Life in all its bittersweet richness, depicted by a master who learned from the more personally revelatory work by younger...
Posthumous collection commemorates the pioneering cartoonist who gave his name to the comic industry’s top annual awards, the Eisners.
<\b>Revered by both his comic-strip peers and the legions of graphic novelists he inspired, Eisner (Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City, 2006, etc.) never felt as comfortable with personal revelation in his narratives as many of the younger memoirists who followed his lead. Thus, the subtitle is only partially accurate. Only “The Dreamer” and “The Day I Became a Professional” make direct reference to Eisner’s prodigious career, and editor Denis Kitchen had to annotate the former to provide the real names of the pseudonymous characters. The longest piece, “To the Heart of the Storm,” is perhaps the most ambitious and overtly autobiographical, detailing the reminiscences of a young soldier on a troop train about the anti-Semitism he and his family have encountered. Yet the flashbacks aren’t presented in chronological order, and neither are these stories, though they’re the closest thing to a graphic autobiography ever published under Eisner’s name. They’re presented in the order he created them, with the first story, “A Sunset in Sunshine City,” providing an allegory of the artist’s twilight years in its tale of the reluctant retirement and relocation of a shopkeeper who has spent all his life in New York. The remaining selection, “The Name of the Game,” features a thinly fictionalized biography of Eisner’s wife’s family. This volume draws far more on personal experience than was usual in such earlier works as The Spirit, but it’s telling that the title is Life, in Pictures rather than “my life.”
Life in all its bittersweet richness, depicted by a master who learned from the more personally revelatory work by younger generations who were profoundly influenced by him.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06107-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Muted outrage produces muted results.
A graphic memoir renders the trials of being a 9/11 widow.
Torres relates in mostly broad strokes how she grappled with losing her husband when she was seven months pregnant. Eddie Torres, a native of Colombia, had arrived in America several years before and risen from sweatshop laborer to currency broker at Cantor Fitzgerald. His first day at his new job was September 10, 2001. The bulk of the memoir details the cruel comedy of his widow’s interactions with the bureaucratic alphabet soup of NGOs and government agencies set up to help people like her, a process with numerous extra tangles because Eddie had recently been hired and his original legal status was muddy. Torres conveys weary outrage at being treated more like a symbol than a person. She cynically writes of her troubled delivery: “They handled me kindly, as a V.I.P., because I had a post-9/11 baby to deliver. Gently, gently, they cut the widow open and took out the orphaned prize.” She also decries the mindless invective hurled at 9/11 widows after the media circus decided that they were lazy money-grubbers. Torres scores a few points here and there, but her gauzy and distant authorial perspective dilutes the anger, and a strange lack of detail weakens the book’s message. The casual meanness thrown her way is certainly revolting, but readers know so little about her day-to-day life other than her dealings with aid agencies that it’s hard to empathize with her. Stiff, blue-tinted art by New York Times illustrator Choi adds little immediacy to the narrative.
Muted outrage produces muted results.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-345-50069-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
Spare, poetic storytelling conveys a tender, bare-bones depiction of personal growth, told simply enough to engage young and...
In her first contribution to the growing genre of graphic memoir, syndicated cartoonist Henley (Laughing Gas, 2002, etc.) recounts the life-altering events following her decision to adopt a child in her late 40s.
The narrative begins with the author informing her family in Texas that a six-month-old Russian boy named Sergey was waiting for her to claim him from an orphanage in St. Petersburg. Henley’s simple pen-and-ink drawings humorously illustrate her trepidation in telling loved ones of her plans to adopt and effectively convey the many trying moments resulting from her decision. It precipitated a reevaluation of what had become a long-distance relationship with longtime boyfriend Rick, and also coincided with a rapid decline in her father’s health. Henley excels in illustrating the intangibles of experience. One of the most frequent states in which she found herself was that of waiting. “I waited…and waited…and waited” for the adoption agency to update her on Sergey’s status, Henley writes; the words appear in frames showing her brushing up on Russian grammar, listlessly washing dishes and doing a headstand in yoga class. Similarly, after Sergey’s adoption fell through and her father continued to linger in the hospital, the author indicates the passage of time with a single picture depicting the phases of the moon, captioned, “There was nothing to say anyway.” Henley’s illustrations richly detail her inaction, and her dynamic narrative flows seamlessly and can easily be devoured in one sitting.
Spare, poetic storytelling conveys a tender, bare-bones depiction of personal growth, told simply enough to engage young and old alike.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-19931-5
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Springboard Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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