One of the more recent additions to the Best American Series has established itself as one of the most valuable.
Annual anthology finds the state of graphic narrative in robust health.
With the estimable Burns (Black Hole, 2005, etc.) taking a turn as guest editor, readers might expect a darker mood to this year’s offerings. Yet if anything connects the dots in this varied collection, it’s how self-referential comic authors are as they pursue their craft. There’s a meta-comic dimension to much of this work, whether it’s a comic focused on the creation of a comic (“Spirit Duplicator,” Dan Zettwoch), a comic that reflects the inspiration of older comic strips (“Indian Spirit Twain & Einstein,” Michael Kupperman), a comic that pays homage to another contemporary comic artist (“Cruddy,” Ron Regé Jr., “stolen from the novel by Lynda Barry”) or comics that focus primarily on the self, either real (“Why I Write Only About Myself,” Aline Kominsky-Crumb) or surreal (“When I Was Eleven,” Gabrielle Bell). Some artists extend the net well beyond self and craft, from the futuristic “Galactic Funnels” of Dash Shaw to the apocalyptic, cross-cultural desolation of Gary Panter’s “Dal Tokyo.” Other forms of popular culture provide inspiration as well, with Kevin Huizenga’s “Glen Ganges in Pulverize” steeped in video-game obsession, Tim Hensley’s “Jillian in the Argument” providing a subversive sitcom twist and “Skim,” by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, illuminating goth. Among the additional familiar names are Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Gilbert Hernandez and Art Spiegelman, making this collection a fine introductory primer. As series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden write in their preface, “The comics you read in this book aren’t the ‘best’ in the sense that they beat out other comics, American Idol-style. What they are is a personally curated selection of top-notch work that reflects just some of the excellence and variety that exists out there.”
One of the more recent additions to the Best American Series has established itself as one of the most valuable.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-618-98965-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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