not reviewed yet on GM.org Amazon blurb: A graphic diary of remarkable emotional honesty that charts the deterioration of one woman’s relationship into violence and abuse. A successful young businesswoman with loving family and friends, Rosalind Penfold couldn’t believe her luck when she met and quickly fell for a charming widower and father of four who seemed absolutely devoted to her. Only a few months into the relationship, however, the first worrying signs began to emerge that the man she eventually married was not quite as he seemed. A pattern of small lies and petty cruelties began to emerge, which,… Read More
Daddy’s Girl
Originally published in 1996, reprinted in 2008, Daddy’s Girl neatly illustrates the reason I think it is pointless to try to divide graphic memoirs from graphic fiction. It is a “quasi” memoir, based on Drechsler’s childhood experiences but narrated by two adolescent girls who both suffer abuse at the hands of older males. The naive style and heavy monochrome brushwork complement the teenage language. Most of the book is concerned with Lily, who, among her 3 sisters, is singled out for sexual abuse by her father, a working man who, in his spare time likes to do charitable work distributing goods… Read More
A Child’s Life and other stories
Disturbing, compelling, brilliant. Phoebe Gloeckners is an american cartoonist, illustrator, painter and novelist. This explicit tale of child abuse, drug abuse and sex is disturbing from the outset, with a teeth-jarringly confessional, but embarrasingly funny, introduction by Robert Crumb, a personal friend of the artist and her mother. I call it ‘disturbing’ because I was brought up in comfortable middle class England, and to someone like me, conditioned to think of myself as ‘average’ but probably actually a from a minority cohort, the type of life that Gloeckner describes here is rather alien. To vast numbers of readers, however, A… Read More