An invaluable time capsule and an arresting expression of the human condition.
Editor and comic-shop owner Fowler curates a collection of more than 140 nine-panel-grid comic strips created during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic by a variety of artists responding to his call to envision the utopia waiting on the other side of quarantine.
The foreword and introduction explain how Fowler, quarantining in a rural Connecticut cabin after shuttering his Brooklyn storefront, posted to the shop’s Instagram account a call to make art with the purpose of buoying a beleaguered populace. Though overwhelmingly North American and European and always in English, responses came from around the globe: three-by-three grids of left-to-right sequential art, whimsical, sentimental, psychedelic, and sometimes all three at once. Many of the works collected here express a longing for physical touch, a yearning for reunions with friends and lovers and even the casual physicality of busy bars and bustling sidewalks. Others celebrate the slowing down that accompanied quarantine, savoring simple pleasures and walks in nature and the idea that an earth ravaged by industry was healing through the deceleration or even cessation of human activity. Many depict transcendent journeys through the cosmos and/or planes of existence, encountering more than a few ghosts and cosmic entities. Pets feature prominently, with one small pup teleporting from his couch to an alien world where he snatches mutated coronaviruses from the air like they were spiky tennis balls, chomping and chewing the plague into submission. The most poignant feel grimly optimistic, seeing the quarantine as an opportunity to reset oppression and inequality (“Normal wasn’t working for most of us”). Vividly expressed through linework with occasional collage, these individual accounts of a shared event strum the cord that connects us. Our current fraught postquarantine moment haunts the pages, and time will tell if it is unfinished business or missed opportunity.
An invaluable time capsule and an arresting expression of the human condition.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593316801
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Immensely enjoyable.
The debut graphic novel from Mohamed presents a modern Egypt full of magical realism where wishes have been industrialized and heavily regulated.
The story opens with a televised public service announcement from the General Committee of Wish Supervision and Licensing about the dangers of “third-class wishes”—wishes that come in soda cans and tend to backfire on wishers who aren’t specific enough (like a wish to lose weight resulting in limbs falling from the wisher’s body). Thus begins a brilliant play among magic, the mundane, and bureaucracy that centers around a newsstand kiosk where a devout Muslim is trying to unload the three “first-class wishes” (contained in elegant glass bottles and properly licensed by the government) that have come into his possession, since he believes his religion forbids him to use them. As he gradually unloads the first-class wishes on a poor, regretful widow (who then runs afoul of authorities determined to manipulate her out of her valuable commodity) and a university student who seeks a possibly magical solution to their mental health crisis (but struggles with whether a wish to always be happy might have unintended consequences), interstitials give infographic histories of wishes, showing how the Western wish-industrial complex has exploited the countries where wishes are mined (largely in the Middle East). The book is exceptionally imaginative while also being wonderfully grounded in touching human relationships, existential quandaries, and familiar geopolitical and socio-economic dynamics. Mohamed’s art balances perfectly between cartoon and realism, powerfully conveying emotions, and her strong, clean lines gorgeously depict everything from an anguished face to an ornate bottle. Charts and graphs nicely break up the reading experience while also concisely building this larger world of everyday wishes. Mohamed has a great sense of humor, which comes out in footnotes and casual asides throughout.
Immensely enjoyable.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-524-74841-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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