An impressive, memorable anthology highlighting writers and artists of color.
A collection delivers comics by artists of color from around the world.
Bringing together short graphic narratives from 32 contributing artists, debut editor Stotts has crafted a group exhibition that showcases the deep and diverse talent available in the realm of comics. The anthology is a response, in part, to the dearth of creators of color represented in mainstream comic publishing. As Shing Yin Khor writes in the foreword: “We are tired of the scraps being offered to us at the traditional publishing table, when we have already proven...that there is both an audience and a market for our voice and our work.” The pieces are united by aesthetic and theme. Each is colored mostly in black and white, with select use of red to highlight elements within the narrative. Each deals in some way with the idea of fire, and many feature storylines that revolve around loneliness, inadequacy, untapped ability, and unexpected friendship. Some pieces miss the mark, providing either too little or too much information to hook the reader in just a few pages. Others use simplicity to their advantage, as in the cinematic “Cactus Flower,” by Sarah DuVall, in which lush panels and a few sparse words document a woman’s mysterious magical rite. The equally laconic but visually busy “Metta Helmet,” by Deshan Tennekoon and Isuri Merenchi Hewage, offers a fable on the contagiousness of kindness. In “Breathe,” Kiku Hughes creates an apocalyptic folk tale from the distant future that is as universal as it is inscrutable. Other standouts include the fantastical “Firefly” by Myisha Haynes, the abbreviated space opera “Pulse” by Der-Shing Helmer, and the heartwarming “Starfall” by Ash G., which ends on the lovely sentiment—shared by two young seekers—that “we’ll find the answers without hurting anybody, won’t we?” The comics are meant for readers of all ages, and while each is accessible enough for youngsters to enjoy, most grapple with larger concerns that are relatable to a much older audience. Both longtime fans of comics and readers new to the medium should find plenty here to entertain and inspire.
An impressive, memorable anthology highlighting writers and artists of color.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9982828-0-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beyond Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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