Shoplifter

Michael Cho’s Shoplifter is the most modern, of-its-time graphic novel I’ve read in a long while. Illustrated in a style that’s Darwyn Cooke meets Adrian Tomine, it’s the story of Corinna Park, a young woman in a big city who no longer knows what she wants or what to do. I was also reminded of the well-recommended Pope Hats in its style and subject matter. Like so many young people, Corinna has been taught to follow her dreams, which included […]

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MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a completely unique graphic novel, the only comic to win the Pulitzer Prize. It is meaningful — telling the story of Spiegelman’s father, a Holocaust survivor, through his son’s eyes — and worth study, yet it turns on the simplest and silliest of visual imagery — the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice. It opened readers’ minds to what the comic format could do, 25 years ago. Now, this companion volume serves to elaborate on how […]

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Asterios Polyp

It’s a shame that such an artistically accomplished work doesn’t have a story of the same high quality. Asterios Polyp is beautiful, with all kinds of formalist and craft tricks to push the medium of comics. But the characters are cliches and you’ve seen the content before, making it an ultimately disappointing book, emptier than I hoped it would be. Asterios Polyp is an architect. Well, a professor, really, because the point is made early on that the building he […]

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Gemma Bovery

Posy Simmonds has taken the plot of Madame Bovary and re-imagined it in late 90s France, using her characters to comment on dissatisfaction, emotional manipulation, and culture clash. As Gemma Bovery opens, Raymond Joubert, local Normandy baker, tells us that Gemma Bovery is dead. He then narrates her life through reading (and translating, since he is French and she is most definitely English) her stolen diaries. His voyeurism infects us all; we want to know how and why she died […]

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Chicken With Plums

The newest book by Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, Embroideries) continues to explore Iranian culture through her deceptively minimal illustrations. Chicken With Plums tells the story of her great-uncle, an accomplished musician who decides to die. Nasser Ali Khan plays the tar (a lute-like stringed instrument), but after his instrument is destroyed, he gives up interest in life. Set in 1958, the story explores the eight days he lasted, as he thinks about his family, his life choices, and what brought him […]

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Cancer Vixen

There was a boomlet for a moment there in graphic novels about dealing with cancer. The primitively drawn Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person was in the traditional black-and-white autobiographical comic vein, while Mom’s Cancer, formerly a webcomic, won the first ever Digital Comic Eisner Award. That subject isn’t a surprising choice — it’s innately dramatic, something many people can relate to (if they haven’t had a scare themselves, a relative likely has), and a nicely meaty topic to make […]

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Persepolis

Persepolis is, as subtitled, the story of author Marjane Satrapi’s childhood. It’s an experience few readers will be familiar with — although certain aspects of youth are universal, she grew up in Iran, the child of protesters with a grandfather who was once the son of the emperor. In only eight years, she experienced the Islamic Revolution, the overthrow of the Shah, and war with Iraq. Her childish perspective, retold from a vantage point years removed, is fascinating to read. […]

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Embroideries

The author of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, returns with a light collection of stories involving the sex lives of her female relatives, Embroideries. After a family meal, as the women clean up, they discuss the history of their loves and relationships. There’s a certain amount of prurient interest involved in hearing these respectable foreign women talk about their most intimate secrets. The introduction reveals the grandmother, the instigator of the discussion, to be a thrice-married opium addict, setting the stage. The […]

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