Kendall (the Lester of the Lesser Gods series) and Latino add more than 50 pages of new material to this hilarious collection of their long-running autobiographical comics series. The wide-ranging anecdotes ruminate on the everyday humiliations of middle age (“I’m practically 50 and have no marketable skills... fuck following my bliss”), child-rearing (“Why don’t you and your penis go back to New York!” shouts Doug’s daughter, having recently been taught how to name intimate body parts), workplace humor, and San Diego Comic-Con. Other vignettes veer into the fantastical with the appearance of werewolves (actually another parenting gag)—and recount the time cows ate Latino’s crop during his brief foray into pot farming. Kendall’s art boasts a rubbery style that looks right out of vintage Mad magazine. Guest artists include alt-comix creators Julie Peppito, Ben Granoff, and Sarah Grillo, and full-color chapter frontispieces are provided by Bob Fingerman, Danny Hellman, Josh Neufeld, and others. This raucous showcase is sure to appeal to fans of Harvey Pekar and Joe Matt. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/04/2024 | Details & Permalink

In her bold, informative graphic memoir debut, Thomas tackles fatphobia in the media, medical field, and her own mind. She’s just 16 when a doctor, in the process of treating her for strep throat, delivers a line that becomes a chorus: “You could stand to lose some weight.” While training to be a paramedic, she struggles to lift a man at the scene of an accident, decides her weight is to blame, and drops out. She joins a gym, commits to a rigorous diet and exercise program, and follows it “like gospel”—but after losing nearly 100 pounds, she still struggles with body dysmorphia and depression, and realizes she’s developed an eating disorder. When a fat activist challenges her in a social media post (“Do you even know who you are without all this weight loss crap?”), Thomas’s liberation begins. The narrative covers the historical and political roots of anti-fatness, the body mass index, and the body positivity era. She notes that even the well-intentioned “Healthy at Every Size” movement is inherently ableist, as it excludes long-term disabled or ill people (she prefers body neutrality). Stark black-and-white illustrations depict her fear as a tarlike substance that envelops her, while dysmorphia melts her into a bulging pile. Nuanced and vulnerable, this succeeds as both a body-politics primer and a personal story of the rocky path to self-acceptance. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/04/2024 | Details & Permalink

A father hopes to rein in his quick temper in the brooding graphic novel debut from filmmakers Chevarier and McGuire. Pat keeps snapping at his elementary school–age kids, Sam and Lily. Though the outbursts—during which he’s drawn as a looming grizzly bear—tend to stem from a protective impulse, he is troubled by echoes of his own father’s alcohol-fueled rages. His wife, Ester, takes frequent business trips, and he begs her to stop leaving him to solo-parent (“I’m afraid I’ll hurt them”). When Sam gets in a fight at school, Pat fears he’s passed down some essential fury inherited from his own father—and posits that men haven’t “evolved enough yet to care for children.” This all coincides with the discovery that his father, who won’t answer questions about his military service, received the Bronze Star in Vietnam. Pat turns to his friends—a stay-at-home dad and a professor who has insights into epigenetics—to help process it all. They push back on his tendency to throw all his baggage on his genes, as does Ester, who tells Pat, “Trauma can be inherited, but that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to repeat all your dad’s worst mistakes.” Chevarier renders Pat’s mounting anxiety in emotive pages rubbed raw with frenetic pencil shading. It’s a charmingly drawn book about a thorny topic. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/04/2024 | Details & Permalink

A bored everyman does battle with the colossal enemy that is a dull Sunday in this epic mock-Proustian graphic novel from Belgian artist Schrauwen (Portrait of a Drunk). The narrative chronicles “one exemplary, lame day” in the life of Schrauwen’s real cousin, Thibault, who wakes up with vague ideas about getting things done. But no matter the task, whether it’s delivering the typeface design he is late on to an angry client or turning his garden into a greenhouse, procrastination and day-dreaming suck up hours. More pressing topics also occupy his mind, such as the threatened arrival of his party animal cousin Rik (“Hide your drugs,” Rik warns as he invites himself over) and the delayed return of his girlfriend, who has been working in Africa. But Thibault’s anxieties are largely self-created and low-stakes; erotic musings about an old crush land more as half-hearted fantasies than the desire for an affair. Any potential for evoking claustrophobia in the reader is warded off by quirky subplots (the imagined philosophical musings of a neighborhood cat, an irritable neighbor’s day drinking) and the cross-cutting between Thibault drunkenly slumbering through The Da Vinci Code on his couch while the people in his life prepare for his surprise birthday party, which caps the book in a seriocomic riff on It’s a Wonderful Life. Schrauwen’s clean white-and-blue sketch pad aesthetic is enlivened by strategic washes of pinks and reds. Any reader who’s ever wondered where the day went will take heart in this surprisingly touching and life-affirming portrait of indolence. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/04/2024 | Details & Permalink

Fox (Prokaryote Season) unspools an imaginative and insightful tale of gender transition. Lucille undertakes the fraught journey across the sea from Girl Island to Boy Island, hoping at last to become his authentic self. The backstory to Lucille’s plight revolves around the rivalry between two powerful arch enemies: Jounce, who serves as the main narrator and describes himself as the “spirit of perversion”; and Fairy, who created the islands to maintain control over strict binaries. Those who are neither male nor female, Jounce explains, are “faced with a choice; either pick a side or flee into the vast ocean.... the bravest among them chose the ocean.” Others in the fantastical cast include Starman, Fairy’s son, who transports people between the islands for “the price of one memory,” and Batleigh, Starman’s estranged sister who is searching for her missing husband on Boy Island. At the close of their adventures, Starman tells Lucille, “We can’t uninvent gender. But we can try and make it work, right?” Fox’s dreamlike landscapes and phantasmagorical character design give the proceedings surreal visual flair. This winning fable is drawn with wild style and genuine heart. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

Ralph underwhelms in his graphic novel debut, which employs encounters between journalist Ida B. Wells and abolitionist Fredrick Douglass as a narrative device to articulate the ties between slavery and mass incarceration arising from the limits of the 13th Amendment. Wells goes to confront Douglass after he delivers a keynote speech at the 1893 Columbian World’s Exposition, despite working with Wells to encourage a boycott of the event and its segregationist “colored people’s day.” After Douglass’s fame gets them past the white staff at the door of an exclusive restaurant, they debate their differences. From there, the pair embark on a journalistic investigation of the convict leasing program at the Kentucky State Penitentiary, where they pry into a corrupt system built on discrimination. Focusing on Joel Scott, a warden who ran the penitentiary for 40 years before the passage of the 13th Amendment, they aim to expose how prisons are being used as private businesses. Comics drawn by Nia Palmer, Ruth O’Leary, and Laura Molnar are vibrantly colored and expressive but too often rely on talking head close-ups, while dense information dumping and disconnected asides leave the central relationship between Wells and Douglass underdeveloped. Despite its good intentions, this misses the mark. Agent: Anna Olswanger, Olswanger Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

“Ninjutsu Is Awesome!” blares the opening of this rollicking ride through manga’s back alleys, created in 1969 by Sugiura—an artist who drew children’s gag manga before developing a postmodern pastiche of his own style aimed at older readers. Sasuke, a master ninja drawn to look like a mischievous little boy, uses his ninjutsu to steal food, wanders into rambling conversations peppered with fart jokes and pop music references, gets into slapstick fights with bizarre rival ninja and even more bizarre monsters, and occasionally, as if by afterthought, participates in vaguely historical samurai adventures. Sugiura mixes rubbery cartoon characters, realistic figures painstakingly copied from American comic books and movie stills (the ninja frequently fight cowboys and dinosaurs), imaginatively freakish monsters that sometimes wander behind the panels, and whatever else he feels like drawing, turning his pages into frenetic collages with surrealist and pop art notes. Manga expert Holmberg supplies an appropriately irreverent translation (“Eat my topknot!”) as well as a scholarly essay on the cultural context behind Sugiura’s freewheeling, relentlessly wacked-out visions. This eye-popping mash-up of kiddie cartoons and underground art is perfectly weird. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

Lebanese artist Rima makes her English-language debut with this robust mix of memoir, history, and magical realism, which gathers her graphic novel trilogy into one volume. Rima’s nonlinear narratives zigzag through a period of relative peace and prosperity in the first installment, “Beirut,” which takes place in 1995. In “Beirut Bye Bye,” she captures the scene in 2015, when a waste management crisis overtook the city, igniting protests against an ineffective and corrupt government. In the final section, “Beirut Rewind,” Rima returns to the city in 2017 to publicize her latest book and reunites with the spirit of her mother, who briefly takes her back to 1967, when “socialism, Arab unity, anti-imperialism, and Palestine inflamed passions among Arab youth.” In response to the dizzying swirl of political strife, Rima expresses mostly ambivalence about her troubled hometown, lamenting, “Each time I appear in the story it’s to say, ‘Quick, let’s run away!’ ” Conversely, she also confesses, “I long to look back.” Rima nimbly handles the shifts in time with evocative, gestural drawings that capture how sociopolitical upheavals reverberate across generations. Throughout, her restless blend of the personal and the political thrums with urgency. Readers will have a tough time putting this one down. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

This stimulating graphic autofiction from French singer-songwriter Grange, best known for her protest anthem “Les Nouveaux Partisans,” chronicles a young woman’s radicalization in Paris in the 1960s and ’70s. Drawn by Grange’s esteemed cartoonist husband, Tardi (Farewell, Brindavoine), the account follows Elise, a composite character based on Grange and her fellow activists. In the book’s opening pages, Elise is scorched nearly to death by an accidental explosion of Molotov cocktails in 1972. The narrative then rewinds to her youth in Lyons, when she’s scandalized by the government’s brutal mistreatment of Algerian immigrants. She joins in the 1968 student uprisings and is beaten by police at a protest. Unlike the stereotypical bourgeois radical, Elise and her “comrades” flee the shelter of their university, work in factories and with immigrants, and fight for quantifiable changes. When Elise proclaims that “the class war continues!” it lands as more than just a slogan. Tardi provides lively and grungy art, but the dogmatic tone flattens the contours of Elise’s story even at its most dynamic plot turns (a short prison term, going on the run), and the narrative plays coy with some specifics (where were those Molotov cocktails intended to land?). Still, it’s a dramatic and defiant raised-fist of a story. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

Poet and memoirist Kercheval (Space) makes a vibrant graphic debut in this gathering of loosely connected reveries on family history. Pithy, introspective vignettes recall a childhood sidelined by illness and a back brace, and marked by her parents’ WWII wartime traumas. Kercheval’s father maintains a haunted reserve, while her mother, who served on a ship transporting wounded soldiers “who had lost limbs. Or their minds,” lapses into drinking and depression. Kercheval writes with a musing, inquisitive voice but also embroiders her accounts with fairy tale flourishes. The description of the dozens of antique clocks displayed in her friend Jackie’s house gives way to a journey through a Narnia-like door to a distant forest; elsewhere, there are pricked fingers and glass coffins. When Kercheval’s mother later struggles with Alzheimer’s, she too braids fantasy and memory, recalling a fearsome wolf that once saved her from appendicitis. Kercheval’s arresting, mostly full page pastel illustrations possess a dreamlike quality reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall (with nods to Cocteau). These evocative personal allegories unearth the knotted roots feeding a very particular family lore. Readers will be beguiled. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/20/2024 | Details & Permalink