Even now, 38 years after the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, there are still people who think that graphic novels are less serious than nonillustrated fiction or that they’re just for kids. But when you add illustrations to text, a whole new level of artistry is possible, as proven by some of the wonderful books that have come out this year.
In The Jellyfish (Pow Pow Press, May 1), author and illustrator Boum uses the gelatinous creature as a stunning metaphor for her own vision problems. The book opens with Odette, a young Montreal woman, sitting in an ophthalmologist’s office as she’s told, “Miss Biset-Yu, it seems you do in fact have a jellyfish in your left eye.” The next page shows a small jellyfish floating over Odette’s head, and in the pages that follow it’s hovering around, sometimes on top of her hat, other times seeming to watch her go about her life—working at a bookstore, taking care of her pet rabbit, and beginning a relationship with a woman named Naina. Then the jellyfish starts growing. “Boum’s startling use of perspective and her placement of the jellyfish that float through every page…create a near perfect symbiosis between narrative and art,” according to our starred review.
Leela Corman’s Victory Parade (Schocken, April 2) is an Expressionist look at life in Brooklyn’s Jewish community during World War II. Rose Arensberg works as a riveter in a shipyard and finds some happiness in the bed of a veteran who lost his leg in the war that her husband is still fighting; she lives with her daughter, Eleanor, and Ruth, a refugee from Nazi Germany who channels her anger into professional wrestling. Rose dreams of death and dismemberment, with legs floating through the air. “Corman’s figures are striking, with angular bodies and faces, the latter punctuated by downturned lips and enormous eyes ringed by darkness,” according to our starred review. “Vivid watercolors enhance the uncanny atmosphere, hues spilling and pooling into visceral shapes and strata.”
David Small is best known for children’s books, but Stitches, a graphic memoir of his difficult childhood, was a bestseller in 2009. Now he’s written The Werewolf at Dusk (Liveright, March 12), a book of three graphic short stories that explore the monsters lurking in a trio of older men. The title story is based on a short by Lincoln Michel and begins with a man recalling the way he used to wake up in strange places, covered with blood. “That was a long time ago,” he says. Now he’s an old man who can’t keep up with a squirrel, let alone run through the city with the legs of a wolf—but he’s still scared of himself. “Small’s linework is striking in its expressiveness and energy, figures and forms leaping across the page while eyes and lips simmer with emotion,” our starred review says. “Broad patches and layers of color imbue the illustrations with a gorgeous painterly quality.”
Coming this month is Rescue Party (Pantheon, July 23), an anthology of 140 comic strips created at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, edited by Gabe Fowler. Our starred review calls it “an invaluable time capsule and an arresting expression of the human condition.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
