Building Stories
Chris Ware
I assumed that I’d love this graphic novel due to its book-as-object nature, so much so that when I recently read Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s description of it being “not an actual book so much as a twee art project,” I also assumed that was an unnecessarily harsh opinion. Yet once I spent some time with it, I found myself agreeing with her more than I expected.
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Calling Dr. Laura
Nicole Georges
It’s that time of year when I tend to think of Portland and my time living there — now five years distant; so it was fitting that Nicole’s new book came out right now. I read it in one snowy evening, finding many old familiars of that city and of the people. Nicole is someone I knew there, through mutual friends as well as crossing paths at the IPRC, but not incredibly well. I wasn’t aware of most of the story she captures in this graphic memoir, but I suspect that my relative closeness has a lot to do with my enjoyment of the book.
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Americus
MK Reed & Jonathan Hill
I found this story centered around a fight to ban a series of fantasy books about witches to be rather black-and-white — and not just because it’s a graphic novel that is drawn that way. The characters are all clearly set into one camp or another, and there is no one in between. There is little sympathy to be found for those on the pro-ban camp, and the extent of their outrage is difficult to understand, especially as none of them admit to reading an entire book.
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The Principles of Uncertainty
Maira Kalman
Maybe you saw these when they were posted as Maira Kalman's blog on nytimes.com and now it's only available as this book, which is not such a bad thing. It's kind of a comic of paintings while also somewhat of a general elegy on the finiteness of life. People who have died are a recurring theme; even some of the people she mentions visiting back in 2006 have since passed on — Louise Bourgeois, Helen Levitt. But her sense of humor particularly tickles me. I read half of it before bed and the rest with breakfast.
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Tales from Outer Suburbia
Shaun Tan
The gorgeous art in this collection of stories would make this worth checking out on its own, but the stories are at times vaguely unsettling, examining the fantastically surreal edges of an otherwise banal world, while also remaining playful. In the end, it's something kids would find entertaining, while adults may more appreciate the darker elements.
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The Eternal Smile
Gene Luen Yang & Derek Kirk Kim
These three stories all look at the intersections of fantasy and reality. I like the different drawing styles in each story, but the philosophies came off heavy-handed to me.
I'm curious about Gene Luen Yang's previous book American Born Chinese.
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One Hundred Demons
Lynda Barry
I came across a mention of this book after I finished Cruddy, more specifically a mention of the story about Barry's relationship with Ira Glass entitled "Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend." The hilarity potential was irresistible.
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The Fountain
Darren Aronofsky & Kent Williams
Manda sent me the art book version of this story for my birthday. A film version was first started in 2002, but was shut down when Brad Pitt left. Aronofsky went to work both on a revised screenplay and a graphic novel based on the original screenplay. The realized movie version (with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz instead of Brad and Cate Blanchett) was released in 2006.
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Optic Nerve 10 & 11
Adrian Tomine
I finally got around to hunting down the second and third issues of this three-part story, and re-read #9 since it had been a while. It's interesting how these issues manage to be very much like the Optic Nerves of the past while feeling far more developed at the same time. The artwork has relaxed from the rigid precision of earlier issues and is all inked, none of the screentone shading that tended to darken up the pages.
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The Push Man and other stories
Yoshihiro Tatsumi
If I'd paid better attention, I would have waited to read Abandon the Old in Tokyo in order to be properly anal and read the books in sequence. The introduction by Adrian Tomine is both a personal and technical opener to the series and how it came to be, including a note on the difficulty of translating the comics from Japanese—not necessarily the written words themselves but rather the format.
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