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
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 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
