by Gabrielle Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2006
These slice-of-life, matter-of-fact (and occasionally fantasy) strips sustain a wry, bittersweet humor and disarming warmth.
Struggling artists of all types (and those who love them) will find a kindred spirit in this graphic diarist/memoirist.
Nothing all that momentous happens in the comics of Bell (When I’m Old and Other Stories, 2005), but her accounts of the frustrations of finding apartments, dealing with roommates and supporting herself with odd jobs (from nude modeling to assisting a more commercially successful artist, who takes credit for some of Bell’s work) ring engagingly true. There’s a childlike innocence to her drawings that complements the confessional intimacy of her work. The first and longest section takes the form of a six-week journal, mainly a six-panel strip per day. It shows Bell and her boyfriend, Tom, attempting to find apartments and suitable roommates for each other (cohabitation apparently doesn’t strike either of them as a good idea) and encountering a menagerie of humanity in the process. It seems the best way to make a roommate situation work is to communicate by Post-it notes and only be there when the other isn’t. The saddest story concerns the loss of her sketchbook (a month’s worth of work and the second issue of Lucky) in a rush to catch an airplane. The funniest episode finds Bell teaching drawing to a couple of French boys, whose major interest lies in drawing comics with vulgarities and obscenities. The last and shortest entry takes a turn toward the surreal, as a hole in the bathroom wall exacerbates conflicts between a couple, until the man crawls into the hole, never to return.
These slice-of-life, matter-of-fact (and occasionally fantasy) strips sustain a wry, bittersweet humor and disarming warmth.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-897299-01-X
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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by Gabrielle Bell illustrated by Gabrielle Bell
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by Gabrielle Bell illustrated by Gabrielle Bell
by Jason Lutes ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.
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
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by Jason Lutes & illustrated by Nick Bertozzi
by Geoffrey Chaucer and Peter Ackroyd and illustrated by Nick Bantock ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 16, 2009
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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by Geoffrey Chaucer adapted and illustrated by Seymour Chwast
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by Geoffrey Chaucer & translated by Burton Raffel
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by Geoffrey Chaucer ; translated by Burton Raffel
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