A must-have for comic historians and those interested in gothic romances, romance comics, and LGBTQ interpretations of...
This anthology pays tribute to the gothic-romance style seen in comic books from their 1960s and ‘70s heyday, updating them in fresh ways.
Like the novels they’re based on, gothic-romance comic books “embodied the best of the gothic-romance tradition—isolated and eerie locations, inherited crumbling manors, family secrets, ghosts, secret identities, and passions heightened by mysterious circumstances,” plus the iconic image of a woman in a white nightgown running away from a dark mansion. The 20 pieces collected here by Nicholson (The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen, 2017, etc.) and Beiko (Scion of the Fox, 2017, etc.) vary in style, tone, and subject but always play with the genre and reader expectations in creative ways. For example, the opening story, “Crush” (writing by Janet Hetherington; art by Ronn Sutton; color art by Becka Kizie; lettering by Zakk Saam), employs a traditional comic-book style and seems at first to be a typical, suspenseful gothic setup: A governess goes to a lonely mansion owned by a ship’s captain whose “eyes are as wild as the sea.” (With his seven children, the story has amusing resonance with The Sound of Music as well.) Not so typical is that the heroine, Constance Mayhew, is black, and the children are undaunted by their harsh father. Other stories, too, turn the tables on tradition. Besides people of color, they also offer powerful heroines; gay and lesbian characters; a mix of several fresh artistic styles; modern-day settings; outcomes that don’t depend on winning love; stories in Vietnamese and Korean; and even a quiz (“How grave is your misfortune?”). By turns romantic, dreamy, death-haunted, or tongue-in-cheek, this is a splendid offering, entertaining on its own and provokingly genre-bending. Editors Nicholson and Beiko have done readers a real service by assembling such a diverse, attractive collection by talented writers and artists. Their love for the genre comes through, and this volume is likely to gain more fans.
A must-have for comic historians and those interested in gothic romances, romance comics, and LGBTQ interpretations of traditional forms—highly entertaining.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-988715-07-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Bedside Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A slim novel, both in its emotion and construction, set in 1972, centering on a family coming to grips with the death of a son and the closing of their small town’s factory. The Vietnam War is gradually ending and Watergate is heating up, but these two giant events in US history serve only as backdrop to the personal anguish of the MacLeans. When 18-year-old Cory dies in a summer-job mining accident, the family unravels at the loss of their golden boy—blatantly the favorite son, popular, good, and college bound. Cory’s death leaves a hole in the family that older brother Mike and younger brother Stephan feel compelled, yet unable, to fill. The black sheep of the family, Mike drifts from one low-paying job to the next; after work, he spends his time barroom brawling, or fighting with his bitter father. Stephan, still in school, wants to be a musician, although now, with Cory’s passing, he feels the pressure to take the straight and narrow to college, to live out the life that Cory lost. Add to this the disenchantment of parents Bud and Lola, laid off when the bottle factory closed down, and the tale provides fertile ground for examining the failure of the American Dream. This slow-moving effort, however, just scratches the surface, shifting from one landscape-focused event to another, rarely exploring the emotional terror that lurks within each character. Nieman offers some gemlike observations—the desperation of the town slut, holiday shopping at the local department store, Bud’s frustration at being retrained in computers—but she can—t quite sustain a storyline that refuses to progress. The bleak ending, derived from a lack of resolution, is in a sense admirable, and true to the resignation the characters hold for the future; it also reinforces, though, the lack of movement that defines the rest of the narrative. A potentially powerful work that fails itself through lack of focus.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-9657639-6-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
What happens to hippies who sell out 20 years down the pike? They become the subject of books like this witty debut about aging boomers’ gradual accommodation to reality. Janelle and Tom may not have been the original flower children, but they were certainly on the scene. Married in the late 1960s, both were involved in various antiwar and liberation movements, and for a few weeks they even sheltered two members of a Weathermen-like underground on the lam for killing a Boston cop during a bank robbery. Later on, they wandered across the country, and Tom, while working at a university, eventually learned to program computers. When Janelle gave birth to their son Zak, Tom built a cabin for them in Valdosta, Georgia, where he found work as a computer designer. Life is going along happily for the pair when they are confronted with a ghost from their past in the person of Michael “Angel” Martelli. An old friend from movement days, Angel calls out of the blue asking if he can drop by for a chat; he’s now a lawyer, and it turns out that he’s concerned about Katherine Powers, one of the bank robbers Tom and Janelle sheltered 30 years back. Katherine has decided to turn herself in, and Angel (who arranged for her to stay with Tom and Janelle) is afraid that his name might come up in the case and hurt his career. Janelle promises to say nothing, but inwardly she begins to wonder about the value of all they once believed in. She’s also increasingly distraught over Zak’s imminent departure for college. Has she lost her ideals? Or has she simply put those ideals into private life? Perhaps “the personal is political,” as they used to say, though in a way that Janelle could not have guessed until now. Somewhat rambling and obvious, but told with a fresh voice and infused with a likable spirit: even Young Republicans might be taken in.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-9657639-3-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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