An authentic, well-rendered exploration of family trauma and the challenges of contemporary life.
McGuire and Chevarier examine modern masculinity in this frank, multifaceted graphic novel.
Pat and Mathieu are friends and fathers living in Montreal. Both are in a bit of a rut. Mathieu put aside his artistic ambitions as a filmmaker to become a stay-at-home dad. Pat, who has two kids—a boy and a girl—is on a teaching sabbatical and picking up the slack at home while his successful wife, an urban planner, frequently travels for work. A former college basketball player, Pat still dreams of dunking, which is really more about taking control of his life. The story soon zeroes in on Pat’s family. Pat has a complicated relationship with his alcoholic father, whom he only sees about once every three years. His father is illustrated in Chevarier’s expressive pencil sketching as permanently morose: frowning, hunched, a dark cloud shuffling along with a six-pack. Pat worries about his lineage of anger manifesting as momentary rage, one he fears has been passed from his father to him. In the moments when Pat takes out his anger on his son, Chevarier portrays him as transforming into a terrifying bear. Pat becomes increasingly absorbed in researching his father’s rarely mentioned service in Vietnam, particularly the medal he’s never discussed. Pat becomes so engrossed in this research that he ignores his son’s mounting anger issues and misses his wife’s gentle cues to focus on the future rather than the past. Throughout, the book has explicit, raw scenes, thorny conversations, and brief insights into the idea of epigenetic trauma. The artwork is always arresting, usually realistic, but sometimes shifting with the emotional states of the characters. The female characters in the story seem a bit underdeveloped, although such underdevelopment feels true to the novel’s theme about men who are exploring their own roles in modern parenting and life.
An authentic, well-rendered exploration of family trauma and the challenges of contemporary life.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781545808412
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Immensely enjoyable.
The debut graphic novel from Mohamed presents a modern Egypt full of magical realism where wishes have been industrialized and heavily regulated.
The story opens with a televised public service announcement from the General Committee of Wish Supervision and Licensing about the dangers of “third-class wishes”—wishes that come in soda cans and tend to backfire on wishers who aren’t specific enough (like a wish to lose weight resulting in limbs falling from the wisher’s body). Thus begins a brilliant play among magic, the mundane, and bureaucracy that centers around a newsstand kiosk where a devout Muslim is trying to unload the three “first-class wishes” (contained in elegant glass bottles and properly licensed by the government) that have come into his possession, since he believes his religion forbids him to use them. As he gradually unloads the first-class wishes on a poor, regretful widow (who then runs afoul of authorities determined to manipulate her out of her valuable commodity) and a university student who seeks a possibly magical solution to their mental health crisis (but struggles with whether a wish to always be happy might have unintended consequences), interstitials give infographic histories of wishes, showing how the Western wish-industrial complex has exploited the countries where wishes are mined (largely in the Middle East). The book is exceptionally imaginative while also being wonderfully grounded in touching human relationships, existential quandaries, and familiar geopolitical and socio-economic dynamics. Mohamed’s art balances perfectly between cartoon and realism, powerfully conveying emotions, and her strong, clean lines gorgeously depict everything from an anguished face to an ornate bottle. Charts and graphs nicely break up the reading experience while also concisely building this larger world of everyday wishes. Mohamed has a great sense of humor, which comes out in footnotes and casual asides throughout.
Immensely enjoyable.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-524-74841-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
