The comics world has amply rewarded Ware for his amazingly innovative work—he’s won numerous prizes for his Acme Novelty Library, a combination of complex narratives about mice, a trove of visually arcane inventions (diagrammed with Rube Goldberg–like precision), and plenty of eye-straining text: a graphic self-effacement that echoes the creepy despair of Ware’s main creation, Jimmy Corrigan.
Jimmy’s story now finds its full expression in this wonderful book, itself an endlessly fascinating art object that deserves attention way beyond the comics market. The Corrigan tale as such, now easier to piece together than it was in the Acme series, concerns four generations of sad, dough-faced men. The first Corrigan, the son of Irish immigrants to the Midwest, loses his wife early on, and bears no affection for his perpetually frightened son, who dreams of the Chicago Exhibition rising on the land near their ramshackle home. It’s also the place where the gruff and nasty old man abandons little Jimmy to his fate. Meanwhile, in present time, the newest Corrigan man, also abandoned by his father to an overprotective mother, is an overweight, sniveling mess, with a receding hairline, and a rich fantasy life. Contacted by his long-lost dad, an airport bar tender, Jimmy takes the unusually bold step of visiting the man he barely knows, only to witness his accidental death. Here, in short, is what this multilayered piece is all about: loss, abandonment, death, passivity. And Ware’s stunning visual style raises this patriarchal struggle to the level of Chekhov, with the historical naturalism of Dreiser. His use of block colors, his precise lines, the intensity of his wordless images are beautifully echoed by his sudden bursts of lyrical language (in an array of apposite typefaces) and his challenging plot developments.
Everything here boggles: the artfully conceived foldout dust-jacket, the cryptically word-burdened endpapers, and, most of all, the story itself: a graphic narrative that deserves a place beside the best novels of the year.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40453-8
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | MANGA
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Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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This black-and-white historical narrative, written and illustrated by Lutes, collects eight volumes of his ongoing comic book set in Berlin during the late ’20s. It’s a multilayered tale of love and politics at the beginning of the Nazi era, as Lutes follows the stories of three characters: a 20ish art student from the provinces, a textile worker, and a young Jewish radical. Their lives intersect in only the subtlest way—Lutes depicts them crossing paths at some great public events, such as the Mayday march that closes this part of his book. And Lutes plays with perspective in a visual sense as well, jumping from point-of-view frames to overhead angles, including one from a dirigible flying above in honor of the Kaiser. At street level, Lutes integrates his historical research smoothly, and cleverly evokes the sounds and smells of a city alive with public debate and private turmoil. The competing political factions include communists, socialists, democrats, nationalists, and fascists, and all of Lutes’s characters get swept up by events. Marthe, the beautiful art student, settles in with Kurt, the cynical and detached journalist; Gudrun, the factory worker, loses her job, and her nasty husband (to the Nazi party), then joins a communist cooperative with her young daughters; Schwartz, a teenager enamored with the memory of Rosa Luxembourg, balances his incipient politics with his religion at home and his passion for Houdini. The lesser figures seem fully realized as well, from the despotic art instructor to the reluctant street policeman. Cosmopolitan Berlin on the brink of disaster: Lutes captures the time and place with a historian’s precision and a cinematographer’s skill. His shifts from close-ups to fades work perfectly in his thin-line style, a crossbreed of dense-scene European comics and more simple comics styles on this side of the Atlantic.
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-896597-29-7
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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