Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays Edited by Brendan Burford Villard, May 2009, $16.95 For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other areas thought acceptable for children dominated…
The Photographer By Didier Lefèvre, Emmanuel Guibert, and Frederic Lemercier First Second, May 2009, $29.95 Lefèvre was a French photojournalist – he died, unexpectedly and too young, in 2007 – and this book is an unusual combination of drawn comics and [[[fumetti]], telling the true story of part of his life. In 1986, Lefèvre took…
That’s it. I’m burned out. I’m frazzled. I’m toast. It’s all getting to me. I close my eyes, but the browser tabs stare at me. What to do? Luckily, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, autor of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Roswell novels, as well as many of her own, has started writing The Freelancer’s Survival Guide….
08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail By Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman Three Rivers Press, January 2009, $17.95 Typically, there are two kinds of non-fiction books about big events – first are the quick-and-dirty ones that come out almost immediately, pulled together from news reports or written on the fly or just knocked…
Publisher’s Weekly reports that Neil Gaiman has signed with Morrow to write three non-fiction titles. Monkey and Me: China and the Journey to the West will be the first tile and is described as "inspired by Journey to the West, a classical Chinese text by Wu Cheng’en, who lived in the 16th century." The author…
American Widow By Alissa Torres; Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi Villard, September 2008, $22.00 Luis Eduardo (“Eddie”) Torres started a new job as a foreign exchange trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 10th, 2001. He was thrilled to get it – he’d been out of work for a few months, his wife, Alissa, was then seven…
A few years back, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón came up with the novel idea of retelling the 9/11 Commission Report in comic book form. Now they’re back with something of a sequel, After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (Hill and Wang, $16.95). While their earlier book was a simple recreation of an existing document,…
With all of the past year’s insanity in Burma — mainly monk uprisings and government oppressions — you’d think Guy Delisle’s nonfiction comic Burma Chronicles would be especially topical. But you’d be wrong. As is Delisle’s style, he passes up on the chance to take an expansive view of the country where he lived for…
The measurable results of bare-knuckled research, like gold and luck, will turn up where you find ’em. Folks often think of cultural research in academic terms – the ivory-tower stereotype, alone in the realm of uninterrupted thought and empirical fact-sifting, or the aloof egghead at large amongst the tribes – but a truer basis…
This just in from Marv Wolfman: I don’t know too many details or the specific category as I just got the phone call but my book, Homeland: The Illustrated History of the State of Israel has just won the National Jewish Book Award. This is supposed to be the most prestigious of all the Jewish…
Harper’s magazine has an excerpt from Karl Schroeder’s Crisis in Zefra in their July issue, but the whole thing — a fake non-fictional account of a near-future African peacekeeping mission that Schroeder did for the Canadian army a few years ago – is also available online, in a form that makes it look creepily real….
The comics industry stands at an exciting crossroads. International acceptance of graphic literature is starting to have a positive effect on how Americans see non-superhero genres, as manga saturates teen audiences and award-winning autiobiographical novels like Fun Home and Persepolis enthrall adults. When you factor the geek contingent into that, as even the superhero genre…
