One of the more recent additions to the Best American Series has established itself as one of the most valuable.
Annual anthology finds the state of graphic narrative in robust health.
With the estimable Burns (Black Hole, 2005, etc.) taking a turn as guest editor, readers might expect a darker mood to this year’s offerings. Yet if anything connects the dots in this varied collection, it’s how self-referential comic authors are as they pursue their craft. There’s a meta-comic dimension to much of this work, whether it’s a comic focused on the creation of a comic (“Spirit Duplicator,” Dan Zettwoch), a comic that reflects the inspiration of older comic strips (“Indian Spirit Twain & Einstein,” Michael Kupperman), a comic that pays homage to another contemporary comic artist (“Cruddy,” Ron Regé Jr., “stolen from the novel by Lynda Barry”) or comics that focus primarily on the self, either real (“Why I Write Only About Myself,” Aline Kominsky-Crumb) or surreal (“When I Was Eleven,” Gabrielle Bell). Some artists extend the net well beyond self and craft, from the futuristic “Galactic Funnels” of Dash Shaw to the apocalyptic, cross-cultural desolation of Gary Panter’s “Dal Tokyo.” Other forms of popular culture provide inspiration as well, with Kevin Huizenga’s “Glen Ganges in Pulverize” steeped in video-game obsession, Tim Hensley’s “Jillian in the Argument” providing a subversive sitcom twist and “Skim,” by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, illuminating goth. Among the additional familiar names are Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Gilbert Hernandez and Art Spiegelman, making this collection a fine introductory primer. As series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden write in their preface, “The comics you read in this book aren’t the ‘best’ in the sense that they beat out other comics, American Idol-style. What they are is a personally curated selection of top-notch work that reflects just some of the excellence and variety that exists out there.”
One of the more recent additions to the Best American Series has established itself as one of the most valuable.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-618-98965-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
PERSPECTIVES
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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