Though a bit of a period piece, a lovely and wholehearted coming-out story.
From Belgium, the graphic novel on which the 2013 Palme d’Or–winning film of the same name was based.
Clementine is 15 in 1994 when she sees a beautiful young woman with blue hair crossing the plaza. That night, the woman figures in an erotic dream, and her world is rocked. “I had no right to have thoughts like that.” When she meets blue-haired Emma for real, she begins an at-first platonic relationship with the art student, who tells Clementine of her own coming out. The relationship turns sexual (graphically, beautifully so) and complicated. The story is told in flashback; readers meet a years-older Emma in the aftermath of Clementine’s funeral as she reads Clementine’s teenage diaries. The late-2000s scenes are somber and washed with blues, while the bulk of the tale is drawn in delicate black, gray and white with strategic highlights of blue. The text is occasionally clunky and purposive—“We do not choose the one we fall in love with, and our perception of happiness is our own and is determined by what we experience…”—but the illustrations are infused with genuine, raw feeling. Wide-eyed Clementine wears every emotion on her sleeve, and even if today’s teens will feel that her mid-’90s experience is rather antique, they will understand her journey perfectly.
Though a bit of a period piece, a lovely and wholehearted coming-out story. (Graphic historical fiction. 16 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55152-514-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Reads more often like a lecture than a graphic novel.
This illustrated peace polemic and lesson in international relations is often educational but only occasionally engaging.
The unusual collaboration teams Roberson, formerly a peace-studies major at Berkeley, with artist Piskor and writer Pekar, who established his reputation through graphic memoir (and whose American Splendor series inspired the well-received film). More recently, Pekar has been telling stories other than his (Ego and Hubris, 2006, etc.), and here he recounts a student research trip taken by Roberson to discover how Macedonia was able to avoid the civil war and ethnic cleansing that had beset so much of what was formerly Yugoslavia. The challenge is to convey the complexities of the situation in graphic form, which amounts to large stretches of Roberson engaging in debate or explanatory dialogue. In the first part, a boyfriend seems there only to serve as a sounding board, allowing Roberson to expound on the history of the Balkans and the peacekeeping efforts in Macedonia. After Roberson decides to go on a quixotic mission to Macedonia for thesis research, the boyfriend drops out of the picture, without explanation. Her travel adventures make for livelier reading, as she becomes frustrated with men hitting on her and a hotel clerk trying to cheat her, while absorbing as much of the culture as she can, forging strong friendships and learning how Macedonia has been able to avoid the fate of its neighbors. The narrative doesn’t whitewash the situation. The Macedonians aren’t necessarily more noble than anyone else, and the ethnic tensions with Albanians threaten the same sort of strife as has torn neighboring Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet the Macedonians have remained committed to war prevention, rather than using the threat of war as a means of sustaining peace. Though there’s a lot of personality in Piskor’s illustrations, a picture plainly isn’t worth a thousand words in this text-heavy work (that ends with an all-text epilogue, presumably written by Roberson).
Reads more often like a lecture than a graphic novel.Pub Date: June 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-345-49899-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gives credit where due, but not in a manner that is likely to please conservative partisans.
Part primer, part polemic, this graphic biography scratches the surface of what its creators depict as a comic-book presidency.
Though the life of Ronald Reagan has previously inspired a number of longer biographies, even some of those have suggested that the challenge of coming to terms with the “Great Communicator” is that there wasn’t much intellectual depth beneath the actor’s engaging façade. Written by Helfer (Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography, 2006, etc.), a former group editor at DC Comics, this hit-and-run graphic narrative reinforces that position, taking a tour through the life of a man who began playing roles as a nearsighted teenage lifeguard (when his record of 77 rescues was apparently inflated by aiding those who were in no danger of drowning) and then mastered the art of dramatizing baseball games where he wasn’t in attendance as a studio radio announcer. In Hollywood, he made more of an impression as a union activist and corporate pitchman than through most of the roles he secured as an actor, while failing at a first marriage that seemed more like a career convenience. It was in politics he found his greatest success, the role of a lifetime, as long as he kept things simple and stuck to the script. (When he went off-message, he was likely to make claims that had no basis in fact.) The narrative touches all the high points: his transformation into conservative crusader and election to the governorship of California, the adoring Nancy, the striking contrast he presented to the ineffectual Jimmy Carter, a presidency marked by an assassination attempt and the Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages scandal (one of the controversies that the Teflon president deflected with a convenient lapse of memory), the long fade into the Alzheimer’s sunset.
Gives credit where due, but not in a manner that is likely to please conservative partisans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9507-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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