from graphic novel guest blogger Francisca Goldsmith: Those who recognize the name of Bryan Talbot as the creator of one of the first graphic novels to be permitted into 20th century teen collections (courtesy of being named to YALSA’s Best Books for Young Adults list), may wonder if that story had its grounding in his wife Mary’s own unhappy childhood after reading the beautifully distilled but hard hitting joint biography they have now co-authored. While James Joyce’s daughter served as her father’s muse and beloved companion when she was a girl, her efforts to become independent were rebuffed by him as well as the rest of her family in young adulthood, turning her bitter about the role she had played as inspiring some of Read more…

Ernie Colón’s transformation of a quartet of horror tales from the essentially aural to equally essentially visual suggests some interesting questions about how our minds meet and work with elements of story. Inner Sanctum was among the radio-broadcast “theaters” through which audiences could get doses of pleasing thrills in pre-television days—about 500 tales of “mystery, horror and suspense” were brought to life by actors using voices and sound effects between 1941 and 1952. Altering the support of sounds for the support of pictures is only part of Colón’s work here: his choices of panels and perspectives come to the fore to create a new—but loyal—way of experiencing what started as actor’s voices. By maintaining Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith: As experienced readers even in traditional print formats, we all know how the size of a page, the presence or lack of margins, font choice and color can be relevant to something beyond merely our enjoyment or comfort with reading.  These factors can also tinge how we judge what we read, where we find ourselves holding the book, and how deeply our noses may be pressed into the narrative figuratively as well as anatomically.  The choice of binding, paper stock and ink aren’t just matters of economy, but also lights and textures we experience physically as we read glossy coffee table pages, cheap paperbacks, “book club” editions that, although encased in board covers, nonetheless Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith: The well constructed anthology not only offers readers an opportunity to find multiple voices, views and styles within a single pair of covers, but also directs the reader’s attention to similarities, differences, developing tropes and legacies arising from the variety. Tom Pomplun’s long running series of “Graphic Classics” typically provides richly rewarding explorations of both the writers and the cartoonists he pulls together in any single topical volume. Even at that, African-American Classics, number 22 in the series, is especially fine. Poems included are maintained as the authors wrote them, while the short stories have undergone necessary adaptation so that the book Read more…

This graphic novel is an excellent team effort, with Gruber’s technical vocabulary running through Newquist’s simplified rewording, without any loss of accuracy. Schreiber’s imagery of the four demographic groups of Americans most touched by and concerned about the new national Affordable Care Act enhance the detailed clarifications and explanations that Gruber, the MIT economist who helped to develop the nuts and bolts of the affordable health care plan, provides in this thorough but accessible work. By setting out the details of the book’s subtitle, the work as a whole not only addresses questions and concerns about this new act, but also gives readers new insight into how different offices of government actually do their Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith: Lynda Barry’s public career as a cartoonist began in a variety of alternative newspapers thirty years ago.  Since then, she’s become well recognized, not just as a humorous and insightful comic strip powerhouse but also as a teacher who can encourage those who have never before explored their creative abilities to let down the guards of their own fears, pick up a pen or pencil and let it flow.  The first volume of Blabber, Blabber, Blabber shows how these sparks and igniters all developed for Barry herself. Unlike some retrospective volumes, she isn’t looking back over the building of an empire; she is in midstream in her life and offering views of how she got to this Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith: No Starch Press continues to translate and produce a series of books that provide fact and fiction combined in a perfect balancing act.  While Larry Gonick and Stan Mack have given us excellent nonfiction resources in sequential art form, this series takes a different approach. Gonick and Mack both utilize cartoons to document facts.  The approach used in “The Manga Guides” series is more layered in format terms:  there is a running manga story in each volume, while the facts of the subject of the volume are discussed most directly in illustrated, but not cartoon, narrative pages, paragraph-style.  Both explicit and implicit in the manga story, however, can be found elements Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith: Among the modern classics teens are set to read as school texts, George Orwell’s Animal Farm resonates with most without rankling. Classrooms across the nation tear the text apart and readers across the nation feel rightfully bright and smug that they get this clever fable, that they have suspected something very similar going on in their own lives. Mush! is the Farm’s heir, but the political sphere is set aside and instead we are at the level of the neighborhood: there’s the pretty girl (Venus), the not so bright rich kid (Winston), the guy whose crotch rules his mouth and daydreams but who, really, has his scruples together (Buddy), the troublemaker, more schemer Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith: The biography of Tintin’s creator under review below is not, although sharing a similar title, to be confused with the 2008 coffee table style presentation of the artist and his characters. Instead, this translation of a somewhat older French study serves as a contemplative vehicle as well as an informative one.  It helps to know the rudiments of Georges Remi’s life: his devotion to scouting, his predicament as one who earned his living as a writer in Occupied Belgium, his concern that no one but Spielberg produce a Tintin movie and that it be live action.  But readers who don’t know these details will have their curiosity sufficiently piqued by passages here to Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger Francisca Goldsmith: While the civil protests and military strong-arm tactics that comprised the event we call Tiananman Square were televised to the world and have been revisited regularly since by activists, politicians and historians from all nations, the brutal suppression of Iranian protesters 20 years later, in response to a seemingly hijacked election, remains obscure in the West.  The development of cell phone networks and social media between the two events could have brought it to everyone’s eye and ear, let alone our living rooms, but the chill and misunderstandings between the barely admitted Christianity of the West and the Islamic politics that have become enmeshed in our Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger Francisca Goldsmith: Unlike teens in many other cultures, Americans are shy about discussing the ramifications of class. Teens recognize that some of their peers may be significantly better or worse off than themselves, and feel discomfort with the lack of parity. Making the stretch to recognize that, while one acts from one’s own awareness of what is “right”, that action may not hit the mark in others viewpoints can be a bitter pill to swallow. Oil and Water offers the opportunity to see the various sides of this divide, even as it shows in grim and non-hyperbolic detail the environmental and economic devastation caused by BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Bill MicKibben organized a group of Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith: Marjane Satrapi’s memoir depicting her girlhood in a changing Iran, during the 1970’s, is already a sequential art classic: relevant to readers who have and haven’t shared the kinds of emotional hardships and wonders of which she speaks, accessible across generations, and providing a story that has that magic power to compel its audience to accompany the main character through her explorations and revelations.  Newcomer (to American readers) Marzena Sowa recounts her different—and yet arguably equally universal—experience of girlhood in Marzi. The differences stand out readily enough:  countries (Iran vs Poland), cultures (Muslim vs Catholic), class (middle vs working), Read more…

HOSSEINI, Khaled Hosseini’s poignant story is brilliantly retold in this graphic novel. The author has provided the text; enhanced by Celoni and Andolfo’s artwork, the account of the complicated friendship between Hassan and Amir, two boys of very different social classes, carries all of the power and emotion of the original. Amir’s story continues, framed by changes in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, the subsequent Taliban takeover, and his journeys to Pakistan, the United States, and back to Afghanistan as he struggles to understand what it will take to “be good again.” The artists use a realistic illustration style and different palettes to add dimension to the story. Richer colors for the early days of Amir Read more…

Science-fiction novelist, short-story writer, and film-script author, Ray Bradbury has assisted in the rebirth of several of his most famous tales into graphic-novel form. In expressive black and white, Wimberly’s interpretation of the death of innocence by means of a nightmarish encounter with a traveling circus is among the most successful. Bradbury’s pacing and subtle but accessible emotional portraits of two boys discovering their limits of honor and goodness are maintained while the images offer horror-inducing perspectives as well as the necessary counter of mundane small-town life. Fine use of panel arrangements expands upon the properties of story telling by showing simultaneous events to be exactly such, Read more…

SALA, Richard. Sala creates stories in which brightly colored, cartoony art and characters who speak in casual idiom tell of events that aren’t so much humorous or casual as provocative and scary. In this outing, he combines motifs of a postapocalyptic landscape, wanderers, some vampiric businessmen, and, ultimately, Dr. Frankenstein. The stew works perfectly: readers have no chance to engage in incredulity as Tom and Colleen, returning to a destroyed and barren place after a camping trip, stumble across an amnesiac man and slowly tell his story. Characters are introduced at a steady but manageable pace, and it is only at story’s end that the opening pages become horrifyingly clear. Sala works with a full palette of beautiful, Read more…

Not a graphic novel but a collection of comic strips, this volume offers truly funny and pithy parodies on events in literary history, the lives of famous–and infamous–politicians, explorers, writers, and everyday behaviors of flawed humans. Matthew Henson gets revenge on Admiral Peary; Victorian ladies swear like sailors; Odysseus confronts the lure of Facebook; Nancy Drew and LBJ both get their due. Most pages contain 6-10 panels, and each black-and-white cartoon vignette includes a note explaining the context. A fair number of the political jokes are Canadian (Keaton is from Nova Scotia) but they work well as a way to show that stereotypes and insights can be held by all parties, not just self-involved Americans. The Read more…

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman led a busy life, not only as researcher, professor, civilian scientist at the birth of the atomic bomb, and lecturer, but also as a raconteur, husband, and interlocutor with other scientists. Well practiced and noted science comics writer Ottaviani offers s a first-person Feynman who is fully fleshed, humorous, and frustrated by turn, and clear about the roles of family and art in his life, as well as physics problems and solutions. Myrick’s beautifully colored images bounce with Feynman’s emblematic energy while showing clearly his attraction to women, his lack of concern for upscale creature comforts, and his methods of cracking safes as well as prioritizing image over number when Read more…

From graphic novel blogger, Francisca Goldsmith: Rick Geary’s Sacco and Vanzetti isn’t just a question of who-really-dunnit, but a fine exposure of how prejudice, temper, arrogance, and even regionalism played their roles in the messed up trial the pair of Italian immigrants got after they were arrested for murder during a daylight robbery in 1920 Massachusetts. Accuracy during the evidence collection phase was a bit sloppy, but its tattered remains during the trial and then during the appeals process are shown by Geary as being criminally negligent. As is his typical method, Geary provides exquisite levels of detail within highly compressed space: he shows us how some witnesses couldn’t possibly see what they claim, what Read more…

So, what happened to yesterday’s big-deal coppers? And how do they handle the death of a has-been arch-nemesis? Through the story, art, and perfect coloring of this creative team, readers get a satisfying look at the possibilities: retired big-city police detective Kane, known as The Spook, learns of the demise of his 1940-ish era rival, Mr. Murder, and can’t help both investigating and ruminating. In passages that alternate between then and now, readers get a purposefully and pun-laden stereotypical journey through how detective comics used to read and what a couple of angry old guys–the Spook has a sidekick, of course, in equally retired former Captain Chung–can unearth in the present. The real story, however, is whether Read more…

NPR reporter Gladstone proves highly successful in delivering insights, opinions, contextual history, and a heady dose of implications of current conditions of media consumption on both individuals and cultures and how it affects the likely future. And she does all that within this accessible and clearly drawn comic book. Neufeld lays out her scripting in clear, turquoise-washed panels, and together the two make sure those panels speak in both words and images essential to the message. And the message: at the bottom line, we make the media what they are and so we get from our news sources what we really want. Along the way here, readers learn about the history of reporting, the complex system of biases that journalists Read more…

Eating disorders, a teen (as well as adult) problem that regularly finds its way into both fiction and memoir, have appeared in several recent graphic novels.  Lesley Fairfield’s Tyranny, Tracy White’s How I Made It to Eighteen and Carol Lay’s The Big Skinny each depict recovery stories in which aspects of eating disorders are addressed. The medium is well suited to showing the ravages of anorexia, the inaccuracies a sufferer of bulimia holds in viewing his or her own body, and the boredom and patient deceptions possible during hospitalization. Lay skillfully depicts good advice for maintaining newly gained health, including non-food habits needing change in the yo-yo dieter’s relationship with eating. In Lucille (reviewed Read more…

The term “multicultural” when applied to reading choices for youth is used too often as shorthand to identify books that aren’t multi in their cultural portrayals, so much as about a cultural group that is something other than the dominant one. Natsume Ono, however, has concocted a rich and splendid story of fully expanded multiculturalism: the setting is an Italian apartment and its neighborhood, the cast includes middle aged Italian bachelors and a stream of exchange students — female as well as male — from Denmark, Japan, and America, and the friends all these characters cultivate beyond the apartment.  Without ever losing the thread of story or suggesting that any cultural norm is a mere stereotype, the sepia world Read more…

VENDITTI, Robert. The Homeland Directive. illus. by Mike Huddleston. 148p. Top Shelf Productions. 2011. Adult/High School -– The premise in this genre-blending political commentary/thriller is compelling: the government’s various investigatory agencies have determined that U.S. residents can be more deeply probed for undertaking suspicious activities by mining everyone’s data DNA, the sum of each person’s online transactions and activities. Venditti’s tight plotting and well-developed characters, envisioned by Huddleston’s variegated artistic approaches, are perfectly suited to one another. The federal plot is in the hands of a few geeks depicted on pages with graph-paper backdrops; the heads of the plotting departments Read more…

by Millar, MarkPolitics doesn’t often blend well with superheroics. Heroes have to see the world in black and white, and politics introduces too many shades of gray and smears of red. This makes it all the more refreshing when someone tackles a serious issue in a nuanced way in a comic. The major question in this book is vigilantism versus authority, whether superheroes should register and have a license in order to act. What makes this book work is that it argues both sides, giving compelling reasons in favor of registration as well as against. The end of the book, and the decisions made on both sides, establish a new order, in which the usual black and white of superheroics has become gray at the edges.- reviewed by Ian, North Read more…

by Diggle, AndyLike Batman, Green Arrow was a billionaire playboy who turned to fighting crime. Unlike Batman, there was no central tragedy in Oliver Queen’s life. His parents weren’t killed in an alleyway setting him on a dark path. His path, and by extension his morality, is more complicated. This book, by the excellent Andy Diggle, gives us a view of what leads a bored young man to become a force for good. It’s at times a painful journey, starting with a shipwreck that leaves Oliver stranded on a desert island having to hunt to survive, but it does an excellent job of stripping Oliver’s comfortable preconceptions and showing a darker world underneath. This is fast-paced, action-packed storytelling with superb art.- reviewed by Read more…