awaiting review
Painted
awaiting review
Wink
Book review by Kevin Wolf First person fictional memoirs written in present tense have made me wonder. Am I, the reader, supposed to think that the protagonist is writing this memoir after the fact and recalling the events? Or that the character never writes this stuff down but lives the events and I’m virtually watching them as they happen? Or am “I” vicariously the memoirist living out this life? Or should I treat it like a non-fictional memoir in the present tense and I’m being given the gift of entry into the memoirist’s mind and life? And is… Read More
Go with the Flow
Book Review by Kevin Wolf In its own quiet way this graphic novel, Go with the Flow by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann, provides an excellent teaching tool. Though it’s mainly for middle and high school students, I highly recommend it for all ages, genders and orientations. This graphic novel’s actions are in real time with all dates lining up with the 2019-2020 school year. It’s about friendship, menstruation, bullying, frustration with school administration, fighting back, and taking responsibility. Go with the Flow revolves around four diverse characters Christine, Brit, and Abby, three friends from childhood, and the new… Read More
Wait, What? A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up
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
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