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
Living & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle 2020-2022
by Stephen Dudas In his foreword to Steve Brodner’s Living & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle 2020-2022, Edward Sorrel draws the apt comparison between Brodner’s graphic diary of the COVID-19 pandemic and the diaries of Samuel Pepys. Just as Pepys “fastidiously kept a record of the effects that the bubonic plague had on London” in the 17th century, Brodner records a nuanced experience of the first two years of the pandemic in our own time. Deeply reflective and carefully analytical of the intersectional dimensions of illness in a politically and socially tumultuous era, the artifact Brodner creates (and is… Read More
Lifetime Passes
awaiting review
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
100 Months
Review Guest Review by Andrew Schechterman, September, 2015 The final statement 100 Months: The End of All Things is John (“Johnny”) Hicklenton’s disturbing, largely non-verbal, statement about going from diagnosis to dying, to death. Not for the faint of heart, this last work captures and embodies, obliquely, his ten-year progressive decline and ultimate destruction by Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Because of his indirect approach, the disease itself is mostly presented via allegory. (For the reader who would like a more traditional account of his MS, consider a 2008 interview “MS: I’m very angry about this disease”). In the Introduction, Hicklenton’s surviving friend and professional… Read More