Book Review by Kevin Wolf When I was a child, perhaps age 8 before my younger brother was born, my mother sat down to read me a book with the title Where Do Babies Come From? I don’t recall the author. It was a picture book. My mother wasn’t very comfortable talking about sex, and used this book to give me my sex education; I only remember the picture of a sperm finding an egg. There’s a new graphic sex education guide with five fictional adolescents (Rico, Malia, Max, Sam, & Alexis) talking “about everything.” The book is called Wait,… Read More
Sky in Stereo
Book Review by Kevin Wolf I recommend this black and white graphic novel which is narrated in the first person by Iris. Starting in 1989 Iris’ mom, Gina, becomes a Jehovah’s Witness. Gina’s live-in boyfriend is skeptical about the Witnesses. Iris initially joins her mother’s new belief system through supporting “evidence” in the apocalyptic messages in her childhood Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Iris finds the Kingdom Hall meetings tame relative to the end-times that they’re supposed to be awaiting. Iris becomes frustrated in her teen years, flees the conservatism of her mom’s religion, and turns to illicit drugs to… Read More
Lucille
awaiting review on GM amazon blurb: ‘Winner of the Rene Goscinny Prize! With Lucille, Ludovic Debeurme takes on the difficult world of adolescence, following the life of a young anorexic woman and the difficult relationships she has with others, who have significant problems of their own. Influenced by psychoanalysis and the exploration of dreams, Debeurme explores life and fantasies with elegant clean graphics and a profound love of the games of childhood.’
The Most Natural Thing In The World – collected edition
By including Francesca Cassavetti’s collected edition of TMNTITW here, I don’t wish to ‘medicalise’ childbirth. As the title suggests, women had been doing it themselves for a long time before maternity units, midwives and obstetricians. I am including it because medical staff do have a role to play nowadays and it is good to know how ‘we’ are percieved by the ‘service user’ so I will happily include any comics with depictions of healthcare workers. I also include it because I think it’s a great little graphic novel; It is funny, light-hearted, self depreciating, and very, very well observed. The… Read More
Monsters
The funniest book about herpes you’ll read this year. Let me make my opinion clear from the outset: this book is superb. A work of genius. I don’t think anyone is able to graphically imbue their characters with such a sense of anxiety and dejection as Ken Dahl does. Many thanks to Martha Cornog for allerting me to the work of Gabby Shulz, a.k.a. Ken Dahl who, according to his blog, still plods on in a series of day jobs in order to pay the bills. He deserves great things, indeed he has just won an Ignatz Award for Monsters. This… Read More
Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy
According to Augusten Burroughs (2009), there are two types of therapists: ‘those who are truly gifted with perspective and empathy, and those who are profoundly confused and possibly sick, and must feed off others’. After reading Couch Fiction (twice) I am reasonably confident in the feeling that Philippa Perry must fall firmly into the former category. In an interesting departure from the usual graphic novel format, Couch Fiction both tells and analyses the theraputic relationship between Pat Phillips, an experienced psychotherapist, and James Clarkson Smith, her client. James is a successful barrister from a priveliged background who has developed a… Read More
I Never Liked You
To include this great little book in a list of “medically themed” graphic novels may be stretching the point somewhat, or tending towards the medicalisation of normal life (doctors are good at that, but maybe not as good as Big Pharma). I include it because of the thread narrative that concerns Chester Brown’s relationship with his mentally ill mother. The main theme of this memoir is Brown’s somewhat troubled adolescence, growing up in the 1970’s in a Montreal suburb. Chester is the slightly geeky teenager whose quiet, thoughtful manner and skinny, longhaired good looks get him plenty of (seemingly unwanted)… Read More
Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story
Blue Pills, by Swiss artist Frederick Peeters, chronicles his relationship with Cati, a wild, vivacious girl he meets at a New Years Party. They connect and become lovers. Before long Cati tells Fred that she and her three-year-old son are both HIV positive. He is filled with a mixture of passion, pity and desire, but he does his best to act cool. Although disconcerted, he wants the relationship to work, and so it does. The book charts Fred’s evolving relationship with Cati’s son, cataloguing his periods of illness, his stays in hospital and the routine of his medication- the blue… Read More
My Diary
Beautifully designed, the minimalist structure of this sparsely laid out volume makes it feel more like an art book than a graphic novel. Mio Matsumoto is an artist from Japan, and was studying in London when she was found to have a cancerous growth on her tongue. She travelled back to Japan for treatment and documented her illness in this sketchbook diary. The scratchy, deliberately “inept” biro drawings are very of the moment (think David Shrigley) but convey little in the way of emotional depth, leaving the text to convey the authors thoughts. The the idiomatic narration and romantic preoccupations… Read More
The Complete Maus
I include the Complete Maus here for three reasons: firstly, it is generally held to be one of the benchmarks against which other graphic novels are judged, a work that has made people who don’t like comics read comics, and a pinnacle of achievement that Spiegelman has spent the last twenty years trying to either live up to, or get away from. If you only ever read one graphic novel….(Actually, Art Spiegelman doesn’t like the term “graphic novel”, even though he is credited as being one of the Godfathers of the medium. He prefers plain old “comics” or “comix”). Secondly,… Read More