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
BOOK REVIEW
Widely published illustrator and comic-strip artist Kuper does more than merely provide pictures for nine of Kafka's narratives. He edits the text sharply, and concentrates various descriptions into his singular scratchboard drawings. The result is unevensome pieces nicely capture Kafka's cityscapes in angular designs reminiscent of ``The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.'' Others update the time and place, an idea that works particularly well in ``The Trees,'' a striking tale of indifference to the homeless, with menacing images of police brutality. The project, on the whole, seems a bit hastily conceived; each story begins with a powerful splash page that defies conventional graphic panel design, but then the stories often peter out, with images less and less fully imagined. Hand-lettering would also have improved the visual impact of these black and white texts. Nevertheless, a worthy companion volume to R. Crumb's recent Introducing Kafka.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56163-125-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: NBM
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A prominent critic of Chicano literature tries his hand at a novela conventional romance that tarts itself up as a postmodern study in obsession and perspective. Bruce-Novoa's debut has the makings of a modest, sociologically interesting coming-of-age narrative: the story of an assimilated Mexican-American boy in Los Angeles during the '50s and '60s. Instead, the author overreaches and turns his protagonist's first love into a goddess of mythic proportions. She's the ``American Dream,'' the blond ideal, a madonna too good to defile. Later, when Paul Valencia becomes Paul Valence, a successful screenwriter, he even claims to have inspired George Lucas's unattainable blond driving a convertible in American Graffiti. And that's just a small indication of where this ambitious novel goes wrong. The first half of the story nicely recounts the innocence and frustrations of Catholic schoolboysthe sports, the psycho nuns and the nurturing ones, and, of course, the early awareness of girls. Paul's great love is one Ann Marisse, a blond Italian- American from a large and friendly family. Despite some furtive kisses and gropings, Paul saves his pent-up sexuality for a series of less perfect girls until Ann Marisse finally gets wind of his other life and they eventually split. The novel abruptly shifts to many years later, with Paul realizing that all his film work derives from the same primal scene: his first look at Ann Marisse. Though married to a famous European actress, Paul still swoons for his ideal woman, now married to a childhood enemy. He finally returns from his long European exile to create his dreamscape in Carmel, though it's not clear whom he's enjoying it with at the self-consciously poetic end. A meta-level overlaycomplete with footnotes and commentaryweighs too heavily on an otherwise amiable and nostalgic narrative.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55885-078-3
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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