An excellent encapsulation of what makes sequential art such a compelling, singular art form.
Editor Gloeckner (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 2002, etc.) and series editor Kartalopoulos curate the 13th annual collection of North American sequential art.
As Gloeckner states in her wonderful introduction, these are auteur comics—works birthed from a single creator (with the exception of one father-son team)—rather than the ensemble approach (writer, artist, inker, letterer) often seen in commercial comics, not to mention the by-committee production employed in TV and movies. While independent comics stalwarts such as Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly published many of these stories, self-published books make up a good chunk of the collection. The low-to-no budget required to produce comics allows for the indulgence of outsider visions, like the compellingly bizarre “Untitled” from Michael Ridge (guy and girl cruising in an old car, thick black lines inexplicably spilling from their eyes and mouths, closing with the repeated refrain “Buy Fuckin Pickels”) or Max Clotfelter’s “The Warlock Story,” an autobiographical tale of the artist’s shy, unpopular early days in school drawing outrageously violent and sexually explicit comics on notebook pages, which simultaneously earned him interest from cool kids and deep concern from school officials and his mother. Many of the works tackle contemporary issues such as gender identity, global terrorism, and class warfare. Others explore timeless concepts like artists struggling against the strictures of art school. The most effective have a sense of humor (Aaron Lange’s “Selections from Art School” or Keiler Roberts’ “Sunburning”). Sometimes the more refined and impressive the art, the less resonant the stories (Ted Stearn’s “The Moolah Tree”). But each story excels on some level, from intimate confessions to surreal mythologies.
An excellent encapsulation of what makes sequential art such a compelling, singular art form.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-46460-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
A gorgeous symphony.
Illustrator McGuire (What’s Wrong With This Book, 1997, etc.) once again frames a fixed space across the millennia.
McGuire’s original treatment of the concept—published in 1989 in Raw magazine as six packed pages—here gives way to a graphic novel’s worth of two-page spreads, and the work soars in the enlarged space. Pages unspool like a player-piano roll, each spread filled by a particular time, while inset, ever shifting panels cut windows to other eras, everything effervescing with staggered, interrelated vignettes and arresting images. Researchers looking for Native American artifacts in 1986 pay a visit to the house that sprouts up in 1907, where a 1609 Native American couple flirtatiously recalls the legend of a local insatiable monster, while across the room, an attendee of a 1975 costume party shuffles in their direction, dressed as a bear with arms outstretched. A 1996 fire hose gushes into a 1934 floral bouquet, its shape echoed by a billowing sheet on the following page, in 2015. There’s a hint of Terrence Malick’s beautiful malevolence as panels of nature—a wolf in 1430 clenching its prey’s bloody haunch; the sun-dappled shallows of 2113’s new sea—haunt scenes of domesticity. McGuire also plays with the very concept of panels: a boy flaunts a toy drum in small panels of 1959 while a woman in 1973 sets up a projection screen (a panel in its own right) that ultimately displays the same drummer boy from a new angle; in 2050, a pair of old men play with a set of holographic panels arranged not unlike the pages of the book itself and find a gateway to the past. Later spreads flash with terrible and ancient supremacy, impending cataclysm, and distant, verdant renaissance, then slow to inevitable, irresistible conclusion. The muted colors and soft pencils further blur individual moments into a rich, eons-spanning whole.
A gorgeous symphony.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-375-40650-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
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