edited by Lynda Barry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2008
The third annual anthology in this series is the best yet, with inspired work from a variety of relative unknowns mixed with that from artists who enjoy great renown in this burgeoning field.
As series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden write in their preface, “Anthologies are the place where young cartoonists get a break, where they can hope to be published alongside the likes of Chris Ware and Matt Groening, and to be noticed by the likes of Lynda Barry.” Though many of the best, or at least the most ambitious, graphic narratives in recent years are larger in scope, the editors opt here for shorter, self-contained pieces, of the type pioneered by Barry in her Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and collected in volumes such as The! Greatest! Of! Marlys! Readers who know Groening only as the creator of The Simpsons will discover a whole new dimension to his work in the “Will and Abe” selections from his Life in Hell strip, while Ware’s “The Thanksgiving Series” of covers for the New Yorker reinforces his emergence from the comix underground into the literary mainstream. Yet the explosion of energy in John Mejias’s “The Teachers Edition,” which chronicles the challenge of teaching art to grade schoolers in the Bronx, shows that mainstream acceptance hasn’t tamed the form’s more radical impulses. In the contributors’ notes, Mejias writes that he “hopes to document my dealings with board of education bureaucracies as I try to make human connections in an inhuman atmosphere.” Other highlights range from the wordless to the word heavy, and from the socially conscious to the dreamlike—the volume as a whole suggests the seemingly limitless variety that the format permits. Perhaps the best testament to the magic of comics is Barry’s illustrated introduction, which she devotes to work that was not included, but which has profoundly affected her.
A treasure trove of discovery for fanatics and initiates alike.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-98976-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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by Mark Twain ; adapted by Seymour Chwast ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2014
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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by Geoffrey Chaucer and Peter Ackroyd and illustrated by Nick Bantock ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 16, 2009
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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