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The Nightingales

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by Cassy Lee In a small town in Oregon in 1985, Emil Wilson’s father made a decision to take in a coworker named Jim and his two dogs who had been evicted from their home. The family is told that Jim is dying of cancer, but it soon becomes apparent that he is a gay man dying of AIDS during the early years of the epidemic, when the disease remained poorly understood and was surrounded by fear, stigma, and misinformation. While Wilson’s mother is not pleased about bringing a stranger into their home, his younger sister, seventeen-year-old Lou, approaches Jim… Read More

Whistle – A New Gotham City Hero

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by Jeff Mason Set in the DC Comics universe, Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero is an easy-to-read 6-chapter story of a teenager’s well-intentioned efforts to help her family make ends meet. The story follows 16-year-old Willow Zimmerman, a non-super-powered, Jewish teenager with a penchant for local activism and a love of stray dogs. Willow is growing up in Down River, an historically Jewish neighbourhood that has seen better days and whose residents are currently troubled by a murderous gangster and the mystery of buildings suddenly being “greened” by lush vegetation. Along the way we meet Willow’s Down River High… Read More

Playing in a Dream

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By Yu-Ling Kung   Playing in a Dream (2024) is a bilingual Chinese–English comic book written and drawn by SEN (森森) and published independently. The project received publication support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, which allowed the artist greater freedom to invest in its material production. From its physical appearance, the book already feels very different from most comics commonly found in bookstores in Taiwan. The production cost is clearly higher, and both the printing and binding use uncommon methods. The cover is deliberately understated and made of thick, rough paper that feels almost like stone. When the book is… Read More

Retrospective Review of Horrible Histories: Anarchic Bodies and Healing in the Classroom

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By Lilith Todd Horrible Histories’ Titles included here: Terrible Tudors (Terry Deary & Neil Tonge, Current ISBN: 978-1407178677, 144 pages, 1993; Awesome Egyptians (Terry Deary & Peter Hepplewhite, 978-0590738927, 1996, 128 pages, Scholastic; Slimy Stuarts (Terry Deary, writer, and Martin Brown, illustrator, 978-0590134828, 128 pages, 1996; Gorgeous Georgians (Terry Deary, writer, and Martin Brown, illustrator, 978-1407104195, 139 pages, 1998); Format: paperback; Publisher: Scholastic. As I’ve been finishing up my Ph.D. in eighteenth-century literature, staring down the barrel of the job market and counting down the number of semesters of funding I have left, it’s been a useful and frankly comforting… Read More

Symptômes

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By Annemarie Jutel Catherine Ocelot’s Symptômes is a lovely piece of embroidery.  A collection of graphic narratives about pain, illness, suffering and loneliness are carefully stitched together to bring agency, if not quite joy, to the female protagonists whose suffering creates the fabric of the novel. While it is hard to know if the story is autobiographical (and perhaps it doesn’t matter), the principal character bears the author’s name, and prefaces the book by letting us know about her simultaneous fixation with medical television drama and her parallel hypochondriac tendencies.  She is enthralled by these confident and capable white-coated creatures,… Read More

Illness, Disease, and Death in the Graphic Novels of Raymond Briggs: A Retrospective Review Essay

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By J.T.H. Connor, Memorial University, St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada Titles: Father Christmas Fungus the Bogeyman Gentleman Jim When the Wind Blows Unlucky Wally Unlucky Wally Twenty Years On Ethel & Ernest: A True Story With the death of Raymond Redvers Briggs in 2022, Britain along with the graphics community at large, lost a talented and beloved, if not a bit grumpy, storyteller, artist, and illustrator. Briggs (1934-2022) trained in London first at the Wimbledon College of Art and then at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art. Initially, he  worked as a freelance illustrator for children’s books, which earned him… Read More