Another winner from Ware, up there with Jimmy Corrigan.
Like the cartoon equivalent of Willy Wonka—a graphic visionary opens the door to his creative factory with a wide-ranging anthology that conjures a world (if not a universe) unto itself.
Before he helped spur the graphic novel to greater cultural legitimacy and mainstream popularity with Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), Chicago artist Ware had established a devoted following among comic connoisseurs with his work under the periodical ACME Novelty Library banner. This tabloid-sized collection of short strips suggests a manifest destiny of the imagination, as Ware moves all over the artistic landscape, from the retro homage of Quimby the Mouse to the sci-fi futurism of Rocket Sam and Tales of Tomorrow to the new frontier of Big Tex. (Inevitably, Jimmy Corrigan pops in as well.) Many of these strips are a single page or less, and some of them are not accompanied by text. Ware elsewhere employs plenty of small-type language to subversive advantage through a series of comic-book advertisements that suggest the cultural imperialism of America-the-theme-park, and the quick-fix, self-help capitalism that puts a price on everything from creativity to sexual/spiritual fulfillment to reason to live. Cutting closest to the subculture that shaped Ware’s sensibility are the ongoing adventures of Rusty Brown, in his move from geeky kid to obsessive collector. For those willing to dismantle the book as a disposable artifact, there are cut-and-fold projects for assembly and a constellation chart of the cosmos suitable for wall-hanging. Ultimately, the artist argues that the essence of cartooning isn’t drawing; that this is a complex language of pictures and works, meant to be read rather than merely viewed. The innocence of childhood comics, the formal precision of design (almost art deco in some places) and the darker realities of modern life find an edgy balance in Ware’s work.
Another winner from Ware, up there with Jimmy Corrigan.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42295-1
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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
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