A powerfully disturbing graphic narrative from an author with a lot to say and plenty of creative chops to say it...
A graphic manifesto for female empowerment and a punch to the gut of predatory males.
The young, British female artist who has taken the name Una (“meaning One, one life, one of many”) recounts her years of coming-of-age when the Yorkshire Ripper rampaged as a serial killer of prostitutes (and other women he considered of dubious moral value) and seemed almost to serve as some sort of moral barometer in a country that had its own problems concerning female sexuality. During a time of slut shaming and victim blaming, which have hardly disappeared, a young woman coming-of-age with punk-rock rebellion and her own emerging sexual desires could feel conflicted and alone, as those victimized (as she was, more than once) could often feel before the internet would take that victimization viral. The author was told that “there was a problem and it was located in me,” that the source of her anxiety and depression might be better treated through psychological therapy than through legal redress for crimes that she, as the victim, felt afraid to confess. “So I became an unreliable witness and a perfect victim,” she writes. With a sensory overload of text and visual variety, readers share the unsettling feelings as the narrative expands to cast Una as an Everygirl who was not the shamed exception but actually more the norm. Two pages on how “We Can’t COUNT on the justice system,” followed by a visual representation of “The Ocean of Sexual Crime That Goes Unreported,” show just how pervasive the threat toward women has been. And when the Yorkshire Ripper was finally apprehended, everyone was surprised by what “an ordinary married man” he turned out to be and what “a lovely man” he’d seemed to his neighbors. The book concludes with a wordless coda, projections of the lives that might have been had the murderer not killed these women and disrupted these families.
A powerfully disturbing graphic narrative from an author with a lot to say and plenty of creative chops to say it provocatively.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55152-653-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.
This black-and-white historical narrative, written and illustrated by Lutes, collects eight volumes of his ongoing comic book set in Berlin during the late ’20s. It’s a multilayered tale of love and politics at the beginning of the Nazi era, as Lutes follows the stories of three characters: a 20ish art student from the provinces, a textile worker, and a young Jewish radical. Their lives intersect in only the subtlest way—Lutes depicts them crossing paths at some great public events, such as the Mayday march that closes this part of his book. And Lutes plays with perspective in a visual sense as well, jumping from point-of-view frames to overhead angles, including one from a dirigible flying above in honor of the Kaiser. At street level, Lutes integrates his historical research smoothly, and cleverly evokes the sounds and smells of a city alive with public debate and private turmoil. The competing political factions include communists, socialists, democrats, nationalists, and fascists, and all of Lutes’s characters get swept up by events. Marthe, the beautiful art student, settles in with Kurt, the cynical and detached journalist; Gudrun, the factory worker, loses her job, and her nasty husband (to the Nazi party), then joins a communist cooperative with her young daughters; Schwartz, a teenager enamored with the memory of Rosa Luxembourg, balances his incipient politics with his religion at home and his passion for Houdini. The lesser figures seem fully realized as well, from the despotic art instructor to the reluctant street policeman. Cosmopolitan Berlin on the brink of disaster: Lutes captures the time and place with a historian’s precision and a cinematographer’s skill. His shifts from close-ups to fades work perfectly in his thin-line style, a crossbreed of dense-scene European comics and more simple comics styles on this side of the Atlantic.
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-896597-29-7
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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