edited by Alison Bechdel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2011
The state of an art that has yet to reach stasis.
Another annual cornucopia of graphic narrative (and comic strips).
Whether comics were ever striving for cultural legitimacy, they are now struggling with it—even resisting it—though this year’s collection suggests that the range of subject, tone and technique continues to expand. Perhaps no other graphic memoirist has achieved greater acclaim than this year’s guest editor Bechdel (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, 2006, etc.), who not only contributes an illustrated introduction (which comments on the imbalance of men over women among the artists, in this as well as previous years, and the absence of African-Americans), and shows a feminist perspective in both the sequencing and selection. Among the developments highlighted by the anthology are “webcomics” (a natural extension of the indie and self-publishing of comics, and the punk-rock, DIY spirit the form shares) and “metacomics” (which use comics to comment on the making and essence of comics). Highlights include Gabrielle Bell’s opening “Manifestation,” where she imagines critical acclaim and world renown for her adaptation of The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas (who attempted to kill Andy Warhol), and “Pet Cat” by Joey Alison Sayers, who follows a strip through the publishing industry’s various permutations. While much of this work is at the cutting edge of contemporary culture, there is a historical perspective to some of the more ambitious pieces, as Joe Sacco’s excerpts from Footnotes in Gaza, the longest selection, explores the unreliability of human memory in recalling a mid-’50s Mideast massacre by Israeli soldiers, while “Little House in the Big City,” by Sabrina Jones, frames a love letter to New York with the battle over urban renewal between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. The extended, wordless visual epiphany in “Winter” is stunning (adapted by artist Danica Novgorodoff from a Benjamin Percy short story and its screenplay). David Lasky shows the greatest range, with both the most formally complex selection (“Soixante Neuf”) and the most elemental (the single-page closer, “The Ultimate Graphic Novel”). As always, Chris Ware’s inevitable selection is brilliant.
The state of an art that has yet to reach stasis.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-33362-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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by Geoffrey Chaucer and Peter Ackroyd and illustrated by Nick Bantock ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 16, 2009
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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by Peter Kuper ; illustrated by Peter Kuper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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