Review by New York Times Review
FOR 44 YEARS, Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy" was the most meat-and-potatoes strip on the funnies page, a streamlined and glistening machine for delivering one dopey gag every day, no more and no less. "Dumb it down" was one of Bushmiller's mottos; in practice, as Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden point out, that meant applying the sizable arsenal of his craft to making sure every mark in each strip served its central joke. Their book how to read nancy (Fantagraphics, paper, $29.99) is a comprehensive, scholarly and intensely goofy dissertation on a single daily "Nancy" strip from 1959, in which Nancy's pal Sluggo is spritzing people with a water pistol and growling "draw, you varmint," while she prepares to blast him with a garden hose. The core of the book is a 44-part analysis of each individual element of that strip and the artistic considerations behind it, from the way Sluggo's cap interrupts the contour of his final word balloon to the precise number of droplets emerging from a water spigot (four): "When these drips are taken together with the previous panel's spritzes, a mental image is constructed of Sluggo demolished in a fulsome blast of liquid comeuppance." Karasik and Newgarden augment their argument with extensive historical context for that August morning's "Nancy" strip. The book features an illustrated biography of Bushmiller, explaining how he took over Larry Whittington's feature "Fritzi Ritz" in 1925, and how Fritzi's frizzy-haired niece Nancy, introduced in 1933, got the strip renamed after her five years later. One of many appendixes is an extended history of the "water hose" gag from its origins in belle epoque Parisian cartoons through its appearance in an early Louis Lumiere film; another one catalogs other "Nancy" strips with similar elements. And the late Jerry Lewis, of all people, supplies a four-sentence foreword - as in Bushmiller's art, the gesture alone makes it funny. A nearly-400-page graphic memoir by a 21-year-old seems like a dicey proposition - not least because most cartoonists take years or decades to develop their voice - but Tillie Walden's SPINNING (First Second, paper, $17.99) IS an engrossing, gorgeously quiet look back at the 12 years she devoted to figure and synchronized skating. It's also her fourth book, remarkably. Walden touches on the physical control the sport requires and on the rivalries and camaraderie of young skaters, but she's more concerned with evoking the feeling of being a skater: the chill of earlymorning wake-ups (she recalls sleeping on top of her blankets so that she'd be cold already by the time she arrived at practice), the openness above the ice in an empty rink, the long stretches of waiting punctuated by brief flashes of performance. "Spinning" gradually reveals itself as a coming-out story, too. "A teacher's aide had shown me how to hold your sleeve when you put your jacket on," Walden writes. "1 still remember her hands on my shoulders. 1 didn't have a word to describe it yet, but in that moment 1 knew." When she meets her first girlfriend, we see them nervously watching a video on "how to kiss a girl" together. Walden evokes emotional states with elegantly composed panels: minimal, tentative lines, more delicate than a blade's, surrounded by bold swatches of negative space. (The entire book is printed in a chilly dark purple ink, except for a few passages in which a solid, pale yellow stands in for sunlight or electric light.) After a sexual assault, she finds herself drifting through life for a while, and the narrative shifts to disconnected, full-page images. Later, a crucial competition appears as a fusillade of little panels, with tiny drawings of Walden in motion alternating with transcriptions of her fragmented thoughts. The premise of Matthew Rosenberg and Tyler Boss's 4 KIDS WALK INTO A BANK (Black Mask, paper, $14.99) IS delICIOUSIy twisted: A smart, angry 12-year-old girl named Paige discovers that her father's former criminal associates are forcing him to help them rob a bank, and decides to save him by robbing it herself first, with the aid of her three role-playing game buddies. But the story is mostly a showcase for Rosenberg and Boss's Looney Times formalism, from its Saul Bass-style cover design onward. Characters are introduced with captions detailing their stats ("Getaway driver with an 85 percent success rate. +2 Dexterity") ; action scenes are drawn as diagrams, and conversations as RPG fantasies; the sound effects for a pair of handcuffs closing and opening are "BUSTED" and "UNBUSTED." For every experiment that works, there's one that flops, which still leaves three or four successes on any given page. All of that fun, though, is in the service of the sucker punch tonal shifts that arrive whenever "4 Kids" seems to be going in a predictable direction. This is a tragedy trying to avoid recognition by wearing a disposable comedy mask. Paige thinks she's in an I-love-it-when-a-plancomes-together heist story, but she's actually in an everything-goes-horribly-wrong heist story. And her friends, having grown up on tales where plucky kids can play detective (or criminal) and save the day, aren't prepared for what happens when blood starts flowing. A very different sort of story of youth derailed, the Australian artist Campbell Whyte's exuberant debut graphic novel, home time (Top Shelf, $24.99), turns "magical realm" tropes inside out. It begins as a vacation romp, with a cluster of half a dozen friends hanging out during their last summer before high school. Then the story takes a sharp turn: The kids fall into a river, and emerge in a seemingly utopian fantasy land, populated by tiny, cheery, treehousedwelling peach people who regard them as divine spirits and induct them into their culture. Mostly, that involves brewing artisanal teas, singing cute little songs about stasis and contentment, and persuading plants to grow into useful shapes. (Oh, and also not venturing beyond the wall that's supposedly there to keep out predators.) It's a richly imagined world, and Whyte immerses readers in it - every so often, the plot pauses for a few pages so he can silently survey the flora, fauna and habitats of a particular area, or explicate some aspect of peach civilization. At first, the kids are desperate to figure out what, exactly, their role in this sugar-buzz "My Little Pony" scenario is supposed to be, and to get back to the real world. As the months pass, though, they acclimate to the peaches' way of life, and find themselves beginning to forget their old reality, until an abrupt ending suggests that a future volume will bring them home, or at least give them a new perspective. (The story gently implies that this isn't the sort of paradise you can come back from.) Whyte draws the early "real-world" section as pencil sketches with a pale sepia tint behind them, and adopts different full-spectrum techniques for the sequences focusing on each of the human youths in the Forest of the Peaches: the flat-colored line drawings of animation cels, the crinkly 8-bit pixelations of old "Legend of Zelda" games, and finally blended paint-on-canvas tones. If "Home Time" hints at a "Peter Pan" situation, the WENDY PROJECT (Super Genius, paper, $12.99), by the writer Melissa Jane Osborne and the artist Veronica Fish, explicitly spells one out, with a similar visual approach. Wendy Davies, 16 years old, was behind the wheel for an accident in which she lost her brother Michael, and his body hasn't been found. Tormented by guilt, she can't bring herself to admit that he's dead, and retreats into a fantasy in which he's been spirited away to J.M. Barrie's Neverland, drawing her visions in a notebook given to her by her therapist. Fish draws Wendy's actual surroundings in jagged, splintery black lines and gray wash. Wherever the "Peter Pan" fantasy turns up, though, her artwork blooms into color, suffusing Wendy's dreams of Neverland and tinging the elements of the real world that she's charged with her hopeful imaginings. Osborne doesn't quite pull off the grand statement about grief and creativity that her story seems to be attempting to make, but Fish's inventive, dramatic staging is striking in its own right. The Austrian cartoonist Ulli Lust's first graphic novel, "Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life," was autobiographical; her second couldn't be much less so. voices IN THE DARK (New York Review Comics, paper, $29.95) IS Lust's controlled, eccentric adaptation of a 1995 German novel by Marcel Beyer (published in English as "The Karnau Tapes") about the collapse of the Nazi regime and the willful ignorance on which it fed. As with Beyer's novel, it alternates the points of view of Hermann Karnau, a (fictional) sound-recording engineer in World War Il-era Germany, and Helga, the oldest of Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels's six children (their last name, coyly, never appears in the text itself). Karnau is fascinated with recording and studying human voices, and with collecting curious examples on reelto-reel tapes and shellac discs: "This here, open vowels impinging on gutturals, is a youngster in his death throes losing all vocal control." His is a pseudoscientific curiosity untempered by any moral concerns; that makes him useful to Goebbels, whose inner circle he joins. (As we eventually learn, despite his constant bloviations about the meaning of voice, Karnau doesn't even understand the full range of sound all that well.) His young friend Helga, on the other hand, is too sheltered to grasp what's going on around her - although she's beginning to get a sense of it in the second half of the book, which largely takes place in the last 10 days of her life, in Hitler's bunker in the spring of 1945. Lust counterposes the children's genteel hiking trips and war games with the atrocities Karnau dispassionately documents, drawing both narrators' segments to emphasize visual details over their context. Bodies are seen so close up that they become abstract masses of lines, like Lust's renderings of acoustic phenomena; faces are flattened into grotesque caricatures; scenes are half-obscured by tints that change from section to section - rusty purple, rusty orange, rusty green. THE HUNTING ACCIDENT: A True Story of Crime and Poetry (First Second, $34.99), written by David L. Carlson and drawn with graphomaniacal fervor by Landis Blair, begins with a lengthy feint: It purports at first to be about the relationship between its narrator, Charlie Rizzo, a young Chicagoan in the late 1950s who's gotten in trouble with the law, and his blind, literature-loving father, Matt. Nearly a hundred pages in, it turns out to be something else entirely: the story of Matt Rizzo's extraordinary turnaround. An eighth-grade dropout blinded in an armed robbery he helped commit, he was sent to Illinois's Stateville Prison in 1936, and shared a cell with Nathan Leopold - the upperclass thrill-killer whose murderous partnership with Richard Loeb had been a media sensation a decade earlier. Rizzo wanted only to die, so Leopold made an unlikely deal with him: If Rizzo would learn Braille and read Dante's "Inferno," Leopold would help him commit suicide. The elder Rizzo was, naturally, saved by his newly developed passion for literature, going on to become an enthusiastic if unpublished writer. The lengthy prison drama he narrates to Charlie builds to a climax with suspiciously tidy symbolism, involving a burning library and a ceiling that opens to reveal the sky. The chief pleasure of this book, though, is Blair's artwork, which slathers on patterns, scribbles and frantically detailed cross-hatching of various densities, with only a few flashes of light to breathe air into most pages. (A few entr'actes superimpose silhouettes and blocks of Matt Rizzo's writing upon a background of Braille dots.) He crams every scene with visual metaphors and allusions: In a sequence where Leopold and Rizzo are discussing the story of Dante's damned lovers Paolo and Francesca, the killer's explanations are superimposed on images of fratricides and lovers in the style of Greek pottery, and overseen by the hulking, empty-eyed figures that represent the specters of Leopold and Loeb as Rizzo imagined them in his youth. Daphne, the narrator of Deb Olin Unferth and Elizabeth Haidle's I, PARROT (Black Balloon, paper, $18.95), IS not quite in hell, but she's having a purgatorial moment. The apartment where she lives with her son Noah (when she has custody of him) is "a way station where we wait until there is enough room in hell for us ... They have to expand it down there, put on an addition, get some housepainters in there to fix it up." Still raw from a divorce and trapped by an economy whose cruelty is never far from the story's surface, she's found a gig taking care of a house full of rare parrots for a "positive thought" guru who's taught them to repeat clichéd affirmations ("Practice gratitude! Caw!"). But she doesn't have much to be grateful for: She's got a mite infestation, a boyfriend who can't keep a job, and perpetual friction with her ex-husband's new wife, who's convinced that Daphne can't do anything right for Noah ("The last time he was with you he lost two pounds"). Unferth is best known as a prose fiction writer, and her language is sly and bitterly funny, matched in mood by Haidle's monochromatic, inkwash-style artwork, which plays up the story's whimsy as well as its sadness. Its characters and settings are presented as something like layered cut-paper silhouettes, and the birds who populate the book are sometimes detailed, sometimes the simplest of abstractions. The stripes of a cage's bars perpetually appear in one guise or another. Everything about the birds' presence suggests freedom, and everything about taking care of them traps Daphne a little more. Douglas WOLK is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Award-winning Walden's first book-length work traces her childhood spent in the competitive figure-skating world, and although most of her memoir happens in skating rinks or at competitions, that element ultimately becomes the backdrop for a deeper story about her coming out and coming-of-age. In delicate, evocative artwork, rendered exclusively in purple with yellow highlights, Walden relates the struggles of moving to a new city in middle school, dealing with a particularly cruel bully, feeling scared to be open about her homosexuality, and so on, all while gradually becoming disillusioned with skating. She uses negative space to great effect, elegantly depicting her loneliness and isolation while simultaneously emphasizing how deeply she feels unable to speak up for herself. Subtle hints of her burgeoning interest in art, depicted in small, fine-lined doodles encroaching on the edges of panels and pages, are a tantalizing glimpse into what readers know she'll become. All these feelings play out compellingly on the ice, and chapter-heading descriptions of skating moves seem to hint at Walden's larger emotional development. The overall effect is quiet and lyrical there aren't many huge epiphanies, and conflicts disappear rather quickly but Walden's cumulative growth and courage to speak up for what she actually wants are unmistakable and deeply satisfying. A stirring, gorgeously illustrated story of finding the strength to follow one's own path.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In an elegant, contemplative, and somber graphic memoir, Walden (The End of Summer) immerses readers in an adolescence dominated by competitive figure skating. The story stretches over several years, during which time Walden vacillates between embracing the routine of early morning practices and the rush of competition, and a near-constant feeling of otherness, due in large part to her attraction to girls, which she hides from her family and peers. "It wasn't the thrill or freedom I felt that I remember," she notes after making a romantic connection with a friend. "It was the fear." Chapters open with illustrations of spins and jumps, the movements delicately mapped, paired with commentary that, at times, gives insight into Walden's personal life; of the frustrating axel, she writes, "As I would turn to go into it I would wish and hope with everything I had that this time it would work." A palette of deep purple, splashed with yellow, underscores the loneliness that permeates Walden's story, and her careful attention to facial expressions and body language makes readers intimately aware of what she is feeling. A haunting and resonant coming-of-age story. Ages 14-up. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 6 Up-A graphic memoir about competitive ice skating, growing up, and coming out. Walden spent much of her youth on the ice, at practices and competitions, and in locker rooms among friends, frenemies, and competitors. In this deeply personal reflection, the author/illustrator is unflinching in her examination of what drove her passion for the sport, the embarrassments and experiences that marked pivotal moments in her development, and how she eventually came out to family and friends as a young teen. The art is economical, with a simple indigo and white palette with very occasional splashes of yellow, lending the book an appropriately cold tone; readers will shiver with empathy as Walden steps onto the rink in the early morning before the sun rises. While her drive and commitment to being the best athlete is evident (at one point, she describes sleeping in her practice clothes on top of her blankets, not allowing herself to get warm so that the early morning transition would be easier), the details about some of her relationships are held at arm's length and only hinted at, most notably the strained relationship with her mother. A scene in which a male tutor sexually harasses Walden and attempts a physical assault is affecting and may spark deeper discussion. Her first romantic relationship is both tender and heartbreaking. VERDICT An honest and intimate coming-of-age story that will be appreciated by tweens and young teens, especially those in competitive sports.-Kiera Parrott, School Library Journal © Copyright 2017. 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.
Review by Horn Book Review
In a graphic memoir, former competitive figure skater and synchronized skater Walden looks back at her twelve years growing up in the world of competitive sports. The shadowy, cool bluish-purples of most of the pencil drawings reflect young Tillies mood for much of the narrative: although shes committed to her skating, it rarely brings her joy. Meanwhile, shes being bullied; her family relationships are strained; she feels the need to hide her homosexuality; she struggles academically; and she is sexually assaulted by her SAT tutor. The skating world serves mainly as a well-realized backdrop for a story about holding secrets in and going against expectations. Walden, whose growing interest in art is a recurring theme throughout her memoir, knows when to let this books art or text be spare and when to interrupt the purple sleepiness with a pop of golden yellow; the occasional incompletely drawn figures are clearly deliberate, whether to protect her own memory or someone elses anonymity. She sometimes only hints at her motivations, giving the impression that, like many adolescents, shes not fully sure what they are. The result is much more layered than the tell-all about the seedy world of glittering young ice skaters that, according to the authors note, Walden (now only a few years removed from the events) originally intended to create. shoshana flax (c) Copyright 2017. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Graphic novelist Walden recounts her years coming-of-age as a competitive ice skater.Tillie Walden knew she was gay since she was 5, which was also when she began ice skating. This memoir recounts the years from when she's 11 to when she reaches her late teens, as her life marches on through fledgling romances, moving halfway across the country, bullying, and various traumas with skating as her only constant. Her story is largely insular, with her family only visible in the periphery, even with regard to her skating. Walden's recollections tend to meander at times, with an almost stream-of-consciousness feel about them; her taciturn introspection mixed with adolescent ennui creates a subdued, yet graceful tone. For a young author (Walden is in her early 20s), she is remarkably adept at identifying the seminal moments of her life and evincing their impacts on her trajectory. Her two-toned art is lovely and spare, utilizing the occasional splash of an accenting color to heighten visual interest. She draws herself as a blonde, bespectacled, white girl, a depiction that brings Harriet Welsch to mind. Walden deems herself "a creator who is happy making a book without all the answers," and while she may not solve any of life's great conundrums, her offering is intimate and compelling. A quiet powerhouse of a memoir. (Graphic memoir. 13-adult) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
