Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg

Desolate moorlands have such a strong association with the works of Bronte sisters so it’s fitting that Glass Town (Jonathan Cape), a biography of sorts, should begin with Charlotte Bronte out alone amongst them. Charlotte is approached by a gentleman she appears to know who wants her to talk about her past, and so begins her recollections of childhood when she and her siblings – Branwell, Emily and Anne – created a fictional world; The Glass Town Confederacy. It soon becomes apparent that the man she is talking to is actually a character from this long-neglected world, and so we are introduced to a major theme of the book, about how the attention and affection put into creating a fictional world can impede on reality. Charlotte Bronte recalls how she succumbed to what she called “scribblemania” and began to lose sight of what was important around her and the characters from the world began to bleed into her real life. For her, the fairy tale-like world they created is actually something to be cautious of and avoided.

There are three narratives at work in the story: the present, involving the conversation between the older Charlotte Bronte and the character she created; the past, showing the Bronte siblings creating the world and the affect it has on their relationships with each other; also the fictional world of Glass Town, which focuses on a compelling tug-of-love story between five characters which manages to escalate to the point of war. This is the area where author-illustrator Isabel Greenberg had to employ some creative licence, not because there is so little that exists from the Bronte siblings work on Green Town, but because there is so much. Greenberg has spoken of (in an interview with The Guardian here) "Tolkien levels" to the quality and scale of world-building, which she had to shape into something a little more straightforward for the purpose the book. 

The artwork is charming and evocative – rough, child-like drawings in pencil and charcoal, in what Greenberg has referred to as a scratchy finish. The small hands and feet draw attention to heads and therefore expressions, and the overall affect makes them look like cardboard characters in a Victorian toy theatre; as if they were actually all part of a fiction created by children. The backgrounds have the impression of wood cut prints and the colouring contrasts the brightness of the fictional world with a more monochromatic depiction of reality.  

Incidentally, Jonathan Cape have done a great job with the production of the book; an appropriately sized hardcover with a red ribbon page marker and gold embossed lettering for the title to accompany the bold cover illustration. 

Year of the Rabbit

Maybe you have only the vaguest awareness of the events in Cambodia from 1975 when an uprising by the collective known as the Khmer Rouge seized power from the Government, if only for the name of its leader Pol Pot, a name that became infamous among ruthless dictators in history. Essentially, the regime set about evacuating all major cities and instigated a brutal version of Communism that resulted in the deaths of some two million of its own people, making it one of the worst mass killings of the 20^th century.

Although Year of the Rabbit (Drawn & Quarterly) keeps the reader aware of the political context, the book is more concerned with the civilians-eye view of events, and the general populace were told very little about what was happening to them. Author and illustrator Tian Veasna was born three days after the Khmer Rogue took control. The book tells his father’s story as he desperately tries to look after his extended family while they are stripped of possessions and shipped out to work in rural villages which were nothing more than labour camps. He learns to lie about his previous life (the educated were ‘removed’ and never seen again) and walk a narrow tightrope of not offending the guards or infringing the strict laws of behaviour where even the most minor misdemeanour was punished with death. Children were separated from parents and taught to spy on them and people were kept on the verge of starvation, working on the land to grow food that they weren’t allowed to eat.

With delicate, loose line-work, Veasna captures a feeling of immediacy, as if the sketches are being drawn at the time, like a diary. The style also reflects the constant state of uncertainty the characters are living with - the book is filled with frightened eyes and sweaty, nervous expressions. There is little attempt to heighten tension with dramatic devices but there is no need to do so as it would only add melodrama to such a naturalistic style of storytelling. 

Year of the Rabbit is a perfect example of how the graphic novel can be an important way of telling such a horrific true story; an easily digestible format, which still manages to lose none of the power to appal or act as a testament to human resilience. 

The Wolf Of Baghdad

Carol Isaacs is a musician and illustrator who, under the name The Surreal McCoy, has contributed to The New Yorker, The Spectator and Private Eye. Although she was born and raised in England, her family originated from Iraq but fled during the pogrom in the 1940’s. In a few years almost the entire population of 150,000 Jews had either perished or fled the city of Baghdad. The Wolf Of Baghdad (Myriad) is a graphic memoir in which Isaacs, as the central character, dreams about life in the era. 

In the opening, musical notes drift through the London sky until we find the author in her living room looking troubled. She retrieves a box of photographs which then litter the page as the musical notes did – a lovely touch to convey a sense that they are having the same influence on her as the music does. 

The pages of wordless story then start to become punctuated with drawings of photos of faces accompanied by quotes about life in the old days. As the protagonist lays on the sofa and drifts off to sleep, she is led on journey back to Baghdad where she watches ghostly forms enjoy a life of peaceful integration and cultural cohesion. While the pages of sequential art are wordless, the pages of real-life quotes illuminate and compliment the images. Then, feeling as if it was down to nothing more than a random change in public opinion, we see the rise in Nazi propaganda and the attitude towards the Jewish community turns against them.

There is a lot to cover in the book – to convey the life before the pogrom so that the reader can appreciate the loss, but also keeping it brief to maintain the dreamlike quality – and Isaacs manages the pacing really well. The personal testaments ground the work amongst the figures of the past who, unnervingly are depicted as ghosts so that the spectre of death lingers throughout the book. The linework is simple with a naïve style that brings to mind Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis except warmer and less abstract. The artwork is also coloured nicely, starting with a greyscale in the opening pages and then, like the movie Wizard of Oz, becomes coloured as we discover the new world. As events turn for the worse, the pages around the panels become black and the images are washed in watery blues.

The title of the graphic novel comes from the belief amongst Baghdad Jews the wolf kept away spirits and demons – Isaacs does not overplay the sickening irony that it turned out to be real people that were capable of inflicting true horror.

Carol Isaacs has been touring with a live show of The Wolf of Baghdad involving a live band and projections from the book - details can be found on her blog.

Swoon Now! Are You My Mother?

 

When Fun Home (Jonathan Cape) won Time Magazine's Book of the Year award heads turned and possibly a corner as well - it's not often a graphic novel wins such acclaim.  Since then Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For (Jonathan Cape) series has been collected and she edited (rather well I thought) the recent Best American Comics anthology but finally, six years after the multi-award winning arrival her follow-up book has been released.  Whereas Fun Home dealt with Bechdel's father, Are You My Mother? (Jonathan Cape) explores her relationship with her mother who stopped kissing or even touching Bechdel when she was seven years old.

As with Fun Home, it's a biography but it's also an unflinching psycho-analysis which sets it apart from its predecessor.  It's also, in my opinion, artistically superior with a slightly more relaxed and uncluttered style inked and then water coloured in red and grey.  For further reading there are interviews with Alison Bechdel at ComicBookResources and TheParisReview (see here and here) and an interesting review by a reluctant graphic novel reader at TheSeattleTimes (see here).

Swoon Now! My Friend Dahmer

So which new graphic novel has got an eclectic mix of writers such as Robert Crumb, James Ellroy and Alison Bechdale providing effusive cover quotes?  That'll be My Friend Dahmer (Abrams) by pollitical cartoonist Derf Backderf.  

In 1991, in America, Jefferey Dahmer was arrested for the murder of seventeen young men and boys.  In My Friend Dahmer, instead of recounting Dahmer's crimes and unpicking the police case that led to his arrest as is often the case with books about serial killers, Backderf looks at his early life searching for the rot that caused the decay in his character.  The reason Backderf can speak with a certain amount of authority on this topic is that he was friends with Dahmer at junior and high school. 

The underground Comix-style art may not appeal to everyone but Backderf fills each panel with as many clues as he can and his depiction of Dahmer is really quite chilling switching between his regular frozen-faced, emotionless expression to a twisted face of comedic horror for times he would fake epileptic fits.  Every put-down, rebuke and incident of bullying has greater significance and any item or person that catches the attention of his cold eyes becomes a chilling portent. 

There is an impressive level of restraint on show here, not just because Backderf eschews resorting to the drama of grisly crimes, but also because he never loses sight of the fact that this book is about Dahmer rather than about himself - the notes at the back of the book are testament to the extensive research he undertook to fill in the blanks of what he didn't know about Dahmer in the times he wasn't with him.  A rare and utterly compelling book. 

For Backderf's website see here and see here for the first eleven pages on BleedingCool.

Swoon Now! Dotter of her Father's Eyes

Bryan Talbot has built an impressively eclectic CV covering sci-fi, action and moving human drama and created a shop-owners headache with genre-defying books such as Alice in Sunderland and the Grandville series.  With Dotter of her Father's Eyes (Jonathan Cape) he returns to fact-based work of Alice... but with the sensitive character storytelling of A Tale of One Bad Rat - this time however, he's illustrating the writing of a collaborator; his wife Mary Talbot (see here for her website including more about the book).

Mary Talbot is well-renowned scholar in the fields of language, gender and power and her father, James S. Atherton, was a highly respected authority on the works of James Joyce and his books are  still well regarded today.  The story starts when Mary discovers her father's old ID card, coincidentally on the anniversary of Joyce's birth.  The two converge for her as she begins to reminisce about her upbringing whilst finding herself drawn to the story of Joyce's daughter Lucia.

What starts as a graphic autobiography, becomes entwined with Lucia's story firstly because of certain coincidences between the two women, but also drawing parallels in their relationships with their fathers and their struggles against constraints on their identities.  Mary's was more obvious with an aggressive, volatile father who only had time for his work and whilst James Joyce doted on his daughter it appears he could never bring himself to fully support her ambitions which was just as damaging in its own way.  But where Mary found support from Bryan, Lucia found herself spiralling into desperation and depression as her ambitions to dance were cut short through enforced family duties and a failed relationship with Samuel Beckett.

Bryan Talbot's artwork is playful and evocative, undoubtedly benefiting from the closeness of a husband and wife collaboration, and nicely colour-coded to distinguish between the different pasts but with a touch of colour to bring alive a treasured item.  A beautifully simple and important book.

Swoon Now! Hellraisers

 

Not the Pin-Head kind but loveable rogues Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed.  Billed as 'a Christmas Carol for the wannabe hellraiser', Hellraisers (Self Made Hero) is a biography with a difference.  It begins with your average run-of-the-mill drunk - Martin - who is visited by the ghosts of  those aforementioned actors.  Each one takes a turn at recounting the story of their life with the booze. 

Although I can't help wondering what the subjects of the book would have thought of having their stories turned into a tale of cautionary finger-wagging, the structure turns out to be a great way of tip-toeing in and out of the highlights of their lives and all with a wry, misty-eyed smile.  The art by JAKe has a curious muddy quality to it but the caricatures are all excellent and it's easy to spot the cameos from the likes of Russell Crowe to Steve McQueen.