Graphic novels
Dante's Inferno by Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson
It seems incredibly right, on only the third page of this text, that the Divine Comedy should be transferred to the black and white, cartoonish side of the graphic novel format. Our venturing hero encounters the 'leopard of malice and fraud', the 'lion of violence and ambition' and the 'she-wolf of avarice and incontinence', and leaves bemoaning living in a world of symbolism. You could see the beasts illustrated and captioned by name curving alongside their body, just as Hogarth may have displayed them, but no, Emerson goes down the path that is less cartoonish and less newspaper comic strip, and lets the picture and script stay a bit more separate. But later on he is delving into the more blatant, and immediate, by dressing The Furies up as multiple Maggie Thatchers. The good thing about this book is there is reason for everything in it - from the examples of artwork I have described, to the fact both creators claim it to have been 'influenced by childhood reading of MAD magazine', and a reason the publisher of this untouchable classic is known as Knockabout Books. Full review...
Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero by Grant Morrison
Consider the super-hero comic. Borne out of a need to create cheap and franchise-friendly content for newspapers in America, it's grown into a billion-dollar industry, with Hollywood jumping on the bandwagon of several major characters now their FX have finally caught up with the printed page. Disposable? - once upon a time, yet now collectable to the tune of a million dollars or more. Frivolous? - probably, yet not exclusively now, if ever so. At one point here, they are just one product of the infinitely powerful imaginary system each of us carries in our brain, and at the other 'ethereal, paper-thin constructs of unfettered imagination'. Full review...
The Lovely Horrible Stuff by Eddie Campbell
Money, in amongst all the cliched things it does, makes for peciluar detail for a graphic novelist like Eddie Campbell to include in a book about it. He has to make himself a company to qualify for creating a Batman strip to earn it, and has to pay $4 to buy $1 to draw (- then claim the tax back on the purchase to save himself some of it). It causes friction when his daughter earns too much, and when his wife's dad spends too much in a legal pursuit to have more. In the second half of this book it causes a journalistic piece of non-fiction as he takes a look at Pacific islanders who used man-sized stone discs as currency. Full review...
Paris by Maarten vande Wiele
In the category of graphic novels not to be seen reading in public, Paris is way up there. With a gaudy pink and silver glitz cover, and a lot of blowjobs and sex inside, it's not one for the daily commute. But, even though it's subject matter is merely the unlikely choice of the rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of three Parisian starlets, it is certainly worth a decent perusal. Hope was a juvenile beauty queen, and could now work in fashion were it not for scars due to a car crash, and Faith wishes for the vicarious life of pop stardom, and it's no spoiler to report who and what they find will disappoint them. Chastity, the most sarcastically-named character in comix, is happy enough destroying herself. Full review...
The Celestial Bibendum by Nicolas de Crecy
Diego is new to town. He's a seal, on crutches, but don't raise an eyebrow at that - you won't have enough left to raise at what follows, when he is hounded by a singing professorial claque who go about grooming him for being a very public, hopeful figure. Observing all of this is the devil (a dwarf in check dungarees, of course), who wants Diego for his own purposes... Full review...
Revolver by Matt Kindt
Meet Sam. He has a rather dull life, with a materialistic girlfriend, and a job in the arse-end of celebrity journalism and a boss he can't stand. All of which is preferential to waking up and finding his home city under attack - munitions going off, skyscrapers burning and people falling from them. He ends up fleeing with said editor, only to wake the next day back in this world. He will indeed fall to being snatched from each reality in turn, at set times of day, forced to suffer consumerism in one, looting in another, basic pay raises here, producing Samizdat bare-bones journalism for survivors there. But always with enough time to ask the important questions - how, and why? Full review...
Fables: Legends in Exile - Vol 01 by Bill Willingham
Forced out of the Homelands by the evil Adversary, the characters in Fables have made their way to New York City. Those of them who look relatively human, at least. With Old King Cole as Mayor (in name, at least, despite his deputy Snow White running the show), Bigby Wolf as the Sheriff, and Prince Charming being, well, charming, towards every woman he can, these are characters you'll already know and love – but portrayed in a way that completely reinvigorates them. Full review...
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Comedian is dead. In a world where costumed vigilantes have been outlawed and former superheroes are either retired or working for the government, the murder of his former teammate leads the outlaw Rorschach to investigate. What he finds could change the world... Full review...
One Soul by Ray Fawkes
When reading this it soon becomes very clear we're reading not one, but nineteen, stories. With each page divided into a regular 3x3 grid there are eighteen images on each double page spread, and every one shows an episode, or a beat, of a different character's life in turn, from being a babe-in-arms to death. However, the way they join up - everyone's figurative moment comes at once, at times the artist's heavy black ink makes all eighteen images coincide into one image - proves there is a separate, individual tale around and behind the others, one which will end with the most delightful moral - that the ability to be anything one imagines is in our DNA. Full review...
The Lying Carpet by David Lucas
There is a room in a big old house where nothing moves but the insects. An empty chair sits to one side, a stone statue of a girl called, and representing, Faith, the other. In between is a tiger rug. What potential is in that for the setting of a charming book? What potential indeed... Full review...
Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot
If there's one person able to produce a worthwhile potted history of James Joyce's daughter, it should be Mary M Talbot. She's an eminent academic, and her father was a major Joycean scholar. Both females had parents with the same names too - James and Nora, both took to the stage when younger after going to dance school, but it's the contrasts between them this volume subtly picks out rather than any similarities, in a dual biography painted by one person we know by now as more than able to produce a delightful graphic novel - Bryan Talbot. Full review...
Modesty Blaise: Live Bait by Peter O'Donnell
We're back in the gritty yet glamorous world of Modesty Blaise - at least, as gritty and glamorous as you could get in the Evening Standard daily comic strip in the late 1980s. Titan have had a mammoth undertaking to reproduce all the original strips in handy large-format graphic novel compendia, and this latest covers three stories, all of which I consider greater in depth than those in the other volume I've reviewed - Sweet Caroline. Full review...
Best Shot in the West by Patricia McKissack, Frederick L McKissack Jr and Randy DuBurke
'We're going to do the real West, Nat. You're as real as the rest of 'em - Bat Masterson, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill, the Earps.' So says a publisher to a lowly railroad porter, Nat. But if this guy's as real as the rest of those famous names, why does his not trip off the tongue? Is it purely because as the most famous African-American cowboy, he still was not allowed to be as famous as he should? Full review...
The Rainbow Orchid: Adventures of Julius Chancer v. 3 by Garen Ewing
Here we are, then, ten years after the debut of this graphic novel on the Internet, and finally the print trilogy is complete. At last we can see if our hero Julius, his chums, the shady Government people, and his enemy’s beautiful assassin aide who remains impossible to shrug off, manage to get anywhere near the fabled titular plant in its secret Himalayan location, and just how important it has been for all those many people left back in England. It’s been a rollercoaster ride, and it’s been worth it. Full review...
The Viewer by Gary Crew and Shaun Tan
The story concerns a young lad who loves scavenging and exploring. Finding a Hellraiser-styled box of tricks contains a Viewmaster-type machine, he puts it to his eyes and sees something a lot more serious than, say, a Thunderbirds episode in thirty 3D images, which was all I ever saw in mine. Instead, Tristan sees nothing but death and destruction, and a compelling sense of - well, something. Full review...
MetaMAUS by Art Spiegelman
Before the Holocaust was turned into a child-like near-fable for all, and before it was the focus of superb history books such as this, it became a family saga of a father relating his experiences to a son, who then drew it all - featuring animals not humans - Maus. To celebrate the twenty-five years since then, we have this brilliant look back at the creation of an equally brilliant volume. Full review...
Tintin: Herge and His Creation by Harry Thompson
I love Tintin. I love his quiff and his innocence, his plus-fours and his foreign adventures, I love Snowy the dog and most of all I love Captain Haddock and the flamboyance of his blistering barnacles language. So I was thrilled to see a biography of the character and Hergé, his creator, and I picked it up with enthusiasm. Full review...
The Kite Runner (Graphic Novel) by Khaled Hosseini
A confession. If there's one book I'm not likely to read, it's that which everyone else is reading. If it turns into a hugely popular film for all the left-wing chattering classes to rave over, then that's just more grist to my mill – I'll always have a chance to catch up on it later on, even if I never take that opportunity. I'm not alone in acting like this – see a friend and colleague's similar admission when reviewing White Teeth by Zadie Smith. But at least, through the medium of the graphic novel, the book reviewing gods have conspired to let me see just what I'm missing, with this adaptation, by Italian artists, of a hugely successful – and therefore delayable – novel. Full review...
The Comic Strip Big Fat Book of Knowledge by Sally Kindberg and Tracey Turner
Who doesn't like a nice comic, eh? There's something so accessible about the lovely picture and text combos, and facts are far from dull when they come via speech bubbles, don't you think? Taking full advantage of this fact, Sally Kindberg and Tracey Turner have, for some time, been creating factual books for children which pass on their insight and Important Information through the medium of comics. Now for the first time, you can collect 3 of their titles in one simple volume. Combining the previous reviewed History of the World and History of Space with the Greatest Greek Myths Full review...
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 by Kevin O'Neill and Alan Moore
So much for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Of the three main protagonists available for this adventure, one and a half are female! Anyway, Bram Stoker's Mina, Woolf's Orlando and Allan Quartermain are in London at the height of the swinging 60s, amidst rumours that a new attempt at birthing an Antichrist is about to occur. Certainly, the evil they've faced the last several decades will soon get a new face... Full review...
Pinocchio by Winshluss
Imagine, if you will, Disney's film of Pinocchio had been animated by a crew of artists hell-bent on sabotaging the prospect. Painterly frames of beauty would be rare in amongst gritty, grimy, shadowy images of nightmarish content, which took it upon themselves to break into black and white, or sepia. The prologue might have a character forcing his cat to join in at Russian Roulette. Geppetto would be accompanied in the leviathan, in one of the rare tuneful segments, by a penguin playing the piano. And this after the proud inventor was trying to sell Pinocchio as a prototype robotic super-weapon, just as his wife was putting Pinocchio's most distinctive feature to a most unexpected use... Full review...
Dreams and Everyday Life by Aviv Ratzin
Well, thank you, Aviv Ratzin - you've provided me with the one book I'm least capable of summarising for a review. I can't begin to pithily precis the plot, or describe the happenings in any quick, snappy way. To give the gist of the surreal, scattershot whimsicality cannot do the contents justice in any way. Full review...
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...