Category: Feminism & Sexual Politics

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Kusama: Polka Dot Queen (Art Masters)


By Simon Elliott (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-91422-430-0 (HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced for dramatic effect.

The Sixties were an amazing time, I remember them well – which apparently means that I wasn’t really there. However, many others were and this potent revisitation and exploration of one of the most misplaced icons of that era reveals in fabulous fashion how she overcame institutional neglect, habitual sidelining, racial intolerance and gender prejudice to finally see her merit and achievements acknowledged.

Moreover, the long climb and her subsequent fame and influence have been magnified in the decades since, both abroad and – most crucially – in the land of her birth and where she was first discarded. Apparently, living long and well and true to oneself is the best revenge…

Legal eagle Simon Elliot (art obsessive, criminal barrister and stand-up comedian by night) adds to his list of side hustle successes with another superb artist biography to supplement Hockney: A Graphic Life (Frances Lincoln, 2023), and 2024’s Vincent: A Graphic Biography by here encapsulating and reassessing, in potent pictorial terms, the life of Japanese sensation and grande dame Kusama Yayoi.

Avant-garde icon, globetrotting art ambassador, Pop Art Darling and perennial target and headline fodder for paparazzi and media parasites, Kusama is best known for literally thousands of artworks comprised of countless dots painstakingly painted, drawn and stuck down, and her vast “infinity nets” works. However, as seen in this compelling biography, her unique manner of perceiving the world and addressing her mental health issues has also been impressively expressed in other forms of conceptual art, including filmmaking, poetry, fashion design, fiction, performance and video art, as well as tradition but novel sculptural and painted forms. You can actually own a piece of her massive and monumental output simply by buying a copy of the 2012 Penguin Classics Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which she illustrated.

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Kusama Yayoi grew up in a wealthy home, afflicted by appalling abusive parents in the go-getting yet ferociously hidebound and formal Japan ruled by empire-building militarists. Subjected to a cruel home life and the whims of capricious parents at war with each other, the little girl was ostracised by her siblings and became obsessed with nature and art. She also suffered from periodic hallucinogenic episodes…

Enduring war, occupation in the aftermath and parental pressure to marry beneficially and strategically for the sake of the family, Yayoi pursued her art intensely and reached out to other women artists. In 1958 she managed to escape to America just in time for the art and social revolution to swallow her…

As with other women during the Pop Art era, Yayoi “inspired” white male artists including Andy Warhol and particularly Claes Oldenburg. The latter shared studio space with Kusama, whose rubber and fabric installations only coincidentally predated Oldenburg’s soft sculpture phase… and that’s when her story, artistic ascension, international expansions and eventual triumph begins…

Gloriously vibrant and ebullient, this light-looking but heavy-hitting appreciation, history and assessment of a figure unique even for the weird world of gallery art is a beguiling and powerful introduction to a much overlooked (here in the west at least) artist who deserves to be a household name right beside her avant-garde contemporaries and cherished for everything she’s done since…
Text and images © 2025 Simon Elliot.

Kusama: Polka Dot Queen will be published on 10th April 2025 and is available for pre-

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Dolltopia


By Abby Denson (Green Candy Press)
ISBN: 978-1-931160-70-4 (TPB/Digital edition)

Not everybody is comfortable with whom they are and most of us don’t like to be assumed one thing when we’re another. Lulu/IPPY Award winner Abby Denson is a magically subversive cartoonist and journalist with such disparate notches in her belt as graphic novel Tough Love: High School Confidential (relating the Coming Out story of two suburban teens), lifestyle bibles Cool Tokyo Guide, Cool Japan Guide and The City Sweet Tooth: a culinary cartoon column about the New York desserts scene for L Magazine.

An educator (teaching at Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, Eugene Lang College at The New School, Sophia University, Tokyo), her script credits run from Scooby Doo and Power Puff Girls to Spider-Man via Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Josie and the Pussycats, Disney Adventures and The Simpsons.

This entrancing shocking pink parable is an edgy, deceptively naivist fairy tale about gender, place and identity: making telling points in a clandestinely gentle manner via a swingeing attack and dissection of conformity…

Kitty Ballerina is a doll who escapes from The Factory, refusing to be what her makers tell her to be. During her escape she meets Army Jim, another maverick toy who refuses to conform. Together they make their way to the Promised Land of Dolltopia, where you can wear and look like and be whatever you want. With the comradeship and assistance of the cat Mr. M, fashion Divas Candy X and Candy O and slightly off-kilter, self-taught “plastic surgeon” the Doctor, the renegades make themselves at home and truly free…

However, freedom demands effort, vigilance and sacrifice. Some such recently emancipated individuals seem to crave their previous cultural indenture, and raids to liberate more dolls suffer when the apathetic conformists refuse to cast off their social shackles. However, the real threat comes when humans threaten to take away and destroy the hard-won oasis of security these disappointed rebels have strived so long and hard to win…

Charming and cleverly controversial, if perhaps a little heavy-handed at times (sometimes you need fireworks and two-by-fours just to get a mule’s attention!), this eclectic black, pink & white tome – complete with cut-out-&-dress paper dolls – is a winning and culturally crucial addition to the world of adult cartooning and the bigger one you can read it in. You’d be an idiot not to take a good long look – but of course you don’t have to be what I say you are…
© Abby Denson. All right reserved.

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Mimi and the Wolves volume 1


By Albaster Pizzo (Avery Hill Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-91039-548-6 (HB/Digital edition)

Alabaster Pizzo is an animator and cartoonist who hails from New York, but makes her living in Los Angeles. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts, she’s been intermittently releasing episodes of an epic anthropomorphic post-modern fantasy since 2013. When not animating or storyboarding for major companies you or your kids are quite familiar with, she crafts her own comics such as Ralphie and Jeanie, Hellbound Lifestyle and more of the one under consideration here…

A trio of those early Mimi minicomics were lavishly compiled into a sturdy hardback monochrome tome by the astute powers-that-be of British publisher Avery Hill and comprise the opening salvo in a potent and hopefully long-running allegory for personal empowerment – as all the best fairy tales are…

Preceded by a handy and informative map of the bucolic Hilly City region and a roll call of the major characters, Mimi and The Wolves Act I ‘The Dream’ opens with enigmatic, voyeuristic magician Severine chiding her attendant spirits in snow-draped forests before herbalist Mimi goes gathering plants and herbs for the constructions, concoctions and confections she makes. Times are tough for her and partner Bobo, but they have each other, and good friends in the same boat, so the treehouse they live in is all they really need…

The couple spend a lot of time helping out old farmers Cato and Ceres. Shady Island Farm is getting to be too much for them, so trading toil for food is always a welcome standby option.

Thankfully, Saffron at the general store is always keen to trade for Mimi’s creations and the farm’s dwindling produce output, but the sensitive artisan is painfully aware that the unrelenting strain is getting the better of her fellow workers. Tough but happily idyllic, life would be perfect for Mimi… if only she wasn’t plagued by horrific dreams and terrifying nightmares…

Determined to get to the bottom of her traumas, Mimi distils a brew to provoke a lucid dream and is “rewarded” with an audience: a face-to-face confrontation with an apparent goddess calling herself the Holy Venus. This ethereal visitor tells her to seek out likeminded others and reveals to her a strange symbol by which she will know them. As spring turns to summer, the image obsesses Mimi, even becoming part of her artistic output, much to the growing discomfort and increasing resentment of Bobo. Ever-more distracted, Mimi forages deeper into the woods surrounding the village and one day comes face to face with a huge wolf…

For small woodland creatures like her and Bobo, these giant predators are a constant terror, but this one is different. His name is Ergot and he is a dedicated follower of Holy Venus. In Mimi he sees not lunch, but a fellow congregant. Before long she is invited to join his pack and share knowledge. Hungry for answers – and new experiences – the little artisan slowly falls under Ergot’s sway, and her life changes forever…

Act II ‘The Den’ was included in Best American Comics 2015 and reveals how life has treated Mimi since Bobo turned into an abusive controlling dick before she moved in with the wolves. Ergot and his mate Ivy have been sharing history and doctrine with her, but other than her former lover, Mimi still maintains contact with her other friends in Hilly City. That circle expands when Ceres and Cato take in wandering musician Kiko, and all but implodes when Mimi finally introduces them all to Ergot. Some prejudices are hardwired and cannot be placated or ameliorated…

Life becomes even more bewildering after meeting other wolfpacks. Cobalt, Copper and Opal are friendly enough – although they have unspoken problems with Ergot – but night-dark Nero and Galena live up to every scary stereotype city folk hold dear… and they seem to have an unsettling, unspecified interest in Mimi.

Events take a dark turn in Act III ‘The Howl’ after the revelation that constantly-observing Severine has a foreboding connection to the Holy Venus and is gradually enacting a complex plan. Mimi, however, has been fully inducted into the pack, but is blithely unaware that she is a highly desirable pawn in plans between rival groups who act more like cult families than simple kin. When Nero approaches her, Mimi is so terrified that she flees back to her city friends, but quickly returns to the lupine lair and agrees to attend a large gathering of packs.

… And in the unnoticed background, Kiko quietly observes all…

Joining the Howl is a huge mistake. Nero attacks Mimi and gives her to the Holy Venus as an offering and – although it’s possibly an induced hallucination – in the aftermath allegiances amongst the smaller packs are now twisted and shifted. When Ergot reverts to his true nature, the Goddess makes her move and Mimi comes into her true power…

One common notion of Paradises, Edens and Utopias is that they are always under imminent threat of ending. Life in the allegorical Hilly City and evergreen woods is a rural/small town ideal, but it’s never portrayed as immutable and stable. Amidst the cunning social echoes of Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons – as plain and simple rustic folk eke out a hard but generally rewarding life – comes an implicit awareness that things beyond the group are always disrupting and potentially harmful. Dissent is bad, change is bad, and we trust only ourselves are proven truisms, but they don’t mean a thing if the society harbours – and hinders – a rebel who needs to find their true self…

Bewitching and enticing, this magical mystery tour of self-discovery will charm and reward readers, so why not start your own quest for knowledge by joining this pack?
© Alabaster Pizzo. All rights reserved.

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Jinx volume 1


By J. Torres, Rick Burchett & Terry Austin (Archie Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-93697-500-6 (HC/Digital edition) 978-1-87979-491-7 (PB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.

Despite tremendous advances in the last couple of decades, for most people, when we say comic books, thoughts STILL either turn to outrageously buff men and women in garish tights or leather hitting each other and lobbing cars about, or stark, nihilistic crime, horror or science fiction sagas aimed at an extremely mature and sophisticated readership of already-confirmed fans. For mainstream American comics that remains the norm. Over the years though (and throughout the rest of the world long ago), other forms and genres continue to wax and wane.

One US company steadfastly that held its ground against the tide for decades – supported by a thriving spin-off TV and movie franchise – was a teen-comedy powerhouse which created a genre through the exploits of carrot-topped Archie Andrews and the two girls he could never choose between – Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. For so many years, other companies largely ignored the fact that girls read comics too and, in their slavish pursuit of the spandex dollar, lost half their potential audience. Girls simply found other ways to amuse themselves until, in the 1990s, the rise of manga painfully proved to comics publishers what Archie Comics had always known.

Ever since that pivotal moment Editors have attempted to recapture that vast missing market: creating many worthy titles and even entire imprints dedicated to material for teen/young adult audiences (since not all boys thrive on a steady diet of cosmic punch-ups and vengeful vigilantes) which had embraced European classics like Tintin and Asterix, manga material, momentous comics epics like Maus and Persepolis or abundant and prolific prose serials which produced a never-ending wave of passionate fans for everything from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to Twilight to The Hunger Games.

Archie thrived by never abandoning its female readership and by constant reinvention of its core characters, seamlessly adapting to the changing world outside its bright, flimsy (or digitally unbreakable) pages: shamelessly co-opting pop music, youth culture and fashion trends into its infallible mix of slapstick and romance. Each and every social revolution has been painlessly assimilated into the mix (the company has managed to confront a number of major issues affecting the young in a manner both even-handed and tasteful over the years), and the constant addition of timely characters such as African-American Chuck and his girlfriend Nancy, fashion-diva Ginger, Hispanic couple Frankie & Maria and a host of others – like over-privileged home-wrecker-in-waiting Cheryl Blossom – all contributed to a broad and refreshingly broad-minded scenario. They also lead in non-sensationalised interracial romances, and in 2010 Archie jumped the final hurdle for a family-entertainment medium with the rapturously well-received introduction of Kevin Keller; an openly gay and proud young man who was a clear-headed advocate capably tackling and dismantling the last major taboo in mainstream kids’ comics.

Where once cheap, prolific and ubiquitous, comics magazines in the 21st century are extremely cost-intensive and manufactured for a highly specific – but dwindling – niche market. Moreover the improbably beguiling and bombastic genres that originally fed and nurtured comic books were increasingly being supplanted by TV, movies and assorted interactive games media.

Happily, old-school prose publishers and the graphic novel industry have different business models and more sustainable long-term goals, so the magazine makers’ surrender has been turned into a burgeoning victory, as solid and reassuringly sturdy Comics-as-Books still buck the slowly perishing pamphlet/papers trend. Publishers like Archie…

Back then Jinx was another barely-noticed landmark which saw one of the company’s venerable and long-lived child-stars given a stunning makeover and refit courtesy of a multi award-winning creative team. Writer J. Torres (Teen Titans Go!, Alison Dare, Degrassi: the Next Generation, Days Like This, Lola – a Ghost Story and others) in conjunction with celebrated artists Rick Burchett (Batman Adventures, American Flagg!, Blackhawk, Black Hood) & Terry Austin (X-Men, Superman, Batman, Cloak and Dagger) are responsible for turning adorable but venerable 1950’s 6-year old tomboy Li’l Jinx into a genuine icon of, if not role-model for, modern teenaged girls in a style and manner at once astonishingly accessible and classically captivating.

If you qualify as an Ancient One like me, you might be familiar with precocious, feisty Li’l Jinx who debuted in Pep Comics #62 (cover-dated July 1947). Created by Joe Edwards, she debuted as the publisher began dropping superheroes such as The Shield and Black Hood to specialise in kid-friendly humour features. Over the coming decades she appeared in her own title, as well as Li’l Jinx Giant Laugh-Out and assorted anthologies including Pep and Archie Giant Series Magazine. Like auteur Edwards’ own son, her birthday was on Halloween and the writer/artist put much of himself into the strip. A boisterous, basically decent, sports-loving, mischievous tyke (in the manner of our Minnie the Minx), when not romping, cavorting and tussling with other kid pals Gigi, Greg, Charley Hawse, Russ, Roz and Mort the Worry Wart, Jinx almost exclusively interacted with her long-suffering dad Hap Holliday.

Mother was seldom seen. The kid’s Christian name is lost to history: apparently so screamingly embarrassing in-world that to utter it was to invite battered ear drums and mangled limbs…

Li’l Jinx faded away gradually during the 1980s as fashionista-teenagers and Mutant Turtles supplanted pesky kid characters in Archie’s increasingly “young adult” oriented stable. However, Jinx Holliday was revived and given a thorough 21st century upgrade for a new serial in Life With Archie (#7-11, March-June 2011): a growing girl just starting big school. The former tomboy hadn’t lost all her rough edges though…

This initial volume collects the serialised story of her beginning the inescapable if deplorable process of becoming responsible – with all the scary changes that entails. After a handy ‘Cast of Jinx’ page, the dramatic comedy opens with 4-part tale ‘Little Jinx Grows up’ – as serialised in anthology title Life With Archie, with the nervous 14-year old Californian kid starting over at Rose Valley High School where she immediately falls foul of draconian martinet Principal Mr. Vernon. At least many of her oldest friends are starting too, but they all seem so changed and grown up since summer vacation…

As all attendees settle in, Jinx is oblivious to the fact that more than one of the boys she used to wrestle and play football with now considers – and treats – her very differently. She’s just starting to hate the place and its stupid rules when Greg points out the final straw: Freshman Baseball – in fact all her favourite sports – are for boys only. Former child model Gigi is typically smug about it, hinting again that it’s time Jinx began acting like a girl, but that only provokes the incensed and outraged tomboy to break another rule…

Everybody is talking about Jinx after she most publicly signs up for Football Tryouts, and neither a barracking from Mr. Vernon or some heavy-handed bullying of Greg by the senior Football squad can change her mind.

The Principal thinks he has the final word after making Jinx take a permission slip home to her dad, but after Hap Holliday absolutely refuses to let his little girl get crippled by teenaged Neanderthals, Jinx simple forges his signature…

Tryouts are a disaster, but at least Greg is honestly trying to help her. Surly Charley, however, delivers a tackle that results in her being stretchered off, and when dad is called to school all hell breaks loose. While she’s grounded and recovering, BFF Roz starts dropping hints about Greg and romance, promptly going into snoopy overdrive when a mystery caller leaves a large bouquet of flowers…

For the first time Jinx realises High School is just one big stew of frustrated hormones which only add to her worries. So preoccupied is she that, when Greg timidly asks her to a dance, she doesn’t realise what he’s saying and shoots him down without even noticing. The mystery flower-sender – covertly watching – does, however, and seethes…

Flustered, confused and determined to end the turmoil in her head, Jinx ambushes and pre-emptively kisses Greg, but the result is something neither of them nor their secret stalker expected…

The grand gesture completely destabilises Jinx who goes into a spiral of angry depression and tetchy acting-up. Baffled Hap is hopeless to cope, and – with Halloween approaching – throws himself into organising her birthday costume party: a tradition they’ve enjoyed since she was a toddler. He has no idea how much his little girl has changed and that the prospect of a party sounds like torture to her. And thus the scene is set for a showdown nobody will ever forget…

All dramatic foreboding aside, this clever, warm tale ends well and promises much more for the future. Smart, witty and intoxicatingly engaging, Jinx is a superb example of what can be accomplished in comics if you’re prepared to portray modern kids on their terms and address their issues and concerns.

Without ever resorting to overblown soap melodrama or angst-ridden teen clichés, Torres delivers a believable cast of young friends who aren’t stupid or selfish, but simply seeking to find their own tentative ways to maturity. The art by Burchett & Austin is semi-realistic and astoundingly effective.

This terrific turbulent tome includes bonus features such as a ‘Football Pinup’, J. Torres’ thoughts and commentary on the story as described in ‘The Voice of Jinx’ plus a fascinating, picture-packed peek behind the scenes in ‘The Concept Art of Jinx’. More production secrets are revealed by Editor Suzannah Rowntree, describing the project’s conception and creation in ‘The Story of Teen Jinx’, and there’s even a smart selection of one-page Short Comics treats to wrap up the fun.

‘Fitting In’, ‘It’s Complicated’, ‘Frenemy of the State’, ‘The Dating Game’ and ‘Chat Fight’ combine to prove that although they might be growing up, the cast are still kids at heart…

Compellingly funny, gently heart-warming and totally absorbingly, this book will resonate with kids and parents, offering genuine human interactions rather than repetitively manufactured atom-powered fistfights to hold your attention. It especially gives women a solid reason to give comics another try.

Sheer exuberant fun; perfectly crafted and still utterly irresistible nearly a generation later…
© 2012 Archie Comics Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Maids


By Katie Skelly (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-68396-368-4 (HB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic and literary effect.

Illustrator Katie Skelly hails from Brooklyn by way of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and caught the comics bug early, thanks to her newsstand owner dad. Her Barbarella inspired series Nurse, Nurse began after graduating from Syracuse University with a BA in Art History and becoming a postgrad at City College of New York. Thanks to her inquisitive insights, striking art style and potent narrative voice, Skelly has been the subject of many gallery shows and is a star on the global lecture circuit. She has been agonisingly quiet of late but hopefully there are more wonders in store (Sorry! No Pressure!)

Her first graphic novel – again inspired by Gallic trailblazer Jean-Claude Forrest but also with seductive scents and flavours of horror-meister director Dario Argento – was My Pretty Vampire (2017), supplemented by latter collections Operation Margarine and The Agency. All her works ask uncomfortable questions about the role and (permissible) position of women in society, as seen through exploitation genres of mass entertainment, and that’s never been more effectively explored than in this “semi-autobiographical” tome recounting the true-crime story of the Papin sisters.

History says that on February 2, 1933, former convent girls Christine and Léa (working as maids for the wealthy Lancelin family in Le Mans) bludgeoned and stabbed to death Madame Léonie and her daughter Genevieve. The case was manifestly open & shut, but became a Cause Celebre in France following reports of the killers’ early lives and years of service and physical abuse becoming public. Intellectuals championed the Papin sisters and the case was cited as a perfect example of the dangers of inequality and privilege…

In this graphic re-evaluation, Skelly brings her own incisive interpretation to the case, and it’s a little gem that you will find hard to put down and impossible to forget…

Verdict? Read this book.
© 2020 Katie Skelly. This edition © 2020 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

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High Soft Lisp


By Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-318-7 (TPB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect.

Please pay attention: this book contains stories and images of an adult nature, specifically designed for adult consumption, employing the kind of coarse, vulgar language most kids are fluent in by the age of ten. If reading about such things is likely to offend you, please stop now and go away. Tomorrow I’ll write about something with violence and explosions, so come back then.

In addition to being part of the graphic and literary revolution that is Love and Rockets (where his astonishingly compulsive tales of Palomar and the later stories of those characters collected as Luba gained such critical acclaim), Gilbert Hernandez has produced compelling stand-alone tales such as Sloth, Grip and Girl Crazy. They are all marked by his bold, simplified line artwork and a mature, sensitive use of the literary techniques of Magical Realist writers Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez: techniques which he has added to and made his own.

Love and Rockets is an anthology comics publication featuring slick, intriguing, sci fi-ish larks, heart-warming, terrifying, gut-wrenching soap-opera fantasy and bold experimental comic narratives that pretty much defy classification. The astounding Hernandez Bros still captivate with incredible stories that sample a thousand influences conceptual and actual – everything from Archie Comics and alternative music to German Expressionism and luchadores.

Palomar was the conceptual and cultural playground “Beto” devised for extended serial Heartbreak Soup: a dirt-poor Latin-American village with a vibrant, funny and fantastically quotidian cast. Everything from life death, adultery, magic, serial killing and especially gossip could happen in Palomar’s meta-fictional environs – and did – as the artist explored his own post-punk influences: comics, music, drugs, comics, strong women, gangs, sex, family and comics, and all in a style somehow informed by everything from Tarzan comics to Saturday morning cartoons and The Lucy Show.

Happily, Beto often returns to Palomar, frequently for new tales involving the formidable matriarch Luba, who ran the village’s bath house, acted as Mayor (and sometimes police chief) as well as adding regularly to the general population. Her children, brought up with no acknowledged fathers in sight or ever looked for, are Maricela, Guadalupe, Doralis, Casimira, Socorro, Joselito and Concepcion.

Luba eventually migrated to the USA and reunited with her half-sisters Petra and – the star of this volume – Rosalba “Fritz” Martinez. This collection was compiled from assorted material that first appeared in Love and Rockets volume II and Luba’s Comics and Stories, with new pages and many others redrawn and rewritten.

Fritz is a terrifyingly complex creature. She is a psychiatrist and therapist, former B-Movie actress, occasional belly dancer, persistent drunk and ardent gun-fetishist, as well as a sexually aggressive and manipulative serial spouse. Beautiful, enticingly damaged, with a possibly-intentional and affected speech impediment, she sashays from crisis to triumph and back again.

This moving, shocking, funny chronicle uses the rambling recollections of one of her past husbands – sleazy motivational speaker Mark Herrera – to review her life from High School punkette outsider through her various career and family ups and downs…

Under the umbrella title of ‘Dumb Solitaire’, what purports to be the memoir of Senor Herrera reveals in scathing depth the troubled life of a woman he just cannot stay away from in an uncompromising and sexually explicit “documentary” which pulls no punches, makes no judgements and yet still manages to come off as a feel-good tale.

High Soft Lisp is the most intriguing depiction of feminine power and behaviour since Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – and probably just as troubling and controversial – with the added advantage of intoxicating drawing adding shades of meaning mere text cannot impart.

Extremely funny and powerfully moving, remarkable and unmissable: no fan of the medium, student of humanity or lover of life in the raw should deprive themselves of this treat.
© 2010 Gilbert Hernandez. All Rights Reserved.

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Lucky Luke Volume 8 Calamity Jane


By Morris & Goscinny, translated by Pablo Vela (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-905460-25-0 (Album PB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Doughty, dashing and dependable cowboy “good guy” Lucky Luke is a rangy, implacably even-tempered do-gooder able to “draw faster than his own shadow”. He amiably ambles around the mythic Old West, having light-hearted adventures on his petulant and stingingly sarcastic wonder-horse Jolly Jumper. Over nine decades, his exploits have made him one of the top-ranking comic characters in the world, generating nearly 90 individual albums and spin-off series like Kid Lucky and Ran-Tan-Plan, with sales totalling upwards of 300 million in 30 languages. That renown has translated into a mountain of merchandise, toys, games, animated cartoons, TV shows and live-action movies and even commemorative exhibitions. No theme park yet, but you never know…

The brainchild of Belgian animator, illustrator and cartoonist Maurice de Bévère (AKA “Morris”), Lucky only truly expanded to global dominance via his 45-volume collaboration with superstar scripter René Goscinny (from Des rails sur la Prairie/Rails on the Prairie beginning August 25th 1955 to La Ballade des Dalton et autres histoires/The Ballad Of The Daltons And Other Stories in 1986).

On Goscinny’s death, Morris worked alone again and with others, inspiring a passel of legacy creators including Achdé & Laurent Gerra, Benacquista & Pennac, Xavier Fauche, Jean Léturgie, Jacques Pessis and more, all taking their own shots at the affable lone rider. Morris soldiered on both singly and with these successors before his passing in 2001, having drawn fully 70 adventures, plus numerous sidebar and spin-off sagebrush sagas.

Our taciturn trailblazer’s tales draw on western history as much as movie mythology and regularly interacts with historical and legendary figures as well as even odder fictional folk in tales drawn from key themes of classic cowboy films – as well as some uniquely European notions, and interpretations. As previously hinted, the sagebrush star is not averse to being a figure of political change and Weapon of Mass Satire… like this one…

Lucky Luke is a rangy, good-natured, lightning-fast quick-draw cowboy at home in any crisis; and generally unflappable. He’s probably the most popular Western star in the world today, but occasionally he meets someone even more confident than he.

First published continentally in 1967, Calamity Jane was the 30th European album and Goscinny’s 21st collaboration with Morris. It’s one of the team’s better tales, blending historical personages with the wandering hero’s action-comedy exploits and as such it’s a slice of Horrible Histories-tinged Americana you won’t want to miss. It all begins with our hero taking a welcome bath in a quiet river, only to be ambushed by Apaches spoiling for a fight. Their murderous plans are ruined by a bombastic lone rider who explosively drives off the raiders in a hail of gunfire before stopping to laugh at the embarrassed Luke. His cool, confidant rescuer is tough, bellicose, foul-mouthed, tobacco-chewing and infamous: born Martha Jane Cannery, apparently most folk just call her Calamity Jane…

She’s becomes more amenable after learning who Luke is, and, over coffee and a scratch meal, mutual respect develops into real friendship. Recounting her (remarkably well-researched) history, Cannery learns in return why Luke is in the region: someone has been supplying the Indians with guns just like the ones that almost killed him earlier…

Keen to help, Calamity joins Lucky and they ride into frontier town El Plomo and another minor crisis. The saloon prefers not to serve ladies – until Jane convinces them to change the policy in her own unique manner.

The glitzy dive is owned and operated by unctuous, sleazily sinister August Oyster who instantly suspects legendary lawman Luke is there because of his own underhand, under-the-counter activities…

As the cowboy heads off to check in with the sheriff, Calamity indulges in games of chance and skill with the sleazy Oyster and his hulking henchman Baby Sam, swiftly causing an upset by winning his hotel and saloon. Happily, Lucky is back on the scene by the time the grudging grouse has to officially hand over his money-making venture. Flushed with success, the new proprietor starts making changes and no man cares to object to the Calamity Jane Saloon and Tearoom (Reserved for Ladies). They’ll happily buy her beer and whiskey too, but not even at gunpoint will they eat her crumpets…

Oyster and Baby Sam, however, are utterly frantic. The saloon was crucial to their side business selling guns to renegades and they have to get it back before the increasingly impatient Chief Gomino takes matters into his own bloodstained hands. Still hunting for the gunrunners and pretty certain who’s behind the scheme, Luke is constantly distracted by petty acts of sabotage and even arson plaguing Calamity, but even as he finds his first piece of concrete proof, Oyster instigates his greatest distraction yet: organising the haughtily strait-laced Ladies Guild of El Plomo to close down the insalubrious saloon and run its new owner out of town…

Never daunted, Luke eventually pacifies and placates his tack-spitting pal down before deftly counterattacking by sending for an etiquette teacher to polish rough diamond Jane enough to be accepted by the ferociously militant guildswomen. It is the greatest challenge urbane, effete Professor Robert Gainsborough (an outrageously slick caricature of British actor David Niven) has undertaken. His eventual (but only partial) success leaves him a changed and broken man.

Stymied at every turn, increasingly panicked August Oyster is soon caught red-handed by the vigilant vigilante, but it’s too late. Frustrated and impatient, Gomino has opted to raid the town in broad daylight and seize his long-promised guns and ammo from their hiding place. The marauders have not, however, reckoned on the steely fighting prowess of Lucky Luke and the devil woman they superstitiously call “Bang! Bang!”…

Cleverly barbed, wickedly witty and spectacularly playing with key tropes of classic sagebrush sagas, this raucous romp is a grand escapade in the comedic tradition of Destry Rides Again, Cat Ballou and Support Your Local Sheriff, superbly executed by master storytellers as a wonderful introduction to a venerable genre for today’s kids who might well have missed the romantic allure of an all-pervasive Wild West that never was…

Also included is a photo pin-up of the actual Martha Jane Cannery in her gun-toting prime and, in case you’re worried, even though the interior art still has our hero drawin’ on his ol’ roll-ups, there’s very little chance of any reader craving a quick snout (or crumpets wild west style), but quite a strong likelihood that they’ll be addicted to Lucky Luke albums.
© Dargaud Editeur Paris 1971 by Goscinny & Morris. © Lucky Comics.

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The Terror of St Trinian’s and Other Drawings


By Ronald Searle with Geoffrey Willans, Timothy Shy & others (Penguin Modern Classics)
ISBN: 978-0-141-91285-1 (PB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Time for another Birthday Briefing as we exploit our month mostly mandated to mulling over women in and of comics – by celebrating the achievements of another old white guy. However this is truly one of the good ones and absolutely a true pioneer in male/female power relationships…

Britain has a fantastic and enviable history and tradition of excellence in the arts of graphic narrative and cartooning. Whether telling a complete story or simply making a point, much of the modern world’s most innovative, inspirational and trenchantly acerbic drawing has come from British pens powered by British hearts and minds.

If you’re quietly humming Rule Britannia or Jerusalem right now, or heavy breathing and fingering a flag, pack it in. This is not the tone we want. I’m just stating a few facts.

Ronald William Fordham Searle was one of a very gifted few (in modern times I’d number Ken Reid, Leo Baxendale, Murray Ball and Hunt Emerson among them) who can actually draw funny lines. No matter how little or how much they need to say, they can imbue the merest blot or scratch of ink with character, intent and wicked, wicked will.

Born in Cambridge on March 3rd 1920, Searle studied at Cambridge School of Art before enlisting in the Royal Engineers when WWII broke out. When he was captured by the Japanese in 1942 he ended up in the infamous Changi Prison. The second St Trinian’s cartoon was drawn in that hell-hole in 1944 and it survived – along with his incredible war sketches – to see print once peace broke out. Searle was a slave-worker on the Siam-Burma Railroad (a story for another time and place) and risked his life daily both by making pictures and by keeping them.

He became a jobbing freelance cartoonist when he got home, acerbically detailing British life. Perhaps that why he moved to France in 1961 and became a globe-girdling citizen of the wider world. By the 1980s he was established – everywhere but here – as not only a cartoonist and satirist but as a film-maker, sculptor, designer, travel-writer and crafter of fascinating reportage. This man was a capital “A” artist in the manner of Picasso or Hockney and,  Scarfe and Steadman notwithstanding, he was the last great British commentator to use cartooning and caricature as weapons of social change in the caustic manner of his heroes Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank and the rest.

This magnificent volume includes selections from assorted previous collections and includes political illustration, social commentary, arcanely mordant whimsy and some of the most surreal, sardonic and grotesque funny pictures of the 20th century. I won’t spend too much time on his other achievements as his work should be seen and his thoughts and opinions should be understood in his chosen language: Art. At least, he still has enough fans to fill the internet with all the information you could need, so go search-engining after you read this if you wish. You’ll probably be offered a digital copy of this archive there. Do yourself a big favour and buy it…

Why his creations are so under-appreciated I do not know. Why this book is physically out of print: ditto. That he will remain a relative unknown despite the clutch of movies about his St Trinian’s girls… Not if I can help it…

Anyone who considers themselves a devotee of the arts of graphic narrative should know of Searle’s work, even if not necessarily love – although how could you not? Just be aware of the tremendous debt we all owe to his vision, dedication and gifts.

This compilation traces the rise of his star following his POW years. Post-war, his mordantly funny cartoons appeared in venues such as Punch, Lilliput and The Sunday Express, and in hugely successful collections like Hurrah for St. Trinian’s!, The Female Approach, Back to the Slaughterhouse, The St. Trinian’s Story, Which Way Did He Go?,Pardong m’sieur, In Perspective and The Non Sexist Dictionary.

Searle’s work has influenced an uncountable number of other cartoonists too. His unique visualisation and darkly comic satirical cynicism in the St. Trinian’s drawings as well as his utterly captivating vision of boarding school life as embodied in the classically grotesque Nigel Molesworth quartet: influencing generations of children and adults, and even playing its part in shaping our modern national character and language.

And have I mentioned yet that his drawings are really, really funny?

This superb collection of monochrome cartoons samples choice cuts from a number of his book collections, all delivered with stunning absurdist candour and the peculiarly tragic passive panic and understated warmth that only Searle could instil with his seemingly wild yet clearly-considered linework.

Fronted by an impassioned Introduction from fan and proper grown up journalist/columnist Nicholas Lezard, this paperback and digital collection offers a sweet taste of dark design in haunting and hilarious images culled from a number of sources, opening (un)naturally with macabre treats from St Trinian’s: blending the comforting traditional bonhomie of a girl’s boarding school with the accoutrements of a sex dungeon, the atavists of a charnel house and the fragrant atmosphere of The Somme two days after all the shooting stopped.

Having proved that for some crime Does pay, focus shifts to Merry England, etc., where class, toil, occupations, hobbies, and the ardours of life are ferociously scrutinised before diverting into mirthful metaphysics with a damning disembodied judge dubbed The Hand of Authority…

More satirical body-blows from Souls in Torment lead delightfully to a montage of misspelled madcap moments of terror-tinged nostalgia as Molesworth extracts snippets of sheer genius from the books he co-created with Geoffrey Willans for Punch and which were subsequently released to enormous success as Down With Skool!, How to be Topp!, Whizz For Atomms! and Back in the Jug Agane.

Having fully gripped our last dose of ghastly goblin-esque girl power and brutal boy-moulding, our review of a master of graphic assassination moves on the far less solid ground of politics and satire. As I said previously, Searle was a devotee of satirist William Hogarth and in 1956 adapted the old master’s series of condemnatory cartoons (painted in 1732-34 and released as staggeringly popular engraved prints in 1735) to modern usage and characterisation. Included here in its entirety to conclude our fun, The Rake’s Progress follows the rise and fall of a number of contemporary figures – The Athlete, The Girlfriend, The Soldier, The Poet, The Trade Union Leader, The Actor, The Painter (he based this one on himself), The Don (English academic, not an American gangster but such confusion is easy to understand), The Dramatic Critic, The Doctor, The MP, The Clergyman, The Novelist, The Humourist, The Master of Foxhounds and The Great Lover – with all the excoriating venom and wit you’d expect from a master of people-watching…

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant stuff! See for yourself, whatever side of the battle lines you cower behind.
© 1948, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1959 by Ronald Searle.
This selection © Ronald Searle 2000, 2006. Introduction © Nicholas Lezard, 2000. All rights reserved.

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Veils


By Pat McGreal, Stephen John Phillips, José Villarrubia & Rebecca Guay (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-355-1 (HB): 978-1-56389-561-6 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect.

Although at first glance more exercise than exposition, this undemanding and inarguably prurient tale of the Seductive East is also a very readable exercise in genre fiction. Victorian gentlewoman Vivian Pearse-Packard is late in marrying, and her eventual “better half” is a ne’er-do-well wastrel. Now her father-in-law has brought them with him as he resumes his post as British Consul to a Far Eastern Sultanate.

The new and exotic land is shocking to Vivian, and husband Harry remains a possessive and loveless beast, but her life changes when a visit to the Sultan’s seraglio leads to a friendship with one of the ruler’s odalisques. Vivian’s need for companionship initially draws her into the luxuriously seductive world but soon she becomes subtly aware of a hidden agenda among some of the women. Specifically, she is told the ancient tale of Rosalind, a white woman stolen from her father and given to a Sultan, only to rise to the second most powerful position in the land.

How the fable impacts on the increasingly desperate and repressed Englishwoman, and the choices she is subsequently compelled to make in her own life, provide a predictable but enjoyable spin on a most clichéd plot. Moreover, the combination of Phillips stagy yet compelling photography, augmented by Villarrubia’s digital enhancement, imbues the tale with a static theatricality verging on abstraction in places. Rebecca Guay provides classic pen-&-watercolour art for those sections involving Rosalind’s story, imparting the strangest inversion as her contribution is warm, sensitive, deeply alive and approachable, in contrast to the cold, distant and passionless fumetti walling it all in.

All that aside, this is a worthy effort to escape to traditional boundaries of our medium and serves well as a bridge to the wider public.
© 2001 Pat McGreal, Stephen John Phillips & Rebecca Guay. All Rights Reserved.

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Kill My Mother


By Jules Feiffer (Liveright/W.W. Norton)
ISBN: 978-0-87140-314-8 (HB/Digital edition)

This book includes some Discriminatory Content included for comedic and dramatic effect.

After years as cartoonist, illustrator, pundit and educator, at age 85 Jules Feiffer returned to his primary role of comics storyteller with an intense, sublimely gripping and innovative graphic novel. Spanning 10 turbulent years, Kill My Mother is a supremely classy, passionately heartfelt tribute to Film Noir, Hollywood Babylon, sexual politics and family secrets, blending trappings of Dashiell Hammett with the tone, pacing and spark of Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder to tell an extended story of love, murder, jealousy and revenge.

It all begins in ‘Bay City Blues’. It’s 1933 and times are tough all over. At 15-years old, Annie Hannigan is cutting up, constantly leading poor, gullible sap Artie Folsom into trouble, whilst the mother she despises works all hours for dissolute, dipsomaniac, exceedingly cheap private investigator Neil Hammond. The odd arrangement developed after the shamus agreed to investigate the murder of Elsie Hannigan’s husband, whom he constantly refers to as the wrong sort of honest cop. Events take a dark turn when stylish, exceedingly tall maneater Mae Longo walks in, offering outrageous sums if the gumshoe can track down a certain someone. The photo she gives Hammond shows a woman remarkably similar to his coolly aloof new client…

Eddie “the Dancing Master” Longo is a rising star of the fight game who usually employs shady but capable gorilla Tiny Tim Gaffney to handle the more unsavoury problems in his life but Neil claims to know just how to handle him. In the course of her mean-spirited, casual rebellions, Annie gets poor Artie into real trouble when a shoplifting binge results in pursuit by a store detective far faster than he looks. A very nasty beating is only avoided when an exceptionally tall derelict in an alley lays out the private cop with her carefully concealed baseball bat. The rattled teen takes the tramp back to the dump of an apartment and cleans her up, even as Elsie – very much against her will and better judgement – is dragged by soused-as-ever Neil to the Big Fight to see the Dancing Master.

The escapade almost costs her everything…

Her drunken boss’ plan to draw his tall target out of the woodwork also involves poor Elsie and leads to a lot of pain, trouble and strife, whilst Hammond, clearly a dipsomaniac with a death wish, starts dogging mysterious client Mae instead of doing the job he was hired for.

The result is a murder unsolved and unexplained for a decade…

The concluding half of the story resumes in 1943 with ‘Hooray for Hollywood’ as we return to our cast and find them all greatly advanced. Goonish Artie is a Captain of Marines, successfully battling the Japanese in the Green Hell of the Pacific whilst Annie Hannigan is a writer and media darling. Her sensational hit comedy “Shut Up, Artie” is the most popular radio show in America and is broadcast wherever Yanks are posted. Eddie Longo made the transition to B-Movie star and Ellen, when not babysitting obstreperous grandson Sammy, is Executive Vice President of Pinnacle Studios in charge of Image Security and Maintenance. The scary indigent little Annie met in an alley has also cleaned up and moved on. Now she sings torch songs in the Reno Roost as the enigmatic Lady Veil…

Eddy hates his life. The former hard-man boxer is trapped as a song-&-dance hoofer in big, morale-boosting musicals but dreams of major stardom like glamorous He-Man Hugh Patton or even an Academy Award… but is typecast and more under the thumb of the formidable Mae than ever.

The fraught status quo changes after Annie meets the dashing Patton at the Hollywood Canteen, but her romantic elation is crushed soon after, when the sponsors call her in to discuss a crisis. A genuine war hero is suing the show, claiming his life is being made a mockery. Unless she can fix things up with her old pal Artie, the show and her career are over…

Eddie is also near breaking point and Mae calls in thuggish Gaffney as a minder. Events begin to spiral to a shocking conclusion when Longo joins a USO tour to the war-torn Pacific Islands. Patton is going too, and Annie takes the opportunity to join him, as does her mother in the role of “image maintainer”…

The first port of call is Tarawa; the hellhole where Captain Arthur Folsom is almost single-handedly repulsing the Jap advance. On the island, Artie is overseeing the building of a stage for the visiting stars whilst marvelling at the stupidity of putting on a show in a battleground still hotly contested by enemy forces. In the air above him, Ellen has a sharp confrontation with Mae Longo and “bodyguard” Gaffney. The events of ten years ago are still painfully fresh in every participant’s mind. By the time all the players debark on the island, a devious and supposedly foolproof plan to commit another perfect murder has been hatched, using the Japanese as ideal scapegoats. However, an intimate killing is far harder than mass slaughter and the scheme soon starts to unravel…

Complex, beguiling, smartly sophisticated, devastatingly witty and peppered with shockingly casual violence (as every noir thriller must be) this spectacular yarn is packed with twists and surprises, where nobody tells the truth and no one is playing on the side of the angels.

A masterpiece of cool suspense, mature ingenuity and graphic dexterity, Kill My Mother was winner of the Eisner Prize for Best New Graphic Album, took the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for Best Graphic Novel 2014 and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by Vanity Fair, Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal. It remains a timeless, hearty slice of bravura storytelling that gets better with every re-reading and a fitting tribute to the talents of one of graphic narrative storytelling’s greatest masters. If you love crime yarns, comic tales, nostalgia and having your intelligence respected, this is the book for you.
© 2014 Liveright Publishing Corporation.