Manga-format comics have a tropism for high school even stronger than that of sunflowers for the sun – it is possible to find manga without a hint of high-schoolery in them, but serious digging is required. But you couldn’t loose an arrow in a manga warehouse without hitting at least one book about girls in…
Of course, we all know that comics can be for adults now…but they don’t have to be. Some of the best books out there now were made for kids – which is just the way it was fifty years ago, come to think of it. Now, I’m not claiming that these three books are the…
Will Eisner has a towering place in the modern comics field – the premier awards in the field are named after him, and for good reason – due both to his pioneering Spirit newspaper insert from the ‘40s and ‘50s and to the graphic novels he started creating in the late ‘70s, after a long…
Red SnowBy Susumu KatsumataDrawn & Quarterly, October 2009, $24.95 From a Western perspective, it would be understandable to assume “gekiga” meant “short, depressing Japanese comics stories,” even if that’s not the most accurate definition. (Gekiga can also be long depressing Japanese comics stories, of course.) And, since the current exemplar of gekiga for those of…
Stitches: A Memoir David Small W.W. Norton, September 2009, $24.95 You can’t write a memoir these days unless you had a bad childhood – call it the Law of Oprah. You have to have some horrible secrets, either your own or those of your parents/keepers/guardians, that you can reveal, tearfully, to an enthralled TV audience…
The impulse to anecdote is ubiquitous in mankind; we all want to tell our own stories. Since those stories happened to us, we naturally think that they’re fascinating…and sometime are surprised when the rest of the world doesn’t agree with us. Comics creators have been spilling out their lives onto their pages for a few…
Where would comics be without the stories of young people with amazing powers? Oh, sure, you could cobble together a world canon of stories with no supernatural stuff at all, but it would have to be a masterpiece of the gerrymanderer’s art. And why would you want to – when you can have all of…
I should start by quoting something weighty – the most obvious would be that old Tolstoy saw about happy and unhappy families – but let’s take that as written, shall we? Comics have given short shrift to families for the past seventy years – at least, the American comic-book industry has, though strip comics grew…
Everything is going to hell. Everything is always going to hell, and always has been, of course, but it’s going to hell even more now than it ever has been, and quicker, too. And so we get ever more stories about those hells – like these two very different books that I have to talk…
Asterios Polyp David Mazzucchelli Pantheon, July 2009, $29.95 Comics are an essentially mongrel art, bred out of the scraps of two prior art-forms in the great kennel of popular culture. That’s no bad thing, despite what the mandarins might say – mongrels typically have the strengths of both parents, without the fussiness and decadent weakness…
George Sprott: 1894-1975 Seth Drawn & Quarterly, May 2009, $24.95 Comics very, very rarely tell stories about old, fat, boring men, which most people probably don’t think is a problem. But no art form can ever become mature if it ignores large swaths of the world, and it’s indisputable that our world is filled with…
All young comics protagonists are special, even if they don’t know it yet. In manga in particular, they’re likely to protest loudly that they’re just “a normal kid” and to squirm at the thought of being separable from the vast thundering herd of undifferentiated humanity in the slightest way. But it doesn’t matter what they…
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