An overstuffed, beguiling masterwork of visual storytelling from the George Herriman of his time.
Ware (Building Stories, 2012, etc.) fans rejoice: The long-rumored and hinted-at adventures of Rusty Brown finally come to the page after years in the making.
If Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is indeed the smartest kid in the world, Rusty Brown is perhaps among the least comfortable inside his own skin: He lives a life of quiet desperation in a snowy Midwestern suburb, obsessed with comic heroes such as Supergirl, who he’s sure would melt away the snow with her heat vision (“maybe she has problems shutting it off sometimes”); for his part, he wonders whether, in the quiet after a snowfall, he might have developed superhearing. Rusty’s dad, Woody, is no more content: A sci-fi escapist, he teaches English alongside an art teacher who just happens to be named Mr. Ware but seems happy only when he’s smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee in the teachers’ lounge even if Mr. Ware is given to bewildering him there with talk of Lacan, Baudrillard, and ennui. Joanne Cole, an African American third grade language teacher, gently empathizes with her angst-y little charges while nursing an impulse to learn how to play the banjo; it being the civil rights era, the music store owner who sells her an instrument asks, without malice, “So how’d you get interested in the banjo, anyway? Folk music? ‘Protest’ songs?” The lives of all these characters and others intersect in curious and compelling ways. As with Ware’s other works of graphic art, the narrative arc wobbles into backstory and tangent: Each page is a bustle of small and large frames, sometimes telling several stories at once in the way that things buzz around us all the time, demanding notice. Joanne’s story is perhaps the best developed, but the picked-on if aspirational Rusty (“I appear as a mortal, but…I may not be…”), the dweeby Woody, the beleaguered Chalky, and other players are seldom far from view.
An overstuffed, beguiling masterwork of visual storytelling from the George Herriman of his time.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-375-42432-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-known designer Mizrahi scripts a trio of adventures for his fictional supermodel, Sandee, a ``really, really real'' beauty from Bountiful, Utah, who takes Manhattan by storm under the tutelage of her best friend and discoverer, Yvesaac Mizrahi, an alter ego whose only difference from his creator is about 30 pounds and a carefully chiseled chin. The unusual presentation- -three oversized, full-color comics in a portfolio—is intended no doubt to justify the high price, though Mizrahi's audience is not likely to include the average fan of graphic narratives. His fairy-tale plot takes his discovery (``a cross between Jean Harlow and Jean Shrimpton'') from her initial success as a cover girl to her eventual stardom in a documentary about her life. Along the way, Sandee encounters no small amount of jealousy, plenty of sharpies who wish her ill, and suffers bouts of anorexia and drug abuse. Fashion insiders will find much to giggle about here—the insiderish poop on agents, photographers, publicity flacks, magazine editors, and all the hangers-on. Frawley's weak-lined drawings, meantime, fail to deliver Mizrahi's inflated prose (there's nothing ``fabulous'' or ``ravishing'' about his Barbie-like realization of Sandee), and his backgrounds provide few surprises or eyeball kicks, while all his faces pretty much look the same. But the biggest problem is with the cut-out dolls: If you use the clothing, you ruin the text on the page behind. Then again, maybe you're not really expected to cut them out, and this glitzy tale is a comic book only because it's written on a level that—well, all the fashion world can understand.
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83511-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
An over-peopled, over-subplotted second novel from the author of Desert Blues (1994), this set in the turn-of-the-century American West. It's 1906 when 11-year-old Meyer Liebermann—shocked at learning that he's adopted and that his natural mother was one of the ``Division Street Jews,'' the dregs of Europe—experiences a crisis of identity and runs away from his wealthy New York home. Then, his larynx crushed in a mugging by a Jewish street gang, Meyer is left for dead outside Madison Square Garden, where he's found by Sunset Buffalo Dreamer, a Sioux member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Now a mute, the young Meyer is informally adopted by the Sioux and given the first of his many new names. His symbolic rebirth reflects Albert's theme that Americans constantly reinvent themselves and that with each new identity comes a new story. This promising idea, however, is smothered by too many stories: Buffalo Bill and the passing of the Wild West; Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies; May Arkwright Hutton and women's suffrage; the temperance movement; the Indians' loss of sovereignty; racial prejudice; judicial corruption; the plight of prostitutes. Meyer frequently compares himself with Twain's Huckleberry Finn, but Huck's journey ultimately had a purpose: to free Jim and confront his own prejudice. This young man's journey across the West seems to have no purpose, except perhaps to provide an Old West adventure. Even his involvement with Bill Haywood's efforts to unionize Colorado's miners is more accidental than purposeful, though the account is so choked with minor characters named but not introduced, and so confused with the tag ends of other subplots, that it's unlikely the reader will notice. Accurate historical research and occasional humor fail to compensate for a lack of focus and an overabundance of sheer subject.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-877946-67-2
Page Count: 351
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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