Gottlieb, a performance poet, and DiMassa, creator of the comic series Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, join forces for this graphic novel about a young woman wrestling with both her father’s death and her sexual identity.
The first venture into graphic fiction for Gottlieb focuses on Sasha, a 19-year-old spending her summer as a clerk at the same hospital where her father worked as a doctor. In Sasha’s eyes, it’s a bleak and Fellini-esque milieu: There’s a chain-smoking pregnant woman in the cafeteria; her supervisor is a mouthy woman with bad breath who’s prone to belittle her; Dad’s old colleagues dredge up the past; and the patients she encounters are either belligerent or sadly terminal. Glum stuff, but Gottlieb and DiMassa have a nicely tuned sense of gallows humor. The story (which takes its name from a book by Freud) is interspersed with lengthy stand-up jokes, told in one- or two-page breaks. Adding a little more light to the story is Jet, the raven-haired, overalls-wearing, skateboarding woman of Sasha’s dreams, though their relationship moves haltingly—Sasha has her father’s death and her neuroses about ex-boyfriends to work through, while Jet has a history of sexual abuse. It’s wordy for a graphic novel—there’s little room for images at all on some pages—and Gottlieb’s prose can be overwritten and digressive. And though it is broken out into digestible five- or six-page vignettes (an encounter with a patient here, a drunken hookup with a boy there), making the story move along somewhat disjointedly, toward the end, there’s so much chatter and varied plot points that the climax doesn’t have the impact it could have had. DiMassa helps manage some of those problems with nice metaphorical touches—she draws boys’ arms morphing into tentacles, a stick of dynamite planted in a heart valve, a computer monitor transformed into a snake’s head.
Spirited and often funny, but maddeningly discursive.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-57344-250-X
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Cleis
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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