The anthology suggests that, thankfully, this extended family isn’t close to exhausting its creative potential.
Don’t be fooled by the prosaic title or the whiff of pedagogy in the introduction; this is the world of comics—or at least the North American, English-speaking part of that world—at its liveliest.
The second anthology edited by Brunetti (volume one was published in 2006) showcases some of the form’s history and development, highlights some of the best and better-known contemporary artists and introduces some cutting-edge innovators working at the vanguard of form and collage. The thematic organization by the editor (a Chicago-based professor and cartoonist) is compellingly idiosyncratic, juxtaposing Chris Ware’s one-pager of a superhero named “God” with R. Sikoryak’s series of covers for the fictional Action Camus series—a takeoff on Action Comics with a superhero who is part Superman, part Albert Camus’s The Stranger. The work included addresses plenty of psycho-philosophical issues—death, identity, dreams, memory, death and the possibility of an afterlife—while also including a tribute to MAD magazine’s creator Harvey Kurtzman, with his work followed by extended graphic celebrations by such leading acolytes as Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. The latter stresses how far Kurtzman’s influence extended beyond fellow artists to the culture at large: “I think Harvey’s MAD was more important than pot and LSD in shaping the generation that protested the Vietnam War.” The obsessions probed throughout the anthology are as personal as the artistry, with Crumb offering a series of strips on record collecting (the first in collaboration with Harvey Pekar) and the exotic lure of what were once known as “race records”; Joe Matt on porn addiction; and Lynda Barry on dancing (and “keepers of the groove”). In David Heatley’s closing “ Portrait of My Mom” and “Portrait of My Dad,” it’s plain that what he’s really offering is a portrait of himself. Explains Brunetti, “I have tried to represent a variety of approaches while retaining a sense of wholeness and interconnectedness among the stories. If the first volume viewed comics as a developing human being, then this volume treats them as an extended family.”
The anthology suggests that, thankfully, this extended family isn’t close to exhausting its creative potential.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-300-12671-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
In his first fiction in nearly 30 years, Cabot (The Joshua Tree, 1970) offers an exemplary trio of novellas, each occupied with the theme of reconciliation to oneself and one’s losses, presented in often stunning prose. Each tale is told from multiple perspectives——generally, those of several male members of a single family’spanning decades and, in the first novella, —Breath of the Earth,— centuries. —Breath— chronicles a Mediterranean village’s fortunes, conflicts, and sufferings. Cabot’s rendering of places, though they are often too stylized to reveal their real-world basis, is marvelous: The olive trees, parched dirt, and wine, however underspecified (is that Mediterranean land really Italy?), become hypnotically real as a history of fierce pirates, wayward sons, and, the most powerful of all malefactors, modernization, unfolds. Cabot’s scale and tone are intimate and sometimes impressionistic, but the pleasure of the volume is less in what happens—often events that are hard to place or even identify—than in the way the tales are told. Cabot’s mode throughout is elegiac: His narrators are woeful though not bitter. In —A Rat in the Boardroom,— a son learns and finally leads the business his father established. By selecting discontinuous scenes from different stages of each man’s life, Cabot persuasively depicts the son’s inability to comprehend his father’s view of the world—and the ways each man’s values corrode the other’s idea of what makes life worthwhile—as intractable. The final tale, —Touch of Dust,— completes the progression from village through family with its story of the solitary artist who attempts to wrestle his past into meaning and who emerges with an inspiring conviction about the love he has known. For all its extraordinary lack of specificity, Cabot’s incantatory prose memorably captures the dramatic tragedy of living, and the precious, endangered whimper of redemption.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1999
ISBN: 0-929701-60-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
French comics artist Juillard, best known for his graphic novel, The Blue Notebook, here picks up a few characters from that work, and spins off a full-color narrative that’s best when he relies strictly on wordless frames. Juillard’s cinematic simplicity and his amazingly detailed backgrounds overwhelm the intrigue in the foreground—a commonplace thriller with few surprises. Abel Mias, a chubby Parisian schoolteacher, spots in a local gallery a photographic portrait of his old friend Tristan, a sculptor who disappeared a year earlier. The recent photo confirms that Tristan has indeed run off with the stunning Clara, an enchanting—and married—beauty whose desperate husband enlists her sleazy brother in an ill-fated plot to find her. Abel spends his vacation near Florence, tracking down the slim leads, and proves more efficient than the police. The final violent sequences, with murders and an attempted rape, display Juillard’s stunning visual skill. Elsewhere, he enhances his story with thugs straight from the film Diva and a splendid sequence worthy of Hitchcock—Abel witnesses a crime through binoculars. Only the final, wordy denouement detracts from this otherwise taut and sophisticated tale.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56163-223-6
Page Count: 56
Publisher: NBM
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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