A fittingly audacious finale to an artistically ambitious trilogy, one that pays homage to the comic books of old yet takes...
The third volume in a trilogy concludes a renowned graphic artist’s hallucinatory descent into comic-book hell—and it doesn’t end prettily.
The size and format of the traditional comic book perfectly suits the darker vision of Burns, who's reinforced his reputation through work in magazines such as the New Yorker but lets his demons run wild here. Without ever resorting to a linear narrative, he concludes the story of Doug that began in X’ed Out (2010) and continued with The Hive (2012). Sober for more than a year, he suffers a massive relapse when he returns to his former punk-rock haunts and sees some people who would rather not see him. Yet his dream life and waking life aren’t clearly delineated, for Doug or for the reader, and whatever state he’s in, he fears, “[n]o matter what I do, I’ll never get rid of that voice in my head.” Framing and interweaving Doug’s narrative is the even more nightmarish descent of the bandaged boy Johnny, like Alice down the rabbit hole, through a stack of skulls, a reunion with his cat and a deep sleep that finds him awakening to a nightmare that might be worse than his nightmare. Identities blur as plot points in both narratives involve romance comics, unexpected pregnancies and women as agents of healing for deeply bruised young men. But the art carries the weight here and rewards repeat viewings, as the text resists summary and paraphrase. Like a dream or a very bad acid trip, what often defies linear logic makes connections on a subliminal, surreal plane.
A fittingly audacious finale to an artistically ambitious trilogy, one that pays homage to the comic books of old yet takes the art to another, weirder level.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-90790-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A treasure trove of discovery for fanatics and initiates alike.
The third annual anthology in this series is the best yet, with inspired work from a variety of relative unknowns mixed with that from artists who enjoy great renown in this burgeoning field.
As series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden write in their preface, “Anthologies are the place where young cartoonists get a break, where they can hope to be published alongside the likes of Chris Ware and Matt Groening, and to be noticed by the likes of Lynda Barry.” Though many of the best, or at least the most ambitious, graphic narratives in recent years are larger in scope, the editors opt here for shorter, self-contained pieces, of the type pioneered by Barry in her Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and collected in volumes such as The! Greatest! Of! Marlys! Readers who know Groening only as the creator of The Simpsons will discover a whole new dimension to his work in the “Will and Abe” selections from his Life in Hell strip, while Ware’s “The Thanksgiving Series” of covers for the New Yorker reinforces his emergence from the comix underground into the literary mainstream. Yet the explosion of energy in John Mejias’s “The Teachers Edition,” which chronicles the challenge of teaching art to grade schoolers in the Bronx, shows that mainstream acceptance hasn’t tamed the form’s more radical impulses. In the contributors’ notes, Mejias writes that he “hopes to document my dealings with board of education bureaucracies as I try to make human connections in an inhuman atmosphere.” Other highlights range from the wordless to the word heavy, and from the socially conscious to the dreamlike—the volume as a whole suggests the seemingly limitless variety that the format permits. Perhaps the best testament to the magic of comics is Barry’s illustrated introduction, which she devotes to work that was not included, but which has profoundly affected her.
A treasure trove of discovery for fanatics and initiates alike.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-98976-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
Not for the squeamish or literal-minded, but in a genre whose artists routinely test all sorts of boundaries, this debut...
A debut collection of ten short graphic narratives from Israel native Shadmi.
Reading these stories might take less than an hour, but their effects could last longer than the most haunting nightmare. Are they existential parables? Postmodern pornography: graphic sex that sparks more revulsion than desire? Illustrations of what one character terms “the cruelty of memory”? In many of the stories, people who are strangers to each other, perhaps even to themselves, share their perversions or obsessions as they joylessly mate and part. “The Fun Lawn” features a porn addict whose day job is dressing up in a dog suit for a children’s TV show; he meets his match in a woman who seems to want to have sex with the big dog. In “Antoinette,” a man becomes obsessed with a decapitated woman who cradles her head in her arm. Several narratives concern oral addictions that confuse food with sex. The best and most ambitious piece is “Radioactive Girlfriend,” in which a high-school student who sleeps through an atomic bomb while everyone else is in fallout shelters attracts the one boyfriend who isn’t afraid of radioactive contamination. Describing the nuclear blast, which produces a gorgeous sunrise, Shadmi writes: “As the whole town was bathed in radiant light, the most insignificant and mundane details of suburbia were suddenly reborn into a meaningful existence.” Christine, who was expected to die from exposure, finds herself more full of life than ever, sapping the strength of her boyfriend. Whatever any of this might “mean” in some linear thematic sense, the unsettling power of these stories comes from the tension between the hyper-realistic drawings and the elliptically surreal narratives.
Not for the squeamish or literal-minded, but in a genre whose artists routinely test all sorts of boundaries, this debut collection obliterates them.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-50871-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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