awaiting review
Bottoms Up!
Book Review by Gene Bild I’ve long thought an anthology by a range of ex-addicts and other sober folk telling their life stories was overdue. It’s now arrived as a graphic novel and that’s surely icing on the cake. Forty-four mostly anonymous souls were paired with cartoonists and then bared all, delivering gripping tales of sad descent and then some measure of redemption. I binge-read Bottoms Up! cover to cover in one sitting and here mention a few of its highlights. Accepting the premise that these are first person narratives, the mere fact of their telling implies the recovery,… Read More
Hummingbird Heart
Guest Review by A. David Lewis In her book Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability, Eszter Szép analyzes Joe Sacco’s The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo in terms of haptic vision. Drawing on the work of Laura U. Marks, Szép explains haptic vision as the visible made tactile, “a mode of visual perception that is synesthetic in nature: It connects tactile and kinesthetic sensibilities with vision without the actual act of touch” (120). She describes the thickly cross-hatched backgrounds of The Fixer as “haptically charged” (121), causing the reader to pause and to experience Sacco’s own embodied… Read More