Tagged: Non-Fiction

The Joy of Snacking by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

There were three major comics memoirs by women in the fall of 2025, all about the same cluster of topics: eating, cooking, family, and how those things are connected. I don’t know if it’s going to be surprising to anyone that many women have issues around both eating (their bodies are often policed by others) and cooking (they are generally assumed to be responsible for feeding the people around them), but the cluster is an interesting thing, and I hope someone better-qualified than me (an actual woman, at a minimum) digs in and looks at the three books together.

I first saw Jennifer Hayden’s Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner , published in November, leaning towards the production side of food and making comic hay about Hayden’s inability or unwillingness to do it well. Then I noticed My Perfectly Imperfect Body  by Debbie Tung from September, which is more focused on the consumption side of food, and a bout of disordered eating in Tung’s youth.

Published in between the two of those is The Joy of Snacking , from Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, whose work I’ve seen as a cartoonist in The New Yorker, but has also done a previous comics memoir, illustrated several other books, made a few documentary movies, and also works in burlesque.

Snacking is mostly about eating – young Hilary was what we call “a picky eater,” and that’s continued into her adult life. (She’s now in her early thirties.) The spine of this book is, as the title implies, “snacking” – Campbell is one of those people who eats lots of little bits all day long, isn’t terribly fond of big meals, and tends to focus on a few preferred, beloved, standard snacks. (She also says this is a youngest-kid thing, which made me realize my younger son is also a grazer – there’s a kind of bowl that he uses to gather stuff to eat, and we see them pile up in the sink – so I tentatively think her theory has some merit and she should get a major research grant to investigate it.)

Campbell organizes Snacking into loose chapters, bouncing between two timelines: her childhood and young-adulthood, as she discovered new foods and mostly tried to avoid them, and the last few years and her tumultuous relationship with a man she calls E. Separating scenes or sections are cookbook-like pages, which are each about a food Campbell likes – apples and peanut butter, or “a baggie of goldfish,” or “a bowl of potato chips,” or Cool Ranch Doritos – with details on how to “prepare” them, when and where to eat them, and their significance to her.

It might be the fact that this isn’t her first memoir, but I found Campbell to be harder on herself than other people – in particular, E comes across (maybe, though, because I am a man) as a fairly reasonable guy trying to live with Campbell’s issues, as the two of them snipe at each other in that deeply nasty way some couples develop. I’m sure he had his flaws, but I felt that Campbell presented him in a mostly-positive light: he’s a guy who is in many ways her opposite (a foodie who works selling wine to restaurants!), but they made it work, more or less, for a number of years.

This is not a how-I-changed book, or a I-fixed-my-problem book. Campbell likes snacking. She’s going to continue doing it. On the other hand, this isn’t entirely a celebration, since she’s also clear that she had a weird, often unpleasant childhood because of her food issues, and that it’s affected her adult life in ways she doesn’t like. That tension plays out throughout the book – can she be herself, eat the stuff she likes (and maybe “normal” food, too, OK, sure, sometimes), and go through life with less stress and anxiety? Well, maybe. But how about some popcorn and white wine now, while she thinks about it?

This is a big book, with some aspects I’ve not even mentioned – Campbell traces the eating habits of her parents as well in flashback sections, so it’s not just a book about her individually – and a warm open-heartedness I found deeply engaging. Campbell has a cartoony, dense style here: her people are loosely defined with thin lines, her panels are many and jammed together without gutters, her dialogue is long and rambling, like real people. This is a fun book about a distinctive person who’s not afraid to show herself being odd and quirky – that’s the whole point of the exercise. I don’t know if anyone else eats quite like Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell does, but, then again, do any of us really eat like all of the rest of us? This book made me wonder that – and that’s a good thing to wonder about.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal and Kim Consigny

Most lives don’t have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn’t form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements – there’s at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras – but that only means better raw materials for a biographer.

So if I say that George Sand: True Genius, True Woman  tells an “and then this happened” version of the famous 19th century novelist’s life, I’m mostly just saying that George Sand had a normal kind of life. Things happened, she did her work, she was involved in causes and had love affairs, and then she died. That’s the story writer Séverine Vidal and artist Kim Consigny tell here: one woman’s life, from fairly early childhood to the moment of her death, in some detail. Vidal focuses somewhat on Sand’s writing, but more so on her relationships – with her mother and grandmother in youth, with other family members and the men she was involved with later in life.

And I appreciate that. Some biographies, especially in graphic-novel form, find a story in their subject’s lives by focusing on a moment or a period on the person’s life. That’s certainly valid, but, especially in a case where I don’t know the person’s life all that well – as here – I’d really prefer to get the full sweep of the story. And George Sand does just that.

She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, daughter of what seems to be a minor noble in the very early 19th century, and the Napoleonic Wars somewhat impinged on that childhood – spent primarily at the family estate in Nohant in central France – but the drama of her early life was more centered on the conflict between her aristocratic paternal grandmother and her Parisian mother after the death of Aurore’s father at a young age.

Vidal and Consigny show young Aurore as strong-willed, rebellious, prone to visions, and often unhappy with her role as a young aristocratic woman. (As seen later in life, she was against both the roles of “woman” and “aristocrat” as they existed in France at the time.)

She grew up, she started to write, she had affairs – but, before most of that, she did what women in her time had to do: she got married, at the age of eighteen. It was not a success, and maybe that lack of success led to some of the rest.

This is a fairly long graphic novel, over three hundred pages, and it’s packed with details from all of Sand’s life – again, more skewed to her personal life than to details of the themes and reactions to her works, though we do see her talk about and work on her major books here.

There’s a lot of text, particularly dialogue. I assume a lot of it is taken from Sand’s own extensive memoirs, or third-party accounts – I don’t know if we can entirely trust any detailed account of a conversation before sound recording, but Sand’s life was well-documented. Consigny brings a lose, breezy, amiable, energetic line to the proceedings, giving a lot of life to a story of people mostly in rooms talking to each other.

I’ve never read Sand, and knew very little about her life or work before this book. So I’ll say it’s a fine introduction, and a strong portrait of an interesting, influential figure who lived through tumultuous times and was close to a lot of other cultural figures of her day.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir by Jeff Lemire

For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format – maybe just from an assumption that’s how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots of art (and an entire early self-published comic in the back).

10,000 Ink Stains  is Jeff Lemire’s memoir of what he calls the first twenty-five years of his comics career. I like a lot of what he’s done, so I hope that isn’t hubris – I’d like to think he has another twenty-five years or more ahead of him.

Lemire has done a lot of work in a lot of directions over those twenty-five years, so it’s not surprising that his memoir is well-organized, even compartmentalized. He talks a bit up front, and occasionally later, about how hard it was to talk about his personal life here, particularly some struggles with anxiety and other mental-health issues – but that’s a very small part of the book, partially because I don’t think Lemire’s readership ever noticed any slowing of work or lesser effort because of his problems. (He clearly has a ferocious work ethic – or maybe I mean he loves making stories in comics form, so that’s what he spends most of his time on.)

There are nineteen chapters here, each covering one project or a small related cluster of projects, plus an introduction to set the scene and an epilogue to sum it all up. The first chapter is the usual memoir “how I got to zero” section, covering his childhood and education and all of that – up to the point where he decided to start getting serious about comics. The second chapter covers that self-published comic – Lemire put out two issues of Ashtray in the mid-Aughts – and his Xeric-winning first book, Lost Dogs . From there, Lemire has chapters on Essex County  and The Nobody , on groups of smaller projects, on Sweet Tooth the comics series and Sweet Tooth the TV series, on his work for DC and then for Marvel, on The Underwater Welder  and Trillium  and Roughneck , on his adventure comics with other artists (Descender , Gideon Falls, and Plutona ), on Black Hammer  and Royal City , one chapter on both Frogcatchers and Mazebook , on the recent Essex County TV show, and one last chapter on his two current/upcoming projects, The Static Age and Minor Arcana.

That’s a lot of comics, even for twenty-five years. Lemire did a lot of work – a lot of different, detailed, thoughtful, often excellent work. I might make fun of Black Hammer, and suspect I would be similarly dismissive of most of his Marvel and DC work, but Lemire puts in the time and effort to do stories he cares about and do them well, even when some readers (yours truly, for example) might not be as excited by all of them.

There’s not a lot of detail about any single project, which might disappoint some readers: if you’re a massive Underwater Welder fan, for example, you’ll only get about ten pages about it. Lemire generally has liked all of his immediate collaborators and most of his editors – there are some left-unnamed editorial functionaries and fellow writers for DC and Marvel who were less than collegial, but Lemire keeps it vague enough that I think even people more plugged in than me will only have suspicions of who he’s talking about – and he mostly likes the work he did, and focuses on the things he learned or did differently on each project.

There’s some insights into how he draws each project, including how one early art teacher encouraged him to use the back of a pen nib, the source of some of those chunky, dynamic Lemire lines – but I’m not an artist, so I can only point and say he does talk about that, which may be of interest to people who understand the topic.

All in all, 10,000 Ink Stains is a comprehensive, thorough look at a busy career, by a writer I think was not overly given to this kind of introspection before. If you like Lemire’s comics, you’ll probably like hearing how he made them.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Fortune & Glory: The Musical by Brian Michael Bendis & Bill Walko

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Brian Michael Bendis’s Hollywood memoir-in-comics Fortune & Glory  was republished about two years ago, for no obvious anniversary- or thematically-related reason. At the time, I thought it was just a random new edition, but now it’s clear that it was setting up for what we might as well call a sequel.

Fortune & Glory: The Musical was published at the end of January – I don’t think it was serialized first, which is a little unusual for a book written by a guy like Bendis and published by an outfit like Dark Horse – and it tells a different story of a younger Bendis getting pulled into writing stuff for other creative media. While the first F&G centered on trying to turn his creator-owned early noir GNs into movies – Spoiler alert! it didn’t quite happen, though Bendis got contacts and contracts and some income for a few years and other things eventually did get made – this second one is about one project that we readers might not have known Bendis was ever part of.

The famously…um, troubled Broadway musical of the early Teens, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark [1], had a book attributed to director Julie Taymor, playwright Glenn Berger, and (after a hasty rewrite during previews) playwright and comics scripter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. But it was no secret that other writers, including several comics writers, had been part of the project earlier. And Bendis was one of them, having been pulled in by Marvel head Avi Arad in 2004 to meet with Taymor and, everyone hoped, write the book of this musical.

(The music and lyrics were always going to be by Bono and The Edge of U2, and they were.)

The Musical is written by Bendis and features him as the main character, with roughly the same character design as the Bendis-drawn original F&G. But this time the art is by Bill Walko, with colors by Wes Dzioba and letters by Joshua Reed. It is the story of his involvement with Turn Off the Dark – which is actually pretty short and minor – as well as loosely-related material about his youth and the usual how-I-got-into-comics stuff.

Bluntly, Bendis took a couple of meetings with Taymor (one by phone, one after being flown down to LA), where he was impressed by her energy and passion but reacted really badly to two major pieces of her vision. First, that the musical should end, like a comic book, with a big “To Be Continued!” message – but he thought he could finesse that. Second, and more seriously, that she wanted to change Spider-Man’s origin from the standard radioactive spider-bite, so that instead Peter Parker got his powers by praying to the Greek goddess Arachne.

(That stayed in the final work, more or less, so it clearly was a deal-breaker for Taymor. I’m more surprised that Marvel allowed it; they could have fired her instead and gone with another director. But I suppose this was post-bankruptcy, pre-Iron Man Marvel, a company more willing to take a crazy chance on someone who was well-known and successful in her area of expertise.)

So Bendis wrote up a treatment, and had another meeting to pitch it. He did not include the Arachne origin, and got only about that far into the pitch before Taymor blew up, and Bendis’s involvement in the project quietly ended. (Bendis thought the project ended, and was surprised when the musical popped back up a few years later.)

That, as I hinted above, is only one small thread in The Musical – maybe 15% of the pages at most. It’s not a long story, and not a lot happens. Most of the book is flashbacks to Young Bendis, dewy-eyed and obsessed with comics, bugging people like Walt Simonson and making crappy comics as a teenager and, eventually, forging an indy self-published crime-comics career in his twenties.

I don’t know if anyone will come to The Musical for that story, but, if you’re a Bendis fan, you’ll probably enjoy it. It’s the standard story of a lot of fans-turned-pro, and Bendis tells it with a lot of self-awareness and humor. Walko brings a slightly cartoony, caricatured line that adds energy and big facial expressions to pages with lots of captions and dialogue.

The Musical does not provide much background on Turn Off the Dark; Bendis was only involved briefly and inconclusively several years before it actually happened. But it’s an amusing “creative people are obsessive weirdoes with quick tempers” story, and the rest of the material in the book is at least loosely and vaguely connected to that story.

[1] I actually saw Turn Off the Dark on Broadway with my two kids. Sadly, I saw it after the retool, when it was just kooky and not full-on insane. I  didn’t write about it at the time, and that was fifteen years ago, so all I have are vague memories. It was very technically impressive and full of excellent on-stage talent doing impressive things, but the story was…well, I don’t want to say “a confused mess,” since that would be insulting, but it wasn’t the most clear and understandable thing I’ve ever seen.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Sartre by Mathilde Ramadier and Anais Depommier

Most books like this have a subtitle, but not this one. It is just Sartre . Take him as he is, or walk away – those are your options with the book, as it is with all things Sartrean.

This is a French graphic novel, written by Mathilde Ramadier and drawn by Anais Depommier. And I immediately have to take back what I just said – maybe it’s a subtle difference between how English-speakers view Sartre and how his countrymen do – because the 2015 Dargaud edition had the longer, more descriptive title Sartre, Une existence, des libertés. This 2017 US edition was translated by Peter Russella and published by NBM.

It is a biography in comics form of the writer and philosopher – straightforward and chronological, starting with his youth and ending the main story in 1964 when he refused the Nobel Prize. (Sartre consistently refused all prizes and awards in his life as part of his philosophy: he thought that a person could always change at any point, so judging anyone before they were dead was impossible. I am probably mangling his argument here.)

Actually, it nearly becomes a twinned biography – Simone de Beauvoir is almost as important to the book as Sartre is himself, as she was in his life. We even get her words in captions, as we do Sartre’s, a few times throughout this book. (One minor production note: their captions are tinted to distinguish them from the white-background captions, which are the books’ narrative. I found, reading this digitally, that those captions were scattered enough that the color difference wasn’t clear – though they tend to be used for scenes of either Sartre or de Beauvoir away from the other, so they’re always clear in context.)

For a man who lived through WWII in Paris and was at least nominally part of the Resistance to German occupation, Sartre led a quiet, sedentary, bookish life. The thrills of this graphic novel are primarily intellectual, the conflicts inter-personal and brought out in long complex conversations in drawing rooms over fine food and between cigarettes. It’s a very wordy book, as I suppose it had to be – Sartre was a man of words, more so than even most writers.

Ramadier and Depommier don’t focus on the many sexual adventures of Sartre and de Beauvoir, though they do have a few moments to indicate they are happening (continuously, all the time, in the background of the intellectual activity) and also show the beginning of their relationship with a frank in-bed conversation in which Sartre says (this is my blunt translation out of Sartre-speak) “I want to fuck a lot of people, and I think you do, too – but let’s always come back to each other and tell each other about it, to stay the most important people to each other.”

This is a book full of words, and I have to credit both Ramadier for making it all work in the first place and Russella for turning it into clear English that fits into the panels and tells (what I have to assume is) the same story. It is not an exciting book, and it will be deeper and more interesting the more a reader is familiar with Sartre’s life, thought, and major works, but it’s a solid introduction even to people who only vaguely know who Sartre was or why he matters. 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

All Tomorrow’s Parties by Koren Shadmi

The Velvet Underground were famously the band who had only a very small fanbase while they were around – but, the joke went, every single one of those fans started bands of their own. So they were massively influential, which is nice, but not usually what people start rock bands to achieve.

Koren Shadmi’s 2023 graphic novel All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Velvet Underground Story  tells the story of the band in comics format. It follows Shadmi’s previous nonfiction books Lugosi  and The Twilight Man , more traditional pop-culture bios of a single person, as well as a number of Shadmi’s fictional works, like Bionic . He’s been making book-length comics for more than a decade now, through a bunch of variations, and clearly has the chops to do a more complicated book like this one, with multiple main characters and a lot of faces to get right on the page.

Now, I am not one of those fabled Velvets fans – I’ve heard their music, here and there, and obviously heard a lot of people influenced by them, but it’s never been my thing. I’m here partly out of vague interest in the famous story, partly for the mid-60s vibe around Andy Warhol’s Factory, and partly because I’m just keeping up with Shadmi’s career.

So I think Shadmi does this well, but I might not be the one you trust on that. He frames the main story with Andy Warhol’s 1987 funeral, the first time former Velvet creative titans Lou Reed and John Cale had spoken in nearly two decades, and tells the main story conventionally, starting with quick glances at Reed and Cale as tormented teenagers in Long Island and Wales, respectively, before bringing all the threads together in New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1960s.

The core of the book is the early days – say roughly 1963 to 1970 – when Reed and Cale first met and started making music together, then forming the band, connecting with Warhol and his whole weird entourage/machine, and finally recording their first two records. The book doesn’t exactly end when Reed kicks Cale out of the band unilaterally in 1968, but there’s only two short chapters after that point: one a vignette of the band’s life in 1970, their last failing grasp at popularity; and the other returning to the frame story in 1987 to show how Cale and Reed reconciled, made a record together about Warhol, and eventually had a small Velvets reunion in the early ’90s.

That’s probably as much of the story as I’ll bother to explain: the core audience for this book knows all of these details much better than I do.

Shadmi focuses on the band members in a rough scale of importance: primarily Reed, only slightly lesser Cale, and then a big drop down to guitarist Sterling Morrison (who’s part of a lot of scenes, but not as active), and then even more down to drummer Mo Tucker (who seems to have been pretty quiet to begin with). Nico is there but oddly, not really fitting in – just as she was in real life. He’s good at their faces, though at times the book is oddly a series of images of Reed’s craggy face masked by sunglasses – just as it was at the time, of course.

There’s a lot of material here, and Shadmi has good control of it. I did wonder about some threads that never quite get resolved – Reed probably kicked his drug habit somewhere between 1970 and 1987 (or possibly even before 1970), but it doesn’t happen in the book. But this is a big, messy story about a bunch of messy, complex people who fought a lot, did a lot of weird things, and were never that consistent about what they did or how they explained it afterward.

I’m slightly surprised there was a comics biography of the Velvets in the first place. I’m happy to see it’s this serious, comprehensive, and through.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Superman Isn’t Jewish (But I An…Kinda) by Jimmy Bemon and Émilie Boudet

With supposedly-nonfiction books, I’ll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that’s pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we’re being told, how constructed they are, to know how to respond.

But it’s not always clear how much the book is claiming to be nonfiction. This graphic novel – or bande dessinée, since it’s originally from France – is in the “Life Drawn” series from Humanoids, which I thought meant it was clearly, well, drawn from life. But I just took a look at their website, and the series is described as “Biographies and slice-of-life tales that show us what it means to be human” – and, more specifically, Wander Antunes’s adaptation of Twain’s short story Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg , which I read recently, is also included in the program. So my assumption that of course anything published as “Life Drawn” would be nonfiction has been proven to be inoperative.

In other words: this is probably close to true, more or less. But only…kinda.

Superman Isn’t Jewish (But I Am…Kinda)  is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by a French boy, Benjamin, and covers mostly his youth in the late eighties and early nineties, in a large extended family with a (now-divorced) Jewish father and Catholic mother. It was written by the film director and screenwriter Jimmy Bemon and drawn by Émilie Boudet, first published in France in 2014 (when Bemon also made a related short film with the same name) and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2018 English-language edition.

Jimmy is immersed in Jewish culture and history by his father’s side of the family, encouraged to believe himself part of a long, storied cultural tradition stretching back five thousand years, one of the chosen people. And he’s happy with that part.

But being Jewish also meant that he was circumcised at birth – which is vastly less common in France than it is in the US, something Bemon didn’t need to point out to his original audience but might make his histrionics come across weirdly to American readers – and so he is Different From Other Boys.

There are other issues as he grows up – undertones of how much “Jewish” means “Zionist” to a bunch of schoolboys, some of whom are Arabic, things like that – but the chopped willy is the big one. Benjamin is worried that, when he ever gets together with a girl, she will point and laugh, and then tell everyone else.

Superman Isn’t Jewish is relatively short and conversational, like a film driven by a single narrative voice. We don’t see a whole lot of Benjamin’s young life: just what matters to his possibly-Jewish identity. He has classes with a rabbi, and celebrates his bar mitzvah. There’s a moment where he’s pulled in to be the tenth man for a minyan. But he doesn’t quite feel Jewish, and eventually works up the courage to tell his father that. This is a mostly amiable, positive book, so that goes OK in the end.

I do wonder a bit how much of Jimmy is in Benjamin, and what there is of Jimmy that didn’t make it into Benjamin. But that’s the inherent question of semi-autobiographical fiction, isn’t it? In the end, this is a nice story about a good kid who figured out how he wanted to live and found happiness, in bright colored pencils and big faces from Boudet’s art – that’s a fine thing to have.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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The Incredible Story of Cooking by Benoist Simmat and Stéphane Douay

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The obvious thing to start out with would be a joke about how only the French would make a 250-page graphic novel about cooking.

But I don’t want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that’s hugely important for everybody – we all gotta eat, and the vast majority of us enjoy it and want to maximize that enjoyment. It may be too much for some readers, true. But there have been books like this in prose for decades – centuries, actually – and there’s no reason the graphic format should be less useful.

The opposite, in fact – in a prose book, you have to add pictures on individual pages or a photo insert to show what food looks like – in a graphic novel, that’s built in on every page automatically. You have to deliberately avoid showing what things look like in a graphic novel.

So I’m happy to see more books like The Incredible Story of Cooking : serious non-fiction in comics form, for people who want the details and also want to see what it all looks like, or maybe don’t want to read walls of text, or just like the organization of a comics page. (I’m all three of those things, myself, at least intermittently.)

Cooking was written by Benoist Simmat, a journalist and comics writer – he previously did a big book on wine , which has also been translated into English – and drawn by Stéphane Douay, who’s been drawing comics for twenty years but doesn’t seem to have been translated into English before. (Well, he draws the pictures, so his part of it doesn’t need to be “translated,” but you know what I mean.) It was originally published in Paris by Les Arénes in 2021; the US English-language edition (translated by Montana Kane) is from NBM and officially publishes today.

It stakes out a lot of ground: the subtitle starts with prehistory and claims to cover half a million years. The book delivers on that: the first page lists a number of hominids active in Africa between four and one million years ago, and the first chapter tells us as much as modern science knows about what those early humans ate and how they found, prepared, and kept food. I’m not sure that counts as cooking, but I don’t have a solid mental definition of what’s required to “count” as cooking, either. The book only claims 500,000 years of history, anyway, so these additional millions up front are purely lagniappe, to set the stage.

Eight more chapters bring the story, in successive stages, up to the modern world. We start with the great civilizations of antiquity – Sumer and Egypt and China and India – then Greece and Rome, trade routes and the Far East, medieval Europe, the Columbian exchange and food in the New World in general, the rise of first restaurants and gastronomy in the 19th century and then (soon afterward) the industrialization of the food business, before ending with a look at the world today, anchored by the Slow Food movement and related localization trends. Each chapter is dense with detail – there are lots of footnotes, which can send the reader back to an extensive bibliography in the back – livened up by Douay’s crisp and occasionally amusing art.

In the back, besides that long bibliography, Simmat also provides nearly two dozen recipes from representative cultures around the world – the US gets a Chicago Hot Dog, for example – which can probably be cooked from with only a small effort. (Measurements are all in metric, which may confuse some American cooks.) In case the foregoing wasn’t French enough, Simmat also gives a complexity/difficulty level for each recipe in graphic form: one soufflé for simple, up to three for difficult.

I doubt I will cook from this book, but the recipes are a nice addition. And the bulk of the book is the main comics narrative, which is detailed, backed up by all those footnotes, and includes all sorts of quirky details – starting with all of those pre-sapiens hominids up front – that I wasn’t expecting at all. It’s a book that’s both entertaining and informative: what more could you ask for?

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces by Valérie Villieu and Raphaël Sarfati

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The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition.

And this is all true, as far as I can see. This all happened, to the real Valérie Villieu, and she’s telling that story to us, with the aid of artist Raphaël Sarfati. It was a little while ago – Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces  covers a few years in the mid-Aughts, with the 2007 French presidential election somewhere in the middle – and the French edition came out in 2012, to be eventually translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2020 English-language edition from Humanoids.

Josephine was a woman in her mid-eighties, living alone in a small Paris apartment, as she had for nearly sixty years. She’d recently been found wandering disoriented in the street, and, after a brief hospitalization, was back in her apartment with daily visits from caregivers and an official legal conservatorship to manage her affairs. Villieu was working as a visiting nurse, with a roster of patients like Josephine, who she would see several times a week, to evaluate and support, administering medications and keeping track of their conditions. Villieu seems to have been part of a nursing team; she uses “we” somewhat regularly to talk about the work done, and occasionally shows what I think is a colleague also visiting Josephine.

But it’s mostly Villieu’s personal experience: how she met this woman, how they interacted, what happened over those years, how Josephine affected Valérie.

A lot of the book is the day-to-day: complaining about the often-lackadaisical work of the caregivers, battling to get the conservator to actually do something and not just complain about how many cases he was handling, and slowly gaining Josephine’s trust. Villieu writes at length about the work she does, and how she interacted with Josephine, and what Josephine was like as a person – this is a graphic novel with extensive captions, a very narrated story.

Villieu cared for Josephine for years – and I mean “cared” in both the professional and the personal sense. And she makes their relationship real here, without sugarcoating it. Josephine had a serious, unreversable, progressive mental illness, that confused her and made her forget thousands of things, that changed her moods and made her combative at times. Dementia is one of those horrible diseases we don’t like to think about – for ourselves or for ones we care for – since it turns the sufferer into a different person, bit by bit stripping away important pieces of who they were and replacing those with a pseudo-childish shell, smaller and diminished and occasionally realizing that.

(I may be biased: a very close family member is going through something similar right now, so this is more real to me than another health problem would be.)

Josephine was still a quirky, interesting person: dementia had stolen a lot from her, but a lot of her was still there, the woman who had lived in that Paris apartment for decades and still had stories of the ’50s and ’60s to tell when she could remember them.

That’s who Villieu wants to celebrate: the woman she met, behind the disease, the woman she supported and helped for a few years, giving her some more happy life at a point when she could easily have been shoved into an institution and left to decline quickly. Little Josephine is a more serious, deeper book than the cover would make a reader expect, but it’s well worth the journey.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness

How do any of us choose the next book to read? Looking at a big list of possibilities – all things you don’t know well, all things new and different – what sparks the thought “that one”?

This time, it was hair.

On the cover of Time Under Tension , her major 2023 graphic memoir, creator M.S. Harkness draws her hair as a giant, swoopy, structural thing – almost a separate, solid object, like a shark’s fin. That said to me “this is a creator who is comfortable with caricature, who gets that cartooning is how to put complicated ideas down on the page. She’s going to be interesting to read on a craft and structure level.”

I don’t want to say “I was right.” Let’s say I accurately noticed some clear strengths in Harkness’s immediate, uncompromising work. Let’s say that she both has the drawing and page-layout chops to tell a difficult story well, and both the material in her own life and the mental strength to turn that into art to work from. Let’s say I was not disappointed.

This is autobiographical: I assume it’s true as much as any memoir is, that some characters may be somewhat fictionalized or events moved in time or dialogue reconstructed to work better on the page. It feels real. Harkness has an immediacy, in her bold lines and her in-your-face storytelling, that tells the reader she is not fucking around here.

We open just before her art-school graduation, in what turns out to be an extended prologue that jumps back and forth in time during that taut moment of almost that is the month before that big day. All of the work is done; the group show is being hung. Harkness knows she will graduate. There’s a moment where a teacher bluntly tells her “I had to keep everyone else from failing. I was never really worried about you. Your art career or whatever…you’ll be fine.”

This section sets up the tensions and issues Harkness will be working through during the bulk of the book, rolling out over most of the next year.

And, no matter what that art professor thought, she is not fine.

She’s organized, focused, driven. She has a plan and multiple goals. She’s working on her first graphic novel and studying to become a personal trainer. She has a sympathetic fellow-artist roommate as a support system, and is plugged into the larger comics world.

She’s also doing random one-off sex-work jobs to plug holes in her budget. The book description says she’s also selling weed for the same purpose, but we really don’t see that in the story. She has a messy relationship with an up-and-coming MMA fighter – she is, or was, his dealer, and a fuck-buddy for this guy who already has a “girlfriend.” She wants to be more to him than he’s willing to give, and he keeps coming back but is at least honest about what’s going on.

Behind all that is a horrible childhood: a sexually abusive father about to get out of prison and reaching out through some kind of reparations program to make an “apology” she wants nothing to do with. A mother who means well but who Harkness sees as weak and doesn’t have much in common with.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze her, especially based on her own presentation. But there’s clearly trauma there that she’s still trying to get away from, and a complex nexus of physicality: working out herself, helping other people’s bodies get strong as a trainer, the random paid sex, the toll on arms and back from hunching over a drawing board. Time Under Tension isn’t really about all of those physical demands on her body, and how they intersect with each other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if her next book was – or the book after that. 

Harkness seeks out therapists, which doesn’t go well. She knows she’s driven and goal-focused, but feels like she’s not connecting with people: they’re all just roles in this march forward, each one just a piece of one of her projects.

She has to work it out herself, the same way she does everything. More work, more pushing forward, one day at a time.

In the way of comics, it may be telling the story of a few years ago: I see that Harkness is now thirty-one. Time Under Tension was Harkness’s third book; the first two were also comics memoirs. She’s said that she intends to do five books in this “series.” But this one stands alone: it tells a full story brilliantly, with an unblinking eye on her own life and problems.

And her hair is magnificent. Harkness has a stark style with strategically deployed spots of black, and her hair is the most consistent large black element on most of these pages, drawing the eye to its complexity and unruliness. I wonder if we will see that hair settle down in future books, as Harkness moves forward in life and gets her demons more under control. I hope so. I’d love to see it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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