This book is already dancing about architecture. So I worry that anything I might say would compound that – painting a picture of dancing about architecture. But here I am, and here I go. Fall Through is Nate Powell’s new graphic novel this year: it has what I think of as his trademark atmospheric, black-background,…
Fall Through By Nate Powell Abrams ComicArts, 192 pages, $24.99 Artist Nate Powell gained international acclaim for his work on the March trilogy of graphic novels recounting the life and career of the much-missed John Lewis. However, he is more than just that; he’s an acclaimed writer/artist, as seen in the just-released Fall Through. Powell…
The personal is political. It always was, and always will be. When someone’s identity is a reason to suppress or attack them, from “will not replace us” to bathroom bills, it’s never just personal. There’s a meme I’ve seen a number of times, about what is political – that arguments about taxes and land development and budgets…
I recently finished reading Book Three of March, the graphic novel autobiography of Atlanta Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. I had never heard of Lewis prior to encountering March, but having now read it, I’ve gained a better picture of not only his life, but of the internal and external obstacles that the…
The cliche is that the happiest-looking people have the darkest secrets. I don’t know if that’s consistently true in real life — how would you design a study to test that, anyway? — but it’s a surefire winner in fiction, where contrast and irony are the go-to tools. Nate Powell’s new graphic novel Come Again is…
Hallelujah! Over the weekend, I had a revelation. March, by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, is the answer to every question, the solution to every problem. Let me explain how I came to see the light. I was at a conference for American Jews interested in increasing the opportunities for a shared society among…
One day in the early 80s, I was with my girlfriend in a shopping mall. Somehow I had been relegated to the role of sidekick while she shopped. I liked to do a lot of things with her, but shopping wasn’t high on that list. I was bored so I decided to buy a comic…
In these waning days of 2015, our media tends to look backward at all the great stuff that came down during the previous year. That’s because there’s damn little that happens between Christmas Eve and New Year’s morn and people like me are tasked with filling space. This plays nicely with my powerful sense of…
Yesterday I had the privilege of joining fellow ComicMixers Martha Thomases and Adriane Nash and a standing-room-only crowd at Columbia University to hear Congressman John R. Lewis talk about graphic novels. Make no mistake about it: Congressman Lewis is a genuine hero. I realize that’s a word we toss around rather lightly these days, but believe…
I’m pretty much out of the closet when it comes to my love of superhero comics. The appeal of the “super” part is pretty obvious (flying! telepathy! shrinking!) but I also enjoy the parts about heroes. Recently I read two graphic novels that dealt primarily with that last, non-powered part, and it made me ponder…
Nate Powell hits upon some pretty heavy subject matter in his latest graphic novel Swallow Me Whole, now out frolm Top Shelf. We’re talking childhood schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, family breakdown, animal telepathy, and misguided love, just to name a few. The Indiana-based cartoonist traverses the familiar territory of teen angst and all the growing…
Swallow Me Whole By Nate Powell Top Shelf, September 2008, $19.95 Ruth and Perry are stepsiblings, somewhere in the South – people say “shoore” for “sure,” biology teachers can’t even say the word “evolution,” and the kids’ slowly-dying, live-in grandmother is called “Memaw.” It also seems to be sometime in the late ‘80s, from the…
