Victor is a geeky teenager, mildly bullied by the jockish types at his high school – but also smart and skilled enough to be rebuilding old game consoles to make a serious side income. He’s obsessed with Patricia (Patty), who is gorgeous and rich and blonde, in the way of a million boys before him,…
[youtube I should tell you their first names, though the book doesn’t: Jose Munoz and Carlos Sampayo. Munoz is the artist; Sampayo is the writer. They’re both Argentine, though they mostly worked in Europe, over the past forty-plus years. Both still alive, as far as I know, now in their upper seventies. Billie Holiday was…
Americans are more likely to take this book’s cover wrongly. There’s a young man, tying something around his neck, and a title that could be a vivid, short, violence-tinged name. Americans are likely to jump into some kind of superhero explanation , either real in the world of the story or imagined by the protagonist…
In some world that is not precisely our own – maybe the near future, maybe an alternate present – an island nation has an autocratic, near-fascist government. There is, of course, a revolutionary group aiming to overthrow that regime, which includes violent activities. It is not the UK, exactly. But it is very much like…
[youtube As far as I know, this book hasn’t been banned. Rather the opposite, so far: it was nominated for a National Book Award, and has won some other, more specific awards. But the week I read it acclaimed graphic-novelist-for-kids Jerry Craft was banned from a Dallas-area school for “critical race theory” [1], so I’m…
We all live in the worlds we build for ourselves. For most of us, that’s deeply metaphorical. For people who tell stories for a living, well, it can be more complicated. Take the Bronte family: the three sisters who lived into adulthood (Charlotte, Emily, Anne) all wrote novels, important books that are still read and…
Sometimes you get into something it’s hard to get out of – now that sounds ominous , doesn’t it? But all of life is a sequence of things you get into and can’t easily get out of: relationships, jobs, places to live, family. And fiction, especially fantasy fiction, can be metaphorical about those things, and…
In memory , the past is moments. We slot in memories to specific points in time: that was when I was living there, remember when Y was five years old and started doing Z?, that was the Christmas when A had that crazy hat. But time is more fluid than that. Anything we remember was…
It’s fascinating the way that art comics are similar across vastly different cultures, the same way adventure comics are. (“OK, there are these guys, with crazy powers, wearing colorful clothes, and they fight!”) If I were being saturnine, I’d say something like “it’s almost like we’re all human beings.” The Man Without Talent is almost…
Some media are better for some stories than others. I’d like to think that’s obvious, but the way mass culture obsesses about adapting everything into movies and TV shows makes me think it’s either a minority opinion or that a lot of people are just dim. For example: you can do a strong, mostly silent…
There once was a novel called Flughunde: written by Marcel Beyer in German, published in Germany in 1995. John Brownjohn — I feel so sorry for someone saddled with that name all his life — translated it into English, and The Karnau Tapes was published in the UK in 1997. Almost twenty years later, German…
Look, I don’t think I can describe it better than I did a couple of weeks ago when this book entered my house, so let me quote myself: Twenty years or so ago, everything in corporate comics had to be an event. (Not all that different from now, then!) The Vertigo “line” at DC was…
