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Papaya Salad

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by Felix Cheong   War memoirs usually announce their scars, complete with bandaged words that barely conceal old wounds. Elisa Macellari’s Papaya Salad does something quieter, and perhaps more effectively. Her debut graphic biography retells the picaresque life of Sompong, her Thai great-uncle. When the young Macellari meets him at a family gathering, he regales her with his rags-to-rattled story—one so dramatic that it could only be true. Born to a humble family, Sompong applies for and lands a Thai military scholarship. But before he can be sent abroad to a military academy in Berlin, World War II breaks out,… Read More

Diaries of War – Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia

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by Lilian Nyamongo Published a year into the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Diaries of War follows Nora Krug’s acquaintances, K, a Ukrainian journalist and D, an anti-war Russian artist. Krug, a visual journalist interviewed K and D on their experiences to create a weekly illustrated diary to raise immediate awareness of the war. Their multifaceted identities and experiences on each side of the border highlight their thoughts on identity, patriotism, citizenship and human desire for normalcy as they weigh options for themselves and their loved ones. Krug’s use of unsophisticated, minimalistic, scrapbook-style art with hand lettering is reminiscent of… Read More

Tolkien – Lighting Up the Darkness

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By Martha Cornog   A professor at Oxford University specializing in Anglo-Saxon languages and philology, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is now famed for The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy and its prequel, The Hobbit. Tolkien – Lighting Up the Darkness, a graphic biography by a European team of creators, tells how such a staid-sounding academic came to write the most beloved epic fantasy of the last century, focusing partly on Tolkien’s military service in the Great War (aka World War I) that lasted from 1914 to 1918. As it turned out, Tolkien’s own particular experience of “post-traumatic stress disorder”… Read More

Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison

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by Saily Marrero   Guantánamo Voices: True Account from the World’s Most Infamous Prison is a collection of stories from interviews conducted by Sarah Mirk and Columbia University’s Rule of Law project, and other journalistic projects about Guantánamo (AKA, GITMO). Former prisoners, lawyers, and other workers on the base discuss their experience there, especially in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The results are stories about the unfair United States justice system that has taken place on the base, one that includes arbitrary laws and torture. Because of its difficult and dark subject matter and images, this… Read More

The Heart That Fed – A father, a son, and the long shadow of war

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by Michelle Ollie   The Heart That Fed by Carl Sciaccitano is a graphic memoir structured around interwoven timelines between Carl Sciacchitano and his father, David Sciacchitano, from before the Vietnam War in 1965 to the present day. Carl has known his father to be explosive and wrought with anxiety, yet also a loving parent. Since Carl was born years after his father served in Vietnam, he relied heavily on his father’s stories, letters, and photographs from the past to create this book. He wonders if those four years served in Vietnam forever altered and shaped his father’s personality and… Read More