Review by New York Times Review
Tom Gauld's contribution to the oversize anthology "Kramers Ergot 7," above, and Dirk Schwieger's adventures with fuga, above right, from his sketchbooklike "Moresukine: Uploaded Weekly From Tokyo." IF there's one book that art-comics enthusiasts would be happiest to find in their stockings this year, it's probably KRAMERS ERGOT 7 (Buenaventura, $125), except for the small matter that it's bigger than an entire hearth. This is one of the grandest English-language comics artifacts ever produced - a mammoth hardcover anthology, 16 by 21 inches, of new stories by several dozen notable cartoonists, including Daniel Clowes, Seth, Gabrielle Bell, Kevin Huizenga, Sammy Harkham (who also edited the book) and the "Simpsons" creator Matt Greening. Like the early-20th-century broadsheet newspaper comics pages that inspired it, "Kramers Ergot" occupies its readers' entire visual field, and most of its contributors have some fun with its dimensions, cramming the page with tiny details or opening it up for apocalyptically huge vistas. The cleverest gesture comes from Chris Ware, whose two-page contribution is built around a cartoon of a sleeping baby printed at the child's actual size. Few cartoonists of the moment are weirder or more original than Yuichi Yokoyama - his work obsessively diagrams architecture and design, and just barely clings to shreds of narrative. TRAVEL (PictureBox, paper, $19.95) is remarkably entertaining, given that it's a wordless, nearly 200-page account of an uneventful train voyage. Its first quarter concerns three travelers looking for their seats, and the rest is pretty much what they see out the window as their train passes across Japan, zooming by the disturbing geometries of nature and cities. (The human characters are expressionless glyphs, differentiated only by clothing and hairstyles.) Any individual panel from the book is likely to look almost completely abstract, and the joke of Yokoyama's endnotes is that he's struggling to interpret his own images, too: "It seems slightly strange that they would sit so close together in an empty train car." A very different take on Japan comes from the German cartoonist Dirk Schwieger, whose comics diary MORESUKINE: Uploaded Weekly From Tokyo (NBM/ComicsLit, paper, $15.95) - the name is a Japanese transliteration of the Moleskine notebook in which he drew it - documents his readers' challenges to experience the oddities of Tokyo culture. Schwieger is genuinely open to trying anything: he visits an origami gallery, checks into a "love hotel" and eats potentially poisonous wild fugu. He's also attuned to the details of his environment and the way they color his social interactions. The book's final section contains a handful of responses to Schwieger's suggestion that his readers talk to Japanese people in their own cities and draw cartoons about the experience. Frank Miller, whose bold, bloody comics inspired the movies "Sin City" and "300," was one of the first American cartoonists to experiment with the look of Japanese manga. ABSOLUTE RONIN (DC Comics, $99) is a new, oversize edition of the 1983-84 series that was his stylistic breakthrough. Ostensibly about an ancient Japanese warrior reincarnated to fight a demon in a sprawling, pustular future New York City, it's really an excuse for Miller (and the colorist Lynn Varley) to pull off one swaggering visual trick after another: characters' forms defined by pointillist dots or frantic crosshatching, brutal violence implied by the sheer kinetic splatter of Miller's lines, the boom-boom-boom pacing of the 16-panel grid he went on to use in "The Dark Knight Returns." Another worthy upgraded edition of long-in-print comics is the fourth and final volume of THE ABSOLUTE SANDMAN (Vertigo, $99), collecting the ingenious fantasy series that made Neil Gaiman's reputation before he was better known as a prose novelist. (The final installment bears the credit "additional material by William Shakespeare"; no prob, Neil!) The core of the volume is an extended story line called "The Kindly Ones" - after the name the Furies prefer - in which the horror of a toddler's kidnapping metastasizes into a metaphysical disaster that rattles the foundations of humanity's collective unconscious. Gaiman specializes in writing to artists' strengths, and there's a broad range of drawing techniques on display here, including Marc Hempel's strippeddown, hyperdistorted vectors, Michael Zulli's lushly rendered pencil textures and Jon J. Muth's slashing, Asian-calligraphy-inspired brush strokes. Long-out-of-print comics are reappearing one by one, as well; the vogue for tuxedoed hardcover editions of 12-cent newsprint oddities has thankfully reached Richard E. Hughes and Ogden Whitney's daffy little 1960s series "Herbie," which took the idea of heroic wish-fulfillment to its natural conclusion. HERBIE: Volume One and HERBIE: Volume Two (Dark Horse, $49.95 each) reproduce the earliest adventures of Herbie Popnecker, a corpulent kid with half-lidded eyes, thick glasses and a hideous bowl cut. His father calls him a "little fat nothing," not realizing that Herbie is actually a colossus striding across the cultural landscape of his era. With the aid of his super-empowering lollipops, Herbie punches out Sonny Liston, confronts Fidel Castro and gets sent on a secret mission by U Thant. Hughes took a while to perfect his stories' tone of deadpan absurdity, but Whitney's slightly stiff, matter-of-fact artwork improves the gags by understating them. Ruth and Perry, the teenage stepsiblings at the center of Nate Powell's scaldingly dark SWALLOW ME WHOLE (Top Shelf, $19.95), see and hear things that other people don't: Ruth obsessive-compulsively reorders her insect collection and perceives swarms of bugs everywhere, and Perry has a little man who commands him to draw things. They know they can confide in each other, but they struggle to suppress their visions in order to get by at home and in school; as far as the adults around them are concerned, what's special about them is mental illness, and it needs to be medicated into submission. Powell's flowing, impressionistic artwork, with its ravenous expanses of negative space, swirls the reader's perspective through his characters' perceptions and back out again. It might not be so bad in Ruth's buzzing, chirruping psychological landscape compared with the world the rest of us see, Powell suggests - but then again it might, and Perry's ability to channel his damage into art might give him an escape route that's closed off to his stepsister. The "Watchmen" movie doesn't open until March, but for those of us who've already read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's mid-1980s autopsy of the superhero ideal 63 times, Gibbons's new WATCHING THE WATCHMEN (Titan, $39.95) is a treat: a scrapbook in which he dissects the artistic process that produced the original series, including his thumbnail sketches for every chapter. Appropriately for a story whose theme is the clockwork of human experience, Gibbons arranged its components with admirable care, working out the look and feel of the entire project before he drew a single page but opening it up to happy accidents, like his discovery that one of the book's visual motifs was echoed by a crater on Mars. From top: "Herbie" flies again; David Axe and Steve Olexa's work from "The Best American Comics"; "Watching the Watchmen"; and Frank Miller's "Absolute Ronin." The second volume of Jason Lutes's Berlin trilogy, BERLIN: City of Smoke (Drawn & Quarterly, paper, $19.95), has appeared, eight years after the first. (Comics this meticulous take a long time.) Set in 1929 and 1930, as the Nazis were rising to power, it follows Germany's slide toward catastrophe through the experiences of characters navigating the chaos of the disintegrating Weimar Republic: a black American jazz group hoping to strike it rich, a homeless Jewish man taking a Communist girl under his wing, a tightly wound journalist losing his girlfriend to the city's demimonde and his composure to the country's impending horror. The fascist tide at first creeps gradually into Lutes's graceful, tightly composed little panels, but with the pivotal killing of Horst Wessel, two-thirds of the way through, everything starts plummeting into hell much faster. Long before her 2006 memoir, "Fun Home," Alison Bechdel was drawing the newspaper strips collected in THE ESSENTIAL DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), 25 years' worth of satirical soap opera about a permanently indignant leftist lesbian named Mo, her friends and lovers, and the messy intersections of their personal and political lives. (Her habit of alliteration is catching.) At first, the strip simply revels in its own novelty - a comic about lesbian culture! - but it hits a groove as Bechdel works out the farcical possibilities of her ensemble cast, starts riffing hilariously on the seeming proliferation of sexual identities in the mid-'90s and invents her most memorable characters, especially Mo's paramour Sydney, a dry-witted academic (she writes for The Journal of Ludicrous Queer Theory) and shopaholic. As a bonus, there's an excellently deadpan index ("handmaiden of fascism, mindless entertainment as, 339"). Excerpts from Bechdel's and Lutes's books also turn up in the 2008 edition of THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS (Houghton Mifflin, $22). Best-of-the-year selections are meant to be argued with, of course, but this volume's guest editor, Lynda Barry, gets points for spotlighting promising young artists like Eleanor Davis (a bleak little fable called "Seven Sacks") and Lilli Carré ("The Thing About Madeline," a creepy-crawly fantasy about separation from self). Most of Barry's selections are somehow unsettling; she leans toward stories that draw on the playful look of kids' entertainment to convey something much sadder. Not everything here is polished or elegantly drawn, but virtually every piece has some sort of image that can get under its reader's skin, and you can't ask much more of comics than that. Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Powell's most direct work to date doesn't abandon the fantastic elements that made Tiny Giants (2003) and It Disappeared (2005) so impressive. But those elements' implications are easier to read. The swirling ether and clouds of insects that engulf Ruth, and the little wizard who compels Perry to draw, bespeak mental illness. Ruth and Perry, stepsiblings and deep friends, are initially preadolescents visiting their grandmother in the hospital but from page 28 on are teenagers. Perry seems more disturbed early on, but by high school, Ruth's obsessive-compulsiveness verges on schizophrenia. After she steals a huge frog while at her work-study job at a natural-history museum, Perry can't save her. The last pages show him apparently under the wizard's spell again, feeding the frog. The grandmother's spirit warns him, as she had Ruth, that it'll swallow you whole. Powell's artwork supplies the magic, while the text, almost exclusively dialogue, much of it scribbled and smeared to reflect its accidental or willed inaudibility to Ruth or Perry, provides the realism in this darkly sublime graphic novel.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Indy comic artist Powell, an Eisner-nominee, works full time with adults with developmental disabilities, which may have been an inspiration for Swallow Me Whole, a stand-alone graphic novel about two teenage stepsiblings with psychological problems. Ruth suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder and thinks she can hear insects speak, making it difficult for her to walk across grassy lawns but landing her a sweet internship in the natural history museum. Perry sometimes sees a tiny wizard who speaks to him about his destiny, which would be cute if this were a fantasy comic; instead, it's sadly tragic since Perry recognizes the wizard as nothing more than a troublesome hallucination. It should be obvious from the start that things will not end well. Dark inks and elongated whispering word balloons carry us into Ruth's world of voices and missing time, while experimental paneling masterfully conveys the characters' inner worlds and altered states. Powell's ultimate message remains unclear: is this a cautionary tale reminding ill teens to take their medication(s)? Or should we take a hopeful message away from Ruth's tragic story, knowing that one need not give in completely to one's delusions? (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-Powell has created a complex tale of two adolescent step-siblings struggling through the usual angst and discovery that occur during the teenage years. However, for Ruth and Perry, mental illness makes this time even more difficult. Ruth, who is at the center of the story, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and patterns of schizophrenia. Infatuated with insects, she keeps collections of them in jars in her room and is constantly arranging and rearranging them. She hallucinates that masses of insects surround her and fears stepping on any living thing. For Ruth, the simplest tasks present huge challenges. Perry fights his own demon as he tries to rid himself of a small wizard who persistently appears and makes him draw. The author's treatment of mental illness is realistic and sensitive. Readers are brought into the experiences of the characters and empathize with them. The relationships Ruth and Perry have with each other and with other family members are honest and lovingly portrayed. Every word in this graphic novel is carefully chosen, dialogue is realistic, and background "noise" masterfully done. Powell's detailed pen-and-ink drawings are well executed with lettering and images so brilliantly intertwined that they are one and the same. While the complexity and subject matter of Swallow Me Whole will not appeal to everyone, those teens who pick it up will discover a poignant story.-Lara McAllister, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
