My first masterpiece graphic novel of 2024, Thomas Girtin: A Forgotten Painter (2023) by Oscar Zarate, a 384 page tome, couches a biography of a conteMy first masterpiece graphic novel of 2024, Thomas Girtin: A Forgotten Painter (2023) by Oscar Zarate, a 384 page tome, couches a biography of a contemporary of British watercolorist, J. M. W. Turner within the story of three aging painter friends who discover the work of Girtin and (perhaps in part because of their discovery) decide to make amends to their lives. A gorgeous artifact about jealousy, regrets, man’s destruction of the environment, but also art, friendship and redemption.
The three friends are taking a life drawing painting class together. They have been friends for a long time; they are good artists, not painting professionally but still passionately, and they know and love art history. Sarah is religious; she has a regret about her jealousy of a good friend who became a successful painter early on when she did not, who now wants to reconnect with her; Arturo is a cynic, an atheist, but he has a regret, too, having many years ago left a woman and her daughter in a time of complex political circumstances--should he try to reconnect? And Fred has discovered Girtin and wants to share his discovery with his friends.
Fred relates Girtin’s biography to them and us, sometimes showing us the actual work as the three of them comment insightfully about its significance. Did I know Girtin? I couldn’t recall. But I had been through the Tate Modern Turner collection. As Fred (and of course Zarate) sees it, Girtin, a contemporary, friend and rival of the famous Turner, was a genius, a visionary, though he died at 27. As Turner reportedly said, “Had Thomas lived, I would have starved.” Hyperbolic, but it was nevertheless a tribute to his rival, whom he admired, and of whom he was jealous, too.
Zarate’s work is moving on all accounts, as admirer of the role of art in shaping and sustaining human perception. I love Girtin’s visit to the north, I like it that he is politically compromised (not a saint). We learn a few things about him but it is clear that Zarate thinks the key things Girtin has to contribute to the world is through his art. As with Turner, he taps into a way of seeing and experiencing the world. They show you nature/the environment, something that will never be the same again. Maybe in the end it's less about art per se than the importance of aspiration, about finding purpose, and redemption, in life, through any means. Hopeful in a grim time.
Greg Smith says in an afterword that he feels an affinity for Fred, who has decided to write a biography of Girtin, worried that it will take over his life. Smith confirms that it will, as he has himself taken a quarter of a century compiling an online catalog of his works. Zarate himself has taken the better part of a decade on this project. Amazing, important, probably in my estimation one of the great graphic works ever.
Here is a link to Smith's website, and I can’t wait to get into it:
"Look at these powerful black-and-white figures, their features etched in light and shadow . . . Has not this passionate journey had an incomparably d"Look at these powerful black-and-white figures, their features etched in light and shadow . . . Has not this passionate journey had an incomparably deeper and purer impact on you than you have ever felt before?"--Thomas Mann
When Thomas Mann was awarded in 1929 he was asked to describe his favorite film, but he chose instead to name a “silent” 1919 graphic woodcut novel, Frans Masereel’s Passionate Journey that was also translated as/titled My Book of Hours. (like The Medieval Book of Hours). Later, when the widely known and popular Masereel’s works were republished in finer editions, Mann wrote an introduction to this work.
So Masereel was not an isolated comics artist. He was critically acclaimed, and friends with Mann, Hesse, Rilke, Grosz. He was shaped in part by the socialist ideas and political actions of his father, and early on, the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose ideas about--his celebration of--democracy Masereel admired.
This woodcut journey is auto-fiction, acclaimed as his greatest work, a life told in 167 illustrations. The story is one of discovered passions, over time, a recognition of the good and bad in human life, and a commitment to the good, to serving man. It is no great accomplishment maybe, but Hitler and his thugs declared his work “decadent” in large part because it recognized the needs of the lower classes. And because he had expressed opposition to WWI, from which his country benefitted. A celebration of life. One of the first and best graphic novels ever, though I like them all. I might even like his The City better. And some of you can read this and many of his works on Hoopla for free (which is consistent with his aim when he was publishing, to make his work widely available to anyone who might not be able to easily afford books)....more
I'm tempted to say this is the crowning achievement of alt-comix icon Jim is Woodring, who has for decades been making wordless comics that abut stranI'm tempted to say this is the crowning achievement of alt-comix icon Jim is Woodring, who has for decades been making wordless comics that abut strange creatures. Woodring claims he is merely the vessel for visitations of images/stories that can only be seen as surreal, though possibly mad. Certainly a world of invention, sometimes veering into horror and darkness. Never warm and cuddly, though there is some empathy for his characters and the journies in which they engage.
This is what the publisher says: One Beautiful Spring Day combines three previously published volumes —Congress of the Animals, where Frank embarked upon a life-changing voyage of discovery, Fran, where he learned, then forgot, that things are not always what they seem, and Poochytown in which Frank demonstrated his dizzying capacity for both nobility and ignominy — along with 100 dazzling new pages conceived and drawn by the author."
The story of Frank, a cheery, bipedal creature who he has described as a “generic anthropomorph,” making his way through the Unifactor. So Woodring takes all the Frank works and makes them into a more or less coherent narrative, wordlessly. And since it is basically surreal, you don't always ask "what it is about," but in this 400+ page epic, some gaps are filled, some continuity is established. The work of a kind of consistently weird genius, with unquestioning cartoonist skills, engaged in the making of strange beauty.
Sort of like a combination of 100-year-old comics set in a strange dream world, This one is all black and white, but he also does bold colors in some of his work.
Here is a professional review, so you can see the fascinating and sometimes slightly disturbing images:
"Climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, till you find your dream"--The Sound of Music
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Ali"Climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, till you find your dream"--The Sound of Music
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel was, as of the first of June, the best comics work I had read this year, and it held its position as my fave of the year. Oh, I “enjoyed” more the pulpy noir Friends of the Devil by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips and The Begging Chart by Keiler Roberts is a delight, but Alison Bechdel is also for me in this “greatest” category without question, and without any kind of pandering to the reader to get us to “like” her. She has enough of that adulation, as a MacArthur winner and winner of countless awards for four of the greatest comics works of all time: Fun Home (her “Dad book”); Are You My Mother? (her “Mom book”); 25+ years of her comics strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, and now this fourth, great work, ostensibly about her life in comics and her obsession with exercise and physical health.
“But I’m not writing a book about fitness. I’m writing about fitness as a vehicle for me to get to something else. The feeling of my mind and body becoming one.”
This is a big and ambitious and impressive book, helping us see what comics can do in helping us see and understand ourselves and the world.
Bechdel is not warm and cuddly, in these comics, and I suspect--since most of her work is memoir, and mercilessly honest--her life. In all but the fictional Dykes she writes essentially about herself and her prickly family and warmer friends as just (part of) the occasion for self-obsession and anguish. The unexamined life is not worth living? Oh, she examines, as always. I had not wanted to read this book; why read about her lifelong obsession with exercise? And yet we can see from the ironic title that we know that superhuman strength is not the ultimate point of the reflection; it’s that striving for perfection behind the fitness work that she examines, and not just in her but in the culture of her lifetime, as she jumps from one activity (some of them fads) to the next. As many of us have done! (I’m checking my Fitbit watch as I write this! Gotta get in my 18-20K steps every day!)
This book covers Bechdel’s life until almost 60, the range of it all, including obsessive exercise/activities--running, biking, yoga, martial arts, spin, all of it to establish her independence from others; her relationships--generally sacrificed at the expense of her desire for personal isolation and professional success; the work itself, and reading/philosophy/spiritualism to frame all of which she experiences, to help her/us in her endless searching. One goal in her life is to achieve some kind of balance, to obliterate in some kind of Buddhist way the distinction between self and other--there is no self!--and yet all she does most of her life is obsess about herself--her work, her relationships, her intellectual commitments, her body, all viewed with some amusement and cool reserve. She’s looking at herself, but she is helping us see our own lives, our own drives, our own work and relationships.
Bechdel is out cross country skiing and as happens throughout her life from time to time, accomplishes a state of euphoria, of bliss:
“I sensed my whole life spooling out before me, far beyond the horizon of the Allegheny plateau. Little did I know that I would be spending it in an arduous quest to get back to the state I was in right now. And I’m not talking about Pennsylvania. Soon I would lose this immediate, unreflected grasp of reality. I would become nearly paralyzed with thoughts of achievement, thoughts of self. I would become my own worst obstacle.”
As with the Mom and Dad books she uses the frame of a central issue--in this case fitness--to look at herself and join her in looking at ourselves and the trajectory of our lives. And as with her other books, literature, ideas, infuse everything. Bechdel tries to understand herself in relation to the romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge; the transcendentalists Emerson and Margaret Fuller; the beats Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac (note to self: re-read The Dharma Bums again!), Adrienne Rich, various Buddhist texts.
Oh, there’s some amusing focus on her obsession with Bean/Patagonia fashion to lighten all the potential heaviness. And I like the play about Maria climbing every mountain, as Kerouac climbs with Snyder, as Coleridge and Wordsworth climb, as Bechdel climbs, as all these folks go Back to Nature for recreation and spirituality. Me, too! Bechel's epigraph for the book is "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is." Here's Donovan singing it in his song:
She’s lighter and funnier in places in this book than in her other two memoirs, but she still doesn’t smile or laugh much in this work. But I never put this book down for boredom or exasperation. I’m fascinated by it, admire it so much, as I too have been focused on accomplishments in my life and I too read to understand myself. I want to read everything she is reading!
And the artwork is of course amazing, as always, with some romantic, looser pages to let us know she is trying something more flowing, less confined and cramped than just panel work. But don’t let me dissuade you in any way from reading this by anything I've said. It’s one of the great works of comics in a career/life full of this excellence for Bechdel. You will learn as much about American culture and yourself as you do of Bechdel and her goal of fitness and “superhuman strength.” Must read!!! One of the comics greats of all time!...more
I feel like I have been waiting for many years for this book to come out, and feared that like anyone might switch gears that Kevin Huizenga had just I feel like I have been waiting for many years for this book to come out, and feared that like anyone might switch gears that Kevin Huizenga had just decided to do something else with his life. But oh boy, as with other long projects that took a long time, such as Berlin and Clyde Fans, this is worth the wait. This more than 200-page book is (so far) Huizenga’s crowning achievement, his most ambitious work. What’s it about? On the simplest level, it is a series of short interconnected stories about sleep, sleeplessness, insomnia. Call it a novel, sure, but it’s not really so much about narrative. At one point, he and his wife debate how such a project about sleeplessness might end, and they both think it would be too obvious to have him fall asleep. So it doesn’t even really “end” in any really typical way.
On a larger level Glenn Ganges in The River at Night is a kind of meditation on time, the restless mind, the imagination, and (I think) cartooning itself. I mean, what is your mind like when you are awake and everyone is sleeping? Is this a topic for the arts? How can this mind be "captured"? Most novels are about something significant in a character’s life, with some rising action and dramatic conclusion. Macbeth! But Chris Ware (Building Stories) and Richard McGuire (Here) remind us that most of our lives are lived in quiet desperation, not doing anything earth-shattering.
Glenn Ganges (which is the name of a small town in western Michigan passed on the way from South Holland to Grand Rapids where he went to college [at my former college, I believe] and also the name of the title character of a series of stories Huizenga has worked on for many years) works for a time in a tech start-up, but is “let go” as the dot-com era seems to tank. What else does he do in this book? He tries and fails to sleep, as his wife obsessively works on her own art/comics/illustration projects. Publisher Drawn & Quarterly calls River at Night a “modern formalist masterpiece” and this seems right to me, though I warn you that if you are looking for a good yarn that this will be as engaging on that level as counting sheep.
I think of Proust’s opening to In Search of Long Time, where we learn of everything that goes through a kid’s mind while he is in bed, ready to sleep, for forty single-spaced pages. It’s a portrait of a young child’s mind, stream of consciousness. Or think of Joyce’s Ulysses, one day in the life of one man in the waking hours of a day in Dublin. For something like 800 pages! So River is a portrait of a mind, of a life, from one angle: Insomnia and what this is like.
So this is Huizenga’s contribution to the modernist project of Proust and Joyce, with an ounce of Bill Murray’s Groundhog’s Day humor where we relive, story after story, the nightmare of sleeplessness and mundanity. We worry about Glenn ‘s marriage as he does basically nothing, as far as we can tell, post-job. We also wonder why he can’t sleep. Well, getting fired? Financial woes? Just generalized anxiety? Too much coffee? It’s not about causation or solution, though much time is spent on how to get to sleep, all of it familiar. Glenn along the way reads a book about geologic time, listens to a TED talk on time. But the thing to focus on here is the cartooning, the way cartoons depict the passage of time. Huizenga captures Glenn, or Everyman Mind, just rambling, amusingly. Okay, it’s potentially annoying, as this man does not share Deep Thoughts. He’s not Dali (though some of this is dream-like and surreal in fantastic ways), and he’s not Einstein, or Gandhi.
So almost none of you would agree that this is great comics (boring, some may say!), but I’m calling it that. Again, it’s not a great “story” but it’s an interesting formal experiment, call it “experimental” or alternative comics gorgeously rendered, think Chris Ware or Seth, not Macbeth, but Joe Blow, he is us. We care about and laugh with him. Oh, and Huizenga’s cartooning skills, they're on a par with Seth and Ware and McGuire....more
Mama told me there’d be days like this: Cold Days, indeed. This was for me a veritable event in not just Batman"God is above us. And he wears a cape."
Mama told me there’d be days like this: Cold Days, indeed. This was for me a veritable event in not just Batman comics, but comics, I mean it. Maybe in part because I had just read Twelve Angry Men, and maybe partly because I had not really expected much to happen in the post-wedding, let-down volume, but the first arc, where Bruce Wayne in a Twelve Angry Men story, analyzes—and especially because he is deeply reflective, post-wedding—Batman for his fellow jurors, well, this is special. The case is one of Mr. Freeze, who is accused of murdering three women by freezing them. We have evidence of the freezing, pointing to Freeze, we have Freeze’s own confession, and we the jury know that Batman was instrumental in this detective process, but to what extent is the jury’s sense of Batman’s infallibility/vulnerability at issue in the trial? This arc is one of the best things you will read read in comics, I mean it. And the artwork of Lee Weeks with the amazing coloring of Elizabeth Breitweiser just beautifully complement King’s reflective writing that touches on so many things: The ethics of detective work, the fallibility of superheroes, the loss of loved ones. King even brings in The Book of Job.
"He's not God. He's not. He tries. . . He does. . . I know. And he fails, and he tries again. . . . But he can’t. . . . He can’t provide solace from pain. . . He cannot comfort you for the love you lost.”
The second arc focuses on Bruce and Dick Grayson in the aftermath of the wedding. A father-son story, as Dick comforts Bruce in grief, as Bruce has comforted Dick, and the character of Dick is really well-written, a son trying to lighten up a sad father. I'm not a huge Nightwing fan, so for me, this was maybe not quite to the level of the Freeze story, but still top-notch, and affecting.
The third arc focuses on a confrontation with KGBeast, hired to shoot Nightwing. And the ending is brutal; it’s action that takes this villain seriously, and it’s cold, as in the volume title, taking place in much-below-freezing Russia, and the way Bat leaves KGB, well, it’s not, shall we say, humane police work. We circle back to the Freeze arc here: Bat is fallible, he’s not perfect, he can be brutal vigilante.
One thing I liked in the last arc was King’s use of an actual brutal Russian fairy tale by Alexander Afanasyev as counterpoint to the main story. I liked his smart literary move there, a grimmer than Grimm story Bruce might have read growing up and was going to mention it, I had just thought it was made up by King, but Artemy said it was real and I looked it up to confirm this. So cool?! This is also a very strong arc, and shows the great range King has, and also features great writing. All of the writing of different tones and registers, with art styles appropriate to the different arcs, this is comics gold.
Maybe the last two arcs are 4ish stars for me, but the first is so good that my 4.5 average gets rounded up to 5 stars, and the whole package is just excellent. I loved the humanizing of Bruce Wayne and Batman in this volume, after a couple of his devastating losses. I know, this is another volume with a focus on talk and reflection and less on action, so for Batman Pow! Smash! fans, this may seem like a digression, but for those of us who have seen Batman as brooding but not quite human, this is an important contribution to the Batstory. He’s hurting, dudes! And yep, human. Great stuff. ...more
“I liked to watch the real salesmen--the old-time travelers. A lot could be learned from those guys. Those fellas had plenty of charm. They used to sa“I liked to watch the real salesmen--the old-time travelers. A lot could be learned from those guys. Those fellas had plenty of charm. They used to say that sincerity sells--and if you can fake that, you've got it made"--Abe, in Clyde Fans
A masterpiece, the graphic novel event of the year (well, it's early, so there may indeed be many more), a 480-page tome, gorgeously rendered by author Seth and Drawn & Quarterly. No one in comics loves the description "graphic novel," and Seth calls it a "picture novel," which I like even better, and it has been TWENTY YEARS in the making! As with the similarly decades long accomplishment of the previous year, Jason Lutes' Berlin, this book is ambitious and meticulous and moving.
But whereas Berlin, set in the Weimar Republic as the Naziis began to assume power, has this massive historical and political scope, Clyde Fans creates a much smaller world, though seen with as incisive a lens: The story of two brothers, one of them, Abe, working in his father's fan business, and his brother Simon taking care of their mother. All three of them are less than likable or admirable, they live lives of quiet desperation, they talk to themselves and/or objects in the rooms they inhabit almost exclusively alone.
But Seth has a kind of two-edged approach here to the past, to memory, that imbues the landscape of this book, that both celebrates the past and also reveals how we can sometimes be trapped in it. There's a kind of achingly loving and melancholy nostalgia that infuses everything that Seth does that is especially evident in this work. Not everyone will love it, of course, it's muted, it is so much like Chris Ware's crushingly sad and yet thrillingly executed masterpieces Jimmy Corrigan and Building Stories. Yes, this book is that good. But it is also that sad.
Seth, Abe and Simon love craft--quality fans, novelty postcards, comics--and they can't quite keep up with the present. The book tacks back and forth between 1957, 1975 and 1997 as we see the lovely and almost reverent respect Seth gives to this old, by-gone vestige of a small business world that was already in 1957 (beginning to be) eaten up by big box corporations. At least part of this book is about capitalism, I guess, but to only say that would be to ignore the respectful close look this book takes of this one working class family that was permanently damaged, never to recover when Dad Clyde left the family, never to return. It's a respectful, pained look at the death or at least struggles of the salesman. I love the wordless pages to show the Canadian small town streets and buildings, so deserted and lost. They're all losing it, Abe, Simon, and mother, in their own slowly decaying ways, but you really come to care for them because Seth does. A Canadian Winesburg, Ohio, of sorts.
So: A masterpiece, and as it goes with masterpieces, not fun for everyone, it's work you need to read closely and live into, it's work as the best literary fiction can be, it's not about people you love and admire, it's about real working-class people, not heroes, but it's an amazing accomplishment.
I reviewed Book 1 long ago, and also excerpts published in other places of this book as it developed. It's been worth the wait, and I'll read it again soon. Check out any of his work you can get your hands on....more
“Look – anyone who invents something really great has a moment where they think it's going to destroy the world.”
The publisher writes, “Square Eyes is“Look – anyone who invents something really great has a moment where they think it's going to destroy the world.”
The publisher writes, “Square Eyes is a graphic novel about a future where the boundaries between memory, dreams and the digital world start to blur. “
Many people, as I understand it, in Silicon Valley, truly believe that technology will save the world and that with tech and science, we can live forever. But let’s be honest, the techies are not really setting forth a plan for everyone in the whole world to last forever. This is a plan for The Smartest Guys in the Room, according to Silicon Valley, which means techies, those rich people who can afford it, those who think that they can clone themselves somehow and live forever. You may recall the documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room, about Enron, and all that arrogance and testosterone?
Well, obviously, there’s lots of reasons to love science and tech (i.e., vaccines) but how often have they also brought us to the Eve of Destruction? How many good ideas by well-meaning techies/scientists have been co-opted by short sighted greed to lead us ever more quickly down the path to ruin? Bombs, automation, drugs, oil-dependent cars, and so on. I think this book speaks to some of these issues, among other things.
More good stuff:
Let me make this very clear, this artwork is among the best in the history of graphic fiction. Think that’s too bold? If you doubt the veracity of my claim, go get it from your library--okay, I had to wait more than two years to get it here in my library--and tell me this artwork isn’t absolutely breathtaking. And then, like me, you will most likely buy it and share it with your friends. It’s unbelievable. Just viewing it, you have to rate this five stars. Why? Color, design; they allow the visuals most of the time to tell the main story. Each panel is a work of art. One of the works that show us of what comics are capable. This book represents eight years of drawing images!
The story is some combination of 1984 and the Matrix, a cautionary tale. And architecture. Mills says it was in part born of “a fascination with cities, spaces and objects, and a combined anxiety and excitement about technology and the future.” She also says, “he internet has become a digital mirror of our society.” The work explores the possibility that this digital technology may supersede our experience of reality. This is a dystopian tale, not entirely original in its conception, maybe, not really a character-driven work, but it’s nevertheless engrossing on the level of ideas. One of the best graphic works ever. ...more
3/3/24: Chicago's Court Theatre announces an adaptation of this graphic novel by Jason Lutes for it's 2024-2025 season, April 25-May 18! The masterpie3/3/24: Chicago's Court Theatre announces an adaptation of this graphic novel by Jason Lutes for it's 2024-2025 season, April 25-May 18! The masterpiece graphic novel focuses on the rise of Nazism/fascism/totalitarianism and repression/brutality in one of the great cultural societies in the world, Berlin, seen from the perspective of writers and artists and some every day citizens, first dismissive of the buffoonish Hitler and his thugs, sure his racist views would not hold sway, then in growing horror, shock and dismay.
Original review 11/22/18: “I hope it will amount to more than a pile of stories.”
How many times in a lifetime can you say “masterpiece”? Not many, if you want any credibility. Okay, I’ll call it: Berlin, 23 years in the making, is an epic, 550-page masterpiece by Jason Lutes that focuses on the German Weimar Republic, 1928-1933, from the time that Berlin was a worldwide cultural mecca--though also very much in economic crisis--to the time the country decided Hitler had the answers to this crisis. His first election had him gain 88% of the vote, so this was no coup. And yet as Lutes tells it, some factions in society were in shock as the country was transformed.
We who have been taught the history may recall the basic political events from the textbooks, with an emphasis on Hitler vs. the Allies, of course, know best the wide angle, macro view, but Lutes has a different focus. The idea of the novel, named as it is, is to ask certain questions: What would it have been like for a range of individuals to be in Berlin, a city only culturally second to Paris, in the twenties? Amazing theater, art, and an explosion of writing. What would it have been like to have such a magical mecca turn so quickly to evil? To suddenly have a view of art dominate the scene that would denounce all other forms of art as “decadent”?! And in an economic crisis, to have Jews and Communists seeking economic justice demonized. The first volume (or section, in the completed, one volume text I am now reviewing), is named City of Stones. To live in Berlin in the twenties is to have at one's fingertips literally thousands of new pages every day of books, criticism, theory, magazines, journals, and newspapers, but if Berlin might be seen as a flowing river, such words were like stones that sank to the bottom of that river, seemingly worthless, largely unheard (and increasingly censored, of course).
We see this cultural moment through the lens of historical fiction, a graphic novel, and specifically, largely through the experiences of two people who meet on a train on their way in to Berlin: Kurt Severing, a (politically left, but not too willing to take much of a stand) journalist, and Marthe Muller, an (apolitical) artist. Volume one, published in 2000, focuses on 1928-29; volume two, City of Smoke, focuses on 1929-31, and volume three, City of Light, focuses on 1932-33. We march steadily and patiently from month to month, mapping the landscape, as we get a close up fictional look (and see, and hear, in ways history books cannot help us do) at what it might have been like for a range of humane—and some less than humane--people to be living during this time in this great city. The events happen, but the focus is on the people. That good things happen to good people in the midst of emerging fascism and unimaginable cruelty also gets acknowledged here. But this is no fairy tale; it’s a novel, with imperfect characters, as we switch from the elites to the jazz age artists to the struggling poor, from the Communists to the Nazis.
City of Smoke tacks back and forth between two worlds seemingly oblivious to each other, the emerging jazz nightlife and the political strife between factions of the citizenry. Extremes in both worlds seem to abound as a kind of frenzy grips the city. Images recur: Houdini (the focus of an earlier book from Lutes); The American jazz band The Cocoa Kids makes its way into and through the story—it’s the jazz age!--but the central event in this middle section is the lethal May Day demonstration of 1929. Severing interviews survivors, and Marthe draws accompanying portraits as they tell of their experiences. Again, it is “people’s history,” and not textbook relations of events, it’s how ordinary citizens experienced pivotal events. Tension builds as the battles ensue between Communists and nationalists, Jews and Gentiles. A divided country! One such featured family throughout is the Braun family, with Sylvia joining the resistance, opposed by her Nazi brother.
City of Light, the third section, features the election of Hitler and the increase in representation of his party in the Bundestag. Conditions turn worse, especially for the poor, though things fall apart personally for several key people in the novel we have come to know. None of this should be a surprise; it's the rise of the crushing reign of Nazi power, and the lead-up to WWII. The art reflects the slow, steady, almost subdued march, unspectacular in narration—I was reminded of what Hannah Arendt refers to as “the banality of evil”--but begins to speak to a question we are desperately curious about: How could it have happened?! What are the root causes of a people's embrace of fascism and totalitarianism? We seek the answer to that question, and another: How could one nation embrace a dictator such as Hitler? One interestingly sad dimension of the story (that some of us may know) that gets highlighted in the third section is the fate of the glbtq community. Berlin was once seen as the gay capitol of the world, all but crushed by Nazi condemnation. One sad episode among many.
In the last third, disillusioned writer Kurt and would-be artist Marthe both seem at the point of despair. Multiple story lines make things seem disjointed, mirroring the political and social situation of the time. Increasingly, noir-influenced Lutes creates a somber tone to prepare us for the future we know all too well.
Another sad episode in Berlin writing history: A real life Berlin editor featured early on in this fictional tale is Carl Ossietzky who was later, in the early thirties, imprisoned twice for criticizing the Nazi Party in the press. In 1935 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; the next year he was dead from TB, deprivation and abuse. This book is a loud and hopefully horrifying call to arms about the importance of a free press in a democracy. Murdering journalists is of course a long embraced strategy of totalitarian regimes.
This is a complex, multi-layered comics work, but the old story of the role of the arts and journalism in resisting totalitarian rule is one foundation of this work. Some final, wordless images of post-war Berlin conclude the book, and are both insightful and moving. I don’t think those who read comics primarily for escapist action will love this work, but I think those that want to learn about the potential for comics in examining history, and for telling multi-layered stories that help us see the times in human terms, will love it.
Included are appendices that include a list of (pictured) characters, and lists of resources he used for his extensive research, for you to consult for further reading.
A link to the Comics Alternative interview with Jason Lutes:
“Breaking News: We are all completely fu%%$#ed”--seen on a newscaster robot’s tv computer screen face (and how many of us felt at least in 2018, when “Breaking News: We are all completely fu%%$#ed”--seen on a newscaster robot’s tv computer screen face (and how many of us felt at least in 2018, when this was released, make your own list)
Reread in March, 2022, roughly four years after it was initially published. And to those of you who read these volumes as I did, as issues/volumes came out, no, in case you’re wondering, no, even knowing what is coming in this issue, it does not get better. Way worse. I’m even crying as I write this! And yes, I am now a very late-middle aged (okay, old, damn it) man, and this is a friggin’ comic book series! In the Golden Age of comics, almost eighty years ago, could they have ever imagined it? Oh, I think so, but never quite like this. Maybe this is the Platinum Age of comics.
“War can’t be ended anymore than the rain. All we can do is help each other stay dry”--D. Oswald Heist (the invented favorite author of Markus and Alana)
Original review, 10/5/18, somewhat revised:
So this volume is jaw-dropping in a way that, if anyone on Goodreads spoils it for you, you should probably consider unfriending them. So I won’t spoil it, but this is the Queen of Emotional volumes in an already emotional rollercoaster of a series that moves from hilarity (any two characters talking anytime) to cuteness (Ghus, Hazel) to adult-level graphic sex and profanity to deep family connections. But this was such a tough issue that even the creators are taking a year off from making it! Yes, true!
“Most of the time we don’t even realize we’ve lived through something worth commemorating until long after it's ended”--Hazel
No really important spoilers in what follows! I told you already! I promised!
“Every violent action. No matter how seemingly insignificant, sends ripples throughout the cosmos, inevitably causing more of the same”--Heist, quoted by Marko
One basic point of this series is that violence begets violence. And violence happens in this issue. Several, gut-wrenching times. Including that perpetrated by a character we thought we had begun to know pretty well who surprises us, shall we say. Hazel and Squire fight, too, throughout the volume, and it is sometimes by using damaging words.
Things I liked so much:
*”Our daughter’s biology isn’t a liability. It’s a gift”—Saint Marko, in a meme for our times. *All the Eighties media references, such as “Drop and give me a thousand.” (adjusted for inflation from Animal House) *A scene with Petrichor and Prince Robot, interspecies sex/romance being a hallmark of the series. *The religious concept of transubstantiation as a sci fi trick, a transformation spell, used for witness protection? *Upsher and Doff, our adorable gay journalist couple, “love sick imbeciles,” unh! *The joys and anguish of family, looked at from various angles in this volume *Not all robots are created alike: Squire vs. his father, Sir Robot *Marko as novelist?! *"Anticipation and dread aren’t opposites, just different versions of the same game”—Hazel *Reflections on the nature of fiction as guide to our lives: “Putting new ideas into another person’s head is an aggressive act, and aggressive acts have consequences. Face it, you can be a writer or a pacifist, but you can’t be both.” *"I love that he writes in cursive.” *Magic shrooms *Pinky swears *Chicken fights (in the water, duh) * I love how Staples and Vaughn make complex characters, even in a war where there are clearly enemies
”Anyone can kill you, but it takes someone you know to really HURT you. It takes someone you love to break your heart”—Hazel
*And what is maybe one of the most important things, after all this great writing from Vaughn, and so many great ideas, it is Fiona Staples that now is getting the first author credit in this series. Just awesome invention and execution. There are more stunning visual ideas in this comic series than in ten comics series. Sets the bar for all the budding comics creators everywhere.
And everything changes. Everything. Unforgettably, and I mean it. If you have not read any of it, start the series from the beginning now, you're welcome in advance....more
6/7/24: So I have now read the entire text of My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Volume 2. I read half of it via New Galley a couple months ago, and bough6/7/24: So I have now read the entire text of My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Volume 2. I read half of it via New Galley a couple months ago, and bought this at a book publication event at the Harold Washington Library, the main “branch,” more like the trunk, of the Chicago Public Library.
So I’ll probably revise this quick first draft more than once, but I’ll say again that My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris is a masterpiece in comics history. But the blurbs are a potential set-up! Art Spiegelman says, “Emil Ferris is one of the most important comics artists of our time.” Alison Bechdel calls it a “spectacular, eye-popping magnum opus.” Chris Ware says it is “absolutely astonishing.” I pick these three because they are arguably among the top five comics artists working today, the very icons of the craft. And who am I to disagree?
At a glance it appears I hit on the focus of the second volume in my earlier review of the first half of it. But let me just add that it answers the question of who killed Anka, who kills Victor, the brother of Deeze. We learn more and more about Deeze’s shadowy, angry path and his criminal history. And we can't ethically support him, but Karen nevertheless is connected for life to him as her older brother. We also get to experience the first coming-of-age, coming out story of Karen and Shelley.
The whole epic sprawling work will not be for everyone, just as Dickens, Dostoevsky, or Melville’s Moby Dick will be for everyone. Sprawling, almost formless, it’s about the whole world from the Holocaust to the civil rights era Chicago. It’s a broad canvass of the history of horrific violence because we can’t accept differences among us, and it's also a narrow one, focusing on Karen’s mystery explorations of herself, love, and Deeze. It’s actually a whodunnit, a murder mystery, pertaining to two central mysteries.
It’s about art, including major paintings about violence at the Chicago Art Institute, the foundation of this work, and a kid becoming an artist. It’s a story told as if by a young girl, in her diary, on legal pads, what an economically disadvantaged girl in Uptown might be able to afford. It’s about poverty. Social and economic inequities. And it’s about monsters, real and imagined.
PS: So I want to the June 5 event at Harold Washington Library, moderated by her friend Kurt DeVine. Here it is, via You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQKDN...
But here are a couple things I jotted down in my little notebook:
DeVine says he saw more than 600 pages of the work and thought this has to be made public, but then, how to do it, to give shape to it? And again, when it was about 1,200 pages: How do you do this?! So it had to be ordered, focused to some extent, where multiple threads come together. But like the above epics, it has everything in it, still, as it should.
The birth of Karen: “It was Uptown; it was 1967. I was at a birthday party, and the girls were talking about babydolls and the boys were getting breadsticks to bring to the girls (breadwinners!), and I am disabled and multi-ethnic, and someone asks me what are you? And I say I’m a detective, and there’s been a murder.” And thus, the book that emerged from that moment is an on-going investigation of many things. So this is when Karen was born. The theme of the night is the detective.” Kurt: The what? EF: The detective!
But the evening is really more about art, and Ferris encouraging each of us to do our dream, do the thing we need to do, and though this book deals with hard realities, it is also this from (the murdered) Anka: “It's been my experience that people will surprise you. As often as people will do terrible things, they also do small acts of kindness. I believe that spirits of evil and good whisper to us at all times.”
How to toil in obscurity doing your art? “Artists give their gifts to the world, but the world isn’t always ready to respect the gifts they’ve been given.” But keep on doing it!
Read it!
PS: I left everything below intact as it is somehow important to the process of the creation of both volumes. It took a long time and a lot of work, obviously.
4/28/24: I know this sounds like a mean joke but the new release date is May 28 (2024!) (of the whole second book to the finish!).
4/21/24: Thanks to NetGalley, Fantagraphics and Emil Ferris for this early look at the first two hundred pages of My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Volume 2. I should probably say that Emil drew the cover on one of my co-edited books, has a piece in it, and has been a friend of mine for several years, so consider the source, though I wrote my initial rave review of (the masterpiece) volume 1 before I had known her.
This is Ferris’s life work, clearly, a sprawling epic set in Uptown Chicago in the tumultuous Civil Rights era of the late sixties and puts that in the context of Nazi Germany. The story is narrated (and made to seem as if drawn on legal pads) by a ten-year-old girl, Karen, mixed race, bullied by her peers, coming into her (queer) sexual identity and her life as an artist. Karen’s favorite thing is monsters, as in monster comics, though she sees herself too as her very favorite monster, a werewolf, which for her is a good thing. Mama was a central figure in the first volume, now gone, but Deeze, her artist brother remains. One central concern: Who are the real (negative) “monsters” in the world if not racist, anti-semitic, homophobic humans? And a related concern: Where does our hatred of each other come from, our anger, our violence against each other?
One important aspect of the tale is the importance of art, as the two siblings go regularly to the Chicago Art Institute to get in touch with this important way of seeing the world as a way to understand it and celebrate it. Another central concern in the book is the murder of Holocaust survivor Anka. In addition to seeing herself as a werewolf, Karen also from time to time dresses as a detective to investigate this mystery and hopefully solve it. The question at the end of the last volume is what role Deeze may have had in the crime, if any. Cliffhanger.
The first two hundred pages of volume two maybe slows down the pace of the narrative, continuing and deepening some of the volume one themes. We learn something about a possible Deeze twin, now gone? Named Victor. Did Deeze kill Anka? Did he kill Victor? Karen opens the volume with a dream that he did. And in that dream we meet Anka talking to Karen, too.
We go to the Art Institute and take our time there in volume 2. Karen makes a friend, Shelley, and with her listens to audiotapes that Anka made about her past in Nazi Germany, so we go more into these horrors, including Auschwitz, the belly of the (monstrous) beast. So much of what Karen and Deeze value in the art they see at the Art Institute is the struggle between beauty and harsh truths, and Karen’s dreams reflect those struggles, too. At the Art Institute we have Deeze talk about, among other things, Toulouse-Lautrec and his paintings of gay lovers, dancers, prostitutes (depicted by Karen positively--for her--as vampires), honoring them as Deeze tries to do (he does help them, befriend them, and it’s also clear he has sex with some of them, too). We focus on Carvaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, and we look at Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks as a way of getting at a range of questions about what it means to be human.
What else? We get to know better Jeffery “The Brain” Alvarez, Danny Ditchwater, and a whole Dickensian (that’s it! This is like Dickens! That’s the key!) cast of oddballs and late sixties “freaks” (meant in a good way by me and Karen). Karen does “stealth drawing” of Chicagoans on the train (as Emil Ferris does!), collecting portraits, deepening our sense of her as a burgeoning artist, deepening our sense of appreciation for the wonders of human variation. We see that Deeze is publishing comics, too! We see lots of full page horror comics cover art and scenes of (gothic) Chicago art and architecture.
We don’t ignore literature in the investigation of the human and violence: Myths of Oedipus, Hades and Cerberus, Hercules.
The scope of this is vast and maximalist, epic, operatic, and yet intimate if we realize that it is through the eyes of the young Karen that we are navigating this huge city and the history of racism and violence while committed to art as a sense-making tool. I can’t wait to read more. And no, I have no idea how long it will be til wee see the completed manuscript, but I was glad to see even part of it!
4/6/24: I got a preview copy of the first two hundred pages of this, volume two, and it is great. I'll try to read it as fast as I can, but this likely will not happen as it is again dense and rich and needing to savor.
2/10/24: The most recent New Yorker has an excerpt from volume two and it looks great! Late spring or specifically April 9, 2024 is when we can expect the whole thing, now that the disputes that have kept this from publication seem to be resolved. Can't wait!
She's (sadly) joking when she says on her site:
Expected publication December 31, 2050
But the new, official publication date is April 9, 2024, by Fantagraphics Press!
Nick Drnaso’s debut collection of short comics stories, the LA Times Book Prize winning Beverly, is sort of set in a far south side Chicago neighborhoNick Drnaso’s debut collection of short comics stories, the LA Times Book Prize winning Beverly, is sort of set in a far south side Chicago neighborhood. Drnaso, just 29, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, includes a few recognizable Beverly images in it, but he told me he mainly used that name because he liked the sound of it. I loved that book, reviewed it here, and used it in my comics class last summer. It reads like The Suburb from Hell.
Chicago is again the setting of his first comics novel, Sabrina, which is without question one of the comics events of the year--hell, it's one of the fiction events of the year; Zadie Smith called it a “masterpiece”--an amazing book that captures the present moment in ways I had not yet seen. Drnaso’s work reminds me of the work of Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine. And he’s good enough to be in this club, surely. You know Hemingway’s “iceberg” theory about stripping things down to their essence, and simplifying, letting people figure out themselves what is going on? That’s relevant to all these guys, but surely Drnaso is doing this. Less is more. Let the images tell the story in all its complexities.
“How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Rate your overall mood from 1 to 5, 1 being poor. Rate your stress level from 1 to 5, 5 being severe. Are you experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide? Is there anything in your personal life that is affecting your duty?”-- a daily survey Calvin Wrobel must fill out, given the high suicide rate in the U. S. military
Sabrina (not the witch!) is a woman that disappears on her way home from work. Teddy, her boyfriend of a couple years, is distraught, on the continuous edge of madness in the aftermath; he leaves the Chicago area (without any bags, even) and flies to Colorado to stay with an old high school buddy, Calvin, he has not seen in years, a guy who works nights in a very sterile environment in internet security for the U. S. Air Force. Calvin's wife, with their young kid, has left him to go to Florida, feeling ignored by him. Two isolated guys.
Calvin makes it to work every day, but Teddy barely survives, eating little, and one day stumbles on to a Breitbart-level talk news radio show discussing various theories about Sabrina’s disappearance, theories that confirm their own paranoid world view. A videotape surfaces of what may be the killing, spinning theory after theory, accompanied by death threats, and madness we see on a daily basis now. The events of the next year are increasingly insane as Teddy and Calvin are subjected to an onslaught of media conspiracy theories not unlike the folks that think the Sandy Hook massacre is diabolical fiction, all lies {See below). The media and fake news are central concerns in this scary nightmare which feels very real in the Age of Trump. Let's just say Kafka knew what he was talking about, and Drnaso could have been a buddy of Kafka.
The images we see in this novel are flat, largely expressionless, many of the characters seem similarly bland, and the action and characters are very influenced by these media images that threaten to engulf us, increasingly overwhelm us. This is post 9/11 America. It’s about fear, isolation, and paranoia and is really coldly disturbing, as powerful artistically as anything you might read. An intricately layered comics novel, social horror. A must read for everyone, I would say.
In it, he says, "And you will find yourself looking carefully, trying to piece it all together. I found the experience deeply unnerving. Most especially because Sabrina is a book that looks right back at you." Yes!
If you don't know what I mean when I say "Breitbart-level," "news,"for just one disturbing example of internet hysterical paranoid theories we can always turn to Ann Coulter:
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not pr“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Alone, finally translated this year (2017) in English from the French, is Chaboute’s masterpiece. Early on he did graphic interpretations of the work of Rimbaud, and more recently, an interpretation of the story of Moby Dick, but this more than 400 page novel is Chaboute’s story, in black and white, mostly wordless, and an amazing artistic accomplishment about the nature of words and the imagination.
The story is rather simple; a man with some physical deformities—one is reminded of the Hunchback of Notre Dame in the bell tower—is born in a lighthouse and never leaves this tiny island for more than fifty years, fifteen of them after his parents are dead. Regularly a fisherman, according to arrangements made by our hermit’s father, leaves him food and supplies.
What does the man do most of the day? He picks out words in a dictionary and uses these words as a trigger to his imagination, to create stories that he sometimes enacts for himself and a goldfish. Words free the man for several decades from his prison, but one day a man newly hired by the fisherman leaves him a note with the supplies and everything changes. In a sense, this simple nearly wordless story is an allegory about language and creativity, but the turn to human connection moves it in yet another important direction. A literary masterpiece in comics!...more
A masterpiece. And I mean the whole series, now completed, with a soul-crushing finish.
Providence is a 12 issue comics series, now being compiled intoA masterpiece. And I mean the whole series, now completed, with a soul-crushing finish.
Providence is a 12 issue comics series, now being compiled into three hardcover books, and I expect eventually into one hardcover volume. Last year I said that the first book (first four issues) was the best comic I had read of 2016, and I am certain now that the entire series is among the best comics of 2017. Do I say this all the time? Nope. I have said something similar thus far twice previously this year, as of June 23, 2017, about Roughneck by Jeff Lemire and My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris. My three favorite comics of the year, so far. Three texts that couldn’t be more different, and yet all excellent in their own ways. And epic in scope in their own ways.
In Providence the main character, Robert Black, is a young journalist hoping to turn novelist in 1919. It’s New England, it’s Lovecraft (meaning he is always commenting on Lovecraft stories and ideas), and it’s a specific time in American history. Black is both Jewish and gay. He keeps a Commonplace Book as he travels, researches, reads, recording ideas for stories, for plot, for themes, even as he experiences things. It’s a writer’s journal, the pages of which alternate with the comic itself. It’s a commentary on the events of the story we are reading, as with Watchmen where there are texts that parallel and comment on the main story. Black is also us, we are readers, we are learning to read the world.
Black is interested in (Moore’s fictional) Sous Le Monde, a story that he understands to have inspired The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers, an actual collection of horror stories that came out in 1895. Chambers claimed that when some people read his stories they went mad, some even committing suicide. Lovecraft read Chambers’s horror stories in 1927 and folded them into his Chthulu mythos. Sous Le Monde is, by the way, French for Underworld, a perfect place for horror. Yellow is in Chambers’s and Lovecraft’s mythos the color of horror. Oh, and in this volume Black’s lover Jonathan (Lillian is the cover name for him) commits suicide. Let’s just say it all goes downhill from there.
Providence is a horror comic work of literature that is an homage to H.P. Lovecraft’s world and works, taking place both within the world Lovecraft lived in and the worlds, the Chthulu mythos, he made in and through his texts. It is, like many of Moore’s works, intertextual, urging readers to read Lovecraft’s and others’s texts to understand his, to research what he has researched, to join him on his many-layered quest, into obscure secret societies, the horror writing of the late nineteenth century, the occult, in fact many of the things in Lovecraft that are central to his own understanding of the world. The whole thing is like so many of Moore’s works, incredibly ambitious, technically dizzying, disturbing, scary, and finally impressive, if a little overwhelming. It is better if you have read a bunch of Lovecraft, but you don’t have to to do be disturbed and freaked out by it. The art of Jacen Burrows is amazing. Refined, elegant, just really well done. And not for everyone. I will read it again, with the three volumes of Moore’s Neonomicon, when the hardcover of Providence comes out.
“You know I wish that I had Jessie's girl I wish that I had Jessie's girl Where can I find a woman like that?”—Rick Springfield
“Do you understand what it“You know I wish that I had Jessie's girl I wish that I had Jessie's girl Where can I find a woman like that?”—Rick Springfield
“Do you understand what it means to be a human being?” –Jesse, to Cassidy
“Remember the Alamo.” (Where the epic ending battle takes place)
“They eat horses, don’t they?”—Napoleon Vichy, who likes to eat premium horsemeat. (bizarre side story, but as they always are, it’s strange and funny)
So this is the Big Finish, and it does NOT disappoint.
Interesting dimensions:
* The comically evil Herr Starr returns, the Allfather of the Grail, who’s mean even to grannies. Starr, who became a monster, first to save the world (to give it religious—Christian—order, through the Genesis project), and then for vengeance (to try and kill Custer). The resolution does not disappoint!
*The joint venture of The Saint of All Killers and The Preacher. They both have a bone to pick with God. And again, this resolution does not disappoint! (A kind of existentialist resolution, I thought).
And Jenny is a bit bitter about how God may have treated her, too, since her sister was killed: Can you get angry at God for the misery of the world? Ennis says yep.
*Jesse asks Cassidy if he knows what it means to be a human being, to be a man.
“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.” –Macbeth
Ultimately, this series, underneath the outrage and silliness and partying and violence is about what it means to be human, asking questions about love and friendship and loyalty and betrayal.
*Beating up a woman (or women) (or the general abuse of women) becomes the (unforgivable?) sin for Jesse, in the fight with Cassidy, in their epic battle, but they don’t actually talk much of the central betrayal, Cassidy’s betrayal of Tulip; the excuse is that Cassidy and Tulip thought Custer was dead, so Cassidy could take advantage of Tulip’s grief, but this doesn’t quite fly with me. And there is also a suggestion that Custer had a crush on Jenny, Tulip’s best friend, but I guess the point here is that Custer did not act on his feelings, not did Jenny. But the resolution of the fight between Jesse and Cassidy? Does not disappoint!
*So, in fact there is the series-log-promised confrontation with God, the reason for the 6 volume road trip. But in the end it is Cassidy, not Custer, who meets Him. And Cassidy makes a deal. . . which for me does not disappoint.
*And the great sweeping western love story, between Tulip and Jesse, sweet and not simple. Again, the resolution of this relationship does not disappoint!
*We even get a satisfactory resolution for the Arseface story, aw, with Lorie, whose interesting visual disorder makes her view Arseface as actually handsome.
This is one of the greatest comics series ever, with an ending (or series of endings) that comes through for you.
Oh, and one more thing:
*McSorley’s Ale House (of which I personally have fond memories from when I lived in Manhattan) in the East Village of Manhattan is the second most featured bar in this series (see previous reviews for Ennis’s favorite bar, but it is gone now, anyway, and McSorley’s, the oldest Irish pub in NYC, and at 150+ years strong, is one of the oldest (and coolest) in the country.
“In the halls of his memory still echoed her eyes.”—Johnny Cash
“You are just like your father, Jesse. Living a western.” “Am I really like my father?” ““In the halls of his memory still echoed her eyes.”—Johnny Cash
“You are just like your father, Jesse. Living a western.” “Am I really like my father?” “Oh, yes. You have a sense of purpose driving you to do the thing you feel you must, like a fire inside you.”—Jesse and his mother
In the southwest there was an A-Bomb test, and Jesse Custer fell out of a plane as it blew. He lost an eye soon after that, and we later find out how. His girlfriend Tulip is in despair at the thought of the love of her life now dead and spins out of control (with Cassidy, Jesse’s best friend), but Jesse ain’t dead; he recovers and makes his way to town to see Tulip kissing Cassidy, so he leaves, heads to a small Texas town named Salvation and becomes . . . their sheriff. In Salvation the newly one-eyed Custer meets up with a woman with one arm and a woman who was born with only on eye. The one-armed woman as it turns out is his long-lost mother, long assumed dead!
The town also has a crazy rich guy named Odin Quincannon (also known as the Meatman), a bunch of KKK rednecks,
(“Why is it the greatest champions of the white race always turn out to be the worst examples of it?”—Custer)
a former Nazi, a woman that captures Jesse, knocks him out, ties him down and dresses him up as Hitler and wants him to call her Eva.
Custer finally decides he can’t go on without Tulip, thank god, so he takes a road trip to see her, and we get entertained along the way by the stories of hitchhikers, but the big conclusion (of this book, at least) is that after all this madness Tulip and Jesse reunite, yay, yippee kai yai yay. My favorite book so far.
Will love triumph? One more book will tell, but it is now, I am fully convinced, a great story with something moving and profane and offensive and hilarious in every issue.
But don’t take my word for it, folks. Let Johnny Cash tell you what it’s all about in his song "Time of the Preacher":
8/26/22: Get ready! Volume two--the concluding volume!--after years of our waiting, has a publication date, 9/22/22. Time to reread the first volume t8/26/22: Get ready! Volume two--the concluding volume!--after years of our waiting, has a publication date, 9/22/22. Time to reread the first volume to get ready?
7/12/21: Reread for summer YA comics class. As with any rich and complex novel with great aspirations, you can find new things in every reading.
7/26/18 Read this for the fourth time in less than a year and a half, in part because I have now taught it three times in that span of time for different classes. This time I read it for my summer graphic novels and comics class. This is the first of two huge volumes, and who knows when that second volume will come out [September 22, 2022, I just said!]. The first volume itself took many years to finally see the light of day, so we will just have to be patient. This in part defines the serialized reading experience: Waiting (and trying to remember what happened when you first began reading).
A couple notes: I just read An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration From The Private Sketchbooks Of Artists, Illustrators And Designers, and My Favorite Thing is Monsters is in part written as if it were the illustrated sketchbook of a ten-year-old girl--she's copying covers of monster comics, drawing Uptown Chicago people and buildings as well as journaling/telling the story of her year. Emil Ferris rides buses and trains (as Carl Sandburg did, only to write poems!) and as her protagonist does, sketches interesting-looking people as she goes. This is a love letter to Chicago, acknowledging some of the horrors here, too, of course.
Also, the 2018 Eisner Awards were just announced ten days ago: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters took best writer/artist, best coloring and best graphic album!! Yay, Emil Ferris!!! She deserves all the accolades, all the stars.
11/18/17 Read three times in one year!? Second time taught, this time for Fall 2017 YA class. My vote for best graphic novel/comics series of the year.
7/18/17 I only read this long (414 page!) book--the first of a trilogy--in May, and now have reread it for a class on YA Graphic Novels with a focus on strong girl characters. Karen, the main character here, is from 10-12 in this book, so is a little young for YA, but this is not really a book for younger readers, either. It is a coming-of-age story, a murder mystery, a socio/cultural and political history of Chicago in the late sixties, a shout-out for comics and art, though maybe in particular a nod to pulpy monster comics. It is a book about "monsters"--the mythological ones--and actual monsters (werewolves vs. Hitler and racists, for example). It is a story of the Holocaust and all racism bursting into the burning of Chicago in the riots of the late sixties, sexual identity and family and grief and friendship, and somehow it works and connects everything together. It's a sprawling epic and at the same time an intimate family and neighborhood tale, with great drawing and storytelling and characters. It does feature some sexual acts, nudity, so consider that if buying for your 14-year-old who is into comics. Still, for adults, this is a must read!
5/12/17 Wow, wow, wow. This is one of the comics events of the year, in my opinion, already something I would name already as one of the greatest comics/graphic novels of all time, and I just read it once, over a couple weeks time. Breath-taking. And it was written by someone unknown, and not by someone famous or popular or celebrated in the international media (such as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Alison Bechdel, Brian K. Vaughn and those folks), or even people I personally love that are in that second tier, maybe, like Ed Brubaker and Jeff Lemire, but a woman whose first (!) graphic novel is about a young girl growing up in uptown Chicago in the late sixties. Let me just say you can’t write a breathtaking monster like this book twice in a lifetime. This is her Fun Home, her Maus, so pay attention and get this book, I’m not exaggerating! It is just the first volume, an epic Moby Dick-sized book with the whole sprawling world in it, like Moby Dick.
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes, written and hand-drawn on the facsimile of a lined legal pad notebook, filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster magazine covers and images. So it is a story of loving monsters set against a cultural history that references the killing of JFK and MLK and the riots of the sixties on the grand socio-political level, and it deals with Karen Reyes as junior detective trying to solve the murder of her upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor who was early on raised in a brothel. So we get Nazi Germany and American racism and mass murder and child prostitution on a grand scale in Europe in the forties echoed in the racism and social turmoil and prostitution and sexual abuse of sixties Chicago. And in a loving and often hilarious family setting!
The range and depth of this narrative is truly breath-taking. It involves racism, yes, but it also involves glbtq issues. It's about identity, featuring people who are "different" from the norm (the M.O.B., or the Masses of Ordinary and Boring) and who are seen by that MOB as monsters but who themselves embrace being different, owning themselves as (good) monsters. It involves the story of her hilariously superstitious multi-racial mother and her hot and tumultuous artist brother Deeze (Diego [Rivera] and [Emilio] Zapata), who takes her to the Chicago Art Institute and takes her “into” various iconic artworks. It involves the pulp horror comics culture of the sixties Ferris and Karen so love set against a background of real bad monsters such as Hitler and the murderers of JFK and Dr. King, and good monsters who just want to be free, like Karen and Deeze! It is often very funny, as well, with deft insights and sometimes pretty unfiltered sexual content and language. The storytelling is ambitious, multilayered, uh, I’m just astounded by it and even though I have only read it once I will begin again, and read it even more closely. But it is a huge book, a tome! It has the whole world in it, like many big books.
Some highlights, (besides the amazing drawing that splits the difference between ten year old art journal and accomplished draftsperson and the complex layered storytelling):
*When Karen is bullied in elementary school she gives her classmates horror Valentines featuring monsters instead of the boring Cupid (and gets in a bit of trouble with the nuns).
*The “cootie step” in school everyone has to avoid.
*Deeze and all his girlfriends (that Karen sometimes walks in on, oops). Some of these girlfriends are prostitutes that he helps out when he can.
* The Vesica Piscis: http://www.halexandria.org/dward097.htm. How central this is to painting, to art, to civilization! Look it up if you don't know it! As Deeze says, most creative work starts with the Vesica Piscis. And in a couple pages of looking at a couple masterpieces at the Chicago Art Institute where Karen goes with Deeze (and us) on a regular basis, Karen shows us how it works as we view paintings.
*All the visits to the Chicago Art Institute, where some of the paintings Deeze introduces her to become some of her "best friends."
*Anka, the tragic beauty.
*Mama, who lives by crazy superstitions
*Deeze, the loverboy and devoted brother and son
*And last but not least Karen, the werewolf detective girl, one of the great characters of all comics history!
Part of my love for this book comes from the fact that it is about a time in the Midwest I also lived through: My parents took me from Grand Rapids, Michigan at least twice a year to visit the various stunning Chicago museums, and always to the Art Institute. I live here now, but even if I didn’t I would know every painting she references (and draws with special skill!), thanks to my Mom. I was in elementary school when JFK was murdered, and in high school when MLK was killed and the riots erupted all over this country in rage. So I in some ways lived this late sixties story, and yet Karen's is nothing like my staid Dutch family. If you read one comics book this year, this is the one to read.
“We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not “We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”—HP Lovecraft, “Beynd the Wall of Sleep,” Spring 1919
“I never dreamed it could all turn to such a nightmare.” --Robert Black
I called Providence Book 1 the best comic I read last year. Now, with the second and final arc completed, I will continue to say this is a great comic, for my particular tastes, an event of the year. I just finished it by reading single issues, so the hardcover will be out later this year. I recommend you consider it, but it has two problems for the general reader:
1) It has lots of references to the work of Lovecraft. It will still creep you out if you know nothing about his work or worlds, but knowing more helps. I knew some, but not a lot. It’s erudite, multilayered with references to HPL fiction, to other Moore books in this world/mythos such as Neonomicon and The Courtyard, and hundreds of other writers and thinkers, such as Poe, Bierce, “decadent literature,” of the late 1890s, especially The Yellow Book by Robert Chambers. Dunsany’s Tales of Wonder (1916). Links are made for us to more contemporary work like Robert Bloch’s Psycho, Kerouac’s Dr. Sax, William Burroughs, Borges, David Lynch, and so on. What Moore is doing is creating the image of a web of literature that connects to the HPL mythos, to give this idea that there is this “underground” lit that is interconnected, sinister, possibly changing the world as it reveals it.
“Has that ever happened before, with any work of fiction?” an FBI/literary critic asks. He refers to Lovecraft’s Mythos forming this shared universe, one in which he encouraged others to borrow and expand upon. Fiction usually borrows from other fiction, and life, obviously, but in Providence you get a glimpse of an impressive, supernatural web of fiction (and sometimes non-fiction). I liked it because I am an English teacher, a literary sleuth, and I like that layered web of references. And it’s not just literature, of course; it’s literature connected with the supernatural world, the occult, the world of dreams, operating with dream logic. Mythos is a narrative, we are led to believe, that is replacing the “real world” narrative that we know. It’s like an interspecies invasion that is taking over. Providence is so layered with literary and cultural references that it is impossible to understand it completely, and yet you get enough of a sense of things to feel the horror and strangeness even if you have never read Lovecraft. You get images of a horrible supernatural conspiracy that pretty convincingly frightens/disturbs you.
“If half of this is true, then Lovecraft and his stories were engineered to cause what’s happening now.”--FBI guy
“Dreams and our world are two extremes of a bi-polar reality, that can flip from one state to another.”—HPL
“No. You are dreamth that we were exthperienthing. You are part of uth.” – “No. You are dreams that we were experiencing. You are part of us.”—Johnny Carcosa
What is real? Are we dreaming? Are we hallucinating? Sometimes experiences seem like lucid dreaming.
2) A second problem for the general reader is that sometimes it can be visually disturbing. The art is terrific, but also successful as horror. Meaning that it can be disturbing. You have been warned or encouraged, depending on your need for horror. Some of these images are sexual, some involving severed limbs, stuff like that, just to warn you.
The second arc has former journalist and would-be novelist Robert Black still gathering materials for a story, writing everything down in a Commonplace book (or journal, and each issue concludes with pages from Black’s book), but increasingly horrified and in misery. He's becoming a broken man, now seeing that the horrors of the Lovecraftian world are real and hiding in plain sight. At one point Black meets Lovecraft Himself, shares with him his book, from which HPL crafts some of his own stories.
Images repeat throughout:
--The death of Black’s lover Lili/Jonathan and its effects wind their way through this --“You Made Me Love You” (1913) by Al Jolson --“Azathoth” is Lovecraft’s Daemon Sultan, the nuclear chaos at the heart of the universe. These creatures weave their way throughout, visual reminders of The Impossible.
You interested in at least checking this out? Well, I from time to time used a guide. You remember those three guys living in a trailer in the X-Files that were tuned into everything supernatural and political going on? The Providence equivalent is this website that analyzes every frame of the 12 issue series. It’s amazing, a little overwhelming, maybe too intimidating, but hey, I didn’t know a fraction of this stuff without it and I still loved the comic. This website helped me love it better.
Showa Volume III: The End of WWII (1945) and the Sino-Japanese conflict (1953).
The best of the four mega volumes on the history of Japan from the receShowa Volume III: The End of WWII (1945) and the Sino-Japanese conflict (1953).
The best of the four mega volumes on the history of Japan from the recently deceased and much revered manga-ka, author of Kitaro and many other things just being translated into English. This one weighs in at 530 pages, but I have to say, it is not a chore to make it through. And you should read all of these because they are classics and are SO GOOD, but okay, let me be realistic and say, if you had to read just one of these to get a (healthy, still chunky) taste of the series, I would say this is the best one to read, and the most devastating, because it involves the catastrophic end of the war, and the most vicious critiques of the Japanese political and military leadership that led millions of Japanese to their deaths, and relays Mizuki's own personal survival of the war as a soldier in New Guinea.
Lowlights include the July 9, 1944 horrific military-brass-ordered mass banzai of more than 4,300 soldiers. The largest banzai charge in history. “Nobel death” is the military answer to everything, Mizuki notes, preferable (for the military brass) to the shame of living with defeat or captivity. Never mind what all the families will feel upon hearing of their teenaged son’s “sacrifice:” Pride? Possibly. Kuniaki Koiso said, “I’d rather see the death of the entire country than admit one defeat.” Nothing useful to say to that except to insist everyone read Wilfred Owen’s WWI poem about that attitude, “Dulce Et Decorum Est:”
And you know, I might not be quite so disrespectful of a Japanese cultural practice, but Mizuki himself is really enraged about it in this personal account. But Mizuki himself survived, narrowly, in the Japanese surrender at New Guinea, though he was maimed forever (had to have one arm amputated. . . and by an optometrist!) from serving in that “conflict.” Yikes, guess he could feel just a little “proud” to have been at least maimed . . . but to his credit, he mainly feels rage at the military and banzai and the idea of noble death. He details his experience—including finding stashes of gourmet food in the commander’s tents as their soldiers literally starved--in his memoir, Onwards to Our Noble Deaths, which I review here:
But that personal story, including long bouts of malaria, of having survived a bombing because he had been sent out to get water, and then everyone he left behind died--is also detailed here in Showa. He and his fellow foot soldiers could never fully understand why their military “superiors” wanted them just to die. Many of them tried to heap shame on them for being survivors.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and "ignoble" surrender and defeat are detailed here, alas, but the story is powerful, sort of riveting throughout for me as an American to see these events through a (also pacifist) Japanese perspective! For instance, I learn that postwar students were given historical textbooks with all references to militarism blacked out! (which is not to say U.S. textbooks are holy with respect to truthfulness about American wrongs!). But in the U.S. we would have never learned in school how the Japanese dealt with their defeat.
Some of the recovery from 1946 through 1953 was a little less interesting to me as history, but when this happens, we also get to see more of Mizuki’s personal life, such as his going to school for art. Mizuki made his way for a number of years as a Kamishibai (street performer)
The art is epically great, and yet, in this grand design, there’s some of Mizuki’s humor retained, even though there is so much pain. But this is Mizuki’s strength, that shines through, almost unbelievably strong: His great spirit. 5 stars for the series, 5 for this particular volume. ...more
In Volume 2, Riad, in his father’s hometown of Homs, Syria, goes to school for the first time. He's maOne of the best comics of the year, no question!
In Volume 2, Riad, in his father’s hometown of Homs, Syria, goes to school for the first time. He's maybe 6? Not much of huge significance seems to happen at first, it's quite episodic, but over 152 pages you get indelible impressions of what it was like for him to be a kid in that country in 1984, the accumulated effect of which ranges is disturbing. Riad has blond hair, so kids think he is Jewish and want to beat him up; he’s regularly a victim of bullying by kids who among other things torture frogs by tying them to bike wheels. The town of Homs is dingy, with evidence of poverty everywhere. We learn of kids neglected and dying. Hafez Al-Assad is the dictator at the time who got 100% of the vote, no dissent.
His Dad, a scholar who studied in France that everyone calls doctor, is pretty crazy in a generally goofy way through most of the first two volumes, and he defends the customs of this sad place out of nostalgia and. . . tradition. He's largely amusing, though over time, he's less and less funny. To save money the four in this family live in a largely unfurnished apartment, use a camp stove to cook with, even though he claims they have thousands of dollars saved up. They buy a stove from a guy that walked it on a camel three days from Lebanon. Black market rules. And then Dad kills sparrows to eat for a meal, which also seems barbaric.
Riad’s teachers seem anywhere from mildly to moderately psychotic, one of them beating them brutally on the hands with a stick for mild infractions like talking in class or tardiness while she alternates hateful expressions with grinning. He becomes sort of a emblem of unquestioned patriotism and xenophobia. Riad’s Mom is French and sort of speaks for us in being outraged about everything we see. Clearly in France, where they visit, the food is better, there are more opportunities, everything seems to be better. Sattouf lives there now.
There is one incident I shouldn’t reveal too specifically that is especially telling, that turns the relatively light comic tone of the memoir to darkness in this volume. I’ll say that it is something most of us know about, an “honor killing” that also comes to involve Riad's father and the extended Sattouf family. Until this happens, the tale seems generally paced as if it were just some episodic memoir, but the accumulation of what seems to be relatively minor acts of cruelty and barbarity leads us to this honor killing. The sense of how women are treated is inexcusable, as Sattouf gradually and compellingly makes clear. One of the last images of this volume is of Riad's mother protesting to her husband about this situation.
Sattouf is one of the best cartoonists in the world now. His comics timing and sublety are exquisite. Before this he had done four or more comics series, he worked at Charlie Hebdo, but this would appear to be his magnum opus. It sure looks like it. Here’s a master storyteller at work in a volume that is even better than the first one, one of the best comics of the year. Get on board!...more
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