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Smith (1933–2004) was a prisoner who took a leadership role within the 1971 Attica prison uprising, and this immersive graphic memoir (coauthored by the stepson of his longtime lawyer) illuminates the plantationlike environment that precipitated the hostage crisis—and the bloody siege that followed. The son of a South Carolina sharecropper, Smith was sentenced to 10–15 years in prison in 1965 for holding up a dice game. At Attica, he becomes the yard football coach and bonds with an older prisoner obsessed with da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, an illustration repeated throughout the book to depict Smith’s later torture by guards in retribution for the uprising. The beating of two inmates triggers the prisoner revolt, in which guards and other employees are taken captive, and Smith is named by fellow inmates as head of security. He attempts to ensure hostage safety and manage tensions among inmates as they present their manifesto and appeals to then-governor Nelson Rockefeller. The account also details the 25-year legal battle that resulted in a 1997 settlement to Smith and others for their maltreatment. The stellar artwork by Améziane (Muhammad Ali) includes tabloidlike chapter openers rendered with bold fonts and exaggerated letterboxes. His expressive realism and muted colors invoke a nostalgic 1970s pulp effect reminiscent of Ed Piskor’s work. This penetrating portrait of a broken correctional system and a flawed man focuses on his legacy of courage, which towers over the forces stacked against him. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

Pham (Sublife) crafts a funny and surprisingly affecting story of two slacker friends and their marginal lifestyles. Jay and Kay steal taco rolls from their friend Eggy’s party, encounter Glumpires at the mall, seek out soulless minimum-wage employment, tramp through graveyards, and masquerade as cats and dogs in a Garfield riff. There is a central sweetness to all of the oddness on display; every character deals with sadness, loneliness, and trauma. Even a scene as grotesque as Jay giving “birth” to a pimple-creature they name “Bacne” is rendered semi-adorable in Pham’s hands, thanks in part to his soft day-glow color scheme. The design matches the ephemeral feel of the characters’ existence, floating through a world they don’t quite relate to. Jay, Kay, and Eggy (who is drawn with a face made up of a trypophobia-inducing cluster of lumps) take solace in old magazines, obscure music and video games, and other disposable culture that’s beautiful only to them. Pham includes posters, stickers, a 5” vinyl record, and other ephemera as part of the physical package of the volume, tied to its characters’ obsessions. This jumble of gags and lovable and loving outsiders succeeds through sheer, unrelenting weirdness. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

Villadsen deconstructs the oft-deconstructed western genre—along with gender, narrative, and the comics form—in this feverish stew of pulp tropes and postmodern games. In a Wild West town populated by stock characters—helpfully labeled The Sheriff, The Coward, The Smoker, etc.—a familiar story of gunslingers facing off at high noon is repeatedly disrupted with sex, scatology, surrealist digressions, and unusual eroticism. The closest thing to a coherent plot follows The Window, one of the interchangeable women whose role is to peer fearfully out of windows at the men in the street, as she grows dissatisfied and plans an escape. She grabs the artist’s pen, draws a mustache and testicles on herself, and dresses as a cowboy and attempts to ride off into the sunset. In other vignettes, a wanted poster talks back to an outlaw, and a lady of the evening floats out of her brothel like a balloon. The loose, blue-tinted watercolor art has a deliberately unfinished look, adding to the sense of a fictional world disintegrating into chaos. If the book saunters lackadaisically toward its final pages rather than building to a satisfying conclusion, maybe that’s appropriate, as it’s more of a a formal experiment than a complete story. Wandering until he runs out of ideas, Villadsen takes readers on one bizarre ride. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

In this mature and nuanced follow-up to Hong’s graphic memoir Uncomfortably Happy, the artist and his wife are still living a poor but mostly contented life in the South Korean countryside. They now have a baby, Iwan, and Hong imagines the home they’ve built together as a tiny, idyllic private planet; all the characters are represented as cartoon cats. But the larger world intrudes in the form of Hong’s aging parents, who share a grim basement apartment in Seoul and are starting to require constant care. Having worked hard to escape his father’s alcoholic abuse and his mother’s depression, Hong feels that “only beyond my parents’ reach is my world free to grow.” But he comes to appreciate how the work he does to support his wife and child—cooking, gardening, raising chickens, making kimchi for the winter—grows from an urge to nurture passed down from his mother. “Almost every memory I have of my mother begins with her cooking,” he reflects, and food provides a link between Hong’s two worlds. In Hong’s cheerful drawings, the countryside bursts with life, and his culinary escapades are a jubilant theatrical sequence. But even as the narrative grows darker, the simple, friendly art remains surprisingly effective. This moving story about being both a parent and a child represents a creative leap forward for one of Korea’s up and coming contemporary comic artists. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/14/2019 | Details & Permalink

Backderf (My Friend Dahmer) delivers a provocative, heartbreaking account of the days leading up to the infamous tragedy of May 1970, in which National Guardsmen killed four unarmed students and injured nine others at a Vietnam War protest on the Kent State University campus. Backderf conducted extensive research to explore the lives of the four students, revealing their hopes and dreams for the future—portraits that sharply rebut the politically motivated smears politicians and media outlets inflicted upon them after the incident. Though wholly sympathetic to the student protestors, Backderf also takes care to report the grueling conditions the National Guardsmen were forced to endure; their lack of training for de-escalation versus battlefield deployment; and the failings of leaders such as Ohio governor Jim Rhodes (a Nixon loyalist) and Gen. Robert Canterbury. Both men’s anger and paranoia toward antiwar activists stoked their emotion-driven directives to the exhausted, agitated guardsmen and fueled an already highly volatile situation. Backderf’s tightly drawn, muscular figures and busy layouts anchored by choice period details are consistent with his established style, with flourishes (from hairstyles to smirks) that individualize the ensemble cast. His expertly crafted chronicle of this defining moment in U.S. history serves as a deeply moving elegy for the victims. Readers may also draw from it sobering parallels to the deep divisions of contemporary times, again dangerously rife with media noise and misinformation muddying the waters. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2019 | Details & Permalink

In this lo-fi graphic memoir by Chambaz, illustrated by Barroux (Alpha: Abidjan to Paris), the classically blasé Frenchman arrives in New York to run the marathon only to discover two problems. First: “I hate running.” Second: “My girlfriend has just dumped me.” So he does what any jilted guy with a lot of energy and no easy outlet for it would do: rent a Shadow 750 motorcycle and hit the road. Following the Lincoln Highway across the country, Chambaz has no real escapades, but dispenses some new-millennium-lite Alexis de Tocqueville observations along the way (“Americans love rankings”) and undertakes rather sad one-night stands. The trip is related tersely, with some intermittent navel gazing, though hinting at a deeper darkness and desperation pushing him down the highway. More often, the writing allows the strung-together scenes to exist on their own, such as when he sees people lined up for a free dentist as an illustration of the nation’s poverty or when he flips a coin in Reno to decide which way to go. The splotchy, black-and-white art is vague on facial expressions, but sometimes quite effectively renders the scope and wonder and weirdness of the American landscape. Like a Gallic Jim Jarmusch road movie (though shorter), this slim motorcycle diary has its moments, but it zooms by too quickly to leave a lasting impression. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2019 | Details & Permalink

Swedish artist Wallander plays with the comics medium in this wry meditation on art and self-expression. Three little girls drawn in loose, squiggly lines wander a shifting landscape populated by eccentric artists working in unlikely mediums. One woman lives in a house-sized replica of her womb; another is an island and swallows visitors for inspiration; others try to transform into horses or gather for a group-cry. The jittery linework suggests Jules Feiffer, with similar accuracy at capturing human gestures in a doodle. So does the self-analytical dialogue, peppered with pithy observations such as “I haven’t made a single thing since I got here, but the suffering has been splendid” and “I’ve preserved my childlike sense of wonder. I’ve preserved it very hard.” The spindly characters move through colorful background collages of smudgy paint, photography, patterns, textures, and even sculpture, making this exploration of the artistic urge appropriately varied to look at. Wallander’s gently philosophical ramble is likely to appeal to creative types who periodically get stuck on the question of what creativity is for. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2019 | Details & Permalink

Romanova’s disarming debut graphic memoir grapples with gender, power, and bad Tinder dates. After an uncomfortable night out with an older, well-known media personality, struggling young artist Romanova resolves to ghost him. But he keeps messaging her, and as she falters in coping with academic rejection and a precariously stabilized panic disorder, she finds herself welcoming his sympathy, and accepting his offer to become her financial and emotional “patron.” But the celebrity’s support soon takes on a manipulative tone, leaving her feeling more alone than ever. Romanova keeps the celebrity anonymous, referring to him as “Known TV-Guy, 53” and depicting him with a paper bag over his head. Romanova’s semisurreal cartooning (her protagonist wields bizarre proportions like a cracked-mirror fashion doll, seeming both monstrous and familiar) lays bare the subtle, commonplace ways that men abuse women’s trust. The coloring and textures vibe with 1980s retro, but the script and cartooning are perfectly of the moment, with spot-on dialogue from her team of joke-cracking friends, thanks to a truly excellent idiomatic translation. There are also some hilarious visual gags, such as Romanova’s supportive mother drawn as a Moomin. As Romanova learns to heal and understand herself, readers who have dealt with mental health struggles or unequal power dynamics in relationships will recognize and sympathize with her regenerative conclusion. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2019 | Details & Permalink

Martin, a Spanish cartoonist of European Disney and Tom & Jerry comics, delivers a warrior treatment of the latter in this saga of a burly muscled rodent fighting through a Mad Max–style world. Solo’s postapocalyptic landscape is populated with warring tribes of animals: scavenger weasels, devil dogs, shadowed black cats, and his own species, a tribe of intelligent, overgrown rats hiding in caves and reduced to a primitive society. These animals coexist uneasily with duplicitous humans, and Solo is rat-napped into an all-species gladiator games before finally finding the happiness and family the wanderer aches for. Martin’s art enlivens the survival story with an animated, cartoony style depicting wide-eyed anthropomorphized creatures. The fantastic anatomy of bipedal animals is smooth and natural, and with fluent, energetic tiered panels of fighting action. Muted but robust coloring depicts the tan and brown of an endless scorching desert, subtle grays and whites of a blizzard winter (occasionally splashed with scarlet blood), and black skies ripped with sharper grays on a rainy night. This is the first of Martin’s series of tales of warrior vermin translated for an English-reading audience, and his mythos holds the promise of standing alongside Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo or Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2019 | Details & Permalink

This nimble graphic adaptation of Butler’s 1993 novel of capitalism-ravaged California feels alarmingly prescient and relevant. Duffy and Jennings (Kindred) skillfully rework the tale told through the eyes of teenage empath Lauren Oya Olamina, who navigates a world transformed by drought, gun violence, and exploitation. Lauren, daughter of a preacher, pushes back against her family and friends, who naively hope life will return to the good old days. “The old days aren’t coming back,” Lauren says, as she shares her own spiritual message, the Earthseed, which declares “God is Change.” The adaptation captures the heart of Butler’s message: survival depends on evolution, but also on breaking through isolation to build communities of trust and love. Jennings’s color palette flames with reds, oranges, and yellows, evoking both vibrant Los Angeles sunsets and the city choked with smoke and fire. His blocky, busy line work portrays the brutal violence of Lauren’s life (mobs of desperate people commit murder, rape, and mutilation every day) without lingering on the gore or turning the empathetic story into a grotesque thriller. Instead, the pain Lauren witnesses and feels as she travels across the state reinforces her resolve to become a leader. This accessible adaptation is poised to introduce Butler’s dystopian tale to a new generation of readers. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2019 | Details & Permalink