Newcomer Sheridan makes too much haste toward a happy ending, but, still, his first is a moving, unflinching portrait of...
A family drama in two acts, Sheridan's debut is a sensitive study of working-class perils as a boy-turned-man struggles to love the tough but fragile contradiction that is his mother.
Lorraine is a hard-drinking, oxygen-toting, wheelchair-bound wreck who still lives in the inner-city neighborhood where she raised her son Teddie. Though he's long since moved on to become a somewhat respectable college professor, Teddie still visits Lorraine, still cares for her in the detached way he's learned to protect himself, and still matches her bourbon for bourbon in spite of having taken the pledge. But he remains baffled by her. As they sit in Lorraine’s filthy apartment, boys from the ’hood outside being paid to watch Teddie's wheels so they don't get stolen, mother and son cover the same ground as always. Teddie's early childhood is full of fractures: days or nights spent with his father's parents while Lorraine worked different shifts at the steel mill; times spent with Lorraine as she cursed his drunken, absent father; rare but ineluctable visits from Dad—the time when he came to them bleeding profusely from a barroom brawl, or when he snuck Teddie into the bar while he got drunk with his girlfriend, only to be caught by Lorraine and beaten by her steelworker friend Trudy after he broke his wife's wrist. Teddie recalls the change in Lorraine after his sister was born dead, when depression gripped her and wouldn't let go. And he cannot forget the close of his family melodrama, when in the bitter divorce proceedings he had to choose between his grandparents, his drunken dad, and his depressed mama, who had taken up with the lesbian Trudy. Though long shadowed by this past, Teddie does love Lorraine and finally takes the step that will lay those memories to rest.
Newcomer Sheridan makes too much haste toward a happy ending, but, still, his first is a moving, unflinching portrait of filial duty and tough motherly love.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57962-035-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.
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. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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