Posts filed under 'Graphic Novel'
Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope is an engaging and unusual war memoir. It is the story about a military experience that caused a boy to become a man — a long and sometimes surreal process.
But there are no dramatic combat scenes or brutal battles, instead there is 
much celebration of humanity (and the military) at its mundane best. Alan Cope grew up to be a fine man and a splendid raconteur.
Late in Alan’s life, a random encounter with French cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert led to a five-year friendship and collaboration, ultimately resulting in this terrific graphic novel. Originally published as three volumes in France, the new English translation is a single volume — and one of the best books I have read all year.
Alan Cope died in 1999, but Emmanuel Guibert has spent 13 years creating this book, working from taped conversations and Guibert’s vacations to places that Alan lived in the USA, France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy. The art and the text work together seamlessly, telling the story in a wonderfully integrated way.
Alan Ingram Cope grew up in southern California. He remembers being a kid on a bike, delivering newspapers that headlined the attack on Pearl Harbor. Two years later, he turned eighteen and was drafted.
Sent to Fort Knox for basic training (the first vehicle he learned to drive was a tank), Alan received further training and became a radio operations and cryptology instructor. During this time, he developed close friendships with fellow soldiers and a life-long appreciation for music. A falling out with his family left him committed to look on his war experience as an adventure rather than an unfortunate necessity. Alan’s impressively positive outlook shines throughout the book.
He arrived in France on February 19, 1945 — his twentieth birthday. After a tantalizing glimpse of Paris (just the name of the city, painted on a wall outside of a stalled train), his unit was shipped to Normandy — where they idled for two months because their weapons were accidentally lost. Alan’s war involved a lot of time spent sneaking away to connect with friends, and he made friends not only with fellow soldiers but also individuals and families in the countries he was stationed in.
After the war, Alan stayed in Europe and spent most of his adult life working for the American military. Following a religious calling, he briefly returned to attend college in California, but left in 1948. Disillusioned with religious faith and with America, he never returned to the U.S.
Emmanuel Guibert was so taken with Alan’s descriptive skills and storytelling that he has vacationed to places described in the book — his renderings of the California redwoods are awesome, you can imagine walking through his Bavarian villages and French towns. Guibert uses an interesting combination of textured India ink washes and fine, clean lines. A fascinating sample of part of Guibert’s technique, involving “painting” with water can be viewed on this video, posted on American publisher First Second’s web site.
Alan Cope’s story is wonderful in both its minutiae and outlook. There is a lot that is absurd about Alan’s military experience: tales of misbehavior and incompetence and brutishness, but also stories of gentleness and humor and enduring friendships. Guibert’s commitment to preserving his friend’s oral history may result in a second work, about Alan Cope’s California childhood. Tentatively title “Alan’s Youth”.
Alan’s shining resilience and inherent decency, together with Guibert’s spectacular art, give this book a lot of power.
December 26th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
M
ariko Tamaki’s two new graphic novels featuring arty biracial punk/Goth girls provide similar glimpses into teen angst. Both novels take place in Canada, in different decades, but could easily be set anywhere and anytime because the plots are so character driven.
Skim is generating a lot of buzz and is on the 2009 nominations list of Best Books for Young Adults from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association, as well as the short list for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards. The main character, Kimberly “Skim” Keiko Cameron is a wannabe Wicca with a classmate whose boyfriend commits suicide. Because of the suicide, the community is on alert and Kim is targeted as being “at risk” because she is a loner and wears a lot of black. While everyone is keeping an eye on Kim, the girl who really is at risk goes unnoticed.
Emiko Superstar is one of the final graphic 
novels in the much hyped but slow selling Minx series published by DC Comics. Emiko is a geek turned freak that performs on Friday nights at a performance art venue known as The Factory. Auditions for the Friday night show are judged gong style and it takes Emi weeks to get up the nerve to finally try out. She finds a stage persona by costuming herself in her grandmother’s sixties era go-go boots and Twiggy dresses and her performance material is stolen from the diary of the woman she baby-sits for. Emi achieves the stardom she yearns for, but feels that she has earned it through false pretenses.
In addition to the arty biracial punk/Goth Canadian girl main characters, the plots of both books are similar in that Kim and Emi need to reconcile who they are with who they are perceived to be. They are labeled geeks and itching to break free from their peers. Both books also deal with some heavy issues: key authority figures take advantage of teens in each novel, the girls grapple with different forms of abuse, the highs and lows of first loves and lesbian romances are explored.
The primary difference between the two books is in the artwork: Skim is more realistic, while Emiko is drawn in more of a comic book style. Both stories are compelling and I am wishing the author well during the upcoming awards season.
December 8th, 2008
Molly - Central
Did I ever tell you about my dream?
Not the life’s purpose sort. I mean the kind of dream you have when you’re asleep. This one I remember, I was hanging out at Paul Shaffer’s house, and I think we were waiting for his mother to show up. Dave may have been there, but he didn’t do anything. I went into the kitchen and looked into this big pot that was on the stove. Katherine Ross, the actress from The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the original Stepford Wives movie was in the pot. It was filled with a sort of tomato-ey stew and just her face was visible, surrounded by the red liquid, like she was looking up at the ceiling. Well that didn’t seem right that she could be in that pot, her being normal sized and everything and the pot was only pot sized. So I opened the door to the oven below the stovetop and saw her torso inside. Which explained how she was able to get her head into the pot of stew that was sitting on top of the stove. I did reach in to tickle her ribs, just to make sure she was actually attached to her head floating in the pot of stew. She was startled to be tickled like that and thrashed around a little bit in the pot, getting the tomato-ey stuff on her face and some started to cover her mouth causing her to sputter a little bit. I realized I probably shouldn’t do that again or she might drown.
That’s when I woke up. And I wrote that dream down. I thought briefly about sending it in to Late Night with David Letterman, on the off-chance that he might read it on the air and I’d finally get my fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol has promised everyone would get eventually. But I never sent it in.
It turns out there’s a place where you can send your dreams. There’s a web site called slowwave.com where people send descriptions of their dreams– that is, dreams they’ve dreamt while sleeping, not their longings and desires– and the guy that runs the site, Jesse Reklaw, will turn your dream into a four-panel comic strip that’s syndicated to various newpapers (mostly alternative weeklies) around the country. He’s collected a bunch of them and published them in a book called The night of your life.
And I dare you not to laugh at some of this stuff. Like the guy who took a bath in melted butter, then forgot to dry off so he kept sliding off the vinyl seats on the bus, and he left streaks and globs of butter wherever he went, and people on the street kept pressing their toast and bagels against his arms. Or the woman who’s interviewing for a job at a library but finds herself talking in valley-girl speak “Like, ohmigod! Technology will be, like, so important!” so she doesn’t get the job. Or the couple who answer an ad in the newspaper offering to pay people to adopt baby gorillas and find out that Martha Stewart is the one who placed the ad.
I’ve gotta tell you, the art is pretty good for depicting the bizarre situations that people dream up, but you’d never recognize most of these celebrities from the way they’re drawn in this strip. I suppose there are some (copy)rights issues involved with that sort of thing. Still, I never would have recognized Charlton Heston from that drawing. Or Gary Coleman. Or Prince. Madonna, I could recognize, but that was mostly because of the costume.
The dreams themselves are pretty bizarre. You’ll see centaurs shopping for food, or people living with tribes of apes, or free-falling without parachutes and worrying about how much the plastic surgery will cost to repair the facial damages once they land. Or shopping with Yoda. Or stopping by Sophia Loren’s where she’s entertaining some diplomats until a hockey game breaks out in the living room. The diplomats play pretty good “but your team is kicking ass.”
There aren’t any psychological insights “drawn” from these dreams. Other books or even web sites might search for meaning behind what happens in your dreams. In Reklaw’s book, dreams are all played for laughs.
I am curious about how much the artist adds to the dream descriptions, like the conversational asides between the two superheroes who ride the subway to the scene of the crime: “Is this our stop?” “No. It’s the next one” or the woman who discovers in the last panel that her two missing dogs have been making money by trading stocks and is told by one of them “We didn’t want you to have to work.” “Oh, how thoughtful,” she replies. I imagine Reklaw’s probably embellished the original dreamers descriptions quite a lot. All I can say is, it really worked for me. Every fourth panel would deliver a punch line that was set up in the preceeding three. And it’s quite a gift for anyone to be able to tease out the humor from the ridiculous, surreal, or just plain weird stuff that people dream up. Give yourself a little holiday treat and lighten your stress with a few laughs at other people’s dreams.
December 4th, 2008
Dennis - Central
“When I think of Queen I remember my whole life” writes Mike Dawson towards the beginning of his rather lengthy semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Freddie & Me : A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody. And while Mike’s fascination with the band and it’s music flows through the book, it’s clearly in the background while Mike’s life takes center stage. There’s Mike at a young age, watching a video on TV of Freddie Mercury vacuuming in drag while singing “I want to break free,” Mike listening to a cassette with a friend who wonders if there are any more songs with “swear words”, Mike arguing with his younger sister Sarah about the relative merits of Queen versus Wham! (and, eventually, just George Michael), and, of course, young Mike’s solo performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody” during a talent night while the family was on holiday in Wales with his bemused and mortified parents watching from the audience–guaranteed to make you smile. (Check out that cover image for a preview.)
There’s an opening sequence to set up the story, but then the action moves back in time to Mike’s childhood and follows a pretty straight-forward chronological narrative path, with the occasional omniscient cartoonist/narrator breaking through to comment on the subjectivity of the action. The art is all black-and-white which serves the story pretty well since the narrative takes a fairly leisurely pace (some might say it drags a bit, but I’m trying to be charitable). Dawson’s style borders on caricature with some of the images of children, where features seem to be larger than normal, but that’s probably a decent approximation of the disproportion of youth and the coltishness of adolescence. Still, it takes an artist with a pretty strong sense of self to deliberately render his own image with a nose that large.
Mike and his family are originally from England, but when Mike’s father gets a job in the United States, the family eventually moves to join him and settles in New Jersey, where Mike seems to think his British accent will confer instant coolness upon him. Foolish child. By this time, it’s already been announced that Freddie Mercury has AIDS. Mike would seem to be barely old enough to process what this means when he first learns the news. Yet later, when he hears from his mother that Freddie has died, he’s devastated.
Life goes on, of course. Mike plods through his teen years, complete with braces, bad haircut, and (being charitable again) a rather interesting hat. His interests in art and eventually girls begin to fill his time–once he realizes, or is made to realize, that a musical career is probably not the path in life he can succeed on. And I think most of us can remember what a cruel realization that day can bring. Well, some of us can. Anyway. Moving on.
But where does Queen fit in all this? Well, they’re just background music, for the most part. Mike never manages to see the band perform live, although there were a couple of near misses. And he did get to see Brian May perform once. And a musical based on the band that Mike got to enjoy with his mother. Sadly, like most fans, Mike’s meetings with his favorite band are of the imaginary variety. As an artist, he can imagine/depict what it would have been like for him to meet his favorite band– and for the band to meet their biggest fan. He does that once with a quick, imaginary meeting between he and the members of the band backstage.
What Mike eventually seems to realize is that meeting the musicians isn’t the important part of the music–it’s what the music communicates to the listener. Unless you’re witnessing a live performance, that connection between artist and listener is decidedly one-way. And that’s all right too. But Mike provides a role reversal toward the end of the book, when he and his sister Sarah (in a memorable T-shirt) meet George Michael at a book signing and Mike the cartoonist gives his adult sister the ultimate fan’s wish: he creates a fantasy where George Michael, while being chauffeured away from the autograph signing session, remembers a grinning Sarah getting his autograph, and it brings a smile to the face of the world-famous recording star– while the music of Queen plays in the background on the car stereo… and it’s a sweet, sweet moment to belie the lyrics of the song:
“Nothing really matters, anyone can see… Nothing really matters to me.”
Overall, I think the book could have been trimmed considerably. Too many scenes of Mike growing up that might have seemed significant at the time, but don’t really move the story forward or foreshadow any future events. And if you’re looking for a celebration of Queen or Freddie Mercury, you’ll probably feel neither got nearly enough pages devoted to them. Still, for me, that last scene made the whole read worth while.
November 21st, 2008
Dennis - Central
I’m not generally a reader of graphic novels, though my associate at work is always trying to change that. However, I am a fan of the author Shannon Hale. So when a new book came across the desk by her I decided to take a look at it even though it was a graphic novel. Hale takes classic stories and themes in her books The Princess Academy and The Goose Girl, shakes them up, turns them sideways or upside down in order to look at the reality behind the fairy tale. And that is true also in this new book, Rapunzel’s Revenge.
In Rapunzel’s Revenge Hale’s strong narrative style plus the wonderfully balanced use of humor to engage the reader, which I enjoy most in her books, is very evident. But in a way, it is the wonderful graphic story by Nathan Hale (no relation) which really ties the tale together. It’s all very well to say that Rapunzel has very long hair, but seeing it braided and used to lasso a wild pig, or to whip a gun out of an outlaw’s hand is unreal but great. And setting the story in the wild, wild west is another winner. Get this book and read it!
October 28th, 2008
Liz C. - Alicia Ashman
Earlier this year Tom Batiuk was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his Funky Winkerbean comic strip. And, more specifically, for the story arc that concerned character Lisa Moore. In her story, she was originally diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, suffered a recurrence and recently died. The first part of the story was collected in the book Lisa’s Story and those strips, and the recent strips dealing with the recurrence are collected in a new volume: Lisa’s Story : The Other Shoe.
Given that it was originally published as a 3-panel daily comic strip (and some larger and in color Sunday strips), it’s somewhat surprising that Batiuk was able to attach so much emotional weight to a strip that started out as a “gag-a-day” comic strip focusing on high-school. You’ll still find humor here–but also fear, anger, deep friendships, hope and ultimately, grief. And of course there’s love. (So don’t be surprised if you find yourself reaching for a tissue or two.)
At the time it came out there were articles written in the New York Times and The Daily Cartoonist about readers’ reactions to the storyline and the appropriateness of the comic strip format for such an emotionally charged issue. And the online comments certainly showed the range of feelings. Some readers were angry and others were uplifted. Your mileage may vary.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The Center for Disease Control says that breast cancer is the sixth leading cause of death among women. And yet this recent article by from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says that women who find out they have breast cancer seem to have a tendency to take on a caregiver’s role and worry about others reactions to their announcement. (Women. Gotta love ‘em.)
So if breast cancer is an issue you feel deserves more attention, this book may inspire you. And if you find yourself diagnosed with a medical condition like character Lisa Moore has and don’t know quite how to break the news to your loved ones, loan them this book to read. Then tell them: “We need to talk.“
And if that’s not enough, here are some other graphic novels dealing with cancer:
Cancer Vixen: A True Story / by Marisa Acocella Marchetto. (breast cancer)
Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person : A Memoir in Comics / by Miriam Engleberg. (breast cancer)
Mom’s Cancer / by Brian Fies. (lung cancer and brain tumor)
Our Cancer Year / by Joyce Brabner and Harvey Pekar. (Harvey has lymphoma)
Live in hope.
October 8th, 2008
Dennis - Central
Bill Mauldin’s single-panel Army cartoons featuring the everyman infantrymen, Willie & Joe, are instantly recognizable to many people (even those of us born well after WWII). Mauldin’s 1945 book Up Front was one of the biggest best-sellers of the time and is still in print.
Willie & Joe: The WWII Years is a handsome, two-volume set of Mauldin’s complete works. Volume One covers the homefront, from 1940-1943. Volume Two contains the overseas cartoons, created between 1943-1945. The 18 page introduction, playfully gussied up as a declassified war memorandum, provides a tantalizing overview of Mauldin’s life and career.
Ex-GIs recognize Bill Mauldin’s characters, Willie and Joe, at a glance. I learned this because volume one was sitting next to me on the reference desk, and three different men who were passing by noticed and commented favorably about Mauldin — their eyes caught by the small, black drawing on the book’s dark green cloth cover.
For even more information, the Library of Congress hosts a gorgeous online tribute in a web exhibition, Bill Mauldin: Beyond Willie & Joe or you might check out Todd De Pastino’s new biography, Bill Mauldin: A Life Upfront.
September 18th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Hooray! A new batch of Minx graphic novels are out and more will be available soon. An imprint of DC Comics designed for young women, the previous Minx titles dealt with issues like racism, guerilla art, cyber-bullying and virtual reality. Three recently published titles deal with eco-terrorism, instant messaging (IM) dating and shark attacks.
- Burnout by Rebecca Donner tells the story of Danni, a girl who falls in love with the son of her mom’s boyfriend. To complicate matters, she discovers her new boyfriend is involved in sabotaging the logging outfits near her Oregon home.
- The New York Four by Brian Wood explores
New York City through the activities of four NYU freshmen. The main character, Riley, falls in love with an unknown boy via IM with disastrous results.
- Water Baby by Ross Campbell deals with the heavy topic of losing a limb. Surfer girl Brody gets attacked by a shark while surfing off the Florida coast and she and her friends struggle to maintain life as normal, like before the accident.
Each of these new titles would segue well into a series; I felt there was so much more story to tell, especially in The New York Four. Fans of these comics will also want to keep an eye out for new Minx titles to be published this fall:
September 12th, 2008
Molly - Central
Gene Kannenberg, Jr. has compiled a book containing what he calls the 500 Essential Graphic Novels : The Ultimate Guide. Now that’s the sort of inflated title that’s just begging to be punctured once or twice. Kannenberg even helps by admitting upfront that the phrase “graphic novel” can be open to interpretation. His suggestion is that the phrase should refer to works of “lasting value” rather than the daily strip or monthly periodical format that the word “comics”suggests to most readers. Which is probably as good a working definition as he needs for this collection of titles. It sort of has to be, since he includes works that are collections of daily strips, and others that are considered children’s books. One key limitation Kannenberg placed on works to be included in this volume was that the titles had to be currently in print. Which means that a lot of great material from the past which would have made the list, got left off in the interest of giving readers a fair shot at finding the titles mentioned. But even with those kinds of limitations he came up with 500 titles. And among 500 titles there are bound to be some undiscovered or forgotten gems.
Overall, the book is pretty nicely organized, with the selected titles divided into ten chapters covering ten genres: Adventure, Non-fiction, Crime and Mystery, Fantasy, General fiction, Horror, Humor, Science fiction, Superheroes, and War. Each chapter starts with a two-page introduction covering some of the broader history of each genre and some of the highlighted works, followed by what Kannenberg calls a “top ten essential section.” These top tens get longer reviews and plot summaries and feature a full-color picture of the book cover and usually a page or a couple of panels from the interior of the work. Rounding out each section are works not quite good enough for the top ten, which also display cover art, but fewer examples of interior illustrations. Each also has a star rating from one to five (not all 5-star books make it to the top ten, nor do all the top-ten books garner 5 stars– go figure) and an age rating (A for all, 12+, 15+ or 18+). Each title also includes a short list of “See also” and “Further reading” titles.
In the back there are indexes with page listings for each writer, artist, and title. Be careful with those page listings, however. Don’t confuse them with the rank out of 500 numbers like I did. There’s also a separate list of publishers showing which titles they produced. They even have an index for the age ratings! Too bad they didn’t think to include a separate index for the star ratings.
Whew! That’s a lot of information. True, the graphics cover up a lot of that page space. But the book is printed on trade paperback size pages (about 7 inches tall by 5 inches wide) so it doesn’t take much text to fill out the book. And the graphic novel page samples are really hard to read when they’re reduced down enough to fit. So that tends to detract from the overall appeal of the book. As for the titles, well, it’s a pretty nice mix.
Most of the ones you’d expect to find are here: Maus, Contract with God, Watchmen, Barefoot Gen, Batman: the Dark Knight Returns, along with more esoteric fare like Fun Home, Safe Area Gorazde, Mom’s Cancer, The Complete Concrete, Amphigory and Justin Green’s Binky Brown Sampler. And, literally, hundreds more. As might be expected, the collection does tend to focus pretty heavily on American publications. Japan does have a few titles represented (their English adaptations, anyway). And the same goes for the Europeans. Maybe that’s a minor quibble. And while the Superheroes don’t predominate, their section does have over sixty titles listed (not to mention the titles that overlap with Science Fiction) while War lists just 28.
But there’s plenty to peruse, even if you don’t bother reading each plot and summary. I developed quite a list of titles I want to seek out, and more than a few fond memories of past enjoyable reads. That’s part of the fun of these greatest hits/bibliography type lists. Flipping through pages when something catches your eye and you remember reading that back when it first came out. Suddenly you realize you’re just grinning from ear to ear.
Whether you’re already a fan or completely new to the genre, this will be a very useful resource. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll be able to borrow a lot of these from your local library.
How superheroic is that?
August 27th, 2008
Dennis - Central
Satchel Paige: Striking out Jim Crow is a fast read (less than 90 pages) which is more a story of the segregated South than a biography of Satchel Paige. The author, UW-Madison alumnus James Sturm, throws a curveball with his title: it showcases the celebrity of Satchel Paige through the eyes of an imagined contemporary. It is an odd blend of fiction and biography, telling a bittersweet, fictionalized story of segregation and oppression while providing teasing glimpses of the famed pitcher.
The story is narrated by Emmet Wilson, a sharecropper from Tuckwilla, Alabama. In 1929, Emmet is a young man full of hope, dreaming of making it big in baseball’s Negro National League. His career is cut short by a knee injury sustained when sliding into home plate during a game pitched by the rising young star, Satchel Paige.
Emmet returns to Tuckwilla, raising cotton on land owned by two other former baseball players — the wealthy, white Jennings twins. The 1930s and early ’40s fly by, with the inequities sharecropping and the menacing dangers facing blacks in rural Alabama scarily presented. Emmet’s attempts to keep his son in school during during cotton picking season are horrifically squashed by the twins.
The story jumps to 1944, when the Jennings brothers arrange a local baseball event featuring the now-legendary Satchel Paige and his traveling All-Stars playing against a team of local (white) heroes, The Tuckwilla All-Stars. Baseball long behind him, Emmet is loathe to attend the game but is pulled along by his beloved son, Emmet, Jr. The kid had heard rumors of his father’s baseball past, but nothing firsthand from his dad: “I don’t talk about my days as a ballplayer. It’s like talkin’ about a dead man.” And Emmet is almost a dead man, he has been beaten down by day-to-day life, by segregation and discrimination and the hardships of trying to raise his black child in a white man’s world. The ball game does and does not change all of that…
Rich Tommaso’s illustrations are as understated and roundabout as the story, with heavy black ink and strange pea-green washes of color (deepening to swampier tones during the darker parts of the storyline). This is not a “pretty” book, but the somber colors and simple drawing style elegantly compliment the text.
The last four pages of the book are “panel discussions”, with text providing additional information on topics touched on in the graphics and story. This is a weirdly moving book. Once you get in there, it does not let you out until the end. It is good!
It is a story of many defeats, both large and small — yet ends triumphantly. As an introduction to segregation and Satchel Paige, it serves more to intrigue than to inform, but any title that raises topics that lead to further reading is a good read in my book.
August 19th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
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