Phoolan Devi: Rebel Queen


By Claire Fauvel, translated by Montana Kane (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-251-9 (HB/Digital edition)

Born in 1988, award-winning graphic novelist Claire Fauvel (À la recherche d’Alvaro Dolor; Sur les pas de Teresa, la religieuse de Calcutta [w/Marie-Noëlle Pichard]; Une Saison en Egypte; Catherine’s War [w/Julia Billet]) studied illustration at Paris’ L’Ecole Estienne and animation at L’Ecole des Gobelins before beginning an illustrious career in bande dessinée. She’s particularly adroit and adept with female historical figures…

Phoolan Devi: Rebel Queen is that rare event, a history that has all the energy and impetus of a great action adventure and pioneering, political tract. Despite being a factual graphic biography, this is the stuff of legend and grand drama, detailing the astounding, appalling, tragic and triumphant life of a woman who bucked India’s ancient, all-pervasive caste system and paid the seemingly inescapable price the nation’s women seem doomed to. A victim of poverty and inequality from birth, she sought change through bloody deeds and – and as is so often the case – ultimately via political action, in a country where prejudice is institutionalised and baked in: expressed via gender- and caste-based violence, and fostering for millennia a tyrannical social system of inherent, inbuilt corruption where gods and birth status forever dictate one’s position in life by denying all possibility of advancement or change…

Phoolan suffered a double blow at birth: born both destitute and female. Never educated, she remained illiterate all her life. Her innate burden of being shunned and in grinding poverty was further exacerbated when she was married off at age 11: beginning a harrowing pattern of slavery and sexual abuse that lasted until she was rescued by a troop of legendary bandits infesting Uttar Pradesh at the time. They were actually more decent – and fundamentally more heroic – than most respectable citizens (for which read Men), civil authorities and police officers of the region. Becoming lover to one of the gang, she suffered even greater abuse when he was murdered by a rival from a different caste.

Surviving all these assaults, Phoolan organised an infamous vengeance massacre at the village of Behmai. That slaughter was picked up by the press, who recast her as a rebel queen and her lover as a martyr. The public began using the honorific “Devi” about her and, after a mythic career, she surrendered to authorities in 1983. Over 11 years of imprisonment, 48 capital charges including murder, plunder, arson and kidnapping were incrementally dropped before a trial that never came. In 1994, the state government led by Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party withdrew all charges and she walked free. Joining that political group, she was elected to national office twice, becoming a powerful advocate for radical change in the caste system and the patriarchal treatment of women. Regarded as the “voice of the oppressed”, on 26th July 2001 her past caught up with her when she was assassinated by relatives of the bandits killed at Behmai.

Fauvel took her inspiration from acclaimed 1996 autobiography Moi, Phoolan Devi, reine des bandits by Phoolan Devi & Marie-Thérese Cuny, and although not all of those events are included in this stunning and uncompromising account, the supremely enticing and engaging art succeeds in mixing some few moments of hopeful aspiration, happy romance and family unity to offset the revolting iniquities Phoolan and other women had to survive on a daily basis. Many still do.

This brilliant tale is grim and unflinching in the portrayal of the constant assaults and abuses she endured, so you’d best gird yourself for plenty of righteous indignation and outright anger at the catalogue of venality and casual intolerance civilised folk still seem capable of…

Potent, unmissable, and primed to continue the fight, this is a book you must read.
© 2018 Casterman. © 2020 NBM for the English translation.

The Wolf of Baghdad


By Carol Isaacs/The Surreal McCoy (Myriad Editions)
ISBN: 978-1-912408-55-9 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-912408-71-9

Contemporary history is a priceless resource in creating modern narratives. It has the benefits of immediacy and relevance – even if only on a generational level – whilst combining notional familiarity (could you tell the difference between a stone axe and a rock?) with a sense of distance and exoticism. In comics, we’re currently blessed with a wealth of superb material exploring the recent past and none better than this enchanting trawl through a tragic time most of us never knew of…

A successful musician who has worked with The Indigo Girls, Sinead O’Connor and the London Klezmer Quartet (which she co-founded) Carol Isaacs – as The Surreal McCoy – is also a cartoonist whose graphic gifts are regularly seen in The New Yorker, The Spectator, Private Eye, Sunday Times and The Inking Woman: 250 Years of Women Cartoon and Comic Artists in Britain. Some while ago she found great inspiration in a 2000-year old secret history that’s she been party to for most of her life.

British-born of Iraqi-Jewish parents, Isaacs grew up hearing tales of her ancestors’ lives in Baghdad: part of a thriving multicultural society which had welcomed – or at least peacefully tolerated – Jews in Persia since 597 BCE. How 150,000 Hebraic Baghdadians (a third of the city’s population in 1940) was reduced by 2016 to just 5 is revealed and eulogised in this potently evocative memoir, told in lyrical pictures and the curated words of her own family and their émigré friends, as related to Carol over her developing years in their comfortably suburban London home.

Those quotes and portraits sparked an elegiac dream-state excursion to the wrecked, abandoned sites and places of a socially integrated, vibrantly cohesive metropolis she knows intimately and pines for ferociously, even though she has never set a single foot there…

As well as this enthralling pictorial experience, the art and narrative were incorporated into a melancholy motion comic (slideshow with original musical accompaniment). That moving experience is supplemented by an Afterword comprising illustrate text piece ‘Deep Home’ (first seen in ‘Origin Stories’ from anthology Strumpet) which details those childhood sessions listening to the remembrances of adult guests and family elders, and is followed by ‘The Making of The Wolf of Baghdad’ explaining not only the book and show’s origins, but also clarifies the thematic premise of ‘The Wolf Myth’ that permeates the city’s intermingled cultures.

‘Other Iraqis’ then reveals some interactions with interested parties culled from Isaacs’ blog whilst crafting this book, whilst a comprehensive ‘Timeline of the Jews in Iraq’ outlines the little-known history of Persian Jews and how and why it all changed, before ‘A Carpet’s Story’ details 1950’s Operations Ezra and Nehemiah which saw 120,000 Jews airlifted to Israel. Wrapping up the show is a page of Acknowledgements and Suggested Reading.

Simultaneously timeless and topical, The Wolf of Baghdad is less a history lesson than a lament for a lost homeland and way of life: a wistful deliberation on why bad things happen and on how words pictures and music can turn back the years and make the longed-for momentarily real and true.
© Carol Isaacs (The Surreal McCoy) 2020. All rights reserved.

Calamity Jane: The Calamitous Life of Martha Jane Cannary, 1852-1903


By Christian Perrissin & Matthieu Blanchin, translated by Diana Schutz & Brandon Kander (IDW Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-63140-869-4 (HB/Digital edition)

Other people’s lives are fascinating. Just see any TV schedule to affirm that watching what neighbours or strangers have done, are doing or want to do is a major drive for us nosy hairless apes. It’s even more enticing if we’re allowed a smidgen of comparison and an ounce of judgement, too. However, the problem with famous dead people is that we’re forced to make our assessments at a remove because they’re dead and we only have records or, worse, myths and legends to construct our portrait from. Thankfully, we’re pretty imaginative monkeys too, and have drama to help us fill in the gaps and flesh out the characters.

These gifts proved immensely valuable to author Christian Perrissin and illustrator Matthieu Blanchin in the creation of a 3-volume graphic biography demythologising one of the Wild West’s most enigmatic icons. The award-winning result was Martha Jane Cannary: La vie aventureuse de celle que l’on nommait Calamity Jane.

Perrissin studied Fine and Applied Arts before moving into Bande dessinée, and from 1987 to 1990 apprenticed with Yves Lavandier before going solo. He has since scripted TV shows and film, written epic sagas such as El Niño and Cape Horn and inherited the scripting of venerable comics classic Redbeard.

Co-creator Blanchin started out as a storyboard artist and illustrator at the turn of the century, before moving into comics, producing work for a host of companies and titles. Eventually he moved into historical and autobiographical material such as Blanche, Bonjour… and Le Val des ânes. In 2002 he was hospitalised by a brain tumour and languished in a coma for 10 days. After convalescence and relapse he ultimately (in 2015) turned the experience into the hugely influential and celebrated Quand vous pensiez que j’étais mort: Mon quotidien dans le coma (When You Thought I was Dead: My Daily Life in a Coma).

This monochrome, duo-toned translation offers their epic collaboration in one titanic tome, blending often-sordid facts of outrageous adventures, unflagging spirit and astonishing determination into an entrancing tapestry showing the underbelly of the American dream. With great warmth and humour, they construct a true masterpiece of the very real and strong woman behind all the stories – many concocted by Martha Jane herself – as she overcame and survived impossible odds, doing whatever was necessary to survive and protect her family.

The tale begins with a graphic note from the creators, citing sources and contextualising her life and times in ‘The Mormon Trail…, before the unforgettable life story begins in an overcrowded cabin in the desolate prairie region of Utah. In her life, Martha Jane Cannary worked hard for little reward, met scoundrels and scalawags, gunslingers and heroes, lived on her wits and determination and was forced far too often to compromise her principles to preserve others as well as herself. She knew many famous men in many infamous places but I’m not naming them. This is her book, not theirs.

Calamity Jane was present throughout many of the most infamous moments of American history in its most iconic locations. She had far more enemies than friends and was most often despised and ostracised rather than honoured, but she always carried on, living her life her way. It was often tainted by tragedy, but she also scored her share of triumphs and experienced joy and love – always on her terms.

This is a compelling and utterly mesmerising chronicle of authentic western principles and achievement to enthuse and enthral anyone with a love of history and appreciation of human strength and weakness.
Calamity Jane: The Calamitous Life of Martha Jane Cannary, 1852-1903 Translation and Art © 2017 IDW Publishing. Story © 2017 Futuropolis. All rights reserved.

Harlem


By Mikaël, translated by Tom Imber (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-328-8 (HB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-329-5

Certain eras and locales perennially resonate with both entertainment consumers and story makers. The Wild West, Victorian London, the trenches of the Somme, and so many more quasi-mythological locales instantly evoke images of drama and tension, and prompt tales just begging to be told. In these modern times of environmental doom, global brush wars and economic privation, one of the most evocative is Depression-era America’s “Big City”.

Perhaps because it feels so tantalisingly within living memory, or maybe thanks to its cachet as the purported land of promises and untapped opportunity, America has always fascinated storytellers – especially comics creators – from the “Old World” of Europe. This inclination has birthed many potent and rewarding stories, and none more so than this continentally-published yarn from multi-disciplinary, multi-award-winning French-born, Quebeçois auteur and autodidact Mikaël (Giant; Bootblack, Junior l’Aventurier; Rapa Nui, Promise), who has been creating comics wonders since 2001.

First published in Europe in 2018, Giant told linked stories of little people – many of them newcomers to America – who built the Empire State Building in 1932, lensed through the interplay between immigrants and the underworld that offered so many their only chance to survive and thrive. Mikaël returned to the milieu with Bootblack, which originated as twin albums before being released as a brace of English-language digital tomes courtesy of Europe Comics. It finally found a worthy home as an oversized (229 x 305mm) resoundingly resilient hardback edition from NBM that got the entire story done-in-one. Now designated “The New York Trilogy”, the evocative venture concludes in a powerful fictionalised account of a minor but ferociously real celebrity of that faraway era…

Originally released au Continent as two tomes in January 2022 and August 2023, Harlem unfolds as a complex sequence of overlapping flashbacks, telling (part of) the story of crime boss, shady entrepreneur and unlikely civil rights crusader Stéphanie St. Clair (December 24th 1897 – December 1969). Regarded as a French migrant, she was actually born in Martinique (West Indies) before becoming a domestic servant in Quebec and moving to New York in 1912. From then she went by many names but most notably Queenie

By 1931 the infamous elegant mobster, popularly adored social climber and “richest black woman in the country” had instituted and was running Harlem’s numbers racket. Other people’s penny bets made her rich, lifting her above and beyond alleys and gutters via a meticulously organised, savagely administered – by poet turned enforcer/lover Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson and slick white lawyer Mr. Mahoney – (generally) harmless gambling enterprise that provided work for hundreds of poor black residents…

As the drama shows, Queenie has a man who supports her every decision and a close circle of women friends who enable her to occasionally drop her austere and steely public façade. Cushioning glamourous notoriety allows her to live away from sordid poverty in a posh enclave of wealthy and influential “negro intelligentsia” – at 409 Edgecomb Avenue: the palatial apartment building on “Sugar Hill”…

Everything starts to collapse when her activities increasingly chafe with cops who take her bribes whilst despising her skin colour, intelligence and “uppity” attitudes, just as ruthless outsiders Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz – deprived of their former revenue streams by the repeal of Prohibition – turn envious eyes on the district north of 110th Street – the no-go region for decent folk commonly called Harlem…

The actual trigger is well-meaning white reporter Robert Bishop whose love for the glitz of the Harlem Renaissance and a “miscegenating” dalliance with Queenie’s pal Tillie Douglas brings him to a jazz nightclub on the night “The Dutchman” tries to seize Queenie’s territory by force, only to be humiliatingly faced down by the proud celebrity. Outraged by her usual treatment from Irish cops led by corrupt racist Captain McCann, Madame St Claire starts writing opinion pieces denouncing police corruption and Mafia encroachment, also advocating militant change and offering legal advice for the disenfranchised. These she forces local paper New York Amsterdam News to publish. She soon hires Bishop to proofread and edit them, but when his close access turns into his subsequent articles in support of black advancement in white newspapers, it augurs disaster and the beginning of the end…

As a battle for turf collides with the deepening Great Depression, socialist agitation in the streets, an influx of Mafia drug pushers and murder pushes the district into chaos. With Shultz and McCann closing in and Queenie’s old allies and even friends turning against her, St Claire makes a bold and unpredictable move, retaliating in the only way she can…

Intercut with nightmarish scenes of her childhood, island life and gradual move to America, Queenie’s rise and fall occurs in a cultural melting pot of oppressed peoples just starting to feel the faint stirrings of equal treatment. Everything about this stylish drama is potently mythic and tragically foredoomed in a sincerely Shakespearean manner as it completes the auteur’s epic and ambitious New York Trilogy. Packed with period detail and skilfully tapping into the abundance of powerful, socially-aware novels, plays and movies which immortalised pre-WWII America, this tale is all the more enticing for what it doesn’t reveal… the truly remarkable turns Stéphanie St. Clair’s life took after this story ends. Hopefully there’s someone ready to translate the latterday activist’s exploits after WWII into graphic immortality…

This book includes poems by Langston Hughes – Harlem and I, Too – and dozens of stunning pencil studies of key locations and characters at the back. Moreover, if you’re sharp, you can find the Easter eggs throughout the text where this tale intersects with and overlaps the previous parts of the trilogy…

Harlem is moving, memorable and momentous, a graphic narrative triumph you must not miss.
Harlem volumes 1 & 2 © DARGAUD BENELUX (DARGAUD-LOMBARD S.A.) 2022 – 2033 by Mikaël.

Harlem is scheduled for UK release 16th April 2024 and available for pre-order now.

Most NBM books are also available in digital formats. For more information and other great reads go to NBM Publishing at nbmpub.com.

Mata Hari


By Emma Beeby, Ariela Kristantina, with Pat Masioni & Sal Cipriano (Berger Books/ Dark Horse)
ISBN: 987-1-50670-561-3(TPB) eISBN: 987-1-50670-590-3

Until relatively recently (some would argue that should read “hopefully soon”), History has never really treated women well or even factually or fairly. When not obscured, sidelined or just written out, they have been cruelly misunderstood and misrepresented. Moreover, as we’re all painfully aware these days, a bold lie or convenient fabrication has far more veracity than simple, muddled, messy truth.

Margaretha Geertruida “Margreet” MacLeod (nee Zelle) was born on August 7th 1876 in Leeuwarden (in the Dutch Netherlands) to milliner and later industrialist Adam Zelle. She was the eldest of four children raised in wealth… until her father lost it all. Margreet’s life became more troubled and remarkable after that, before she died on 15th October 1917 in front of a French firing squad.

In between, she had married, lived in the East Indies, had children she never really knew and artfully remade herself as a rather scandalous dancer and performer. Margreet adopted a stage name – Mata Hari (which means “eye of the dawn” in Malay) – and her gifts, drive and determination led to her becoming a successful courtesan in the highest circles of privileged society, with princes, ambassadors, tycoons and generals all clamouring for her attention. She was also courted by some countries – including France and Great Britain – to act as an operative in the dangerous world of espionage.

After a chequered life during a volatile period when European society seemingly embraced and welcomed strong independent women, she was accused on meagre evidence of spying for the Germans during the Great War, and rapidly convicted. Deemed to have caused the death of 50,000 men, and the moral ruination of countless others, Mata Hari became and remains the purest and most enduring symbol of the deadly, cunning femme fatale…

However, in the last few decades, serious historical investigation has cast a rather different, and far fairer complexion on the mythical spy in film, song, ballet, books, musicals and all arenas of popular culture. Among the most compelling was an imaginative 5-issue miniseries from Dark Horse’s Berger Books imprint: a collaboration of writer Emma Beeby (Judge Dredd, Doctor Who, Judge Anderson), artist Ariela Kristantina (Wolverine: The Logan Legacy, Deep State, Insexts), colourist Pat Masioni and letterer Sal Cipriano.

Blending hard fact with emotive supposition and informed extrapolation, the sorry episode unfolds in the flashbacks and daydreams of a prisoner held at the Saint-Lazare Prison for Prostitutes in Paris in October 1917. Opening chapter ‘Bare Faced’ introduces Margreet as she strives and struggles to complete a book that will tell her story in her own words…

Against a backdrop of political and military manipulation resolved to make an example of her, ‘Bare Breast’ details her disastrous, life changing marriage and its terrible consequences whilst ‘Bare Heart’ relates her fight back to independence and notoriety after which ‘Bare Teeth’ moves on to the war and great love for a Russian soldier that led to her downfall in ‘Bare All’…

Real life doesn’t work the way narrative would like and the people there aren’t actors. Packed with documentary photos, this contemplative fable carefully acknowledges all that frustrating complexity in an account scrupulously devoid of heroes and outright villains whilst exposing centuries of institutionalised injustice in an extremely entertaining manner. It closes with a series of textual Codas (offering even more intimate photos of the woman and her times) with ‘Mata Hari’s Conviction’, relating oddities and strange events regarding the disposal of her body plus an authorial opinion by Beeby in ‘Was Mata Hari a Martyr?’…

In both word and imagery, Mata Hari is a potently beguiling, evocatively uncompromising retelling of a murky and long-misconceived moment in history any student of the past and lover of comics will adore.
Mata Hari text and illustrations © 2019 Emma Beeby and Ariela Kristantina. All rights reserved.

Marie Curie – The Radium Fairy


By Chantal Montellier & Renaud Huynh translated by Lara Vergnaud (Europe Comics)
No ISBN: digital-only publication

I’ve waited ages (well, since March 2017, but I’m old and joyless and my days are clearly pretty limited now) for this superb book to be picked up by a print publisher, but now I’m just going to plug it again it anyway and assume that as you’re reading this on a computer, you can make the leap to seeing comics that way too.

And yes, I know all about the smell and feel of proper books. I feel that way too, but we’re killing more trees than we need to. Just think of it as portable fun you can’t crumple or rip…

Originally released across Europe in 2011, Marie Curie La Fée du Radium was produced in collaboration with the Curie Museum and the Cité des sciences et del ’industrie (part of Universcience), with educator, illustrator and bande dessinée creator Chantal Montellier (Odile et les crocodiles, Les Damnés de Nantes).

The book summarises and dramatizes via graphic narrative a most astounding life, prior to research scientist, educator and museum curator Renaud Huynh’s (La fantastique histoire du radium) extensive and copious Timeline which traces the triumphs, tribulations and legacy of Marie Sklodowska-Curie (1867-1934): thus far the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes.

The critical comics component kicks off in Stockholm on September 4th as aging Marie Curie works on a speech; preparing to receive that second cherished accolade. Thinking back, she pictures her departed husband Pierre Curie. Their joint isolation of the element they named Polonium after her place of birth was a grand achievement but doesn’t make up for her years of struggle for acceptance or his tragic accidental death so early in their marriage…

And so, briefly, concisely and sans fanfare unfolds a true tale of brilliance applied, adversity overcome and persistence rewarded. Today, Curie is credited with adding two elements to the Periodic Table – Radium was the other one – and venerated for her unceasing researches. She was also the first woman allowed to teach at the prestigious Sorbonne, but for much of her life had to overcome entrenched patriarchal attitudes and oppression whilst being vilified in the media and by wider society for her “scandalous” personal life… and generally just for being an uppity female who didn’t know her place.

Isn’t it great how much everything has changed since then? (I am of course waiting for my own Nobel for the isolation of Sarcastium…)

This small but powerful digital-only tome concludes with that large and detailed Timeline. Huynh’s pictorial essay is packed with photographic illustrations, cartoons and clippings combining to encapsulate and clarify Curie’s life and achievements. It is all deconstructed and précised in chapters entitled 1867/1895 Warsaw-Paris’, ‘1896/1905 A Scientific Dream’, ‘1906/1911 Hardships and Success’, ‘1912/1921 The Radium Institute’ and ‘1922/1934: An International Figure’, before concluding with an ‘Epilogue’ revealing how 60 years after her death, Marie Curie’s ashes were transferred to the Pantheon (resting place of the nation’s greatest citizens). She was the first woman to be accorded this honour based solely on her own merits…

Making learning fun, Marie Curie – The Radium Fairy is a potent and powerful inspiration, venerating one of history’s most dedicated scientists: one every youngster of any age should know.
© 2016 – DUPUIS – Chantal Montellier & Renaud Huynh. All rights reserved.

The Lincoln Brigade


By Pablo Durá, Carles Esquembre & Ester Salguero, translated/edited by Andrea Lorenzo Molinari (Caliber Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-63529-822-2 (TPB/Digital edition)

I’m glad my parents are dead.

Their generation thought that they had dealt with fascism so their children wouldn’t have to, but every day it looks like that kind of intolerance is hardwired in some of us and never goes away. Maybe we simply need to be as ruthless and unforgiving as the foe if we want the insanity to finally end.

At least there are still plenty of people willing to fight and keen to share warnings from the past in books like this digital clarion call.

Preceded by an contextualising Introduction by Josephine Nelson – Commander of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and daughter of Abraham Lincoln Brigade leader Steve NelsonThe Lincoln Brigade is a brief but powerful account ruminating on what 3,015 mostly white, largely second-generation European American, passionately Communist volunteers of the 17th (latterly 58th) battalion of the XV International Brigade experienced during the heroic but doomed struggle to defend Republican Spain from Franco and his Nazi allies in the Spanish Civil War (17th July 1936 -1st April 1939). That skilfully managed proxy conflict is now considered by many historians as a test run for World War II: something certain Russian asshats know very well…

The struggle is seen through the eyes of Oliver Law – one of the few black comrades of the “Lincoln Brigade”. Texas born Law (October 23rd 1900 – July 9th 1937) served in the 24th Infantry Regiment, US Army: a professional soldier in a “coloured unit” stationed on the Mexican border. He served efficiently and with honour from 1919-1925 and on mustering out moved gradually north via Indiana and Chicago, finding jobs as a cement worker, taxi driver, restaurateur and dock worker.

Law’s experiences led to him becoming a labour organiser and member of the American Communist Party. As the Great Depression progressed, he was a member of the International Labor Defense movement employed by the Works Project Administration. Moments of early activism are observed as he meets legendary, inspirational African American freedoms fighter Harry Haywood (February 4th 1898 – January 4th 1985) and faces strike-breaking cops beside equally fervent allies of all colours.

In 1936, Benito Mussolini ordered an invasion of Ethiopia in one of the first overt acts of fascist expansionist colonialism and Law realised – as did so many others across the world – that he would have to fight the rise of a tyranny even greater than that he and his kind faced at home. When Spain erupted into chaos with Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde leading the army (supported by Nazi/Italian National Fascist Parties) in revolt against the democratically elected government, Law and thousands like him volunteered to fight for the embattled Republic.

In this fictionalised account of events by Pablo Durá (Original Sins, Tales of Rogues) illustrated by Carles Esquembre (Lorca – un poeta en Neueva York) and colourist Esther Salguero we see how Law – like so many others – had to sneak across neutral Europe into Spain by pretending to be a tourist or else face arrest by his own government. Like most nations the USA and Britain had signed a non-intervention treaty Italy and Germany were happy to flout…

What comes next is grim, tragic, stupid and shameful as the daily grind of driven idealists betrayed by their own supposed allies and cut down as much by indifference and ineptitude as enemy action lead to Law’s swift rise as a soldier and untimely death. In the course of his duties the Texan advances to Commander of the Machine Gun Company and before his death was for a brief moment the official Commander of the whole Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Of the approximately 3000 Americans he so briefly led, 681 were killed in action or died of wounds or sickness…

Oliver Law commanded the first fully-integrated unit of American soldiers in combat 10 years before white and black US soldiers were in 1948 forcibly made to serve together by Presidential decree of Harry S. Truman

It’s all here for you to see and you really should, as it’s delivered with coldly emphatic understatement and clinically clear authenticity: blurring fact with myth and history with extrapolation in the same compelling, upsetting manner as Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, or in graphic novels like Paco Roca, Rodrigo Terrasa & Astiberri’s El abismo del olvido (The Abyss of Forgetting), Mónica Montanés’ Different: A Story of the Spanish Civil War Picture Book or Vittorio Giardino’s epic No Pasaran! trilogy.

Like all those, this too is a book anyone unhappy with the way things are should peruse and ponder upon.
© 2020 Pablo Durá and Carles Esquembre. All Rights Reserved.

Billie Holiday


By José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo, translated by Katy MacRae, Robert Boyd & Kim Thompson (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-093-5 (HB/Digital Edition)

Argentinian José Antonio Muñoz was born on July 10th 1942 in Buenos Aires and studied at the prestigious Escuela Panamericana de Arte de Buenos Aires, under comics geniuses Hugo Pratt and Alberto Breccia. Aged 18, he joined the prolific and prestigious Francisco Solano Lopez studio and soon his work was appearing in Hora Cero and Frontera Extra all whilst ghosting episodes of legendary serial Ernie Pike for his old tutor Pratt.

Through the Argentine-based Solano Lopez outfit, he found work on strips for UK publishing giant Amalgamated Press/IPC, but had no real feeling for the material he was producing. Moreover, like so many others, he was increasingly uncomfortable living in his homeland. Eventually (in December 1972) he was compelled to leave Argentina as the military junta tightened its totalitarian grip on the country, clamping down on free expression and the arts, as well as all forms of overt or covert dissent.

Moving to England, Spain and later Italy, in 1974 Muñoz met again fellow émigré and creative soul-mate Carlos Sampayo in Barcelona and convinced the poet, music critic, copywriter and author to try his hand at comics. The result was a stunning expressionistic noir Private Detective masterpiece of loss and regret called Alack Sinner.

Born in 1943, Sampayo grew up with all the same formative experiences as his artistic comrade and, after a similar dispiriting start (he’d tried writing and being a literary editor before resigning himself to work in advertising), moved to Spain in 1972. The pair were first introduced in 1971 when mutual friend Oscar Zarate left Argentina at the forefront of the creative exodus sparked by the rise of “the Colonels”…

Urgently urged by mentor Hugo Pratt to “do something of your own”, Muñoz & Sampayo started producing grimly gritty adventures of an ex-New York cop-turned-shamus haunting the shadows of the world’s greatest, darkest city, encountering the bleak underbelly of the metropolis and all the outcasts, exiles and scum thrown together at its margins. Alack Sinner debuted in experimental Italian anthology Alter Linus, was picked up by Belgian giant Casterman for A Suivre and latterly compiled in albums across the continent. The feature was set solidly in history, confronting issues of prejudice, bigotry and corruption head-on through shocking words and imagery. In one of their stories Sinner played merely a bit part as the pages examined the life, times and fate of one of the most ill-starred women in the history of Jazz and modern America.

And that’s where this powerfully moving biography finds us…

Originally translated and published by Fantagraphics in the early 1990s, NBM’s Billie Holiday takes us into the heart and soul of the doomed and self-destructive nightingale whose incredible voice was all-but-lost to the world for decades before kinder, more evolved ears of all colours rescued her works from oblivion. This epic tome dissects her life and influence through the eyes of distant observers, opening with Francis Marmande’s essay ‘Billie Holiday: Don’t Explain’ providing a fact- and photo-packed biographical appreciation of the singer in her heyday.

Eleanora Holiday – also known as Billie and “Lady Day” – was born April 7th 1915, and died July 17th 1959. In between those dates she won many fans and earned tons of money, but it never bought her acceptance in a world where black skin provoked revulsion, cruelty and smug superiority. It didn’t even buy her protection from New York cops who considered her a prostitute made good, and an uppity subhuman who never knew her proper place…

Billie lost money as quickly – or even faster – as she earned it: to unscrupulous friends and management, or corrupt officials, although most of it was frittered away by the succession of cheating, brutal men she was hopelessly drawn to and whom she could never resist.

A short, stark story of graphic flair offering many powerful full-page images, the tale begins in 1989 as a journalist is assigned to write a feature commemorating the 30th anniversary of a Jazz singer. He’s never heard of Billie Holiday but is good at his job and starts digging…

He reads about a poor black girl raped as a child and forced into child prostitution who (almost) escaped a commonplace fate by singing. She became successful, but never dodged the traps and pitfalls of her life: booze, drugs, sleazy men, manipulative bosses and her own seeming hunger for conflict. Even so, the way she sang was uniquely hers and changed lives forever. She called herself Billie and always performed with a flower in her hair…

For a while the great and good came to watch and hear, and jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Lester Young came too. Their gifts also gave them limited entry to the privileged life – but never enough acceptance – but they seemed to understand. Never enough, though, to save Billie from herself.

This intensely personal interpretation is less biography and more a heartfelt paean of appreciation, channelling and exploring the hard, harsh tone of those troubled times where talented, dogged souls fought for recognition and survival at the fringes of a world determined to exploit and consume them. In that respect, no one was more exploited than Lady Day…

Also included here, ‘Jazz Sessions’ offers a stunning gallery of a dozen stark, chiaroscuric, powerfully evocative images based on scenes from Holiday’s short, sad life and dedication to the freedom of the musical form of Blues and Jazz that she graced and transformed through her vocalisations.

Moving, justifiably angry and pitifully sad, this tale holds the singer up to the light and must be read. Just remember, there’s no Happy Ever After here.
© 1991 Casterman. All rights reserved. © 2017 NBM for the English version.

Degas & Cassatt: A Solitary Dance


By EFA & Rubio, translated by Edward Gauvin (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-324-0 (Album HB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-325-7

NBM’s line of graphic biographies never fails to delight, and this oversized luxury hardcover (also available digitally) is one of the most fascinating thus far: exploring one of painting’s greatest yet least understood masters and – deducing by inference – one of the most occluded, protracted and certainly frustrated romances in history…

Degas & Cassatt: A Solitary Dance reunites award-winning screenwriter, historian and novelist Salva Rubio (Max, The Photographer of Mauthausen) with animator/illustrator Ricard Fenandez AKA “Efa” (Les Icariades, Rodriguez, Le Soldat, L’Ãme du Vin: L’ail et l’huile). Their previous collaborations are also beautiful biographies – Monet: Itinerant of Light and Django, Hand on Fire: The Great Django Reinhardt.

First released in France, the translated Degas: La danse de la solitude is preceded by mood-setting quotes from Baudelaire and Shakespeare and closes with a detailed Bibliography of suggestions for further study and appreciation. Between those points is a compelling exploration of one of the most turbulent periods in European and Art history, as impacted upon and partially shaped by a controversial, conflicted, contradictory and misunderstood master of line, colour and form…

This pictorial conjecture gently deconstructs enigmatic Edgar Degas is rendered by EFA in the manner of the pastel crayon drawings so beloved and powerfully utilised by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas (July 19th 1834 – September 27th 1917). It affords a mistily miasmic uncertainty which never obscures detail whilst shaping a mystery to confound and unsettle readers. The stunning confection of painterly images traces – via flashback and supposition – the life of a troubled artistic genius raised almost completely by male relatives to covet success, scorn women and criticise himself mercilessly.

In Paris during the 1870s, a graciously-barbed, polite war of wills and conception began. The creative world was formalised and controlled by a hidebound elite – “The Salon” – dictating what could and could not be ART. The convention-constricted organisation even dictated form, method and content until that stultifying impasse was challenged by a haphazard band of free thinkers who would become derisively dubbed “The Impressionists”.

Among their most outspoken and headstrong proponents were Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Sisley, Bazille and others, but they only really started making waves once staid, bellicose and unfathomable Degas began associating with them. He bemused and bewildered his fellow outriders and the Bohemian set they congregated with, but never felt himself part of the group… or any human affiliation.

His story is seen from its conclusion as ‘1: Solitude’ opens on Saturday, 29th September 1917 with an elderly lady staring at a crypt in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. She is American painter Mary Cassatt who probably knew Degas better than any other person. On visiting his empty studio, sentiment swallows her as she opens his abandoned notebooks, thinks back and wonders…

In ‘2: Monsieur Degas’ the odd bourgeois’ formative days are selectively reviewed and his misanthropic, misogynistic, chauvinistic and racist stances are quizzed through his problems with his own output. Degas’ work does not and has never satisfied him and he can only find inspiration in places no decent person belongs. It seems the austere bookish elitist cannot open up to his peers but is addicted to being an anonymous, masked and untouchable patron of brothels, bawdy houses and ballet… where only the most degraded – or poverty stricken – go.

As his renown grows a meeting with an art dealer from the USA leads to a possibility of a different life in ‘3: Miss Cassatt’, but the voluntary hermit’s true genius appears to be self-sabotage. Even as the impressionists gradually destroy the influence of The Salon, Degas finally starts generating work worthy of his talent whilst sinking deeper into isolation and pushing away all those who could be friends… or perhaps more…

The story ends with ‘4: The Dance’, allowing some fanciful elaboration on the biographers’ part as the elderly artist confronts his muse and inhibitions in a kind of Happy Ever After that concludes with Rubio’s prose rumination ‘Did Monsieur Degas ever find peace?’

Enchanting, thought-provoking and supremely enthralling, Degas & Cassatt: A Solitary Dance is a soft-focus voyage of illicit discovery no lover of unforgettable pictures can be without.
© EFA/RUBIO/ ÉDITIONS DU LOMBARD (DARGAUD- LOMBARD S.A.) 2021. All rights reserved.

Degas & Cassatt: A Solitary Dance will be published on March 12th 2024 and is available for pre-order. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/

Glorious Summers volume 2: The Calanque 1969


By Zidrou & Jordi Lafebre, with additional colour by Mado Peña, translated by Lara Vergnaud (Europe Comics)
No ISBN: Digital edition only

It’s close (OMG! LESS THAN A WEEK!) to the most stressful and commercialised event of the singleton calendar for unattached people who wish they weren’t, so let’s look at what all that amorous manoeuvring and romantic strategizing is supposed to lead to as perfectly depicted in a sublime and delightful family feast of “Happy Ever Afters”…

Until comparatively recently, comics in the English-speaking world mostly countenanced comedic or numerous adventure sub-genres (crime, superhero, horror, sci fi), with only a small but vital niche of “mundane world” ventures, usually depicted via graphic biographies and autobiographies like They Called Us Enemy, Breakwater, Love on the Isle of Dogs, Wage Slaves or Sour Pickles offering a different feel and flavour. Even historical sagas were treated as extraordinary moments with larger-than-life characters whenever possible.

What we have never had – and still largely don’t – is a comics equivalent to general fiction, drama and melodrama. That’s not so in Japan, South Korea or Europe, where a literal “anything goes” attitude has always accommodated and nurtured human-scaled, slice-of-life tales depicting ordinary people in as many quiet as extraordinary moments. Surely it can’t be that hard to tell engaging stories in pedestrian, recognisably ordinary settings? Medical traumas, love stories, school tales and family tragedies about common folk seem to play well on various-sized screens around the world, so why not in English language comics? The closest we seem to get are comedies like John Allison’s superb Giant Days (which I really must review soon)…

People being people is more than enough for Europeans. There apparently is an insatiable appetite for everyday events aimed at properly “mature readers”, joyfully sans vampires, aliens or men in tights. These even have sub-genres of their own. For example, there’s a wealth of superb material just about going on holiday. So, since our own Government-in-Absentia have ensured that it’s now all-but-impossible for any UK-based citizens to pop across and have une petite vacances in Europe, let’s stare & glare covetously at them having a good time. After all, over there holidays are an inalienable right, and they have some simply fabulous tales about a simple break. This one is probably amongst the best you’ll ever see…

An absolute exemplar of fantasy vacations made real, Glorious Summers: Southbound! (1973) was a nostalgia-drenched confection by Zidrou and regular collaborator Jordi Lafebre: a sublime example of idyllic group memory made into graphic sorcery in an everyday account utterly unafraid to temper humorous sweetness and light with real-world tragedy and suspense.

Perhaps some context is in order. Summer holidays – “Midi” – are a big deal in France and Belgium. The French divide into two tribes over the annual rest period, which generally lasts an entire month. Juilletistes only vacation in July, wielding dogmatic facts like rapiers to prove why it’s the only way to take a break. They are eternally opposed, heart, soul, and suntan lotion, by majority faction the Aoûtiens, who recharge their batteries in August whilst fully reciprocating the suspicion, disdain and baffled scorn of the early-leavers. Many European sociologists claim the greatest social division today is not race, religion, gender, political affiliation or whether to open boiled eggs from the top or the bottom, but when summer holidays begin and end…

Les Beaux Étés 1: Cap au Sud! was first in a string of family visits that began in 2015 courtesy of scripter Benoît “Zidrou” Drousie and Spanish illustrator Jordi Lafebre. Drousie is Belgian, Brussels-born in 1962 and was a school teacher prior to quitting marking books in 1990 to begin making them. His main successes include school dunce series L’Elève Ducobu, Petit Dagobert, Scott Zombi, La Ribambelle, Le Montreur d’histoires, the revival of Ric Hochet, African Trilogy, Léonardo, Shi and many more. His most celebrated and beloved stories are this memorable sequence and 2010’s Lydie, both illustrated by Lafebre.

That gifted, empathically sensitive illustrator and art teacher was born in Barcelona in 1979 and has created comics professionally since 2001, first for magazines like Mister K, where he limned Toni Font’s El Mundo de Judy. He found regular work at Le Journal de Spirou, creating the romance Always Never and collaborated with Zidrou on La vieille dame qui n’avait jamais joué au tennis et autres nouvelles qui font du bien, Lydie, and La Mondaine.

A combination of feel-good fable and powerful comedy drama, Glorious Summers depicts memories of an aging couple recalling their grandest family moments, beginning with a momentous vacation in 1973 where their four kids nearly lost their parents….

Here however, second volume The Calanque focuses on August 1969 as pregnant Maddie Faldérault (soon to deliver precociously hyperactive Paulette AKA Peaches) tries to amuse her three impatient kids whilst hubby Pierre frantically puts finishing touches to his latest comic strip. It’s a regular ritual before his month off, but this time less annoying as it’s also his first work as a named creator rather than an anonymous ghost artist for others. Apparently the world is finally ready for a four-armed cowboy gunfighter…

Their kids are immune to bedtimes and indulge in time-honoured holiday rituals like shouting, fighting and singing odd songs, before Pierre downs his brushes. Now the annual Faldérault escape from gloomy Brussels for a month in sun-drenched France can start.

Only… on the way they need to see his dad. Pépé Buelo moved to Brussels when General Franco took over Spain. He made a good life as bricklayer and husband, but now he’s on his own and a little lonely…

Eventually, the family set off with introspective toddler Louis reading, drawing and constantly sharing his far from limited knowledge of where babies come from, even as self-conscious oldest girl Jolly-Julie anxiously ponders life without bathrooms and in-betweener Nicole tells everyone they meet that mummy is going to be a mummy again. As they motor south in the dark – they left really, really late – they play their annual game of deciding where they’re going by solving riddles because planned destinations and pre-booked rooms are for wimps…

True free spirits, they pick up a hippie hitchhiker and scare him witless with their laid back attitudes – especially teasing Jolly-Julie’s reticence to use nature as a restroom. When he drops out they resume southern roaming and finally decide to camp in a shady wood for the night. In the morning the family Faldérault realise their error as elderly French couple Rufus and Ramona discover they have Belgians in the back garden…

After a few lovely days as guests who can’t politely escape, Pierre and Maddie learn that Rufus knows the perfect spot for travellers to enjoy their break, directing them to a hidden cove on the sea coast. It’s beautiful: an idyllic cliff-screened rustic paradise with a ramshackle fishing hut just ready to be temporarily occupied. Rufus even provides a guide in the form of his exuberant older brother – aging fisherman Marius.

What follows is timeless weeks of wonder and unforgettable explorations on endlessly sunny days, with local villagers taking the wanderers to heart and welcoming them to a taste of rustic heaven. Even the Americans landing on the moon or the Tour de France victory of Belgian Eddie Merckx can’t compare…

Ultimately the real world calls them back and the holidaymakers pack up for home. Awaiting them is bad news for Pierre, a new job for Maddie and a rainy grey hometown. One clear sign of normality resuming comes as they find a dog abandoned by the roadside, but brilliantly and boldly they turn that traumatic event into a lasting positive…

This tale is another beautifully rendered and realised basket of memories stitched seamlessly together. It’s funny, sweet and charming whilst delivering painful blows you never see coming. There aren’t any spectacular events and shocking crises and that’s the whole point…

If you’re British – and old enough – this series (six translated albums thus far, plus a French omnibus edition) will echo revered family sitcoms like Bless This House or Butterflies and generational ads starring the “Oxo Family”. (If that description doesn’t fit you, I pity your browsing history if you look up any of that…). The rest of you in need of an opening (but unfair) comparator could break out the Calvin and Hobbes collections and re-examine the bits with his embattled parents when the kid’s out of the picture…

Lyrical, laconic, engagingly demure, and debilitatingly nostalgic, this holiday romance is sheer visual perfection wrapped in sharp dialogue and a superbly anarchic sense of mischief. Vacations are built of moments and might-have-beens, packaged here in compelling clips making the mundane marvellous.
© 2018 -DARGAUD BENELUX (Dargaud-Lombard s.a.) – ZIDROU & LEFEBRE, LLC. All rights reserved.