A graphic adaptation of a short story from Alarcón’s debut, War by Candlelight (2005). Larceny, legacy, and Lima, Peru, with illustrations by Alvarado.
Don Hugo was a thief and a cheat, and his sudden death pulls his estranged journalist son, Chino, back into the family’s orbit for the first time in years—since Don Hugo abandoned Chino and his mother for a mistress. Chino takes the current close relationship between his mother and the mistress-turned–common-law wife and her sons, Chino’s half brothers, as a humiliation. After crafting an obituary truncated in favor of his sweet mother, Chino chases a story on street-performing clowns, his research taking him into Lima’s hustle and bustle even as dark ruminations on family and greasepaint take him straight to his true inheritance. Alarcón (At Night We Walk in Circles, 2013, etc.) paints a fascinating Lima teeming with whores, used-nail salesmen, class warfare, corrupt politicians and security guards, workers building houses only to rob them, marching shoeshine boys, and the ever looming clowns, whose garish appearances put them beyond society’s recognition. The flat blacks and stark whites of Alvarado’s art accentuate a noir atmosphere, one color slicing the other into crisp definition as in an etching. Alvarado’s simple backgrounds, flat figures, and heavy outlines sometimes give characters a dioramic pop off the page, though the art rarely wows. The finest illustrations open sections with small, Edward Gorey–like figures depicting Lima’s hoi polloi, the reduced scale enhancing Alvarado’s linework through compaction. Some pages panel imaginatively—delivering narration of Don Hugo’s construction work one word per brick—and the elegantly concise text takes to the graphic treatment nicely, breaking into bouncing boxes that easily tease the gaze along. This quick pacing helps to gloss over some illustrations’ stiff figures and blunted affect.
A swift, fatalistic love letter to Lima, with spirited if inconsistent art.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-333-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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BOOK REVIEW
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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