john and jana

Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle

Travel is such a natural topic for graphic novels that it’s surprising there aren’t more collections of graphic essays or just travel memoirs littering the landscape. Or perhaps it’s for the best, since I imagine few could live up to Guy Delisle’s mastery of the form. The Quebecois cartoonist previously recounted his work in Asian animation studios in “Shenzhen” and “Pyongyang” — his new book, “The Burma Chronicles” takes him into different territory at the mercy of his wife’s job, administrator for Doctors Without Borders.

Delisle’s main job and purpose during his year in Burma seems to be to raise his son, do some work and to wander around and get to know the country in the name of curiosity and another graphic novel. The latter purpose twists its way through the former two — managing to include peeks into his wife’s work along the way — and creates a multi-faceted look at an expatriate community in a mysterious and troubled country. Continue Reading…

Aya of Yop City by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie

The second in a series of graphic novels following teenager Aya in the Ivory Coast in the 1970s, “Aya of Yop City” is that great sort of teen drama that never panders nor becomes prosaic in its effort to teach its reader a little something about another culture. As a best case scenario in the young adult genre, the “Aya” series treats its subjects as individuals of depth and uses the characterizations and situations to unite teenagers around the world.

As author Marguerite Abouet notes in an interview at the end of the book, teenagers are fairly similar the world over and part of her goal was to capture that truth. It’s an admirable goal that has found champions in other skilled storytellers in this day and age — graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi being the most prominent. Continue Reading…

Red Colored Elegy

Seiichi Hayashi’s “Red Colored Elegy” evokes French New Wave film as it follows the relationship between Ichiro and Sachiko, investigating the personal tortures that have an effect on their status as a couple.

Structurally, Hayashi unfolds his tale through disjointed scenes that either hint at more than they reveal, or sometimes just make the reader feel left out from a secret. It’s that arm’s length mode of storytelling that grew out of films like “Breathless,” where it’s hard to engage with the characters since it’s impossible to get inside them beyond their whining to each other.

Hayashi matches the oblique attitude with simple artwork — sometimes so simple that characters can become interchangeable in appearance. That’s a shame because at points, Hayashi lets his skill slip through, mostly with some lovely renderings of landscapes, street scenes, and architecture. The complication of these renditions make it seem as if he is holding back too much with his characters — especially since there are points where the author is really on the verge of drawing a reader into his characters’ dramas.

At the same time, Hayashi does have the detached, disjointed storytelling technique down. It’s not hard to see that in 1970/71, when this first appeared, it certainly was groundbreaking — it’s just that decades later, it has little emotional resonance and stands best as a technical example of experimentation in the graphic arts.

It points to what could be and shows an astonishing level of creative maturity — it is, unfortunately, a promise of what could be rather than a realization of it.

Paul Goes Fishing by Michel Rabagliati

“Paul Goes Fishing” is a sweet slice of Quebecois life that covers an existence not extraordinary necessarily, but honest in its presentation and likable in its demeanor. Creator Michel Rabagliati invites readers into some very personal space via his apparent alter ego, dealing with that most awkward of spaces — the one where you grow up, the one where you know nothing — without any posturing.

Paul is a graphic designer who takes a couple weeks off with his pregnant wife to stay at a fishing camp with his sister-in-law and her angling obsessed husband. With a baby on the way, Paul finds that all reflection and conversation points to the reality of impending fatherhood — but not in a cliched, fearful way. Paul, rather than shaking at the prospect, is using his experiences and those of others to qualify what it all means.

The pregnancy works as a leveler in the relationship with his more successful old friend Peter — finally something good is happening to Paul even as it does Peter. It becomes a more complicated happening in contrast to his sister-in-law, who tells a harrowing tale of almost-adoption, and from Paul’s own memory of an abused kid he meets on an ill-fated attempt to run away from home.

Through all the trauma presented, Rabagliati’s tale is never overwrought, but rather charming, even at the saddest moments. It also stands as a nice little testament to the great Canadian road trip as a journey of discovery and marriages as a delightful in-joke that two people are lucky enough to share.

This is just one book in a series — Rabagliati has apparently devoted his creative life to have Paul’s unfold in graphic novel form. It’s filled with the kind of gentle earnestness that you don’t often see and I can’t wait to read more about Paul’s entirely normal life.

Gentleman Jim by Raymond Briggs

Through books like “The Bear” and “The Snowman” Raymond Briggs has met with acclaim largely for books aimed at kids that have a dark edge to them. They stop short of actually being depressing, but the humor they disperse has a bite, peppered with an outlook that is not wholly sunny. Briggs has also branched out in his career with works like “Where the Wind Blows,” a fable of nuclear war that plunges to the depths of sadness.

Somewhere in between these extremes lies “Gentleman Jim,” which takes the forlorn of a life wasted and the inability to crawl to higher heights and adds a childlike whimsy to the proceedings. In this way, it plays to both audiences — more importantly, it serves as a funny tale that may just lodge itself in a kid’s brain, a lesson learned to be applied at the crossroads we all face.

The book’s title refers not to the main character Jim, but to a roving masked highwayman that Jim pulls from his favorite escapist literature. Jim wants to be Gentleman Jim, but is in reality a bathroom attendant long past his prime, though not too old to dream of changing his life. Daydreaming on the job and spouting off ideas with his patient wife, Jim goes through a litany of career and life change plans before settling on highwayman. Unfortunately, Jim is naive to the point of idiocy and not only can he not tell the difference between reality and fantasy, he also has little intuition on the way things work in the real world.

Much of the humor of the book is pulled from the inability of Jim and his wife to understand the world around him and the spectacle of his schemes falling apart thanks to society’s rigidity. On one hand, Briggs seems entirely on Jim’s side — on the other, there are aspects to Jim and his wife which shows a cruelty in Briggs’ writing and an anger in his conception. This is not so much a criticism as an observation of Briggs’ usual tone and it’s place in this story — the rounded, ruddy-cheeked people born of his art style sometimes imply a sweetness to his stories that don’t necessarily exist. As the characters unfold, they become as much an examination of Briggs’ psychology as their own.

As the story winds down, the hostility holds far less strength against the humor and “Gentleman Jim” turns out to be something that a kid might enjoy without perceiving the negatives. Briggs’s concoctions are always filled with emotional depth and good laughs — “Gentleman Jim” is that best kind of book, one that grows with the reader and reveals previously hidden aspects that are found through maturity.

What It Is by Lynda Barry

In this primer for cartooning — a sort of how to be creative instructional text book — Lynda Barry takes a very different and very abstract approach. Instead of merely telling you how to fashion ideas and work with them, Barry takes the reader through an autobiographical journey tracing the movement of her brain and consciousness as it learned to fashion ideas and work with them.

“What It Is” unfolds through a bold and abstract presentation, where the subtleties and depth of Barry’s creative process — or, better yet, process to creativity — is echoed through a mix of sharp cartooning layered within intricate collage work. It may be an instructional work underneath all the clutter, but it’s that clutter that does the dirty work, making plain why the instruction makes any sense whatsoever.

Barry employs an arsenal of tactics to walk would-be cartoonists through the process. Sometimes it’s straight cartoon narrative — often Barry messes with this, creating a memoir of childhood with handwritten entries alongside the drawings. The journal winds through the personal circumstances of those years — including some sad details about her parental relationships — but the biographical detail provides a road map to the moment where all the circumstances, the doodling and reading and alienation, come together as artistic motivation.

When she’s not functioning as the Ghost of Cartoonists Past, Barry is posing a series of abstract philosophical questions about storytelling, the kind of Zen unanswerables designed to get you thinking without entirely worrying about any conclusion. Questions like “What is the past made of?” and “What are thoughts made of?” serve as springboards for Barry’s energetic and often gorgeous collage work, providing equally abstract images illustrating the journey begun by the questions.

Reading “What That Is” is like diving into Barry’s mind and swimming for a while. You plunge into bits of narrative now and again, but most of it is free form exploration, with your actions working alongside and in contrast to Barry’s own. In other words, Barry actually takes you through the act of creation, rather than just telling you how it’s done — by the end, she’s a guide in the mysterious world of your own creative brain, not just her own. This should be required reading for any teenager drifting into a creative life.

Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

If Ingmar Bergman were a Japanese Manga creator, he would no doubt have been Yoshihiro Tatsumi. In “Good-Bye,” a new collection of Tatsumi’s short works from 1971 and 1972, the underbelly of the Japanese psyche is examined in from an intimate and often grim vantage point with masterful results.

Japanese Manga has been the hottest comics trend in the United States, with shelves of the books finding their way into mainstream bookstores and the hands of American teenagers everywhere. Tatsumi, though, is a pioneer of the form and if the current onslaught is mystifying to adults on a number of levels — from the youthful subject matter to enormity of the titles available — Tatsumi provides a reference point for the lost, both in chronology and maturity.

In Tatsumi’s world, Japan is land of not merely of repression, but of the illusion of repression. Nastiness still abounds and people still act out their coarsest desires, but society turns a blind eye to it, creating the mass delusion that there is nothing wrong. The way Tatsumi tells it, this results in a world of colliding, mournful loners who want and take and hurt.

In “Hell,” Tatsumi uses the bombing of Hiroshima as the ultimate indicator of the fraud of Japanese society, with the desire for upright decency being revealed as a compulsion enabled by the country’s nostalgia for its own need for honor.

Japanese women are portrayed as being expected to submit to being objects of lust, while being shamed into doing what their society demands of them. In “Life Is So Sad” Akemi is forced to work as a hostess after her abusive boyfriend lands in jail — but his assumptions about her job push her into fulfilling his worst expectations. In “Good-Bye” Mariko — branded a slut by her neighbors — finds herself torn between her American lover and her sleazy father, a conflict that results in a horrible dehumanization of the woman.

Meanwhile, men are desperate and lonely, filled with self loathing due to the expectations of society. In “Just a Man” and “Rash,” older men grope for their fantasies and end up with further dark holes in their souls. In “Woman in the Mirror” and “Night Falls Again” the inability of Japanese men to express themselves in a sexual manner is turned inside out on them by the world at large.

Tatsumi’s bitter slices of life unwind with a silent grace — his artwork renders the tragedies with a compassion that never hides the starkness of the emotions portrayed. Tatsumi is spare with dialog, but it packs a punch when his characters speak, bring the reader to intimate corners as we intrude on the most private — and sometimes horrible — moments in their lives.

Haunted by Phillipe Dupuy

French cartoonist Phillipe Dupuy brings the reader along as a jogging partner on a journey through his own landscapes — psychological and physical — in the short story collection “Haunted.”

Dupuy’s rushed and sketchy art style gives the book the feel of a quick and personal journal, though at the same times the visuals can echo the loose line work of Ludwig Bemelmans. The framing device only bolsters this intimate impression — there are several pieces that depict Dupuy’s thought process while jogging, where the stream-of-consciousness involved in the self-analysis often finds its way to the real world.

Anyone who has done any sort of satisfactory exercise can probably identify with the idea a physical exertion, when done properly, unleashes the psychological, frees the mind to go where it will.

That’s exactly what’s going on here, giving Dupuy the opportunity to converse with his dead mother, reminisce about things that disturbed him as a kid, and get into a philosophical conversation with a duck.

Dupuy extends the themes from this self searching into little anecdotes involving the angst of animals and Mexican wrestlers — and some other asides — treating them with the tenderness that is perhaps missing in his self-portraits.

Not all the individual stories stand alone — though all of them work together to make a thoughtful collection — but there are several of great strength on their own, including “Forest Friends,” which follows a group of animals dealing with a troubled friend who has lost a limb, and “Lucha Libre,” the Mexican wrestler story in question that ambles along mysteriously before ending with a superb sweetness.

In the end, Dupuy is able to put himself in the same place as his characters and “Haunted” stands a testament to the notion that comics don’t have to be about flash and concept, just honest lines and ideas.

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan

With so much fiction that takes place in Israel — at least that I’ve encountered — there is a tendency to focus on Jewish identity — no surprise — and the country’s place and legacy in its region. With the graphic novel “Exit Wounds,” acclaimed Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan has taken a different approach, allowing the well-trod circumstances to function as the backdrop for a more personal story to unfold.

Koby is a young guy without a nuclear family — his mother is dead, his sister has moved to America and his father is at best a phantom in his life. He passes his time with his aunt and uncle, sharing their cab as a means of income and generally stewing in the anger that his life has fostered. One day, a young woman tells him that his father was possibly killed in a bombing and though Koby rejects her concern, the mystery of the possible death begins to bubble within him.

Koby soon finds himself searching for the truth — did his father die in the bombing or is he still alive somewhere — as pushed along by the woman, Numi, who seems to have been dating Koby’s father. What becomes apparent is that as the two lost souls investigate whereabouts of the man who links them, they are also learning more about themselves, discovering an alternate secret history to the incidents of their own lives and creating a connection with each other that may well herald a welcome new phase to each other’s existence.

In Modan’s Israel, terrorism is not a bombastic disruption of daily reality, but part of that routine, and it’s striking how a mound of dead bodies can be dismissed more casually than a misdirected comment said in a negative tone by someone sitting next to you in a car. The reality is that the terrorism becomes a bad part of life, but not a disruption — it’s part of the larger world and people adapt to that. It’s all the personal stuff that trips you up, regardless of your station in life or the political situation in your country. What hurts you is not someone attacking your country, but someone attacking you, because that is a weapon that crawls under your skin and festers.

“Exit Wounds” is as concerned with the quiet moments of the hunt as it is with any resolution. The mystery unfolds and the mystery eventually shifts — you become less concerned whether Koby and Numi will find the father, and more interested in how they will make peace with each other and their pasts. As the mystery resolves itself and Modan allows life to go on, the idea that one must rectify the past and step into the future — and that it’s best if you have a partner in this forward movement — take center stage and “Exit Wounds” becomes a powerful endorsement for not letting history permanently ravage you anymore than a terrorist attack should.

America: God, Gold, and Golems by James Sturm

In James Sturm’s “America: God, Gold, and Golems,” the United States is portrayed in a trilogy of tales that draw from its excesses in fervor, greed and bigotry through a lens of acceptability.

“The Revival” tells of a Kentucky revival meeting in 1801, where true believers gather to create an atmosphere more like a refugee camp than anything else. Joseph and Sarah are traveling to meet healer Elijah Young, on whom they’ve placed desperate faith to solve their problems. What Sturm understands is that as destructive as the old-time religious fire could be, it was also the fuel of change — somehow in their reckless search for a brush with a miracle, Joseph and Sarah find the real meaning of spiritual rebirth in context of a new country to be created.

In “Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight,” a mine in 1886 Idaho becomes the center point of hate and greed. Built on the ashes of a lynching of Chinese miners, Soloman’s Gulch is the place where misguided mine owner Ned Weeks is fixated on a payload of treasure and a workers’ revolt peppers the turgid camp dramas that will overtake his greedy quest.

“The Golem’s Mighty Swing” introduces the Stars of David, a traveling, all-Jewish baseball team that goes from town to town playing local clubs in exhibition games and struggling for to live. It’s a tale of immigrants walking that tightrope to assimilate while still retaining some of their culture. What ends up happening too often is that the assimilation compromises their beliefs — team leader Noah Strauss points out in the beginning that they play on the Sabbath and that’s just the way it has to be in America.

There are larger challenges to fitting in, however — most notably a hovering bigotry that seems to be constantly swooping down for the kill. There are also the more subtle ones, such as the opportunity to sell out their culture. When a promoter offers them the chance for big money by having one team member dress up as the creature of Jewish legend, the Golem, the team at first turns it down, but then changes their mind when they find themselves stranded in a small town. With the introduction of the Golem to the team, though, the crowds get rowdier — and more hateful.

Sturm has a great talent for emotionally honest stories told through straightforward means — his no-nonsense style, with its clean black lines and olive washes, portray the faces and architecture of times gone by with a simplicity that doubles as power.

Sturm’s vision of America is one of crowds where individuals must duck in and out according to the movement of the overwhelming throngs. Decisions are made by the mob, though change often happens despite the stifling movement meant to stomp progress dead in its tracks. Sturm also presents America as a country of outsiders bumping up against other outsiders — and the frictions from those interactions. In this way, the country is a chemical reaction, but once the initial explosion passes, more subtle changes take place, and this understanding of the delicacy past the bombast is at the center Sturm’s mastery.

Milk Teeth by Julie Morstad

As presented in “Milk Teeth,” there’s no denying the talent of Vancouver artist Julie Morstad.
Her thin and busy line work moves like a thread through her drawings, fashioning images witty and precious and grim and affected.

Morstad’s wit is a surrealist one of floating heads, millions of bees escaping from a girl’s ear, and children hiding from stalking tigers behind piles of books. She’s extremely interested in hair, it seems — winding around faces and on beds, bursting out of houses and acting as the stomping ground for various visitors on people’s heads.

It all, unfortunately, adds up to nothing.

One reason is that for all the obvious technical skill, the presentation in the book — part of Drawn and Quarterly’s Petits Livres series — accentuates the fact that Morstad’s images are not standalone gallery art and, therefore, isn’t well-served by the same translation into book form. Her work is illustration through and through. Illustration works best in a context as part of a collaboration with words but there are none in this book.

Though stories are implied, the illustrations don’t work as pantomime and the pages seem naked without the other half of the team. Whereas words or context might lend a power to the images, put in succession in book form, the collection seems more like a vanity press sketchbook.

One easy bit of text could have been something actually explaining who the artist is, actually talking about the artist’s work. As it is, the reason the work is there in a book is a bit of a mystery — the significance of the images aren’t very apparent and the book isn’t keen to divulge anything.

You are left guessing and the first impression you get is that the artist spent much of her time copying Edward Gorey with precision. With dozens of sad-faced art deco girls populating the pages, with grim and goth frameworks accentuating the morbid and absurd moods that underlie them, it looks like Morstad sat down with a pile of Gorey books and taught herself how to draw.

One thing that wasn’t learned from Gorey, though, was his presentation — Gorey’s art is easily the big draw in his books, but his narratives, usually spare, offer some structure to the presentation, particularly in a book like “The Ghastlycrumb Tinies.” Morstad’s illustrations are just as unrelated, with nothing to bind them but the fact that they were chosen to be in this book.

In the context of releasing books that are showcases for derivative work, Morstad is missing the important lessons of her apparent idol. Rather than copy his lines, it would be nice if she found herself and her own style instead — I would love to see what Morstad is capable of without Gorey taking charge of her drawing hand.

White Rapids by Pascal Blanchet

When it comes to picture books, industrialism just isn’t cool anymore — environmental concerns have taken over.

There was a time, however, when the archetypes of industry were scattered throughout children’s books — just take a look at the landscape as viewed by Scuffy the Tugboat in the old Golden Book of the same title. Steamshovels, factories, lighthouses made to feel small next to sprawling bridges that heralded in the engineering triumphs of the new age of man — all these things were routinely celebrated in picture books of old.

Revisiting that territory is Pascal Blanchet’s “White Rapids.” Blanchet, a Quebecois cartoonist, has fashioned a stylistically impressive tale of the communities raised and destroyed by the movements of industry. There is no animated, sentient heavy equipment here — instead, a dam, power plant and workers’ community built on the St. Maurice River, making mankind’s stamp on the wilderness in a haughty attempt to tame it for our comfort. It does not go as expected — but rather than a disaster, mankind’s failure is a whimper and a retreat.

Blanchet’s artwork is gloriously retro, but stylized with a smart hindsight that straddles affection with a knowing glance. He can tread the same territory as any other illustrator who depicts the pre-1960s world of commercial style and suburban socialization, but the breathtaking moments here are reserved for the trappings of big business — the retro-futuristic control room at the dam, the tunnel and township maps, boardrooms, train bridges, skyscrapers — all as exotic in their presentation as the wilds of Canada. This frontier, however, is tamed by outdoorsmen brandishing the latest gear, by housewives and block parties, by modern products flying off the grocery store shelves, of that old chestnut of a word that we don’t think about anymore because it’s no longer a novelty, progress.

Blanchet’s work is a paean to progress as nostalgia, a time when industry was a code for mankind moving forward, an era when the future was an exciting fad for people to buy into. The ultimate lesson is that we dream big and build big, but the mammoths of our ambitions are actually as delicate as the nature we trample over in our fury to move ever onward.