cerusee: a white redheaded girl in a classroom sitting by the window chewing on a pencil and looking bored (extraordinary)
Graphic novels/comics:

Kaplan, Bruce Eric: Edmund and Rosemary Go to Hell
(modern teens are all drug-addicted multi-taskers! Oooh, what bold and inventive social satire. I'm breathless. Memo to Mr. Kaplan: develop a sense of history).

Martinson, Lars: Tonoharu
(AET=JET, I presume, or something functionally identical. This book is kind of funny because I can compare it to Mikkeneko's JET stories. Mikke experienced some of the same issues--language difficulties, awkwardness adapting to Japanese workplace mores, living in the boonies--but as Mikke is A) a real close personal friend, B) not a close-minded, lazy, socially maladjusted twit, and C) also talks about stuff she likes about living and working in Japan, I prefer her stories . Nevertheless, this entertains me, and I'll read more).

Fraction, Matt, writer, Steven Sanders, artist: The Five Fists of Science
(damned silly, but fun. I'm also reading The Devil in the White City at the moment, and I must say, the late nineteenth century was a fascinating period in American history. We sort of skidded through it in my high school American history class, trying to catch up to WWI; I had no idea how much I was missing. Like how Mark Twain and Nicola Tesla built giant robots and J.P. Morgan summoned dark beasts of hell into New York. We definitely skipped that part).

Tetzner, Lisa, writer, Hannes Binder, artist: The Black Brothers
(what a weird hybrid of a story this is! I wish it had more detailed editor's notes on tis creation, since judging by the original publication date--1940--and the date of the birth of the artist--1947--the writing and the illustrations were created independently. Judging by the weird gaps in the text, parts of the story are intended to be told through the illustrations, but they're not consistent or coherent, and it ends up being jerky and confusing. An interesting oddity, but to my mind, not an impressive one).

SOME STUFF I LOVED: all three of the following are highly recommended; I actually read them all in a row and got up and sort of shook the one I'd just finished around in the air, crying, "These comics are so good! I love that these comics are so good! Oh my god!" Yes, really. I get excited about good art.

Briggs, Raymond: Ethel and Ernest
(Briggs' graphic history of his parents' marriage, spanning the 1930s through 1971. It's lovely, kind, affectionate, revealing...gorgeously colored art, with a sense of intimacy, and Briggs is a guy who--unlike Kaplan up there--has a sense of history. The damn thing made me cry, not out of tragedy--Mother Come Home is a tragedy that didn't make me cry, although I don't think it wanted me to--but this made me cry because it is so familial and full of human life and honesty. Life is beautiful).

Hornschemeier, Paul: Mother Come Home
(In a review blurb on the back, Craig Thompson calls this Formalist. I need to look up what that means, because I see it often in comics discussion, but have only a vague idea of its proper meaning. But, um, anyway, this is a sort of stunning work of tragedy which I do not want to explain, because it unfolds itself perfectly without the reader needing an explanation. I really don't know what to say except that Hornschemeier is brilliant).

Kuper, Peter: Sticks and Stones
(another brilliant, vivacious wordless graphic novel without any damned woodcuts. Kuper's drawings are bold and visually interesting; the actions and meanings are perfectly clear. He paces well and knows how to achieve impact; he can achieve emotional depth without sentimentality. This is really one of the niftiest fables about wars of colonization I've read in quite some time).


Manga:

Koike Kazuo, writer, Kojima Goseki, artist: Lone Wolf and Cub vol. 3.
cerusee: a white redheaded girl in a classroom sitting by the window chewing on a pencil and looking bored (Default)
Graphic novels:

Sturm, James: The Golem's Mighty Swing.

Delisle, Guy: Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China
(Delisle occasionally struck me as a jerk in Pyongyang, but I was distracted by the awfulness of North Korea. China and Shenzhen sure as hell aren't paradise, but with their comparative freedom and openness and chaos, Delisle's discontent with his surroundings seems pettier and less profound.

Also more sexist. When he sees women wielding pickaxes on a construction project, he remarks that this is "the downside of women's liberation."

No. No it isn't, you smarmy dickwad. Women have been doing manual labor all over the world for as long as there's been manual labor. They've been doing this type of manual labor as well as domestic manual labor like cooking, cleaning, and laundry, and it's only ever been in select times and places where women belonging to the wealthy, privileged classes wouldn't have done any manual labor at all, and you can be damn sure that in those times and places and classes, their male counterparts wouldn't have been doing manual labor either. Throughout the history of the fucking human race, women have worked just as hard as men; this is not some kind of unforeseen side-effect of feminism that leaves Chinese women writhing with chagrin.

The shallow flippancy of that remark ticks me off, not least because in an earlier chapter, when Delisle notices a female hotel worker furiously scrubbing laundry by hand, his only reaction is that the washing machines he's seen must only be for show. But the intense manual labor involved in washing laundry by hand, carried out by a woman? Completely unremarkable. Women are there to do laundry; laundry is done by women, whether they do it with machines or by hand. It's not manual labor, it's just women's work.

Maybe this isn't Delisle's conscious belief. But it is an aspect of the cultural lens with which he views the cities he visits, and when something less appalling than a totally closed totalitarian state in his focus, the flaws of that lens are harder to ignore).


Hornschemeier, Paul: The Three Paradoxes
(reminded me a bit of Ice Haven.).



Manga:

CLAMP: RG Veda vol. 1.

Hidaka Yoshiki, story, Tsugihara Ryuji, art: The First President of Japan vol. 2
(talk about your fantasies of political agency, huh).

Mizushiro Setona: After School Nightmare vol. 5.

September 2012

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