It’s called “best” for a reason.
Series editor Kartalopoulos taps Tamaki (They Say Blue, 2018, etc.) to help curate the 2019 edition of this annual collection of exceptional graphic storytelling.
In her introduction, Tamaki observes, “It’s not a bad time to make comics, if one absolutely must and is able to do so, and one’s work is marketable enough.” The wry caveat nods to an eternal struggle: The labor-intensive craft of comic creation often means small financial return for creators. Perhaps stating this struggle up front cleared the collection to plunge directly into art itself; though Lauren Weinstein’s “Being an Artist and a Mother” entwines art and money in her struggle to retain her productive-artist self once she gives birth to her first child (“unless you can pay [for child care]…you don’t have access to your hands”), the story is mostly about Weinstein’s connection to a past artist whose painting captivated her as a new mother. Eleanor Davis’ incisive “Hurt or Fuck” contemplates art and human need on an allegorical, visceral level in what could almost be a two-actor stage play. Erik Nebel’s “Why Don’t We Come Together” ingeniously explores the possibilities of a rigid format—repeating but shifting shapes and colors, figures and patterns play across a set of equal-sized panels stacked into a grid, clicking through simple, whimsical stories like a filmstrip of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Jed McGowan’s “Uninhabitable” explores the forces of change as well, old and new colliding in a science-fiction tale of terraforming, hive minds, action, reaction, and creation. The collection also includes an excerpt from the first graphic novel longlisted for the Booker Prize, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and new work by master of graphic journalism Joe Sacco on the topic of climate and economy.
It’s called “best” for a reason.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-358-06728-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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