At its best, a gorgeous, glorious inferno of imagination; at its worst, great art.
The eighth volume of the series collects 30 examples of graphic storytelling—either in whole or as excerpts—from graphic novels, pamphlet comics, newspapers, magazines, minicomics and Web comics.
Editor Smith (RASL, 2012, etc.) explains his selection criteria as “originality; grasp of the tools and syntax of panel-to-panel progression; and most important, if the thing surprised me, it was in.” In terms of surprises, Michael Kupperman’s “Scary Bathtub Stories” offers a hilariously absurdist, 1950s-style warning about the dangers of bathtubs, such as their ability to expose bathers to Lovecraft-ian beasties and horrific demises (“I can feel its eye-mouth on my genitals!!”). Wry wit and simple lines are on fine display in James Kochalka’s excerpts from American Elf, his semiautobiographical, slice-of-life comic strip featuring the artist and his family (and a cat who scratched Kochalka’s face “just because I tried to play him as a harmonica!”). The collection offers strong personal, emotional stories, the most striking being Derf Backderf’s “The Strange Boy,” excerpted from his fascinating memoir-cum–investigative journalism about his adolescent friendship with Jeffrey Dahmer. Backderf presents a sympathetic though creepy portrait of the future serial killer, made all the more perverse when viewed through the cartoonish, R. Crumb/Mad Magazine lens of his art. Another standout is Eleanor Davis’ “Nita Goes Home,” a near-future homecoming that ingeniously nails its science-fiction tropes, highlighted by a scene in which two sisters mourn their father’s passing, clinging to each other and bawling while the suits they wear for protection against a degraded environment render their faces as expressionless bedsheet ghosts. The best panel work comes in Sam Alden’s pulse-pounding “Turn Back,” Sammy Harkham’s fine-lined grotesquerie “A Husband and a Wife,” Joseph Lambert’s chalky depiction of a young Hellen Keller’s world in “Discipline” and the percussive pulp punches of Tony Puryear’s “Concrete Park: (Chapter 1).” While all the stories are executed crisply, some feel a bit pat (Vanessa Davis’ “In the Rough”) or uninspired (Faith Erin Hicks’ “Raiders”) or strain for cleverness (Grant Snider’s “Four Comics”).
At its best, a gorgeous, glorious inferno of imagination; at its worst, great art.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-99546-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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