Archive for the “Comics” category
John Seven • 28th Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Comics • Bill Caldwell, Brenden Fletcher, DC Comics, George Cochrane, Joe Staton, Kamandi, Karl Kerschl, Mass MoCA, Metamorpho, Michael Allred, Neil Gaiman, Paul Pope, Supergirl, The Flash, Wonder Woman
Art books and comic strips are two understandably different things, and many people would put them within opposite spectrums of the totem pole, if not at the very points of it.
DC Comics has managed the meld the two in the new over-sized book “Wednesday Comics,” which uses the serial-cartoon organizing principle as a way to gather illustrative works in order to admire the big picture within a context of good fun.
As painter George Cochrane explored in his Mass MoCA show “Long Time Gone,” the illustrated sequential page is the equivalent of a canvas, the single work that builds to the whole, as experienced in a show.
The Storefront Artist Project’s Joe Staton show and the Rockwell Museum’s “LitGraphic” are other pieces in the curatorial journey to find a place for the page in galleries. In this context, story equals show, and the parts range from the most formalistic and traditional to the wildest and experimental — and that goes for just about any artist.
If each work in a show by Gregory Crewdson or Dario Robleto or Alexis Rockman builds up to a complete text, so it is with, say, “Supergirl” or “Deadman.” Each page is a designed work unto itself to be brought together for a complete thought that appears on gallery walls or within covers of a book. (more…)
John Seven • 22nd Jun 2010 • Comics • Dark Horse, DC Comics, First Second Books, good comics for kids, Grant Morrison, graphic novels for kids, graphic novels for teens, Jane Yolen, Jeff Lemire, Jonah Hex, Jordan Mechner, Kolbeinn Karlsson, Matt Kindt, Michael Allred, Nadja Spiegelman, Oni Press, Prince of Persia, roller derby, Sweden, Swedish comics, Toon Books, Top Shelf Productions, Trade Loeffler, Vertigo
Age of Dinosaurs #3 (Dark Horse)
One of the most beautiful comics in print, this penultimate issue of Ricardo Delgado’s new paleontological epic continues to follow the mass migration of various dinosaur species. Fraught with the violence of nature and the fury of the journey, Delgado’s story unfolds in a total silence that keeps the narrative unfolding on the dinosaurs’ terms and not the readers’. Delgado was an animator on “Wall-E,” but the visuals here are more intimate, and any anthropomorphism comes off as a delicate touch.
Crogan’s March by Chris Schweizer (Oni Press)
In the previous volume creator Schweizer investigated political order versus chaos as a human struggle in a pirate setting. In this new book he tops his previous effort with a tense French Foreign Legion adventure that asks questions about war, borders, bravery, class, prejudice and the tentacles of history. Even with the heavy themes, it’s a lot of fun. With a whimsical but detailed European style of cartooning and an accessible scholarship, this series deserves a lot of attention outside the comics world.
First Wave #1 (DC Comics)
Superheroes with nothing but their fists and guile to help them defeat crime — oh, and a stylish 1940s period adventure to propel them — root around a mystery that will no doubt gather them together in the end. Doc Savage and The Spirit dominate this issue, but Rima, the Jungle Girl, does make an appearance, as do the Blackhawks and Batman — it’s all shaping up to be a fun romp. The beauty of this book is that it does recognize the absurdity of superheroes when placed in a real world setting, but doesn’t allow that inescapable fact to hijack it into silliness — and still the humor is there on the page.
Foiled by Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallero (First Second Books)
Teen fantasy fiction legend Yolen picks up where Minx Books left off with this comedy romance that unfolds precisely before bursting into all out wonderment. Aliera is an up and coming fencer, as well as a high school student with no self-esteem for her social skills. Her game is thrown out of whack by a crush on her lab partner in science class, but as the story progresses, little chips in the walls of her safe world begin to appear — and like many other a teen trapped in a coming of age tale, she finds her place in the universe is far less mundane than she thought. A great one for teen girls with promise for future stories. (more…)
John Seven • 22nd Jun 2010 • Comics • Dan Clowes, DC Comics, Drawn and Quarterly, Peter Bagge, Vertigo
Two alternative comic legends have returned this year with original graphic novels that show them to be not only in peak form, but also leading the pack in their work.
Peter Bagge leaves behind the territory that made him famous in books such as “Hate” in “Other Lives” from Vertigo — a modern satire on Internet communities and identity politics.
Freelance writer Vader Ryderbeck in is the midst of researching an article on people who make use of multiple identities online. By sheer chance, Ryderbeck overhears a guy try to pick up girls in a bar by selling himself as an anti-terrorism agent on leave — a confrontation with him leads Ryderbeck to realize he had gone to college with the fellow, Javy, and doubts he is what he says he is.
But he also seems like a good interview for the story — Ryderbeck suspects a lot of his spy talk is actually culled from his adventures hiding behind an online identity — and sets about getting the goods on Javy.
Thrown in this mix are Ivy, Ryderbeck’s marriage-minded Asian girlfriend, and Woodrow, another old college friend. As Ryderbeck pursues his story, Woodrow pursues Ivy through an online service called Second World, a parody of Second Life, where users fly around a virtual world via outrageous animated avatars.
As “Lord Burlington,” Woodrow takes Ivy on a destructive cyber spree even as his own life falls apart. Ivy, meanwhile, keeps her wild virtual life a secret from Ryderbeck even as he begins to spill revelations about his past to her — and to find out a number of truths he’s accepted for decades are beginning to crumble around him.
The obvious center of Bagge’s satire is the Internet, and his points about its use as a tool to seize control of your identity and prop yourself up to an insane ideal stolen from your silliest fantasies are well taken. Bagge doesn’t just leave it there — through the drama, he draws the line between new lies and old lies and makes clear the human compulsion to present yourself in a controlled manner to other people, whether it’s as immigrants changing their past or fan boys affecting sad power fantasies stolen from their favorite superhero.
Whatever the process, humans have a great capacity for misrepresentation and a desperate need to believe the fib being presented to them. In Bagge’s book, the lies eventually all bleed into reality, but the conclusion is not as pessimistic as the set-up. Despite the darkness, Bagge seems to think people can get past that and work things out in the end. It makes for a not only an intellectually sound satire, but also a rather sweet story.
Dan Clowes returns to the world of graphic novels with “Wilson,” from Drawn and Quarterly, after years of playing the Hollywood game and creating work for outlets such as The New York Times Sunday Magazine. In the world of graphic novels, he’s as acclaimed as it gets, and he deserves that praise. Angry, sarcastic, biting and smarter than most, Clowes is as sharp a social satirist as it comes — and more negatively funny than any other.
“Wilson” consists of a collection of full-page comic strips in which the titular character encounters other people in conversation or has a moment of deep reflection and then disarms any of those situations with a nasty gripe about it.
Beneath the hostile monologues, though, Wilson’s own story unfolds — an empty life of bitterness created, thanks to his own negative disposition, which is dangled a carrot promising a second chance. You already know Wilson won’t make that redemption work for him or anyone else involved.
“Wilson” provides Clowes the opportunity not only to show off his comic timing — still masterful after all the years — but also his grasp of humor art styles as appropriate to the specific joke being told. It also allows him a serious moment or two in which to sympathize with the devastation wrought from Wilson’s oblivious, nasty bravado, even as you’re thinking this guy got what he deserved.
“Wilson” is indeed hilarious reading, but it might function better as a desk calendar or a daily e-mail. Read in rapid succession, it’s like being pummeled by the world’s meanest man, living the universe’s saddest life. That’s not a big criticism if you’re up to the task — there’s a great beauty in its machine-gun negativity. As distilled through Clowes’ world view, it’s as artful as it is cringe-inducing.
Through the character of Wilson, Clowes has taken it upon himself to disarm almost any trite affectation that might come up between two people — it’s Clowes’ version of the emperor having no clothes, except here it’s pleasantries that have no depth. If you can take these terrorist acts against friendly interaction in succession, please do so — they’re hilarious. If you’re worried you might get beaten down by them, take them at a pace that will allow their meaning to sting without any serious injury. It’s an act of serious beauty, though, when Clowes is able to put this little monster in a moment in which you appreciate his candor.
The lesson here seems to be that even miserable jerks are people, too, and I can’t argue with that. There are plenty of stories of nice people being told every day, but thank goodness Clowes is there to capture the rest of us for posterity.
John Seven • 13th Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Book Articles, Comics • Edward Sorel, Jules Feiffer, Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Spirit, Village Voice, Will Eisner
Jules Feiffer is well known as a master of all trades and a jack of none when it comes to storytelling — a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, novelist, children’s book author and illustrator, Tony-nominated playwright, Academy Award-winning screenwriter — and a new autobiography celebrates his over 60-year career.
Feiffer’s memoir, “Backing Into Forward,” was released this year by Doubleday. He will make a Western Massachusetts appearance at the Eric Carle Museum for the Children’s Book Festival in Amherst on June 12, an all-day event featuring a talk by Feiffer at 2 p.m. He will be the subject of a major show at the Carle in the fall of 2011.
Feiffer, 81, boasts many high profile achievements — including authorship of the screenplays for “Carnal Knowledge” and “Popeye” — in a career that began more humbly in 1946 in the studio of revolutionary cartoonist Will Eisner, where Feiffer apprenticed for six years, starting at age 18. Eventually Feiffer ended up writing scripts for Eisner’s innovative detective series about The Spirit, a character recognizable to many people, thanks to the recent Frank Miller film.
“Eisner was instrumental in how I thought and how I learned to work — before I went to work for him he was one of my heroes,” Feiffer said in a recent interview. “I studied him, those early Spirit stories that were in newspapers.
“It was an extraordinary opportunity and a great education for me, just being around his office, as a kid who really was incapable of doing anything right for a long period of time until I accidentally backed into writing The Spirit stories. It was the one thing I could do in the office. I couldn’t do any of the drawings — I just wasn’t able to do that kind of comic book illustration — but I could write it. That surprised him and it surprised me.” (more…)
John Seven • 13th Jun 2010 • Comics • Cathy Malkasian, Dash Shaw, Fantagraphics, Kim Deitch, Pantheon Books
Three new books pick up the mantle of trippy narratives so long ago dropped by film. Each takes the reader into weird psychological landscapes through stories unfolding via physical realities that swirl out of control, refusing to play nice for the characters trapped inside them.
Dash Shaw channels Phillip K. Dick — by way of the recent animated adaptation of his book, “A Scanner Darkly” — as well as a little Hunter S. Thompson and William Burroughs in “Bodyworld,” published by Pantheon Books.
It’s a work of science fiction that also treads on similar territory to Charles Burns’ indispensable graphic novel “Black Hole.” Both deal with that horrible transformative moment from the teenage years into adulthood and present the changes in hallucinatory and monstrous terms. Where “Bodyworld” departs is in its indictment of the corrupting influence of adults who perceive the teen’s one foot in their world without seeing the other foot that remains behind in the sphere of children, despite the appearance of maturity.
The story follows drug investigator Paulie Panther, who has arrived in the planned community of Boney Borough– a futuristic nature reserve with a suburban motif — to look into some odd plants growing in a forest there. Panther’s job is to travel around and find strange substances for testing as a narcotic. He is helped out by the high school science teacher who discovered the patch in the woods. A flirtatious relationship between them soon goes awry as the real effects of smoking the plants is discovered — one that blurs the borders of self between two people and might well be part of the process of evolution into something not human.
Trapped in the middle are Pearl Peach and Billy-Bob Borg, two seniors at the school who become wrapped up in the adults’ push-and-pull with each other over their own feelings and the secret of the plants. (more…)
John Seven • 29th May 2010 • Berkshire Arts, Comics • DC, Gay Comix, homosexuality, North Adams, Stuck Rubber Baby, underground comics, Vertigo
When Howard Cruse’s first and only original graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby, was published by DC Comics’ Paradox Press imprint in 1995, it garnered great reviews where it could find them, and then silently slipped away from a world that wasn’t quite ready for it.
Poised for rerelease this June from DC, Cruse’s autobiographical — and ahead-of-its-time — work explores the gay themes that his shorter cartoon work did for years, but within context of the Civil Rights movement in 1960s Alabama — the world in which he was born and raised. It was a creative high point for Cruse that saw not only a maturity in his storytelling, but in his artwork as well, rendering a dark tapestry of a time in history that was both personal and public for him.
Cruse made his name in underground comics in the 1970s after moving on from his initial dream of having his own daily comic strip in a national syndicate and into a more raw creative field. In 1980, he helmed he first issues of Gay Comix, and his regular strip Wendel appeared in The Advocate, a precursor to the autobiographical slice of life style comics that would dominate self-published and Indie titles in the 1990s.
For the past several years, Cruse has made a new home in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts with his husband Ed Sederbaum, pursuing personal projects, as well as his freelance career. He published two issues of the area art zine The North County Perp, which features his own work alongside local creators, and has put together print-on-demand collections, most notably From Headrack To Claude, which collects a number of his gay-themed comics. Cruse also regularly maintains his blog Loose Cruse.
John: Is the reissue of Stuck Rubber Baby the result of your idea or DC’s?
Howard Cruse: I got an email message from Joan Hilty, who is an editor at Vertigo and also an old friend, and she said that DC Comics was going reissue it as part of a reissuing a bunch of books from the back list, specifically Vertigo books. As I understand it they have developed a new cooperative distribution deal with Random House. I think that’s the impetus partly, and, of course, the landscape has changed. When Stuck Rubber Baby came out, it was pretty much ignored by most of the mainstream press. It did get some reviews here and there, but, for example, it did not get a review in the Times Book Review. The book had a hard time breaking through to readers who might be interested who didn’t already know my work from the work I had done in the gay community. I think they are hoping that at this point the book — having gained more visibility by virtue of winning a number of awards and getting a number of translations into other countries — maybe will get some fresh attention. We are all certainly hoping that. They wanted a new package, so I’ve done new cover art, and they have a new introduction by Alison Bechdel.
J: Fifteen years has made a big difference for gay themes and portrayals of gay people in mainstream popular culture — what impact do you think that will have on the reissue?
HC:: In the ‘80s there was a burst of gay themed novels that made it into the mainstream, and people were saying, ‘Oh, this is a new gay fiction boom.’ Since then it has been more common for straight people not to feel that if a book has gay themes it’s not for them, and so that makes for a more accepting situation for a gay author — however I think the prejudice has been more about comics than about gays. Obviously earlier than that gay content was a big issue, but I think people learning to view stories told in the comics form, as literature, is still fighting its way. I think the opinion-makers and the intelligentsia — so-called — have gotten that idea more, and there are art galleries that are showing original comics art on their walls, and a number of books have become so familiar that no one questions if they are literature. But still you’re kind of fighting uphill with a lot of people. There’s still this tendency that drives comics people crazy when newspapers put the headline for a story about some new graphic novel as ‘Bam, pow, comics are now for grown-ups!’ It has a condescending ring to it. Also at this point, a bigger problem than non-acceptance of gay artists is simply that the world of print is falling apart,. There are no longer nearly as many gay papers or alternative papers that will run comics, so a lot of cartoonists are limited to the web, which is why web comics is where the real creativity is flowering at this point in history for both gay comics and non-gay comics.
J: Your life has changed enormously since you did Stuck Rubber Baby — for instance, you left in New York City in 2003 after three decades there. How has the transition to rural life affected your work?
HC: The fact is that I am now no longer a young turk in any sense of the word, I’m a guy who went on Social Security last year. I no longer live anywhere near a major gay community, but the kinds of things that made me want to draw stories about that community, I’ve already drawn that. I have a low boredom threshold and I don’t like covering the same ground over and over again. Wendel flourished because it grew out of the experience of not just being gay in New York, but being gay at a time of great challenge under the Reagan administration — there was a great deal of ferment within the gay community, some of it in direct response to attacks from outside. At this point there are still attacks from outside, but it’s not as ferocious as it was during the 1980s. I mean, Eddie and I are married. That was unimaginable in the ‘80s!
J: A long-form work like Stuck Rubber Baby was really a one-time endeavor for you — what are you looking forward to doing creatively at this point in your life?
HC: I don’t have the markets I used to have, but also I have to find myself as a person. Who am I as an older person? What are my interests and what do I want to do artistically? I don’t want to do a succession of graphic novels. I was able to do Stuck Rubber Baby because it dealt with themes that had been simmering within me ever since I was a kid in Birmingham. It summarized pretty much everything I had learned about making comics from the preceding 20 years I had been doing underground comics and Wendell. So while I was doing Stuck Rubber Baby, I also had the feeling that this was the peak of that experience, although I will continue to enjoy drawing and probably draw comics from time to time, as the central core of my creative being it doesn’t play the role that it used to. I’m interested in other things — I’m interested in doing some playwriting and perhaps writing fiction in text form. I’m also interested in rediscovering my roots in theatre. Right now I’m in a community theater production — this is returning to my roots from my college days that haven’t had a chance to be expressed in quite a few decades because there was simply never the time. It takes out of your life to do theater. I’m in a real period of ferment right now. What I’ve done before isn’t necessarily predictive of what I’ll do next, and I’m not entirely sure where this will all lead.
John Seven • 26th May 2010 • Comics • Carla Jablonski, First Second Books, good comics for kids, graphic novels for kids, Leland Purvis, Nazis, Pascal Dizin, World War 2
Two new graphic novels from First Second Books promise to show kids different sides of the World War II experience as seen through the eyes of heroes their own age.
“City of Spies” is a throwback of sorts, the kind of story with two spunky kids in the 1940s whose imagination and mischief get them involved in a mystery. In this case it’s Evelyn, a rich kid whose honeymooning dad has dumped her off at her bohemian aunt’s apartment in New York City, and Tony, the building super’s kid. Evelyn isn’t happy to be abandoned by her dad — she’s already ignored most of the time — and sets off to make things more interesting by concocting suspense tales and attaching them to the characters in the building, fueled by the comics that she draws for herself in her sketch book.
When she and Tony latch onto the German doorman’s comings and goings, they believe they’re really onto something, but their antics draw in a local cop with an inferiority complex in regard to his brother, a spy, and together with Aunt Lia, they bungle into a wider conspiracy lurking in the most mundane aspects of World-War-II-era America.
The tone of the story is snarky Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, but the art really brings it into perspective — Pascal Dizin is obviously a firm student of Herge, and his style evokes Tintin through and through.
It’s a good visual comparison, drawing a line to the orderly thrills and gentle humor that were indicative of Herge’s storytelling, as well as his art. This is, just like the Tintin stories, a tale of international intrigue featuring young heroes and a boozy, ne’er do well elder, and a charming one at that.
Strangely Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis also combine the elements of private sketch books and Nazis, but in an entirely different setting with “Resistance,” apparently the first book in a series.
Taking place in Vichy France, “Resistance” focuses on three kids who become embroiled in the French underground as Nazis move into their territory. At center is Paul, who constantly draws what he sees around him, which includes not only useful and vivid mapping of the area, but also portraits of the nasty little interactions between children who ape their parents’ prejudices.
While the book focuses on the struggle of Jews within that scenario — particularly Paul’s best friend, Henri, a Jewish boy whose parents go missing — it does so with a very similar tone to that of “City of Spies.” It’s generally more serious, but there’s that Hardy Boys aspect that doesn’t ignore the fact that, even within the darkest of moments, an adventure is very plainly an adventure, and a kid savors that moment even as fear might drill to his core.
It’s through the thrills that a little bit of history is effectively passed along. Both books manage to get facts in there without being intrusive to the stories that unfold — any kid will come back with a greater understanding of the era and the issues within it, as well as a desire to hear more from the kid heroes depicted in these works.
John Seven • 19th May 2010 • Book Articles, Comics • 2008 election, Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, education, graphic novels, teaching, Weather Underground
It was in the 2008 presidential election that Bill Ayers achieved notoriety as a would-be spoiler — the terrorist Barack Obama was supposedly palling around with was Ayers. This eye-brow raising recognition stretches back to his days in the activist group, The Weather Underground, which saw Ayers ad his cohorts conducting a bombing campaign in protest of the Viet Nam War.
For the decades following, though, Ayers has been a teacher, a writer, a crusader for social justice, and a progressive ideas in the field of education that has won him praise from the mainstream world he once fought against. His 1993 book “To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher” will be reborn in a new format this May — as a graphic novel adaptation from the original publisher, Teachers College Press, which Ayers wrote in collaboration with Xeric Award winning cartoonist Ryan Alexander-Tanner.
Ayers advocates for a form of education that downplays standards testing and focuses on the student as a three-dimensional human being, with a curriculum that plays to the students’ strengths and interests. Ayers also believes that a teacher should be viewed less as an authority figure and more as a fellow traveller with the students, with as much to learn from their experience as they do from the teacher’s guidance.
Ayers vision is of a collaborative classroom that could be, in which critical thought and alternative sources of knowledge are advocated and the ultimate goal is good citizenship in the form of an active and thoughtful individual. His book should captivate not only teachers and education administrators, but parents, as well.
Ayers is a long-time comic book fan, and credits his early love, Mad Magazine, as “the reason the country went off the rails.” His favorites include Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, and Art Spiegelman, all of whom he uses in his education work as well as reads for his own enjoyment.
JS: Why a graphic novel? It doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for a book on educational theory.
Bill Ayers: To Teach is a book I wrote a decade and a half ago, and in my little world of teaching and teacher education it’s been a very popular book used in a lot of teacher preparation programs. Teachers College Press approached me and said that it’s still doing very well, but we should update it, we should do a third edition, and to me that’s the way publishers think. I had already moved on and written several other books and while I know To Teach has a certain kind of standing in that little world, I just felt like it was something I didn’t want to do. I had too many other projects and I had already done it. I said to them that I’ll do it if you allow me to make it a comic book and I thought that would be the end of it.
I thought that was a pretty glib and outrageous statement, and while I love comic books and I’ve read them all my life, and taught them even, so I know comic books from the outside, but I never really thought that I would do such a thing. I just said that to them to push them back and thought that’s the end of it. A month later they came back and said sure, let’s do it. Then it became intriguing to me and I thought, gee, what does one do?
I searched around and found this young comics artist. He was my niece’s roommate in Portland, and I knew him very, very vaguely. He had been a student of my younger brother who was a high school teacher in Berkeley, CA. I knew him vaguely and I contacted him and found his web site and then I checked with the experts, which are my three sons and who, at that point, were in their late 20s and I said to one look at this web site and tell me what you think of this guy because I don’t have a critical brain in my head about stuff like that. They came back with wild enthusiasm and said he’s young, but he’s got a style and he’s creative, he’s smart. So I contacted him and we began talking, and he became intrigued with the idea. He moved in with us in Chicago and spent six months living on the third floor. (more…)
John Seven • 7th May 2010 • Comics • French comics, history, Jacques Tardi, World War 1
French legend Jacque Tardi’s absolutely remarkable “It Was A War of the Trenches” from Fantagraphics examines the conflict that began in Sarajevo but could not be contained — World War 1 — specifically from the French point of view.
Tardi’s narrative push is toward little stories of the soldiers involved, with the understanding that they would rather be just about anywhere else.
In a strange way, the style of story and the format of the presentation reminds one of EC horror comics from the 1950s — intelligently written and gorgeously drawn bits of gruesomeness in which the horror contained often had an ironic edge. Tardi gives this tactic a harsh foreboding, by which each incident becomes a slow, building trauma, marked by the stench of death wrapped around a close acquaintance.
That’s at center of what Tardi is addressing — a situation in which the old rules no longer apply, and familiarities can be ripped apart violently as a reminder that the soldier has been plucked out of his real life and into this semblance of hell.
In Tardi’s portrayal, soldiers are relegated to the role of rats skulking through the trenches in a dirty maze of hopelessness. They are made to fight, but they aren’t made to believe in what they are fighting for — and when one of them dies, if he is noticed at all, he becomes a gross annoyance to be disposed of as the remaining soldiers continue the work they’ve been coerced into performing.
The centerpiece of Tardi’s collection, though, is his beautiful artwork. In cluttered and sometimes muddy black and white, he captures the chaotic and devastated landscape of Europe in the War to End All Wars. The bleak dumping ground of mutilated human bodies and the rubble of destroyed civilization is a perfect manifestation of the horror each narrator feels.
It’s a terrible realization that the doom you feel in your soul is reflected in the reality around you — this is not just an emotional hell, but an actual one. You can’t close your eyes; you can’t keep them open to focus on one small beautiful thing, because there is not one in either place.
John Seven • 7th May 2010 • Comics • Bosnian War, Fantagraphics, Joe Sacco, Sarajevo
Joe Sacco, one of the true craftsmen of the wave of literary graphic novels being published, and the best practitioner of the fledging form of cartoon journalist, returns with a new collection, “The Fixer and Other Stories” from Drawn and Quarterly.
It’s the sort of showpiece that cements his importance and promises to propel him further as a war journalist who covers the big picture by focusing on the little ones and patching them together.
In his first story, Sacco unveils the mysteries of Neven, the book’s titular fixer, who makes his money by guiding journalists through the hell hole of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, hooking them up with interviews and helping them uncover the real story. Neven also talks — a lot — and Sacco utilizes this endless babble to weave the stories of out-of-control Bosnian warlords in with his own wanderings.
Neven, it turns out, has a past — not unexpected, given his current work and the number of questionable connections he sports — and Sacco finds himself chasing the ghost of Neven’s wartime experiences through a series of gruff get-togethers in smoky bars, squalid apartments and crowded streets.
Neven is just one of those characters you meet in life, and Sacco captures him perfectly — a moment spent with him in a page of cartooning feels like time spent in real life, soaking up his charm and danger.
Sacco follows this up with the tale of musician Soba, who bides his time during the conflict trying to cling to his gift and the lifestyle it allowed him before the war, and a story about a press road trip to interview war criminal Radovan Karadzic.
Sacco’s book is as much about the adjustment to peace as it is the adjustment to war. By telling the full stories of these people, he captures how their little worlds disintegrate in wartime, but he also shows how they manage the maintenance of their lives throughout, and how they recoup what they previously had to abandoned. It’s a picture of the whole person, with an acknowledgment of not only what war has changed about them, but also what parts of themselves they have managed to cling to.
Sacco’s characters return to life even as huge portions of it have been sliced away by war. It is basic survival to take back their souls and act upon that spiritual reunion with themselves. Not to do so is to allow your enemy to win — and victory in war is more about peace than it is battle.
