Masterfully paneled and attractively illustrated but populated by archetypes.
Comics writer/illustrator and theorist McCloud (Making Comics, 2006, etc.) presents an artist’s struggle to make a name for himself and the complications love brings to the Faustian deal he's made to gain total control of his craft.
David Smith once had a promising career as a sculptor, but his abrasive personality burned too many bridges, and now he can’t even hold down a job flipping burgers. Stewing in self-pity and booze, he receives an uncanny visitor who offers him a choice between the long, slow burn of the compromised life or the firework pop of the superstar. Without hesitation, David chooses to be a martyr for his art, and soon he has the ability to mold any material simply by touch—and 200 days to live. He launches into an ecstasy of self-expression, fantastically shaping slab after slab of granite like it was so much potter’s clay, but his first showing of the new work only sends him spiraling further into despondency—until beautiful, free-spirited Meg swoops in on angel wings. Her joie de vivre eases David’s tortured mind, and a daffy friendship eventually blossoms into mad passion. But even as David refines his manipulation of matter and his sense of life’s worth, his ultimate deadline looms. At nearly 500 pages, the tale still manages a brisk pace, with crosscut scenes or subtle but telling differences between nearly identical frames propelling the gaze through uncluttered text and crisp, clear lines, while the reader’s mind winds agreeably around the steadily twisting plot. McCloud can sacrifice logic in favor of function, though, and sometimes reactions feel outsized, emotions overwrought and dialogue pat, functioning more as punctuation in a sequence of panels than as the actions of nuanced characters, especially when the work nakedly addresses such grandiose issues as artistic integrity, the glories and agonies of love, and the desperate beauty of life.
Masterfully paneled and attractively illustrated but populated by archetypes.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59643-573-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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