A collection of details that might appeal to military history buffs.
Veteran illustrator Parker presents a graphic novel about his three years in the army during the late 1960s.
After a brief family history (he was an only child born to hardworking parents in 1940s Georgia, raised mainly by his bedridden grandmother, who instilled in him a love of comic strips), the artistically inclined Parker explains how flunking out of junior college led to his getting drafted by the Army and entering the strange world of military life as a 19-year-old. Parker narrates his experiences with sly humor and self-deprecation, capturing his overwhelm and isolation in the face of extremes both physical (pushups, running, simulated combat) and psychological (rigid rules for addressing others, for the size of bites at dinner, for who can walk on the sidewalk). With a keen eye for detail, Parker captures the process of spit-shining combat boots, and with a keen ear for storytelling, he reveals the gruesome aftermath of a drunk-driving accident. Parker eventually enters officer and artillery training—more from a general competency rather than any particular skill—and these developments keep him from being deployed to active combat in Vietnam. He stumbles through a series of responsibilities like training with German soldiers and organizing a military funeral. His interest in drawing recurs, as when he’s recruited to draw naked women for the walls of a makeshift officer’s pub, but it doesn’t develop into an arc. Parker hits humorous and emotional beats via skilled cartooning (exaggerated facial expression, outsized physicality), though his linework can feel caught between simple and intricate, with the weight of some lines flattening out details and rendering figures unappealingly stiff. Parker makes a pleasant narrator of his extreme experiences, but the work doesn’t coalesce into a larger statement on war or art or self.
A collection of details that might appeal to military history buffs.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781419761591
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Using modern language, McDonald spins the well-known tale of the two young, unrequited lovers. Set against Nagar’s at-times...
A bland, uninspired graphic adaptation of the Bard’s renowned love story.
Using modern language, McDonald spins the well-known tale of the two young, unrequited lovers. Set against Nagar’s at-times oddly psychedelic-tinged backgrounds of cool blues and purples, the mood is strange, and the overall ambiance of the story markedly absent. Appealing to what could only be a high-interest/low–reading level audience, McDonald falls short of the mark. He explains a scene in an open-air tavern with a footnote—“a place where people gather to drink”—but he declines to offer definitions for more difficult words, such as “dirges.” While the adaptation does follow the foundation of the play, the contemporary language offers nothing; cringeworthy lines include Benvolio saying to Romeo at the party where he first meets Juliet, “Let’s go. It’s best to leave now, while the party’s in full swing.” Nagar’s faces swirl between dishwater and grotesque, adding another layer of lost passion in a story that should boil with romantic intensity. Each page number is enclosed in a little red heart; while the object of this little nuance is obvious, it’s also unpleasantly saccharine. Notes after the story include such edifying tidbits about Taylor Swift and “ ‘Wow’ dialogs from the play” (which culls out the famous quotes).Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-93-80028-58-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Campfire
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
A Rand primer with pictures.
A graphic novel for devotees of Ayn Rand.
With its men who have become gods through rugged individualism, the fiction of Ayn Rand has consistently had something of a comic strip spirit to it. So the mating of Rand and graphic narrative would seem to be long overdue, with her 1938 novella better suited to a quick read than later, more popular work such as The Fountainhead (1943) and the epic Atlas Shrugged (1957). As Anthem shows, well before the Cold War (or even World War II), Rand was railing against the evils of any sort of collectivism and the stifling of individualism, warning that this represented a return to the Dark Ages. Here, her allegory hammers the point home. It takes place in the indeterminate future, a period after “the Great Rebirth” marked an end of “the Unmentionable Times.” Now people have numbers as names and speak of themselves as “we,” with no concept of “I.” The hero, drawn to stereotypical, flowing-maned effect by illustrator Staton, knows himself as Equality 7-2521 and knows that “it is evil to be superior.” A street sweeper, he stumbles upon the entrance to a tunnel, where he discovers evidence of scientific advancement, from a time when “men knew secrets that we have lost.” He inevitably finds a nubile mate. He calls her “the Golden One.” She calls him “the Unconquered.” Their love, of course, is forbidden, and not just because she is 17. After his attempt to play Prometheus, bringing light to a society that prefers the dark, the two escape to the “uncharted forest,” where they are Adam and Eve. “I have my mind. I shall live my own truth,” he proclaims, having belatedly discovered the first-person singular. The straightforward script penned by Santino betrays no hint of tongue-in-cheek irony.
A Rand primer with pictures.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-451-23217-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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