An achievement kindred to R. Crumb’s Genesis (2009), though less literal and more compressed.
In his first graphic novel, one classic artist channels another.
With all due respect to Dante, this is Chwast’s Divine Comedy, one that uses the poet’s masterwork as a launching pad for a flight to the creative heavens. An influential, revolutionary illustrator, Chwast (Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast, 2009, etc.) meets his match in one of the cornerstones of Western literature. Distilling Dante’s three volumes into little more than 100 pages of large panels (many of them page-sized), he adheres to the tri-partite structure of the original without overburdening the spirit with reverence. Chwast’s Dante has a jaunty fedora and a pipe clenched between his teeth; his Virgil is a bespectacled Brit with a bowler; his Beatrice has the beauty of a classic Hollywood glamour girl. Thus, just as Dante wrote in the Italian vernacular of his day at a time when Latin was the language of philosophy and religion, Chwast has recast the work in today’s vernacular of graphic narrative, sacrificing the literary poetry of the original for visual imagery that is thoroughly accessible. From the boiling river of blood and the rain of excrement in the circles of hell through the ascent into heaven’s ineffable beauty (as with Dante, the transitional stage of purgatory is less compelling than the extremes), the artist makes the Divine Comedy irresistibly comic and inspirationally transcendent.
An achievement kindred to R. Crumb’s Genesis (2009), though less literal and more compressed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-084-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hammond (stories: Breathe Something Nice, 1997, not reviewed) definitely goes for the baroque here. Overwrought and crammed...
Incest, suicide, and a dead baby—who could ask for anything more in a first novel?
Theodora Mapes writes copy for the kind of children’s catalogues that feature perfect velvet dresses and wooden toys. She’s not amused by the irony when she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant: any child of hers will have more than its share of psychological baggage. Her own mother, Marian, committed suicide when Theo was eight. Her cold, remote father denies it still, though he does admit his dead wife had a drinking problem. Theo can relate to that: she’s separated from husband Jackson, a phlegmatic midwesterner with an unquenchable thirst for beer. Living in southern California after leaving their Colorado home, Theo seeks the truth about the deaths of her mother and her baby sister Charlotte. The family is less than forthcoming: Dad says only that babies died more often in those days; older brother Corb is closemouthed to the extreme; even Evan, their garrulous former housekeeper, has nothing to add. Theo consoles herself with former boyfriend Gregg, churns out precious, adjective-laden copy, and continues her search for any concrete information about her mother’s demise. She happens upon a cache of medical and psychological evaluations and learns that Marian had attempted suicide several times, undergoing electroshock treatment and a stint in a mental hospital before succeeding. Then Theo finds her mother’s letters and discovers that not only had her grandfather raped Marian and younger sister Lyla, he’d done the same to four-year-old Theo. But wait There’s worse to come, as Marian’s correspondence continues with confessions of her own lurid misdeeds. Nothing daunted, Theo gives birth in due time to a daughter and showers her with healthy mother love and . . . milk.
Hammond (stories: Breathe Something Nice, 1997, not reviewed) definitely goes for the baroque here. Overwrought and crammed with often revolting detail.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57962-034-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
Distinguished by a keen sense of period detail and sharp pacing: Geary serves his subject with dignity and grace.
The author/illustrator of Jack the Ripper (1995) continues to focus on Victorian crime in this latest historical comic, part of a series on 19th-century murder, based on a true-life story so compelling it inspired a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. While Poe was intrigued by the philosophy of detection in the case, Geary’s apparent interest lies in its revelations about urban lowlife of mid–19th-century New York City. His thick-lined black-and-white narrative, with its loose, curvy edges and distinctive bulbous lettering, well suits this historical curiosity. Geary’s well-researched book recounts the mysterious death of Mary Rogers, a young single woman who lived with her mother near present-day City Hall. When her corpse washed up on the western side of the Hudson River, many journalists became fascinated by the possible reasons for her fate. Was she an innocent, brutally murdered by one of the boarders at her mother’s house? Was she killed by a jealous lover or by one of the many male admirers who patronized the tobacco store where she worked? Or was it a botched abortion? These questions captured the imagination of the contemporary public and press because, in Geary’s view, Mary’s story was a powerful cautionary tale of emerging city life, which the artist illuminates in many sidebar historical drawings. Unsolved in part because of the period’s inadequate forensic techniques, the story becomes “a testament to the unknown and unknowable,” and Geary’s visual airiness perfectly captures the mysteriousness at its core. This is certainly a far cry from his early work for National Lampoon and Heavy Metal.
Distinguished by a keen sense of period detail and sharp pacing: Geary serves his subject with dignity and grace.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56163-274-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: NBM
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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