If this collection spawns annual volumes, they’ll need to be more representative and timely—or carry a different title.
This grab-bag, scattershot selection might appeal to fans of contemporary comics but won’t win converts or satisfy the curious.
With all the attention graphic narratives have generated, an annual “best of” anthology is long overdue. The problem starts with the “year” of the title. In a field where trends move faster than those of hip-hop and advances rival computer technology’s, the period surveyed—June 2003 through December 2004—means that the oldest pieces are almost three years old and none were published within the last year. Whether because of licensing issues or cutting-edge mandate, readers won’t find many of the artists who have achieved a higher profile (no Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, David B. or Harvey Pekar). Yet most of what’s here is intriguing, much of it’s inspired and the sheer variety is proof of the possibilities under the ever-expanding comics umbrella. Among the highlights, an excerpt from Joe Kubert’s Yossel takes a boy’s-eye view of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and Xaime’s “Life Through Whispers” from Love and Rockets, which explores the seamier side of romantic desire. Meanwhile, the selection of Manga—literally, “comics” in Japanese—suggests why the form has been as culturally pervasive in that country as cable TV is here (as Jake T. Forbes’s introduction to that unit attests). Edited by the late Preiss (a pioneering publisher of graphic novels) and Zimmerman (who has worked at Marvel and DC Comics), about half of this anthology consists of excerpts from graphic novels, providing readers with an introductory taste that often proves frustrating. (Imagine an anthology of the year’s best novels that limits each to a chapter or less.) Contributing both an introduction and the concluding piece, The Sandman (which finds its protagonist crossing barriers of time in Venice), the visionary Neil Gaiman indicates where comics have been and where they’re going.
If this collection spawns annual volumes, they’ll need to be more representative and timely—or carry a different title.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34326-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.
This black-and-white historical narrative, written and illustrated by Lutes, collects eight volumes of his ongoing comic book set in Berlin during the late ’20s. It’s a multilayered tale of love and politics at the beginning of the Nazi era, as Lutes follows the stories of three characters: a 20ish art student from the provinces, a textile worker, and a young Jewish radical. Their lives intersect in only the subtlest way—Lutes depicts them crossing paths at some great public events, such as the Mayday march that closes this part of his book. And Lutes plays with perspective in a visual sense as well, jumping from point-of-view frames to overhead angles, including one from a dirigible flying above in honor of the Kaiser. At street level, Lutes integrates his historical research smoothly, and cleverly evokes the sounds and smells of a city alive with public debate and private turmoil. The competing political factions include communists, socialists, democrats, nationalists, and fascists, and all of Lutes’s characters get swept up by events. Marthe, the beautiful art student, settles in with Kurt, the cynical and detached journalist; Gudrun, the factory worker, loses her job, and her nasty husband (to the Nazi party), then joins a communist cooperative with her young daughters; Schwartz, a teenager enamored with the memory of Rosa Luxembourg, balances his incipient politics with his religion at home and his passion for Houdini. The lesser figures seem fully realized as well, from the despotic art instructor to the reluctant street policeman. Cosmopolitan Berlin on the brink of disaster: Lutes captures the time and place with a historian’s precision and a cinematographer’s skill. His shifts from close-ups to fades work perfectly in his thin-line style, a crossbreed of dense-scene European comics and more simple comics styles on this side of the Atlantic.
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-896597-29-7
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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