking specifically about trans issues, Apsara Engine reflects what could be called a trans aesthetic. Evading standard categories and unsettling familiar narrative patterns, the book is a testament to how trans experiences can teach us entirely new ways of imagining our humanity ... Som\'s artistic style breaks boundaries, too. She\'ll employ traditional comic-book techniques for page layouts and character designs, then toss them aside with the turn of a page. A character who\'s drawn iconically, with just a few efficient lines defining her features, will become lushly realistic at a pivotal moment. A story drawn in the usual square panels will suddenly burst forth into a series of flowing, uncontained two-page spreads ... Such moments of explosive transition provide the book\'s heartbeat. It\'s a mesmerizing arrythmia ... But while Apsara Engine is marked by such dualities — fluidity vs. geometry, India vs. the West, nymph vs. engine — it\'s most remarkable when it leaves duality, and other well-worn literary tropes, behind. Som isn\'t always successful in her attempts to find new ways to tell stories, but she\'s always intriguing. Best of all, she\'s uncanny.
Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram
Positive NPR Poelgeest\'s experience in film has given him a strong feel for the way images can carry a story. Strangely enough, though, he actually relies too much on visuals, falling short in the same ways artists sometimes do when it comes to characterization, dialogue and plot. Fortunately, he\'s got fantastic artwork to pull him through. The virtuosic Ian Bertram, who draws like a reincarnated Moebius, crafts a stunning array of mythically evocative characters, way-out gizmos, visceral action sequences and intricate, arty compositions for this book. Little Bird winds up being a fantastic example of the artist\'s role in a comic\'s success ... That\'s kind of a shame, because Van Poelgeest\'s ideas are striking and beg to be developed in more detail ... There are a lot of intriguing ideas here...But Poelgeest writes characters as types, not as people, and invokes the idea of evil without probing its motivations. It\'s Bertram whose complex and challenging images demand that the reader contemplate the book\'s themes ... Bertram\'s work is remarkable, but it\'s only fully realized thanks to the exceptional artistic team of colorist Matt Hollingsworth, letterer Aditya Bidikar and designer Ben Didier. Hollingsworth creates color associations to underscore the book\'s nature/technology split, using deep grays and reds in woodsy scenes and sugary, acidic pastels and neons in tech-riddled environments. This implants the book\'s key theme at a reflexive, visual level: As you turn the page from a prison sequence to one set in the wilderness, your eyeballs relax ... a feat of teamwork, just like a lot of comics are.
Connor Willumsen
Positive NPR So there\'s this pale, gawky, bald guy in mirror shades running through the desert. That\'s the central image of Connor Willumsen\'s graphic novel Bradley of Him, and it\'s also a kind of seed. From the image of a stubborn runner in an inhospitable landscape, Willumsen has built upa hilarious and philosophically challenging meditation on individuality, capitalism, celebrity, connection — and, under it all, absurdity. Willumsen seems to have shaped his story the way only an artist would, letting the visual lead the verbal. Lots of artists are skilled enough at thinking visually to let themes emerge this way, but it helps immeasurably that Willumsen happens to have such an elegant line and painstaking technique. The former is precise and soft at once, making the runner and his surroundings a consistent pleasure to dwell with. Willumsen delicately balances shades of gray and deploys dark and light space with perfect finesse ... Bradley of Him is a fun run.
Kim Deitch
Rave NPR These pages overflow. Even the cover pushes at boundaries, with the iconic Waldo the cat zooming out at the reader in a fiery flying car. All this might make Reincarnation Stories seem like a release, a purging, a great unmediated yowl or yawp from the depths of the artistic soul. But that\'s far from the whole story — both when it comes to this book, and when it comes to the great Deitch himself ... The different stories seem even less connected than in Deitch\'s other books. Chaos reigns. And yet there\'s a pervasive theme here that, while hard to see, is arguably just as Deitchean as all the clamoring misrule. That theme is order, control, even inevitability. Reincarnation, after all, is fundamentally the idea that you\'re living out a destiny established long before you were born ... Arguably, a powerful strain of orderliness, even monasticism, runs through all his work. He may use broad imagery, but his lines are measured and deliberate. He draws multiple versions of every page, and it\'s evident in the cleanliness of the final lines ... Underneath the appearance of lawlessness, there\'s a huge amount of craft and care. Deitch\'s subversion is itself a cover story. It distracts attention from his preoccupation with such austere, alienating priorities as balance, precision and harmony ... Here as in other books, Deitch manipulates and confounds the reader.
Tillie Walden
Rave NPR Magical realism is a tricky genre: tricky to describe and tricky to get right. When an author does get it right, as Tillie Walden does with Are You Listening?, pinpointing exactly how they did it can be tricky as well. A whole host of intangibles supports the fragile balance between truth and wonderment in a book like this, and trying to nail them down feels a bit like shouting out the secret at a magic act. Exposing the hidden wires wrecks the trick, and knowledge is no substitute for the joy a well-spun illusion gives ... One thing that\'s no mystery is the powerful role Walden\'s art plays in suspending the reader\'s disbelief ... Walden doesn\'t build up a thick, realistic magical world, but strips detail away instead. The story has the feel of a dream where everything is both larger-than-life and strangely featureless ... Still, the specialness of these two women and their journey suffuses every page thanks to Walden\'s busy, nervous, versatile pen ... every element is potent. Once in a while she takes time to pay homage to the beauty of the natural world; these pages have a huge impact.
Hazel Newlevant
Rave NPR Newlevant\'s tale does have some newsy import. It addresses race, class and gender while trying (and mostly succeeding) to avoid hashtaggable truisms ... Newlevant, who\'s won two Ignatz Awards, combines sheer talent with the supple versatility of an adroit graphical storyteller. The former quality is clear in their skillful use of monochrome watercolor, a medium whose difficulty is often underestimated. No Ivy League\'s pages are delicately shaded, with judicious pops of detail. Beyond that, Newlevant makes countless acute choices regarding scale, composition and pacing. Even when a single incident seems trivial, there\'s a complex structure operating around it ... In a world dominated by screaming headlines of global importance, it\'s hard to pull up short and devote your attention to anything as fragile and transitory as a feeling. No Ivy League may seem like a modest achievement at first glance, but it\'s got the audacity to direct you (ever so politely) to change your whole habit of thought. That\'s colossal.
Walter A. Brown
Positive NPR Like any good story about a scientific discovery, Walter A. Brown\'s account of the history of lithium features plenty of improvisation, conjecture and straight-up kismet. Unlike many such stories, though, it also features a fair share of personal bias, senseless puttering and random speculation—on part of these scientific researchers ... Lithium is a homage, not just to a drug, but to the renegade side of science ... Danish researcher Mogens Schou...endured much criticism because he had a personal interest in his investigations: He used lithium to help his younger brother...[and] \'was accused by some of being biased\' ... Brown is as determined to puncture such attitudes as he is intrigued by lithium itself. It\'s this emphasis, itself rather quixotic, that makes Lithium memorable.
Jim Ottaviani, Illus. by Leland Myrick
Mixed NPR There\'s little to surprise in Hawking, especially if you know a bit about the subject\'s life and have a spitting acquaintance with his ideas. But Ottaviani finds a nice balance between the personal and the theoretical, making this a diverting account despite the familiarity of Hawking\'s biography ... Along with managing to explain—sans equations—why we should care about black holes and pocket universes, he relates Hawking\'s life without becoming either sensationalistic or mawkish ... Ottaviani doesn\'t omit the unlovely aspects of Hawking\'s personality and private life. While he skates over the details of Hawking\'s marital troubles, only indirectly alluding to the \'90s rumors that his second wife abused him, this restraint feels appropriate. It\'s offset by a frank, nuanced treatment of his first wife\'s experiences ... Ottaviani conveys all these layers with delicacy. The same can\'t be said of Myrick\'s art, though. Although he does a lovely job illustrating Hawking\'s theories, his drawings are workmanlike otherwise. It\'s a real letdown for a narrative that manages to interweave emotional moments with speculations about imploding stars—while omitting all those nefarious equations ... Aside from a lot of physics, Ottaviani doesn\'t really tell us what was going on inside Hawking\'s head. But he does prompt us to reflect on what we\'ve got going on in our own.
George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, Illus. by Harmony Becker
Positive NPR It\'s young George\'s point of view that shapes the story, imbuing it with childlike energy. Even as the Takeis are wrenched from their home, transported hundreds of miles and forced to live in camps, young George\'s openness and curiosity are unflagging. His outlook provides a striking contrast to government officials\' stale attempts to explain, excuse and ultimately seek forgiveness for the evil they\'ve done ... despite the grimness of its subject matter, They Called Us Enemy is a lively, vibrant book ... It\'s a shame Becker\'s artwork isn\'t in color, but she provides a master class on what one can do in a black-and-white format. By incorporating textures ranging from fine hatching to Ben Day dots, she demonstrates how digitally created drawings can have all the dimensionality of work drafted on paper.
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Illus. by Zosia Dzierzawska
Mixed NPR Many of Dzierzawska\'s clever layouts echo architectural forms, and the book as a whole expresses a tension between hardness—exemplified by square comic panels and white space—and the softness of her characteristic line. That sense of softness is perfect for evoking Gray\'s creative imagination ... For some reason Dzierzawska tends to make Gray look winsome and unassuming rather than sophisticated. But though this feels like a liberty, the book\'s bigger problem is its overall scantiness. While emphasizing how unappreciated Gray once was, Malterre-Barthes gives us far too little to appreciate. Gray\'s most memorable objects are only depicted on the book\'s endpapers; Malterre-Barthes focuses almost exclusively on the creation (and Le Corbusier\'s desecration) of the E-1027 house. Lacking detailed examinations of works like the iconic E-1027 Table (a particularly perplexing omission, considering that Gray designed it specifically for the house) or the \'Dragons\' chair...the book feels impoverished. Eileen Gray also concludes too abruptly ... Eileen Gray: A House Under The Sun is an ambiguous tribute ... it\'s a thought-provoking, if incomplete, reflection on the relationship between genius and gender.
Marcelo D'Salete
Positive NPR ... impressively comprehensive ... builds seamlessly on the earlier book, further exploring how a yearning for freedom combined with inhospitable local terrain encouraged countless slaves to head for the hills — and allowed some to evade recapture there ... only partially satisfying... though he establishes these characters fairly well, D\'Salete relates their adventures in an impressionistic style that can be tough to decode. Often, he\'ll depict important incidents as choppy closeups split between several panels. It can be hard to tell what\'s going on and, since he follows some characters from childhood through adulthood, just who is whom. He certainly captures the terror and torment of the ex-slaves\' continual battles for freedom, but his people and their stories feel scanty ... And yet, while it leaves the reader wanting, this weakness also serves to dramatize just how tragically fragmentary our information about the mocambos is. It may be that a graphic novel like this one is uniquely able to evoke history\'s gaping lack. D\'Salete\'s approach emphasizes that although the historical record has plenty to say about the Portuguese colonists\' campaign against Palmares, it tells little about what life was like there.
Malaka Gharib
Positive NPR Even for the most well-meaning cartoonists, it\'s supremely difficult to make race visible without reinscribing such stereotypes ... NPR editor Malaka Gharib\'s answer to the problem neatly encapsulates her whole approach to life in her high-spirited graphical memoir ... even as she makes light of herself, Gharib\'s wisdom about the power and limits of racial identity is evident in the way she draws. Most of the time, Gharib just doesn\'t bother to draw race at all ... Gharib fills her book with the things that do matter: the beliefs, values, food, music and experiences that make an Egyptian Filipino American who she is ... anger, expressed through numerous reminiscences, doesn\'t come out in her art. She draws white people to look more or less like everybody else — which is to say, like people.
Paul Buhle, Steve Max, Noah Van Sciver, and Dave Nance
Pan NPR \"No one reading Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography could doubt that authors Paul Buhle and Steve Max have accessibility in mind ... Unfortunately, in this case the authors\' decision to illustrate Debs\' life seems driven less by an appreciation of the artistic possibilities as by a hope of attracting a spectrum of readers ... It\'s hard to know how much artist Noah Van Sciver had to do with this book\'s shortcomings ... Buhle and Max seem to think you make someone heroic by scrubbing them clean of flaws and having them deliver stirring oratory, so poor Sciver had to copy out line upon line of speeches. There\'s even a hand-drawn chart comparing the 1932 Socialist platform with programs adopted by the Roosevelt administration ... 35 years after [Irving] Howe pondered [why labor history is boring], it remains as formidable as ever.\
Janet Malcolm
Positive NPR \"At a certain point in her new collection Nobody\'s Looking at You, pulling together previously uncompiled essays, Janet Malcolm fails — and it\'s fascinating ... Nobody\'s Looking At You is brimful of all the eloquence, erudition and insight a thoughtful reader could want. Now, if it had just a touch more steel...\
Ted Fox and James Otis Smith
Mixed NPR The voices in this book are almost uniformly boosterish about their theater because it truly feels like their theater, even if it was owned by white guys for much of its history. Fox echoes their enthusiasm, skimming briskly past the bleak parts—from cockroaches in the dressing rooms to riots out in the streets. Smith\'s art has a similar mythmaking quality—all his depictions of the Apollo\'s performers are iconic. He draws these entertainers at their best possible moments, just as they\'d like to see themselves. Though he captures numerous electrifying onstage scenes, he softens the showbiz lifestyle\'s gritty side. These are understandable choices, but they result in a book that\'s too invested in its own myths to be a great read. That may be the only way to write about the Apollo, though ... It\'s shame Fox and Smith couldn\'t explore this potent mix [of \'shame and desperation\'] more thoroughly ... But at the Apollo, hope is always the heart of the dish.
Jessica Abel
Positive NPR Jessica Abel treads assuredly in Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars. Her years of experience as a visual storyteller serve her well in this young-adult saga ... What\'s really amazing about Abel\'s performance, though, is that she pulls it off while juggling a few different agendas. Trish Trash isn\'t just a sports story and a coming-of-age tale; it\'s also a masterful critique of capitalism. Abel manages to make this economic parable consistently engaging, even if its basic elements are familiar. If she bobbles a ball occasionally, at least she doesn\'t slip off the tightrope ... Meanwhile, though, Abel keeps Trish\'s own struggles...energized and absorbing ... Thanks to a thorough grasp of the economics behind Trish\'s story, Abel illuminates that system without becoming dogmatic or dull. The world of Mars is almost seamless, too. If Trish Trash could have used more juice in the hover rink, at least Abel keeps her balance on the believability tightrope. That\'s no small feat.
Olivier Schrauwen
Positive NPR It\'s cold and rejecting, with rigid compositions like some sort of third-world safety manual. It\'s giddy and uncontrolled, with blobby figures engaging wantonly in random acts of pleasure. It\'s schematic, with a mass-produced feel. It bubbles with images of sexuality, procreation and growth. You could say all these things about Parallel Lives, Olivier Schrauwen\'s mischievous and mystifying new graphic novel, and you\'d still only be telling part of the story ... These stories toy unsettlingly with a lot of things...particularly sex ... they have a lot of sex, and it\'s depicted explicitly. These encounters are rather shocking amid Schrauwen\'s minimalist geometries ... Schrauwen\'s vision isn\'t of a bleak future, but of a bland one—which turns out to be much creepier. The smooth, touchless quality of Schrauwen\'s drawings is disquieting, too ... His wit is particularly apparent in the different ways he draws people. Most of the time, his figures aren\'t exactly cartoony and aren\'t exactly realistic, either. Their sketchy lines give them a pathetic quality even when they\'re happily \'leisuring.\' It\'s amazing how anxiety-producing it is to be confronted, page after page, with unrelatable people ... Schrauwen encapsulates oppositions, experiments with new ways of seeing and confounds as much as he intrigues. As he plays with ideas about the future, it\'s the reader who\'s his real toy.
Tommi Parrish
Rave NPR \"Like Eleanor Davis in a sober mood or Nick Drnaso with the brakes on, Parrish spotlights brief moments, ignorable and usually ignored, in which humans lacerate each other invisibly ... Parrish handles the characters\' voices deftly, but The Lie might have felt slight if not for a weighty slap of capital-S Style. The book is a big hardcover with the front cover and endpapers bedecked with kaleidoscopic crowd scenes in full color, which continues throughout much of the interior ... Once she\'s read \'One Step Inside,\' Cleary leaves the book behind on the train. It\'s clear that she\'s not discarding it, but allowing it to be discovered by some new stranger. The Lie as a whole begs to be passed on in the same way. Its themes may appear simple, but its emotions linger — even if we\'ve felt them before.\
M. Dean
Positive NPR M. Dean embraces and explores nostalgia with rare fervency in her debut graphic novel. Actually a series of short stories, I Am Young shows how certain classic albums inflect the lives of an assortment of teens and twentysomethings living (mostly) in the \'60s and \'70s ... People talk about nostalgia being bittersweet, but in Dean\'s case it\'s mostly just sweet. It\'s ironic that the best parts of her book are the ones that run counter to her rather cloying themes. While her characters sigh over their angsts, Dean\'s pen riots all around them. The effect is unintentionally jarring, but intriguing. This book about the past makes you wonder what its author will do next.
John Lee Anderson and José Hernández
Positive NPR More than 20 years ago, Jon Lee Anderson set out to disentangle the revolutionary\'s real history from his legend. The result was the critically acclaimed biography Che: A Revolutionary Life. Now, in partnership with award-winning political cartoonist José Hernández, Anderson has adapted Che into a 421-page illustrated biography ... The sheer amount of artistic labor that\'s on view in these 421 pages is awe-inspiring. Still, the creators falter when they try to condense complex ideological questions into too few panels ... Even with its problems, though, Che remains a remarkable accomplishment, one that belongs next to such works of graphical history as the March series and Shigeru Mizuki\'s Showa books. By foregrounding the tension between myth and truth, Che illuminates the present state of our politics as well as the past.
Annie Goetzinger, Trans. by Montana Kane
Mixed NPR Throughout it all, Goetzinger elides emotional storms, portraying Colette and her loves as improbably, unsinkably resilient. The only real exception is when husband No. 2 objects to her affair with his son ... Goetzinger gives similarly short shrift to Colette the writer, offering little insight into a mind as fecund as it was unfettered. We seldom see her at work and learn little about what made her want to write—though we do witness her insecurity ... And yet, Colette being who she was, Goetzinger\'s approach makes a certain sense. Much of what Colette wrote was autobiographical, after all, and her horizons were bounded by love ... More importantly, Goetzinger\'s art is beguiling enough to excuse her narrative slip-ups ... Her style is deceptively transparent: She seems to be relaying beautiful visions, not crafting them. But her hand is tyrannical nonetheless. Just as she skips over the torturous parts of Colette\'s romantic progress, she banishes all grit and grot from turn-of-the-century Paris ... For anyone who likes to believe that beauty is a prime driving force in life—and that it excuses many failings—Goetzinger offers eloquent support.
Aminder Dhaliwal
Positive WBUR Dhaliwal hasn\'t just imagined a world without men; she\'s imagined a world where everyone is Aminder Dhaliwal ... a remarkably sly and devastating critique of patriarchy. Dhaliwal takes the occasional direct jab at our male-dominated world (she ridicules high heels and envisions positive approaches to menstrual cramps), but is content, mostly, to let her characters\' gentle, comfortable lives speak for themselves.
Lisa Hanawalt
Positive NPR Hanawalt turns the Western genre into a shared joke, giving its too-serious elements an absurdist spin. Instead of being a bitter, stoical figure, the heroine—a pink-skinned, canine-headed person—is mostly just goofy. It\'s all ridiculous and delightful until the truth of Doggirl\'s circumstances intrudes: She\'s fleeing a murderous posse in the wake of a terrible violation. At the moment of this revelation, and again when Doggirl must kill a horse with a broken leg, Hanawalt changes gears brusquely. The evil realities of adult life, kept offscreen until now, suddenly force their way in. It\'s a necessary shift in tone, one that makes Coyote Doggirl a book for grownups with a grownup message. For all her whimsy, Hanawalt knows being an adult is more than a matter of dressing up in a long coat, Adultman-style. We may sometimes feel as childish as Doggirl does, but our grownup problems will follow us across any desert.
Nate Powell
Positive NPR Come Again fits no particular genre, though much of its style and tone resemble the slow-building, true-to-life narratives of Craig Thompson, Lucy Knisley and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. But a touch of the mystical keeps this book off-kilter, raising the stakes on a story that might otherwise have seemed thin ... Set in the 1970s, the story revolves around an \'intentional community\' in the Ozarks called Haven Station. The residents are committed to the values of communal, off-the-grid living ... The community grows its own food, of course, as well as harvesting marijuana and Luna moth caterpillars to sell in the nearest outpost of civilization ... But all is not as idyllic as it seems in Haven Station — at least, not from Hal\'s perspective...Without spoiling the story, let\'s just say Hal\'s actions stir up a mysterious force that impacts everyone profoundly. Powell has come up with a strange and unexpected series of events that are both diverting and symbolically relevant. It\'s a delight to accompany such a fertile imagination to the end of the narrative.
Prentis Rollins
Mixed NPR \"The GARD idea is weird enough, and Rollins is a good enough storyteller, that the narrative remains unpredictable. That keeps things interesting when Walton\'s endless self-recriminations get to be too soggy. In truth, this book\'s greatest weakness is its protagonist. Walton was once a brilliant young scientist, but he\'s never stopped regretting his involvement in the GARD program — and although Rollins suggests this regret is what\'s turned Walton into a washed-up alcoholic, it\'s hard to imagine any better fate for such a sad sack. His fellow scientist Marc may be more evil, but at least he\'s not a sap ... Whoever it was at Tor, Rollins\' publisher, who decided to print The Furnace on uncoated stock was really onto something. The butter-colored, textured paper immediately imbues the book with a sense of artistic portent and indie idiosyncrasy. A slick surface would have accentuated the cleanness of Rollins\' style, making it seem sterile and mass-produced, but the slight roughness offsets his sharp lines nicely. Even if you\'re not inclined to meditate on punishment and human nature, The Furnace\'s visuals make it a page-turner.
Ellen Forney
Rave NPR \"Her writing is unpretentious, occasionally goofy and manifestly replete with love for her fellow humans. Her art is full of love, too; her rich, swooping line seems to cradle the reader\'s eye ... But what really distinguishes Rock Steady isn\'t its thoroughness, it\'s Forney\'s personality. Only she would think to design merit badges for all the different phases of treatment ... And, of course, only Forney would include such delicious cartoons. Her layouts deftly balance information and fun. Even her font exudes warmth. Forney makes her approach seem like the only way to write about depression — or about anything. Rock Steady isn\'t just a book about \'my bipolar life,\' as the subtitle says. It\'s a book about life.\
Vero Cazot and Julie Rocheleau
Rave NPR An artist\'s line can be aggressive, persnickety, mellow or ambivalent. In Betty, Canadian artist Julie Rocheleau\'s line is airy ... It twists and turns, swells and thins, and as it does it seems always to yearn upward, as if it would float right off the page. Rocheleau uses layers of pale color to impart even more gauzy ephemerality. Such buoyancy is crucial to this book\'s message about the heavy topic of breast cancer ... There\'s a lot of slapstick in this book, and not a lot of words. Writer Vero Cazot deliberately emulates a silent movie ... Like Rocheleau\'s airy art, Cazot\'s approach is effervescent. It\'s important to talk seriously and explicitly about breast cancer, of course, but by eliminating (most) words, Cazot shows how burdensome all that verbiage can be. Words can be as heavy as breasts (actually and metaphorically) are themselves. Cazot spins out her tale with a zany, what-the-hell eccentricity ... his frothy book isn\'t just an attempt to lighten up a serious topic. It\'s also a surprisingly subtle exploration of how we deal with the weight of both breasts and cancer.
Anthony Del Col & Geoff Moore, Illustrated by Jeff McComsey
Positive NPR \"Son of Hitler includes plenty of standard elements — hulking stormtroopers, beret-wearing Resistance fighters, car chases through the cobblestoned byways of Paris, a frosty female spy with a fabulous forties hairdo — but it also tweaks the usual formulas. If it\'s not quite as unruly as it could have been, its gung-ho spirit is consistently infectious ... The story rattles along at a vigorous pace, but it doesn\'t have as many twists and turns as it needs to sustain narrative urgency to the end. Fortunately, artist Jeff McComsey is on hand to bring action sequences to life and infuse some drama into the draggy parts ... McComsey\'s just not that interested in subtleties of expression. He models faces the same way he models a snarled bedsheet or a glass tumbler, playing up what\'s visually grabby. As with Del Col and Moore\'s story, there\'s a bit of a sense of opportunities lost. Even so, the opportunities the creators do take are plentiful, and they nail every one ... Their humanity is nicely balanced against the story\'s shocking elements. Son of Hitler may have its slow spots, but few war stories are this much fun.\
Yvan Alagbé, Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Rave NPR The stories in this graphic novel are about the truths — subtle, sad and surreal — that statistics can never capture ... This story, like the others in the book, is drawn in thick strokes of uncompromising black on white. Alagbé\'s ink feels more like paste — dense and chunky — and though his characters are sometimes poised in webs of painstaking lines, more often his scenes seem to burst onto the white page in a discordant frenzy that disturbs the eye ... Alagbé uses his sparse palette to deliver a potent message about how race is portrayed in Western comics.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb
Mixed NPR Her denunciations of nose jobs, aerobics, pretension, the 1970s California lifestyle and (mostly) her own foibles are diverting, but repetitive. Kominsky-Crumb\'s main weapon against banality is her distinctive style. Married to one of the 20th century\'s greatest draftsmen, she doesn\'t even try to compete. Instead, she makes each panel a brutal, torturous act of rebellion against the very idea of artistic standards. Her compositions are haphazard, her figures follow no consistent anatomical rules and her word balloons are blobby and crowded. The constant chaos gives the eye a grueling workout ... To watch her constantly shaking off her mannered inclinations in favor of ferocious, childlike scrawling is exhausting ... But the value of Kominsky-Crumb\'s style is precisely that it confounds the expectations of highbrow critics ... Like the stiff self-portrait on the front, this book\'s bulkiness and erudite intro belie the very qualities that make its contents—however flawed—fascinating.
Nick Drnaso
Rave NPR The book\'s frontispiece perfectly encapsulates Drnaso\'s Spartan way with a line — a tightly controlled, even miserly approach to composition that seems inspired by how-to manuals or emergency diagrams ... this maestro of minimalism manages to convey the horror of senseless murder with nothing but a lumpy sheet and motionless red water in a bathtub.
Pénélope Bagieu
Mixed NPR Bagieu\'s brand of feminism comes with frills and curlicues galore. Her voice is pert and saucy, and her cartoons are darling ... Brazen is at its best when Bagieu\'s ladies are shielded from physical violence and meet happy ends ... On the other hand, when Bagieu is forced to depict real hardship — the abuse and violence that marked the life of Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee, or the torture endured by the Dominican Republic\'s Mirabal sisters — she\'s daunted. She inevitably restricts such darkness to a couple of cramped panels, and when she must draw suffering faces, they\'re unconvincing ... taken together, the two styles stand in a funny kind of balance.
Jillian Tamaki
Positive NPR [Tamaki is] familiar with the complicated business of writing about trendy topics but she insouciantly shrugs off trepidation. The comics in Boundless incorporate of-the-moment phenomena...But though such elements drive these stories, they never seem to shackle Boundless to the present. Instead, Tamaki's existential wistfulness lifts text messages and memes into the realm of archetype ... Her playful experiments with the space of the page range from spreads that seem to overflow the edges to changes in orientation requiring the reader to turn the book on its side.
Kristen Radtke
Pan NPR ...in this work, Radtke gropes for something to say and fills her pages with rudimentary, schematic art. The puzzle is to what extent these weaknesses are acts of deliberation, part of a sophisticated effort to imbue the reader with Radtke's own sense of alienation, and to what extent they're merely failures of storytelling. The letdown is the realization that it's mostly the latter ... at a certain point, when someone says so little, you have to conclude they have little to say ... She doesn't mine the emotions her heart condition must inspire, and responds to her uncle's death not with open grief, but with more numbness. This book would be better off with a dose of desperation. As it stands, it's a puzzle that's not worth solving.
Riad Sattouf
Positive NPR Like its predecessor, this installment is deceptively simple in tone and style ... Sattouf's ability to convey his father's character with just a few lines never ceases to amaze ... Under Sattouf's pen, this state of affairs becomes an ingeniously apt microcosm of the larger world he grew up in. And if this installment is any indication, he has no plans to dial back his rage about it in volume 3.
Lisa Hanawalt
Positive NPR Hot Dog Taste Test overflows with colorful oddities ... Her sense of humor resembles that of another wacky, wise New York cartoonist, Roz Chast. But Hanawalt is further off-kilter than Chast, and more disruptive. It's impossible to imagine Chast casting a series of real clay plant pots shaped like masturbating animals, for instance ... Hanawalt's perverse effervescence has its limits, though. About two-thirds of the way through the book, things slow down a lot. Her diaries of a visit to an animal preserve and a trip to Argentina are pretty standard travel stories. But her frisky watercolor brush and lavish hand with color make these sections almost as memorable, and certainly as diverting, as the mind-bending games of earlier pages.
Chester Brown
Positive NPR This book of lay Biblical scholarship is simultaneously idiosyncratic, meticulous, imaginative and heretical. It's also deeply emotional, which may come as a surprise to readers of Brown's last book, Paying For It ... he makes compelling cases for a whole gamut of unconventional claims. Regarding prostitution, he asserts that Mary, Jesus' mother, was a prostitute, that the early Christians practiced prostitution, and that stories like the Parable of the Talents were pro-prostitute. Equally absorbing is Brown's contention that the Bible lends itself to a 'mystical,' rather than legalistic, interpretation.
Daniel Clowes
Positive NPR Unfortunately, the book doesn't stay with Patience. Jack's time traveling is far from foolproof, and his attempts yank him to different times and places. He suffers strange visions, and his body breaks down and reforms. This gives Clowes a chance to draw fantastic shapes, weird bolts of energy and other fun things, as well as rolling out his patented juicy color scheme. He also sends up the sci-fi and noir genres with ridiculous plot twists and goofy characters. But the time spent with Patience, in both her past and her changing present, feels much deeper.
Riad Sattouf
Mixed NPR Whatever comes next, it's certainly left its mark; Sattouf's feelings about the Arab world are ferocious. They coexist uneasily with his ironical soul. Sometimes rage wins out, other times it's humor. But he always knows what he thinks about his subjects—even if he doesn't allow the reader to feel the same certainty.