At its best, a gorgeous, glorious inferno of imagination; at its worst, great art.
The eighth volume of the series collects 30 examples of graphic storytelling—either in whole or as excerpts—from graphic novels, pamphlet comics, newspapers, magazines, minicomics and Web comics.
Editor Smith (RASL, 2012, etc.) explains his selection criteria as “originality; grasp of the tools and syntax of panel-to-panel progression; and most important, if the thing surprised me, it was in.” In terms of surprises, Michael Kupperman’s “Scary Bathtub Stories” offers a hilariously absurdist, 1950s-style warning about the dangers of bathtubs, such as their ability to expose bathers to Lovecraft-ian beasties and horrific demises (“I can feel its eye-mouth on my genitals!!”). Wry wit and simple lines are on fine display in James Kochalka’s excerpts from American Elf, his semiautobiographical, slice-of-life comic strip featuring the artist and his family (and a cat who scratched Kochalka’s face “just because I tried to play him as a harmonica!”). The collection offers strong personal, emotional stories, the most striking being Derf Backderf’s “The Strange Boy,” excerpted from his fascinating memoir-cum–investigative journalism about his adolescent friendship with Jeffrey Dahmer. Backderf presents a sympathetic though creepy portrait of the future serial killer, made all the more perverse when viewed through the cartoonish, R. Crumb/Mad Magazine lens of his art. Another standout is Eleanor Davis’ “Nita Goes Home,” a near-future homecoming that ingeniously nails its science-fiction tropes, highlighted by a scene in which two sisters mourn their father’s passing, clinging to each other and bawling while the suits they wear for protection against a degraded environment render their faces as expressionless bedsheet ghosts. The best panel work comes in Sam Alden’s pulse-pounding “Turn Back,” Sammy Harkham’s fine-lined grotesquerie “A Husband and a Wife,” Joseph Lambert’s chalky depiction of a young Hellen Keller’s world in “Discipline” and the percussive pulp punches of Tony Puryear’s “Concrete Park: (Chapter 1).” While all the stories are executed crisply, some feel a bit pat (Vanessa Davis’ “In the Rough”) or uninspired (Faith Erin Hicks’ “Raiders”) or strain for cleverness (Grant Snider’s “Four Comics”).
At its best, a gorgeous, glorious inferno of imagination; at its worst, great art.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-99546-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
PERSPECTIVES
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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