Comic books from the 1960s and ’70s, even the good ones, often ask contemporary readers to bring to them some degree of moral relativism, and Baron Yoshimoto’s The Troublemakers (Retrofit/Big Planet) is no different. Collecting a number of short stories that the author produced in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the…
The great joy of reading Soft X-Ray/Mindhunters (Koyama Press) is in not really knowing what’s going on. Characters appear, and you can follow them easily, but what exactly they’re doing and what its significance is cannot easily be discerned. This is in large part due to how the author, A. Degen, structures his book.…
The Italian cartoonist Gipi is still an unfamiliar name for most American readers. His work first became available in English when First Second imported his Notes For A War Story in 2007, and the couple of works that followed announced Gipi as one of the next great Italian cartoonists in a decade beset with European…
In Blackbird Days (Fantagraphics Books) the Italian master Manuele Fior plays with form and style in a series of experimental shorts, some of which appear like brief notes on a scene, while others are more elaborated and developed narratives. It’s difficult to pick a favorite, but the collection’s final story, “Gare…
The first story in Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures (New York Review Comics) is titled “Love,” and in a few brief pages establishes the modus operandi of the collection’s author, Yvan Alagbé. What begins as an assortment of seemingly inchoate lines slowly, over one image and then the next, reveals itself…
The history of the universe is very long and complicated, but it is done no favors when represented as the steady, linear, progressive force of Enlightenment. That is meant as both critique and compliment to authors Daniel Locke and David Blandy, whose new collaboration, Out Of Nothing (Nobrow), gestures in both…
As far as Roman Muradov comics go, Resident Lover (Kuš!) is fairly straightforward. Only 28 pages long, the comic relates the story of a narrator and their lover, ex-lover, and ex-lover’s lover (whose ex-lover is possibly a skilled bocce player, or so the narrator has heard). On a trip to the Colombian province Valle…
Red Colored Elegy (Drawn & Quarterly) is the longest sustained narrative produced by author Seiichi Hayashi, a cartoonist most recognized (when he’s recognized at all) for his opaque and elliptical short stories. His work tends to concern the interior lives of angsty young adults—most of them suffering from oppressive…
In comics, bodies can contort and shift and slide in every way imaginable—changing in size, proportion, color, or detail, from panel to panel, without losing a sense of continuity between them. Gender and sexuality also communicate something to others that changes based on context. In comics, that context can change…
Comics adaptations are almost as old as the form itself, with fairy tales, novels, and other literary works having been adapted as proto-comics as far back as 19th-century Europe. Comics adaptations of nonfiction works have a shorter but no less rich history, and they invite us to rethink the comic as a literary form…
Serialized on the Study Group comics website, Farel Dalrymple’s Proxima Centauri - Part 1 bears an unspecified relationship to one of the author’s early works, The Wrenchies. In this series, which features Sherwood Presely Breadcoat (who readers might recognize as a protagonist of The Wrenchies) as its lead, Dalrymple…
Escapism has long been a driving tenet of comic books, but as the medium has evolved, creators have started to see the value of comics as tools to create empathy and put readers in another person’s experience. 2017 was a year in which the world could have used a lot more empathy, and some of the best comics and…
Something about this year made reading books feel not just crucial, but a little bit transgressive. Maybe it’s the assault on education and freedom of the press, or maybe it’s just that between reading new reports of abusive men and Trump’s latest attempt to chokehold the nation, simply reading for pleasure feels…
In the European and Japanese markets, comics about cooking aren’t uncommon. Take, for example, Yuto Tsukuda and Shun Saeki’s Food Wars!—a popular, slick serial that runs in Shonen Jump magazine. In the United States, cooking is portrayed similarly to any other kind of action in modern mainstream fighting comics: It’s…
Over the course of the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other country in the world—approximately 40 percent of all enslaved Africans landed in Brazil. This fact is often overlooked, and, with it, the rich, lengthy, and tumultuous story of slave escapes and rebellions in Brazil.…
In Steven Soderbergh’s two-part biopic, Che, the Argentine revolutionary is rendered as fully human. Walking the line between hagiography and cold warrior propaganda, Soderbergh’s movie depicts the titular militant as idealistic, hopeful, and caring, but also flawed and struggling. It never attempts to justify his…
The Argentine director Lucia Puenzo once described the Nazis’ political project as an attempt to “modulate” the human race. This is the dimension of Nazism that Ulli Lust most insightfully picks up in her latest, Voices In The Dark (New York Review Comics). An adaptation of the German novel The Karnau Tapes, Lust’s…
Elliptical, opaque, and episodic, I’m Not Here (Koyama Press), the latest comic from the enigmatic GG, wraps itself in a mystery that it only ever approaches with a parallax view. An unnamed girl encounters her doppelgänger on the street and has a dream. That’s the entire plot of I’m Not Here, but GG splays it out…
Savage Town (Image Comics) fancies itself a pulpy crime yarn—in fact, it’s so in love with the idea of itself as an urban crime novel that it forecloses the possibility of being anything, or including anything, else. The work is positively debilitated by this self-delusion, and it makes for a plodding, repetitive…
There’s a real temptation to just tell people to read Mitch Gerads and Tom King’s Mister Miracle #1 (DC) and leave it at that. This team is a solid one with a lot of skill, and after their work on The Sheriff Of Babylon it really shouldn’t be a hard sell to get this issue into people’s hands.
