Graphic novels
Howl: A Graphic Novel by Allen Ginsberg
I first came across Howl as a short film animating one of Ginsberg's own recordings of it. If memory serves, it was a scratchy, jazzy piece, full of spiky, spunky shapes and movements, and low on colour. Now for 2011 and for Penguin Modern Classics' first ever 'graphic novel' comes a very different animation. OK, the real moving animation is only to be seen in the movie Howl, but to call this merely an illustrated companion to the film is to be very unflattering. Full review...
Tyranny by Lesley Fairfield
As Tyranny shakes her - I TOLD you not to eat! You are TOO fat! - Anna thinks back. She used to take joy in life. She used to dream of a bright future - a career, boyfriends, children - but it all went wrong when she hit puberty. She wasn't keen on on the curves of her new, more womanly body. When she looked in the mirror, she didn't see an hourglass figure developing; she saw fat and flab. Deaf to the warnings of her parents and her boyfriend, she listened to Tyranny and entered into the desperate, downward cycle of anorexia. Full review...
Mouse Guard: Legends of The Guard by David Petersen
To start with, I have never heard of Mr Petersen and his Mouse Guard franchise. But I'm often up for an introduction to a fantasy cycle, and I always relish being welcomed to an author by the most esoteric, unusual, quirky and short route. My first entry to the His Dark Materials world was a collector's spin-off, and I'm just as likely to start the Twilight series, if ever, with the latest brief whimsy. And for those of a similar mind-set, this collection of tales from the pens of guest writers and illustrators, serves as an odd-shaped doorway on to this particular universe. Full review...
The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud
When you summon a demon the last thing you want is for you to lose power over it - for the shoe to end up on the other foot. Especially when the demon shifts shape and is currently an eight-legged spider. That's what's happened to young Nathaniel, having summoned Bartimaeus for a task of vengeance. But perhaps it's worst of all when you have to rely on the same demon's help to protect you from an even greater evil - the wicked intent of a fellow man. Full review...
A Sickness in the Family by Denise Mina and Antonio Fuso
In Eton Terrance there lives the Usher family, in a house above a basement flat where a gangster holds sway over a Polish "girlfriend". After a bloodbath in there, the Ushers expand downwards, clearing a cavernous hole in their home where a staircase is due to go. This is not the only crack in proceedings, however, as we soon discover while witnessing the fall of this House of Usher. Full review...
Grandville Mon Amour by Bryan Talbot
The first book in this series didn't end particularly well for DI LeBrock, the badger who works for Scotland Yard. At least the main problem, 'Mad Dog' Mastock, was sentenced to the guillotine. But in the prologue here he bursts out of his quandary, and once more causes problems for LeBrock - this time by slaughtering some Parisian prostitutes. Are they linked? What might their story be? And is there a darker part of the past yet to come out of some secretive hiding place, and cause even more danger and peril? Full review...
Modesty Blaise: Sweet Caroline by Neville Colvin and Peter O'Donnell
Meet Modesty Blaise. You've had countless opportunities to meet her before, mind - she was daily in the London Evening Standard from 1963 to 2001, and this is the eighteenth collection of her comic strip. She's a feisty, unfettered femme fatale with a bottomless fortune and a great supply of both friends and enemies. We see these combine here in four stories, when an enterprising gang of murderous blackmailers force Modesty to become their enemy, an old friend's name is used to dupe her into letting go her criminal secrets from her past, and when a new-found friend, fresh from saving her life in a gliding accident, comes up against some hoodlums. Full review...
Neil Young's Greendale by Joshua Dysart, Cliff Chiang and Dave Stewart
It's 2003. Alaska is about to get raped, and Iraqis killed, for the sake of providing power for the USA. Which is ironic, as only before this is Sun Green a powerless young woman, and after it - well, she might have a very different kind of power. A mystical sort of girl, with a great affinity to nature, the teenaged Sun has to first solve many blank spaces in her family tree, and work out her nightmares - which might include the strange man new to town. Full review...
The Rainbow Orchid: Adventures of Julius Chancer 2 by Garen Ewing
Oh to be popular - and the rainbow orchid certainly is. If, in fact, it exists at all. A collecting challenge for rare plants might hinge on its recovery, imperial British explorers would like to know the truth about it - and its presence on some mysterious ancient carved tablets hints at some mystical part it may once have played in a superweapon. Hence, where this book starts, everyone - from a film starlet, to a dashing explorer's assistant, to a plucky aviator, to an evil henchwoman of an overweight industrialist - is after it. Full review...
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Graphic Novel by Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith and Tony Lee
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie story of any renown will not remain simply a zombie story. Before you can say the risen undead it will become a series of books, inspiring others, and/or lead to the same story being published in many different guises. Here, then, on its way to Hollywood, is Jane Austen’s story of Lizzie Bennet, the feisty young woman trying to ignore Mr Darcy while fighting off the manky unmentionables – at least she is until the hidden truths open up to her, just as the soft soils of Hertfordshire do to yield their once-human remains. And this time it’s in graphic novel form. Full review...
Kick-Ass by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr
Meet Dave. The average Joe personified, he sits at home with his internet connection, his comics collection, his dad, and very little contact with anyone else. He is a typical loner teenager, nearly friendless, wears glasses at school - especially around the hot, mature biology teacher who for some reason seems to have maths sums on her blackboard... Until one day he decides to emulate the comics in his collection. The only superheroes in his world are those whose colourful adventures he follows on the page - why not get his own costume mucked up, and go and fight crime? Full review...
Ghost: Blood and Fire by Phoebe Reeves Murray
Young Jennifer Rhys has been orphaned by the evil Dark Angels. They can possess people and bite off their hands, and there's something about living tattoos which you can take out of boxes and paste into your skin. After growing up in an adolescent psychiatric ward, she will grow up to go on and confront them and fulfil her destiny. Or something like that. Between the huge amount of poorly drawn characters, the leaden prose, and the disappointing pictures of computerized 3-D models, I got lost a few times and couldn't summon the interest to work out what was going on. Full review...
Life on Another Planet by Will Eisner
There are some people who don't even need their name on their books, for the contents are so obviously and uniquely theirs. Will Eisner is one such person, for the esteem and renown his artwork and pioneering work in the graphic novel form is held under is rightfully his and his alone. I'm quite sure I could recognise a page of his black and white inkwork, and his easily drawn but realistic characters, more easily than any other sequential artist. That trademark signature on the cover, surely the most well-known in 'comic strips' outside Mr Disney's empire, is hardly necessary. Full review...
Dark Entries by Ian Rankin and Werther Dell'Edera
The producers of Dark Entries, the latest hit reality TV show, are worried. Yes the six housemates are there, present and correct, and are ready to be scared witless en route to the one way out, and the brilliant prize that might await them somewhere in the merry-go-round of horror that is their new home. They are already being scared witless, by phantoms - but that's nothing to do with the TV producers. Full review...
Calamity Jack by Dean Hale, Shannon Hale and Nathan Hale
I was born to scheme, declares our hero Jack. With flashbacks we see the young lad and a pixie friend, larking about for revenge or small profit. But when his mother's bakery gets more and more into the red, the size of the profit has to increase. And when you add in revenge against the local crime lord - a giant of a man - so does the size of the target of the jape. Full review...
Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis: All 50 Chapters by Robert Crumb
In the beginning was the picture. Just think of all the countless religious images, both inside and outside religious establishments, designed to convey the message to those who could not read. Art and religion have always been linked, which is probably one of the main reasons I stayed an atheist - I hated art at school, and drawing a man on a donkey, something way beyond my skills, was not a task I appreciated, hence my dislike of both subjects. Full review...
Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
Meet Guy. He's a French-Canadian animator, leaving home for a short stay in the capital of one of the world's most intriguing, unknown and alien cultures - Pyongyang, North Korea - so he can work on a TV cartoon co-production. Forced to stay in one of the three official hotels designed for foreigners, so that the locals and people such as he do not have to mix, he see glimpses of the unique socialist dictatorship, stunning views of the buildings forced through the poverty, and thousands of unreadable faces. Full review...
King Lear by Gareth Hinds
Hound me out of town in a most appropriate manner, but I do not like King Lear. For me, even as a trained actor, the language is too dense and rich, the set-up too archly unfeasible to create the great tragedy it's thought to be. To my mind the acclaim and esteem in which it's held is only mirrored by its own over-long, over-blown blustering. Full review...
Thomas Wogan is Dead by David Hughes
Well, with a title like that, need I bother with a plot summary? A man has a day out in Morecambe, then the next thing he knows he's in the ultimate waiting room, with a strange array of animals (a bat, a toad, a sea urchin...), all waiting for... well, something. Yup, as you didn't need telling, he's dead. Full review...
Tales of Death and Dementia by Edgar Allan Poe and Gris Grimly
Wow! What a wonderful combination: Edgar Allan Poe, master of the gothic horror short story, and Gris Grimly, outstanding illustrator, known for his work with Neil Gaiman. Poe's Tales of Death and Dementia are shown off at their very best in this edition. Full review...
Grandville by Bryan Talbot
A dead body found in rural England leads D I LeBrock to urban France, where he is destined to unravel a conspiracy of revolution, treason, and propaganda of potentially global reach. What is the truth behind the fall of a famous tower under air attack a few years ago? Why are so many suspicious suicides coming to attention? And will LeBrock be helped or hindered by his being, as his name suggests, a badger? Full review...
Minor Miracles by Will Eisner
This short story collection starts with two appetisers before getting on with two main courses, but as with the best meals even the smallest dishes can have the most depth. We start with the entire life cycle - rise, fall, rise, fall - of a hobo feeding pigeons in the park. Obviously he hasn't been doing that all his years - he's been keeping his dignity intact, with a huge amount of chutzpah and more. Next, a smart Alec defeats the older kids on the stoop with a bit of canny street wisdom. Full review...
A Family Matter by Will Eisner
Some sons, some daughters, even a shy, semi-abandoned great nephew, are all gathering in the home of a ninety year old stroke victim for what may be his last birthday celebration. It seems like they are all licking their lips at the thought of a future inheritance. We've heard before of a nuclear family, is this one about to get too radioactive? Full review...
Girls Volume 1: Conception by Jonathan Luna and Joshua Luna
Ethan, we see with a great, broad comic stroke or six, is not the best when it comes to girls. Letting his mouth run away with him too often, he is not very successful at relationships. But let us look at what happens when he drives away from an altercation at the local bar, and sees a gorgeous - and very naked - young woman standing in the middle of the road. Full review...
Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood (Heroes & Heroines Graphic) by Tony Lee and Sam Hart
Here, Robin Hood is the Earl of Huntington, a man tempered by bitterness encountered as a youth, trained by skills honed with an apparent need for vengeance. He's out crusading, when he learns just the beginning of the story of what is wrong in Nottinghamshire. Returning, he meets John Little, and soon falls into the robbing/giving cycle we know and love him for. Full review...
Graphic Classics, Volume 17: Science Fiction Classics by H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle
So, an introduction. The Graphic Classics collection is a series whereby the best in genre fiction, from sources both highly likely and remarkably unexpected, is collected and dressed up for us in graphic novel form. This seventeenth edition, a belated best-of sci-fi volume, is their first foray into full colour, and is headlined by a version of The War of the Worlds. The supporting material ranges from a one-page strip to thirty-page stories. Full review...
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
A man gathers a last memento or two before taking his suitcase in hand, saying farewell to his wife and daughter at the train station, and leaving for the docks to get the boat to the promised land. Once arrived, he finds strangeness everywhere - the food, the language, the immigration procedures, and the lodgings. Full review...
Eye Classics: Nevermore - A Graphic Novel Anthology of Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Various, Dan Whitehead (Editor)
So, if I were to mention someone who was born 200 years ago this season, and who changed the world with their writing, who would you think of first? Charles Darwin, probably. But those of a slightly different bent might just have mentioned someone else - someone at the forefront of all things arcane, horrific and thrilling when it comes to fiction. Someone who lost his birth and foster mother both to tuberculosis before he was ever twenty. Someone who had most unusual circumstances surrounding his death, to best Agatha Christie vanishing for a while, and most of the detectives in the fiction he helped inspire. Someone called Edgar Allan Poe. Full review...
Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
Skim is a slightly overweight, goth, witch-wannabe teenage girl going to an all girls High School in Toronto in the 1990's. The book takes the form of her diary entries, painfully honest, and very realistic with words crossed out and re-written at times. We see her tortured teen life and how she faces issues of suicide, depression, first love and being something of a mis-fit amongst the usual school cliques. We meet her initially trying out being a witch, and beginning a strange, secretive relationship with her hippy art teacher, Miss Archer. Then, after the suicide of the ex-boyfriend of one of the girls at Skim's school, those in charge at the school go on an overdrive of moral-boosting, supportive exercises to help all the girls cope. This coincides with Miss Archer leaving the school, which drops Skim into a morbid depression, isolating her even further from those in her class. Full review...
I Like My Job by Sarah Herman
If you've ever been faced by too many Post-Its at the same time, or a performance review, or copious yards of errant electrical cabling all round your workspace - and especially if you've been left with an apologetic pineapple on your desk - this is a book for you. Here the office life is all delegating this, blah blah talk about that, and hanging far too much on the one guy who seems to be most with-it when it comes to the computers. It's a black and white world, on the whole, where you always get what you generally expected. Full review...
The Dangerous Alphabet by Neil Gaiman and Gris Grimly
A is for Always, that's where we embark. B is for boat, pushing off in the dark... And so begins Neil Gaiman's adventure through the (unreliable) alphabet, in the company of two children and their gazelle. They do battle with monsters, hunt for treasure, and get into all manner of scrapes. What awaits them when they get to Z? Dare you read on? Full review...
Indian by Choice by Amit Dasgupta
Mandy is forced by circumstance to fly from his lifelong home in Chicago to India to represent his family at a wedding. He hates it. The Indians on the flight are brash, noisy, unmannered. The city he arrives in is a sprawling, noisy, polluted, impoverished mess. Everywhere people think Mandy is a daft name and he should have stuck to his name of birth, Mandeep. But he is American by choice, and finds nothing appealing about the prospect of four weeks in New Delhi. Full review...
Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle
What we have here are a male househusband and artist, and his MSF doctor wife, and their life in Burma or Myanmar for roughly a year. We get to see the life in the country, from the racks of bootleg software, to the animation class he leads, to their efforts to get into the lush country clubs, to their baby being adored by every passing girl. We see the state of the country, with its horrid drugs, HIV/AIDS and malaria problems, hidden beyond the gentle Buddhist retreats. We see the Delisles' interaction with this singular country - the censored press, and the fact that their road is only made more busy because of the roadblock diverting everyone away from Aung San Suu Kyi's house a block away. Full review...
Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation by Tom Siddell
While having used the internet for several years now I have never needed to use the favourites option much – there is a routine for my comings and goings online that I can handle, and I don't think I regret losing out on a regular visit to any particular site much. The downside of this is that a lot of online graphic novels have probably passed me by, as I habitually don't form the habit of clicking to them. It's a relief then that one very well-acclaimed example, Gunnerkrigg Court, has come to my attention in book form. Full review...
The Twilight Zone: The Monsters are Due on Maple Street by Rod Serling
One of the benefits of growing up when I did, as opposed to, say, just a year or two earlier, was that home VHS coincided with the first attempts to have round-the-clock TV in Britain. The channels struggled to provide enough programming at a budget, just as they do to this day, but one thing they did give us, delightfully, was The Twilight Zone. Full review...
Bye Bye Birdie by Shirley Hughes
Ah, who doesn't love Shirley Hughes? We've all read and cherished Alfie and Dogger over the years. 'Bye Bye Birdie' is her first graphic novel for adults, and it's as great as you'd expect it to be. A man goes on a date with a woman, but things don't turn out how he expected. Full review...
Strawberry Marshmallow: v.1 by Barasui
Strawberry Marshmallow is a slice-of-life manga by Barasui that follows the day to day lives of sixteen year old Nobue, her twelve year old sister Chika, and Chika's friends Miu and Matsuri. The little girls try to solve problems and help each other out, but things don't always go well. Leading to a slow paced, heart warming manga that's basic premise is 'cute girls do cute things in cute ways'. Sounds exciting doesn't it? Don't be fooled! Strawberry Marshmallow, like most slice-of-life manga and anime is full of gentle, subtle and slightly obscure humour. Full review...
Trial and Error: The Aviated Efforts of Jean Babtiste de Bomberaque by Oivind Hovland
We open with a long, slow aerial shot, up the driveway of a chateau buried in the French countryside, focussing in on the family (father, mother, daughter, son) that live there. All except this cannot happen, as yet, for this is long before the age of powered flight and such a shot is impossible. It is up to the son in that family, one Jean Babtiste de Bomberaque, to pursue that dream and make it true. Full review...
A Day in the Life of Alfred by Oivind Hovland
Witness Alfred, getting up, getting ready for work, finding himself low on toothpaste again, going to work, working, coming back from work and falling asleep at home. Is it Alfred's fault, or the world's, that in all that routine, it appears nobody ever talks to him? Full review...
Dragonslippers: This is What an Abusive Relationship Looks Like by Rosalind Penfold
So, a five star book where we can predict the entire plot, and at times foretell just what people in it say. It's a damning indictment of things that that is even possible.
This book lives by its subtitle – this is what an abusive relationship looks like. Rosalind meets a man who seems nigh-on perfect – they seem to fall in love with ease, and she gets on very well with his four children from an earlier marriage. Then odd occurrences start to happen – he declares her work getting in his way, he possibly drinks a bit too much, he sees flirting in her shop-talk with other men. And things escalate and escalate, and – you know every stage. She suffers a guilt trip, before suffering physical violence, discovering affairs, getting back with him, then finding the right kind of help. Full review...
Demo: v. 1 by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan
It's not every young disaffected teenager that will respond to the withdrawal of her medication so explosively. It's not every young disaffected teenager that runs through empty landscapes because she is too scared to speak to anyone – for quite the reasons we see here. Not every family patches itself back together over a funeral in the fashion the third story gives us. Full review...
The Dreamer by Will Eisner
So, who else on the burgeoning Bookbag database has created a whole literary artform, almost single-handed? Not just added something to a genre, or tweaked a style to her own, but done so much towards inventing a format of literature? The name of Will Eisner is legend in the world of graphic fiction, and this book, starting as a thinly-veiled autobiography, is almost as iconic as its creator. Full review...
Pentti and Deathgirl by Emma Rendel
I don't think there will be a more divisive book on our Bookbag database for many a moon to come than this volume. The publishers have it that this is a strange and wonderful delight for every reader, and while that phrase starts with full honesty I have to say it becomes less truthful with every word. Full review...
Rapunzel's Revenge by Shannon Hale, Dean Hale and Nathan Hale
Rapunzel's Revenge is a re-telling of the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale. It is set in the Wild West and is in the form of a graphic novel.
Rapunzel is a feisty 12-year-old living in a grand villa with Mother Gothel. She wants for nothing in the material sense, but is bored and rather lonely. A large wall surrounds the villa, and Rapunzel is determined to climb it, despite being forbidden to do so. She scales the wall and is amazed at what lies on the other side. On her return, she has a chance encounter with her real mother who is enslaved in the mine camps beyond the villa. To punish her rebellion, Rapunzel is banished and imprisoned in a lofty magical tree, but the magic also helps her hair to grow and eventually gives provides her with the means to escape. Full review...
The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels by Danny Fingeroth
I have an admission to make. There are elements of my life I hold dear that, whatever I do, I cannot make other people converts to. They remain resilient to the charms of OMD, and for the life of me I seem unable to make people see the merit of graphic novels. Full review...
The Comic Strip History of the World by Sally Kindberg and Tracey Turner
The Comic Strip History of the World is, as you might expect, a comic strip history of the world. It covers everything from the Big Bang to the present day, with each period of history summed up in a page or two. It's very much a potted history in the vein of the Horrible Histories series and 1066 and All That. It's a fantastic book, both as a light fun read, and as a brief education into everything that has been before. Full review...
Derek the Sheep by Gary Northfield
Derek spends his days eating grass, talking to other sheep, trying to avoid angry bulls and entering the Farmyard Best Haircut competition - y'know, typical sheep stuff. Derek the Sheep packages together thirteen of the comic strips from The Beano into an enjoyable collection. Full review...