awaiting review
The Waiting
by M.T. Bennett When Art Spiegelman wrote Maus, a story of his father’s life as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, he showed us the poignant power graphic novels have in telling the horrific stories of war-torn places. Devastating prose combined with stark black and white images paint stories of some of humanities greatest tragedies. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim has followed Spiegelman’s footsteps and become a master of using the medium to share the horrors of war. From her recently published The Naked Tree, a story told about life during the Korean War, to Grass a story of Japanese Imperial atrocities… Read More
Offshore Lightning
by Christine Castigliano, HeartsQuest.com This collection by manga-ka (manga artist) Nazuna Saito offers a poetic, humorous glimpse into everyday life – and death – in Japan. Most of the stories were originally published in 1991-92 as the artist entered her late 40s. After a 20-year hiatus to care for ailing family members, she published several longer pieces, until a stroke in 2018 slowed her manga production. As an elder, the artist offers her unique perspectives on memory, aging, and the transience of life. As a Japanese artist, Saito draws on a cultural lineage that relies on symbolic nature images… Read More
The Naked Tree
by Matt Peters The trauma of violence can linger decades later, waiting for the slightest reminder to bring it back to the surface. A resemblance of something from the past can steal the survivor from the present, forcing them to relive a separation, a loss, or an atrocity. Clinical terms like post-traumatic stress disorder can’t fully describe how the experience permeates a survivor’s life, turning the past into something inescapable. It can haunt not only survivors but also their posterity, as behavioral cues and epigenetic markers—chemical changes to DNA—are passed on to the next generation, causing the initial shock… Read More
Introducing Epigenetics – Introducing A Graphic Guide series
awaiting review
Medical Mentions Book Review VIII
Medical Mentions is a group of graphic works. The graphic works reviewed here are books whose primary topics are not medical, and yet they cover a medical topic with some depth at some point in the work. The rest of the work might be fictional or nonfictional, while the medical portion is often technical and five pages or more. The reviewer will usually neither recommend nor discourage reading the work, except when the rest of the work is deemed outstanding or terrible, respectively. Typically, six graphic works will be part of the review with one paragraph for each. Prior Medical Mentions… Read More
Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir
by Soph Myers-Kelley Bishakh Som in Spellbound introduces the reader to a memoir experience about culture, immigration, queerness, transness, tantalizing foods, and crushing identity crises. It’s ideal for older teenagers and adults. One of the most interesting creative decisions Som makes in her book is the choice to use a stand-in cisgender Bengali American character named Anjali instead of depicting her own likeness as the protagonist. Som herself is a transgender Bengali American woman, who came out as an adult. She originally created this work as a diary comic before stringing together longer chapters. This book is a complex, note… Read More
Shadow Life
Book Review by Kevin Wolf Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. (Dylan Thomas – 1914-1953) Almost immediately we read that Ms. Kumiko Saito—an elderly Japanese-Canadian woman— in Shadow Life, Hiromi Goto’s first graphic novel and drawn by Ann Xu, only needs life’s necessities and discards the rest. This graphic work wonderfully merges the words and pictures symbiotically without excess. One can’t exist without the other, because too much would be lost if either was missing. Shadow Life is… Read More
Der Sommer ihres Lebens (eng: The Summer of her Life)
Contemporary German writers and comic artists are tackling some of the most challenging issues humanity faces today. Many of these problems are not to be found on the front pages of the newspapers, but nonetheless play direct and crucial roles in the lives of us and our loved ones. In Barbara Yelin’s 2017 graphic novel Der Sommer ihres Lebens (eng: The Summer of her Life) the illustrator, along with writer Thomas von Steinaecker, takes on themes of ageing and care for the elderly, as well as the consequences of outdated gender roles in daily life and work. At the beginning… Read More
You’ll Never Know
This series of three gorgeous memoirs shares Carol Tyler’s effort to investigate and retell her father’s traumatic experiences in World War II. Along the way we are also witness to struggles with her marriage, raising her daughter, her efforts to be a good daughter herself, and much more. Carol, a painter, has a stunning visual style, and she uses the landscape format of the book, meant to resemble a photo album, to her (and our) great advantage. Paul Gravett chose You’ll Never Know as the best autobiography/biography of 2012. In his blog post he wrote, …in the end what floored… Read More