Category: Graphic Autobiography

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Tosh’s Island

Version 1.0.0

By Linda Sargent, Joe Brady & Leo Marcell, adapted by Kate Brown (David Fickling Books)
ISBN: 978-1-78845-333-2 (Digest HB)

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Powerful, Moving and Memorable… 9/10

British comics’ triumph The Phoenix has been generating fun, fantasy and wild adventure for kids since 2012, scoring some impressive results – such as Bunny Vs Monkey, Mega Robo Bros and No Country – and generally lifting the standards of comics literature and quality of graphic novels for children.

Now, thanks to writers Linda Sargent (drawing on her own childhood experiences) & Joe Brady, and illustrator Leo Marcell, the comic periodical has developed a far more traditional kind of children’s drama: one that should rank beside such potent “real-world” fantasies as A Dog So Small, The Family from One End Street or The Secret Garden.

Tosh’s Island is set in bucolic Kent hops country in the era between the end of rationing and advent of mobile phones, and follows the decline and resurgence of an indomitable spirit coming to terms with the cruellest and most unjust of circumstances.

It begins as Tosh is getting ready for secondary school: helping dad ready the hops and prepare the Oast House for Autumn and having him tell again the story of her being The Gooseberry Girl found under a bush. It’s much better than the ordinary story of how they adopted her. Tosh is fit and active and great at rounders, loves her bike, climbing with best friend Millie, and making up fantastic tales – especially about mermaids…

And suddenly, one afternoon it all starts to go wrong.

Slowly pain visits her, increasingly wracking her body and sucking all the energy out of her. The doctor thinks it’s nothing, but soon Tosh is constantly, chronically suffering. Not wanting to make a fuss, she soldiers on, but soon, it’s impossible to keep her suffering – and fears – secret. As big school starts, she finds everything harder, and old and new friends soon start talking about and taunting the troublesome attention-seeker.

Thankfully, her parents believe her, moving heaven and earth to get to the bottom of the mystery. There’s always hope of a recovery or at least end to pain, and treats like a visit to the beach. Here she meets a lonely French boy as forlorn as her – and as imaginative. Together they build a mind palace of refuge, an island for mermaids and shark rides and castles in the air. Corresponding with Louis will save Tosh’s sanity, but only after inadvertently causing her immense grief and embarrassment…

The mystery and misery continue until at last the right diagnosis and even treatment is found, but it certainly not all good news…

A forceful and evocative personal history of fortitude and resolve mesmerisingly clad in whimsy, charm and beguiling imagination, Tosh’s Island is a brilliant introduction to real world problems any kid can grasp and be moved by, in exactly the way books like Animal Farm, Tarka the Otter or Lord of the Flies negotiate the transition from sheltered child to understanding proto adult… and all in utterly entrancing pictures.

Do not miss this landmark tale.
Text © Linda Sargent & Joe Brady, 2024. Illustrations © Leo Marcell, 2024. All rights reserved.

Tosh’s Island will be published on October 10th 2024 and is available for pre-order now.

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Adrift on a Painted Sea


By Sue Bird and Tim Bird (Avery Hill Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-910395-82-0 (TPB)

A child – every child’s – late life obsession to understand their parents and find similarities and differences in the lives each generation has led. What we remember and how we frame such recollections afflicts all of us. It also becomes increasingly important as we get older, a truism that washes all through this elegiac and ruminatory collation where comics storyteller Tim Bird details his response to finding the lost (more actually forgotten and mis-recalled) paintings of his recently deceased mother Sue.

Contemporary found facts just don’t jibe with his own childhood memories and he cannot resist finding what the truth actually is…

What Tim irrefutably knows is that when not running a house, being a wife and rearing two kids, Sue Bird was a talented and compulsive artist, who from childhood created for the sheer joy of it. She loved the sea, shores and marine life, nature studies and still life painting. As a kid she even won competitions and her artworks toured in shows.

Or did they?

Mum created passionately and privately, and never tried to sell her work. After her death during the Covid pandemic, Tim uncovers some paintings and drawings – and a few scraps of newspapers squirreled away. Whilst still coming to terms with the awful restrictions that made her passing so cruel and unfair, he is increasingly gripped with his own passion: a hunger to know what’s what and what happened…

Using the recovered bounty of her dozens of paintings and by talking to anyone still alive who knew her, Tim reevaluates his own past and relationship with Sue Bird, using her artworks as markers and chapter posts for a new sort of artistic statement. Moreover, as he seeks to unravel and reconfigure his fudged and muddy impressions of their times together, other shared milestone moments re-emerge: Northumberland beaches no one else enjoyed, listening to the Shipping Forecast and just sharing a drive to make things…

Using his comics as a skeleton and her paintings as meat on those bones, Bird applies his reshaped consciousness to the past and as his quest brings him closer to his own young family, engineers those feelings and discoveries into a visual eulogy to her and the power of memory, loss, and – always and forever – family.
© Tim Bird 2024.

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Because Some Cannot Be Forgotten… 9/10

Adrift on a Painted Sea is published on 1st October 2024 and is available for pre-order now.

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750cc Down Lincoln Highway


By Bernard Chambaz & Barroux, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-245-8 (album TPB/Digital edition)

For such a relatively young country, there’s an astounding amount of vibrant – and largely self-perpetuating – mythology underpinning America. Cowboys, Indians, colonialism, Manifest Destiny, gangsterism, Hollywood, food, Rock ‘n’ Roll and even names and places have permeated the imagination of the world. This last even created its own sub-genre: tales of travel and introspection ranging from Kerouac’s On the Road to Thelma and Louise via the vast majority of “Buddy movies” ever made.

Somehow, such stories seem to particularly resonate with non-Americans. Scots, French and Italian consumers are especially partial to westerns, and Belgians adore period gangster tales set in the golden age of Los Angeles. I must admit that during my own times stateside there was always a little corner of my head that ticked off places I’d seen or heard of from films, TV or comics: Mann’s/Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Central Park, Daly Plaza, Empire State Building as well as uniquely American moments and activities – pretzel cart, bag of potato chips bigger than my head, bar fight, someone saying “yoo Brits…” – as I experienced them myself. That’s the true magic of modern legends.

It’s also the theme driving this beautiful travelogue depicting life imitating art…

Available in oversized (288 x 214 mm) paperback and digital formats, 750cc Down Lincoln Highway reveals how a French competitor in the New York Marathon takes a cathartic life detour after getting a “Dear John” text from his apparently no-longer Significant Other one hour before the start.

Understandably deflated, he hits a bar, discovers bourbon and strikes up a conversation with one of life’s great survivors…

Ed’s barfly philosophy hits home – as does his description and potted history of the Lincoln Highway – and before long our remarkably reliable narrator has hired a motorbike and opted to cross the USA along the historic route from East Coast to West…

Rendered in a dreamy, contemplative wash of greytones, his ride becomes a shopping list of transitory experiences confirming – and occasionally debunking – the fictive America inside his head and his preconceptions of the people who live there.

Putting concrete sounds, tastes, sights and smells to such exotic ports of call as Weehawken, Princeton, Trenton, Philadelphia, Gettysburg, Pittsburgh, Zulu, Fort Wayne, Chicago, Dekalb, Mississippi, Central City, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Eureka, Reno, Lake Tahoe, Berkeley and so many other places before reaching the highway’s end at Poteau Terminus, the once-broken rider regains his life’s equilibrium and gets on with the rest of his life, happy that the trip and anonymous people he met have rewarded him with fresh perspective and rekindled hope…

Written by award-winning novelist, poet and historian Bernard Chambaz (L’Arbre de vies, Kinopanorama) and backed up by an extensive map of the trip, garnished with suitable quotes from Abraham Lincoln, this is quite literally all about the journey, not the destination…

This beguiling excursion is realised by multimedia artist and illustrator Barroux (Where’s the Elephant?, In the Mouth of the Wolf), serving as a potent reminder of the power names and supposition can exert on our collective unconsciousness.

It’s also a superbly engaging, warmly inviting graphic meander to a mutual destination no armchair traveller should miss.
© 2018 URBAN COMICS, by Chambaz, Barroux. ©2020 NBM for the English translation Hearst Holdings Inc. All rights reserved.

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The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea – A Graphic Memoir of Modern Slavery


By Vannak Anan Prum, told to Ben & Jocelyn Pederick and translated by Lim Sophorn (Seven Stories Press)
ISBN: 978-1-6098-0602-6 (HB/Digital edition)

This book made me furiously angry, but that’s good because it was supposed to. So as we reel at contemporary news headlines from locales as diverse as Saudi Arabian construction sites to Scottish fishing boats and UK care homes let’s dedicate this International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition to ponder again how capitalism got us here and what we will do next…

Despite years of shocking scoops, excellent exposés and countless in-depth news reports, far too many first world citizens seem – or choose to be – blissfully unaware that human slavery still thrives.

In fact, the commercial practise of organised enforced and unpaid labour props up a vast number of businesses and industries, from migrants and homeless people used as domestic beasts of burden to gangs masquerading as service, telemarketing, construction or hospitality companies using shady contracts and extortion to man their enterprises. Young hopefuls are trafficked into a global sex market and entire village populations are captured or conned and compelled to till fields or man fishing boats for “entrepreneurs” no better than racketeers.

At the root of all this appalling exploitation and upheaval is one unchanging factor: a desperate need by the downtrodden to escape overwhelming poverty.

This breathtakingly low key, matter-of-fact tale is the testimony in cartoon form of Cambodian Vannak Anan Prum who went looking for work to pay for his pregnant wife’s medical care and was gone for years…

Bracketed by a fact-filled and frankly nightmare-inducing Foreword from activist and cartoon journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore (Unmarketable, Body Horror, Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking), an equally sobering Introduction by Minky Worden – Director of Global Initiatives for Human Rights Watch – and a laudatory appreciation and call to arms by Kevin Bales (Professor of Contemporary Slavery and Research Director at the Rights Lab: University of Nottingham) in his Afterword, a compelling human-scaled odyssey unfolds in these pages.

Rendered with the gently seductive warmth and deceptively comfortable lushness of a Ladybird early reader book, this saga of endurance and survival against the cruellest of fates begins with a ‘Prologue’ as a stranger enters a Cambodian village…

Vannak Anan Prum started life ‘Drawing in the Dirt’. He had been born the year the Vietnamese beat the Khmer Rouge, but his early life was still one of hardship, privation and family abuse. Barely more than a boy, he fled his home seeking ‘Adventure’, becoming first a soldier, then a monk and finally an artisan sculptor toiling in a workshop making tourist trinkets and statues. His constant hunt for work led him to farming where he met the girl who became ‘My Wife’. When she fell pregnant, he had to make more money to pay for her hospital care, so with village friend Rus Vannak followed a promising lead to Thailand and contacted ‘Moto & the Middleman’. After helping them in ‘Crossing the Border’ their new friends soon changed from chummy helpers to sinister guards…

Apparently, the great secret to successful slave-taking is convincing victims that the police, army and authorities are ruthless and will punish harshly undocumented illegals and economic migrants: constantly dangling hope of good pay and promises of eventual freedom to keep their dupes quiescent. For Vannak and Rus ‘The Writing on the Wall’ was a clear but anticlimactic moment and – after relatively painless incarceration – they were shipped onto facilities ship ‘The Took Tho’. This seedy vessel serviced a vast fleet of illegal fishing boats, pirating catches in other nations’ waters and manned by hundreds of men who only wanted to better themselves. Most never saw land again once they were taken…

One such was ‘The Old Man’ whose fate led to Vannak being transferred to fishing factory ship ‘The Took Oh’. Eventually, crushing routine took hold, only barely broken by what happens to ‘Rus’…

‘Life on the Boat’ ruled Vannak’s world and any number of candidates for ‘The Deadliest Job’ were gratefully handled before the new man’s status was slightly elevated. After he started idly tattooing himself with makeshift tools, his ‘Writing on the Skin’ led to the others wanting such decoration – and paying him for it. His artistic gifts were useless when the ship was chased by the Indonesian navy, resulting in ‘Fire at Sea’ and Vannak being traded to ‘The New Boat’…

Fresh horrors awaited there: murder, beatings and the shocking fate of ‘Two Guys’ from Thailand, but there were also more serene moments with ‘My Friend K’Nack’. Adding to alternating dire tedium and frantic hardship, ‘Storms at Sea’ and consequent becalmed periods made ‘Days Stretch Out’…

At last, after the craft unexpectedly neared land, a chance came for ‘Escape’. With Thai compatriot Chaya, Vannak chanced everything on ‘The Swim’ to an unknown jungle beach and kept going. Once again hope quickly gave way to despair. In ‘The Monkeys and the Man Waiting for Us’ an idyllic pause and aid of helpful locals brought the escapees to ‘Police and the Chinese Man’… who promptly sold them both to plantation owner ‘Crazy Boss’…

More months of slavery in what eventually turned out to be Malaysia followed, but again Vannak’s artistic skills proved invaluable and he made enough to obtain ‘The Phone’. Contact with the outside world made, he prepared for rescue, but when drunken partying dissolved into ‘The Fight’ Vannak and “co-worker” Theara were wounded by machetes and dumped into the custody of the local cops. At least they (grudgingly) got them to ‘Hospital’…

And that’s where the real injustices started piling up as the victims suffered ‘Yo-Yo Justice’. Although Theara was soon reclaimed by his family, illegal worker Vannak was arrested. However, in ‘Prison’ he was interviewed by German NGO worker Manfred Hornung who began the complex and convoluted process of freeing the abducted and enslaved artist.

Sadly, that took months, and was perpetually hampered by police interference and the revelation of just who – and how prestigious and influential – Crazy Boss was…

It was still a long, torturous ordeal before the LICADHO (Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights) could ferry the relieved and apprehensive Vannak ‘Home’ again…

This crushingly sedate, oppressively action-deprived story is an astounding and remarkable testament to sheer will-to-survive, but by no measure does it lack power, merit or moment. Life simply isn’t a 3-act summer blockbuster with exploding helicopters, sexy hotties and Mikado-esque just deserts doled out to the apparently endless chain of truly evil, corrupt bastards entrenched at every stage of this century’s slavery system, all with hands out and blind eyes turned to the plight of those they’re supposed to protect and serve.

In actual fact, the only thing they really fear is exposure, and that began once Vannak – still desperately seeking a means to earn a living – started drawing his five years a slave: awful life-changing experiences gathered in these strips. The comics were seen by filmmakers Ben & Jocelyn Pederick and one of the results and repercussions was this book…

As seen in ‘Epilogue’, there is more to come…

The almost incomprehensible story of a quietly indomitable man who turned survival into a waiting game and patience into his weapon, The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea is a book everyone should read and every exploiter should dread.
Text and images © 2018 Vannak Anan Prum. Foreword © 2018 Anne Elizabeth Moore. Introduction © 2018 Minky Worden. Afterword © 2018 Kevin Bales. All rights reserved.

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Self-Esteem and The End of the World


By Luke Healy (Faber)
ISBN: 978-0-571-37560-8 (HB)

Ireland’s multi-award-winning low-key iconoclast Luke Healy studied journalism at Dublin University and earned an MFA in Cartooning from the Center for Cartoon Studies (Vermont, USA). An occasional stand-up comedian, his previous cartoon works – such as Americana, Permanent Press and How to Survive in the North – have won prizes and acclaim, and he’s also done gallery shows in places like Manhattan’s Museum of Comics & Cartoon Art.

His aforementioned comics for VICE, The Nib, A24, Medium, Nobrow and Avery Hill are exceptionally good and, as I hinted, he apparently likes exposing himself to ridicule on stage. But not so much, these days.

By combining all that trauma, weltschmerz and experience into tales exploring basic big stuff like life, friends, and how to keep your head above emotional water, he has kept many of us wonderfully entertained and himself alive for a decade. Here and now, that self-excoriating journey manifests as bursts of small-scale prediction and prognostication. By looking inwards and backwards, Healy has unlocked a doorway to our probable mutual future…

As seen in prior books (like The Con Artists) our absolutely Unreliable Narrator is London-based, Irish, gay, formerly Catholic, clinically anxious and helplessly honest. He’s still undergoing treatment for his head problems and other self-diagnosed personal issues whilst perennially building pre-emptive stress for the next Big Bad Thing. Incisive, sentimental absurdist, pedestrian and casually surreal, the collective appointments with destiny are delivered in three acts each entitled ‘Luke Healy is…’ with the first preceded by tone-setting prelude ‘fig (i) Self (ish)’.

Here the aging worry-wort consults his treatment advisor and grudgingly accepts a new tactic to process feelings and responses. The first prophetic episode then sees him making ‘Plans’ as a moment of elation at a family gathering plunges him back down and confirms his gloomy assessment of everything after he attends twin brother Teddy’s engagement party and endures a major disappointment. Retreating if not exactly retrenching, Luke immerses himself in a tidal wave of self-help books and runs away to a hotel where he indulges in some unwise acts. And then Teddy tracks him down…

The narrative digresses for ‘Interlude (i) Luke brings a date back to his flat’ after which hilarious encounter we jump ahead five years to reveal ‘Luke Healy is…’ a paid writer scripting a work-training play for a major company. Sadly, devising ‘L’hotel du Murder’ as a whodunnit was a doomed proposition from the start.

The country is on viral lockdown again, Wye Valley’s Regional Hereford Gotel experiences an actual real murder the night before the premiere and with his Mam in the invited audience, Luke has to stage-manage rubbish players, his own stress, a deadly flood and the revelation that he’s subconsciously made the entire story all about him and his bosses and now faces inevitable exposure and humiliation. It never rains but it pours…

Another strange break comes with ‘Interlude (ii) Luke has a video conference with his former agents’ and he learns his books have been re-optioned. The pittance paid means the studio still aren’t making the film they’ve already “bagsied” – and so no one else can – but his reps are keen to sell something else. Surely he must have some old comics or small press stories they can push?

Another five years go by and ‘Luke Healy is…’ in Lefkada. The Greek island – like much of the planet – is mostly submerged now. Although officially working as a telemarketer at and from home, Luke has come to the expanded Aegean on a deeply personal mission. Soon he’s adopted by fellow traveller Beth: there to explore the unearthed archaeological detritus of the past.

Framed from the start in deceit, the jaunt ends painfully for all concerned and – after returning to England – ‘Interlude (iii) Luke receives a phone call’ which promises to change his life forever. Following another ‘fig (ii) Self (ish)’ moment, ‘Luke Healy is… OTMPOW’ finds the bewildered failed author and his Mam five years further on: whisked to Palm Springs (the new Hollywood ever since Los Angeles slipped beneath the seas) where a sleazy producer is turning Healy’s old comic about whale-watching into a mega blockbuster. It’s such a shame the cetaceans aren’t real and the filmmaker is hiding his secret agenda…

An ‘Epilogue’ details the sorry aftermath of all that and is accompanied by ‘appendix (ii) Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales’ which “reprints” the college mini comic notionally adapted into that ludicrous and conniving movie, with young teens in Reykjavik hanging out, having sex and making mistakes on an Icelandic whale-spotting boat: a terse and grittily witty romance I’d certainly watch…

It seems fittingly ironic that this wry and introspective examination of the fustercluck that has become the totality of All Human Endeavour is released on the day much of Britain goes to the polls to choose the minor nabobs who will mis-guide and mis-lead us until our next general election, but that’s really just a peculiar and coincidental facet of publishing schedules. There’s certainly nothing conspicuously covert or conspiratorial. Nope. Nu-uh. No sirree-bob. Read nothing into it, but please do read this book…
© Luke Healy, 2024. All rights reserved.

Self-Esteem and The End of the World is published today.

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Ruins (Paperback Edition)


By Peter Kuper (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-914224-18-8 (TPB/Digital edition)

Multi award-winning artist, storyteller, illustrator, educator and activist Peter Kuper was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1958, before the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio when he was six. Growing up there he (briefly) met iconic Underground Commix pioneer R. Crumb and at school befriended fellow comics fan Seth Tobocman (Disaster and Resistance: Comics and Landscapes for the 21st Century, War in the Neighborhood, You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive).

As they progressed through the school system together, Kuper & Tobocman caught the bug for self-publishing. They then attended Kent State University together. Upon graduation in 1979, both moved to New York and whilst studying at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and The Art Students League created – with painter Christof Kohlhofer – landmark political art/comics magazine World War 3 Illustrated. Separately and in conjunction, in comics, illustration and via art events, Kuper & Tobocman continued championing social causes, highlighting judicial and cultural inequities and spearheading the use of narrative art as a tool of activism.

Although a noted and true son of the Big Apple now and despite brushing with the comics mainstream as Howard Chaykin’s assistant at Upstart Associates, most of Kuper’s singularly impressive works are considered “Alternative” in nature, deriving from his regular far-flung travels and political leanings. Moreover, although being about how people are, much of his oeuvre employs cityscapes and the natural environment as bit players or star attractions.

When not binding his own “Life Lived in Interesting Times” into experimental narratives – such as with 2007’s fictively-cloaked Stop Forgetting To Remember: The Autobiography of Walter Kurtz – or bold yarns like Sticks and Stones (2005), Kuper created The New York Times’ first continuing strip (1993’s Eye of the Beholder) and regularly adapts to strip form literary classics like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1991), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2019), Kafka’s short stories  Give It Up! (1995) and Kafkaesque (2018) as well as longer works like The Metamorphosis (2003), all while creating his own unique canon of intriguing graphic novels and visual memoirs.

Amongst the so many strings to his bow – and certainly the most high-profile – was a brilliant stewardship of Mad Magazine’s beloved Spy Vs. Spy strip, which he inherited from creator Antonio Prohias in 1997, and he also chases whimsy in children’s books like 2006’s Theo and the Blue Note or experimental exercise The Last Cat Book (1984: illustrating an essay by Robert E Howard). Whenever he travelled – which was often – he made visual books such as 1992’s Peter Kuper’s Comics Trips – A Journal of Travels through Africa and Southeast Asia. Three years later he undertook a bold creative challenge for DC’s Vertigo Verité imprint: crafting mute, fantastically expressive thriller/swingeing social commentary The System.

Kuper’s later comics – all equally ambitious and groundbreaking – had to make room for his other interests as he became a successful commercial illustrator (Newsweek, Time, The Nation, Businessweek, The Progressive, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly and more), lecturer in Graphic Novels at Harvard, a teacher at Parsons School of Design and The School of Visual Arts and – since 1988 – co-Art Director of political action group INX International Ink Company. Translated into many languages, he has built a thriving occupation as a gallery artist exhibiting globally and scored a whole bunch of prestigious Fellowships and Educational residencies as a result.

He still finds time to pursue his key interests – such as contributing to benefit anthology Comics for Ukraine: Sunflower Seeds and cultivates a lifelong passion for entomology. This hobby infused 2015’s fictionalized autobiographical episode Ruins: an Eisner Award winning tome now available again in an enthralling trade paperback edition.

A passionate multilayered tale of crisis, confrontation and renewal infused by his ecological concerns, political leanings, rage against authoritarianism and love of Mexico, it draws from the same deep well as 2009’s Diario De Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico. Between 2006 and 2008, Kuper, his wife and young daughter lived in Oaxaca, absorbing astounding historical and cultural riches, beguiling natural wonders, hearty warmth and nonjudgemental friendliness. They also witnessed how a teacher’s strike was brutally and bloodily suppressed by local governor/dictator Ulises Ruiz Ortiz – AKA “URO” – in a series of events with a still heavily disputed death toll scarring the region and citizens to this day.

Part travelogue, part natural history call to arms and paean to the culture of Oaxaca, Kuper’s tale details a marriage in crisis played out against a disintegrating crisis of governance. Recently unemployed, socially withdrawn and emotionally stunted museum illustrator/bug lover George finally capitulates and voyages to the Mexican dreamland his wife Samantha has been pining for since before they met. Under the aegis of a sabbatical year taken to write a book on pre-conquest Mexico, she has dragged him out of ennui and churlish career doldrums to a place where he can indulge his abiding love of insects, if not her…

For Samantha, it’s a return to a paradisical place and magical time, albeit one where she loved and lost her first husband. That’s not the sole cause of growing friction between the increasingly at odds couple. The lengthy trip’s overt intention of reuniting them falters as she is drawn deeply into stories of how the Conquistadors destroyed Mesoamerican cultures they found and highlights parallels to her own plight. There are other earthier distractions she just can’t shake off too…

Slowly, George’s intransigence melts as he meets people willing to tolerate his ways, see beyond his shell, and share the history, geology, geography and serenely easy-going culture that eventually penetrates his crusty exterior. All manner of distracting temptations – like the infinite variety of cool bugs! – are endless and constant as he makes friends and finds healthier ways to express himself. He even tries to renew his constrained relationship with Samantha, but there will always be one impossible, impassable barrier to their future happiness…

… And then they’re caught up in the Teachers’ strike and extra-judicial methods Governor URO employs to end it even as George achieves the milestone life goal he never thought possible and visits the Michoacan forest where Monarchs come to breed and die.

… And finds it expiring from human intrusion…

Acting as thematic spine and tonal indicator for the unfolding story, each chapter follows – with snapshot scenes of changing, degrading landscapes – the epic flight of a lone Monarch butterfly, from its start in Canada, across America to the forest’s lepidopteran devotee George ostensibly left his comfort zone home to see.

With overtones of Peter Weir’s film The Year of Living Dangerously (and Christopher Koch’s novel too), Ruins layers metaphor upon allegory, distilling political, ecological and personal confrontation into a powerfully evocative account of people at a crossroads. Inspirationally visualised in a wealth of styles by a true master of pictorial narrative and classic drama, this new paperback edition also includes an ‘Afterwords’ where the author adds context to the still ongoing saga of the civil war crime underpinning his story.

Clever, charming, chilling and compulsively engrossing, this delicious exercise in interconnectivity is a brilliant example of how smart and powerful comics can and should be.
© Peter Kuper 2015. All rights reserved.

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Walking Distance


By Lizzy Stewart (Avery Hill Publishing)
ISBN:978-1-910395-50-9 (HB)

Assuming you do still think, where do you go and what do you do to get in touch with yourself? I only ask because, in these days of a million and one ways to chemically, digitally functionally and emotionally sedate the mind, one the most effective ways to process information is still a good long walk…

Lizzy Stewart lives in London and Shanks’ Pony is not only how she manages city life but is also a restorative physical act which seemingly obsesses her. She even keeps a list of favourite movie walks by a host of female stars that fit all her personal criteria for moments of perfection…

Walking Distance is a coping mechanism: a meandering meditation on Right Here, Right Now, utilising a stunning sequence of painted views of what she sees on her various perambulations – a beguiling travelogue of London literally at ground level and a healthy pace – wedded to small tracts of text graciously sharing her innermost, scattershot thoughts and deliberations on notions that trouble women (and perhaps the odd man or two) these days.

All the bugbears trot along with her (and, by extension, us): getting by, success and failure, body issues, direction and achievement, growing up and growing old, family pressures, exactly what comprises norms of behaviour, unfair expectations, balances of power in gender relationships and what the future holds in store…

Naturally – and shamefully for us men – a large proportion of that menu includes deep and ever-growing concerns over personal safety and the right to privacy and agency in public. There’s isn’t a woman anywhere who hasn’t had a walk marred at some moment after apprehensively anticipating what a complete stranger in the vicinity might abruptly say or do.

Happily, the grim is balanced by the delightful: ponderings on art and work, a sense of home space and just the sheer joy of observing the fresh and new as well as the comfortingly familiar. There’s even room for intimate views of personal history and opinion, yet overall the progression is always hopeful, tending towards examination rather than hasty judgements or solutions and always in the direction the walker chooses…

This beguiling stroll offers a blend of philosophy, anxiety and anticipation, all brainstormed as she – and you, if you can keep up – strides ever onward. Clearly, walks do anything but clear your head, but can result in beautiful visual ruminations like this one: no glib sound-bite responses, no roles modelled and no solutions, but you can consider this a privileged personal chat while she walks and you don’t.
© Lizzy Stewart, 2019. All rights reserved.

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Marzi volume 2: From Heaven to Earth


By Marzena Sowa & Sylvain Savoia, translated by Anjali Singh/Mediatoon Licensing (Europe Comics)
ISBN: 979-1-03280-391-2 (digital edition only) ASIN: ?B0C1JLQFMV

As you’re surely aware by now, our Continental cousins are exceeding adept at exploring humanity’s softer, more introspective sides through comics. Here is another autobiographical tome, detailing the life of a little Polish girl growing up in an era of massive social change: a masterclass in emotive, evocative, vibrantly funny and ruthlessly sensitive storytelling to delight our senses by quietly affirming people everywhere are basically the same…

Originally released in France in 2006 as Marzi, tome 2: Sur la terre comme au ciel, this charming episodic collation continued a sequence of seven cartoon memoires by writer Marzena Sowa and her work/life partner Sylvain Savoia. They first met when she came to Paris from Poland as an exchange student, and he – a successful cartoonist and graphic novelist – quickly realised the potential of her family anecdotes as she spoke of growing up in a subjugated Soviet satellite nation at the tumultuous tail end of the Cold War…

Their published collaborations were a hit in Europe, and first translated into English for DC/Vertigo in 2011 (still available if you prefer physical books). At that time, media hype concentrated on the political aspects, but if you can, when reading this version, try to ignore that just as the creators did. It’s a shaping element and plot point – albeit a omnipresent and potent one – like boarding at Hogwarts or growing up in the Teen Titans, but the setting is almost never what the stories are about. These are tales of childhood and finding comfort. Inspiration and happiness wherever you can, not a fabricated kid’s adventure like Emil and the Detectives or a historical testament like The Diary of Anne Frank…

Marzna Sowa was born in Stalowa Wola, Podkarpackia, Poland on April 8th 1979. She grew up mostly ordinary like all her friends and family, but after achieving maturity during some of the most eventful years of the last century, changed her life path in 2001 when she left Jagiellonian University, Krakow for Bordeaux’s Michel de Montaigne University to complete studies in Literature. The how and why will become great comics in later volumes, You’ll just have to be patient or buy all the books now.

On meeting Savoia, mutual attraction became a working partnership with the first Marzi tome Petite Carp published in 2005. The last to date was released in 2017. Her other award-winning tales include N’embrassez pas qui voulez (Don’t Kiss Who You Want – 2013, art by Sandrine Revel) and Tej nocy dzika paprotka, (with Berenika Kolomycka). After further schooling to become a videographer, Sowa moved into Cinema, writing screenplays and directing documentaries while still scripting comics like La Grande Métamorphose de Théo (2022 with Geoffrey Delinte) and La Petite Évasion (2022 with Dorothée de Monfreid).

Savoia was born in 1969 in Reims and initially studied at the Saint Luc Institute in Brussels. In 1993 he co-founded art workshop 510TTC, crafting his first comics – Reflets Perdus – from a Jean-David Morvan script before beginning their extended series Nomad. Later hits included Al’Togoat (2003), Les Esclaves oubliés de Tromelin and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Allemagne 1945, supplemented by poster making, advertising art and training manual design and illustration.

Since 2018 he has helmed educational series Le Fil de l’Histoire raconté par Ariane & Nino (On the History Trail), enjoying further success with Sowa in Les esclaves oubliés de Tromelin and Petit Pays. In 2020 Savoia was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Previous book Little Carp introduced 7-year-old Marzi, growing up in a Soviet-built apartment block. There are always shortages and long queues at the housing estate store, but somehow the market always has most of what people need. Dad works with Zdzich in the Huta Stalowa Wola, the city’s only factory, which has its own perks and perils…

Smart and observant but perhaps thinking too much, Marzi’s also – to her excitably loud and frequently angry mum’s consternation – a very picky eater, only barely aware of the effort dad must make to support them. Of course daughter is grateful, but also deeply concerned about so many things she can’t change…

State-controlled housing is short on amenities and variety (there are only two kinds of apartment available – small or bigger) with no play facilities, so kids cluster around the elevator on her floor (the fifth) to play their games vertically. Favourite is messing with lift buttons so the carriage stops at every floor. They also like ringing doorbells and running away. Marzi is great at the latter but hampered in the former as she’s afraid to ride the grim grey box and will always use the stairs if she can…

She has a strong bond with Andrzej, Magda, both Anias and especially feisty Monika, who always leads at everything, like that time Ania (1) and Andrzej’s mother pierced all their ears (except Andrzej and baby Magda!) and Monika’s mum gave them all their first earrings…

Here, we resume her ruminations on December 13th 1981, with ‘The state of fear’ as – aged 2½ – she recalls how appointed head of state General Wojciech Jaruzelski was on their intermittently-working television declaring “Poland is in a State of War!” There were tanks in the streets and everybody whispered and avoided telephones. It would be years before she understood, but her parents did right away and were really, really scared…

Marzi is a little older as ‘Reality TV’ details a world of shortages where everyone hides what cash money they have. When the little lass sees colour TV for the first time and begins agitating to get one, she sees more of a world where everything is rationed and controlled by the Kupon (coupon system) dictating the dissemination of goods and foodstuffs…

Although dictatorial by diktat and “Communist” by command, Poland remained devoutly Catholic throughout Russian rule and we jump to the most important event in a child’s life in ‘God loves me’. Mama is manically devout and goes into nuclear mode as her only daughter simply cannot get with the program and do what priests and teachers demand as her class prepare for their first Holy Communion. She just can’t understand all the fuss and her First Confession is a disaster, but this day and life-change is just inescapable…

Marzi is luckier than most of her friends as Dad has an official garden (in Britain we’d call it an allotment) and her Aunt Niusia lives on an actual farm. The family always have access to extra – fresh – food and can even make extra, under-the-table cash selling produce on the openly-ignored food black market. However, the day-dreaming child’s visits to either are always fraught with unacknowledged but pragmatic brutality. Marzi has met cows, pigs, turkeys, chickens, cats, dogs and other creatures and fully understands why mum says you shouldn’t give animals names, but it can’t stop her trying to form bonds or leave food on her plates…

A weekend at Niusia’s and a new white dress for Mass on Sunday inevitably draws calamity and catastrophe when Marzi gets on the wrong side of cart horse Baska, but her “punishment” in ‘What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh’ is a real gift from God, after which ‘Bad grass’ sees the family stocking up on fruit & veg from the urban spread for a quick money bonanza. Sadly, after being forbidden a go on the scythe, Marzi gets caught up in observing ants at work and lets down her folks yet again…

When (relatively) rich girl Justyna joins the class, all her American bought clothes and cosmetics prove that ‘Money does smell (good)’ whereas Marzi’s new – incontinent – guinea pig ‘Perelka’ just does not, and comes to an inevitable end in the family flat. Marzi really wanted a dog anyway…

Hinting at exotic things to come, an impromptu but welcome trip to the farm in Skowierzyn results from a distant aunt (born and raised in France!) wanting to reconnect with her roots. However, the glamour promised by ‘Oh la la Elen!’ isn’t what the little dreamer was expecting, although that disappointment was then eradicated by a 15-day stay in fabulous metropolis Krakow with grandmother Jdzia, Aunt Dzidzia and Uncle Metek…

Her first extended taste of freedom supercharges Marzi’s imagination as modernity, history, fantasy and romance collide, especially after hearing the legend and seeing the statue of the dragon ‘Smok Wawelski’. Our tiny tourist is far less enamoured of patent herbal medicines like Amol, ruthlessly dispensed when she’s deemed to have overdone things…

Despite all her gripes and doubts about everything – even God is on her “unproven” list – the life of Marzi and her pals is pretty good and generally happy, but that suddenly changes in chilling final episode ‘Breathing can be hazardous to your health’. Here, Marzi is on the farm and revelling in the mucky joys of the countryside when suddenly the adults all start acting crazy. Now, no kid can go outside, eat vegetables (no loss there!) or drink milk. The trip ends suddenly and Dad drives them back to the flat in hurry. Soon every kid is having to take nasty medicine from the hospital and all outside activities are stopped. It’s spring 1986 and slowly reports are emerging that there has been an accident in a place called Chernobyl…

A skilfully shaped, enticingly enthralling paean to growing up in interesting times (and aren’t they all?), From Heaven to Earth is a celebration of independent thought: blending pranks and misunderstanding, new fun with familial strangers and with doing tedious stuff adults tell you to. Making fun where you can as your awareness deepens and a mature world is built by ever-expanding experience, and how we all grow up to be our parent in unbalanced doses of imitation and utter rejection…

Marzi is definitely about independence and freedom, but it’s personal not national and inherently hopeful: the tale of a fish out of water learning to swim her own way. If you want polemical condemnation and confirmation of your own prejudices, look elsewhere. Better yet, stick around to see how a delightful and unique individual lived her own best life…
© 2017 – DUPUIS – SOWA & SAVOIA. All rights reserved.

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Mongrel


By Sayra Begum (Knockabout)
ISBN: 978-0-86166-269-2 (TPB)

Comics offer an immediate and potent method of communication that is both universally accessible and subtly intimate. You want countless characters and exotic locales? Just draw them. Need to navigate the most torturous tracks of the psyche and expose the most taciturn soul? Just fill captions and balloons with the words and tone that cut to the heart of the matter…

Somebody who got that from get-go was Sayra Begum, who first presented her life story in pictorial form in 2017. Happily, she shared it with the perceptive folks at Knockabout Comics who recognised a great work when they saw it. In her own incisive words and deft pencil work, Begum – identifying here as “Shuna” – shares what growing up meant for the child of a strict, devout and loving Bangladeshi Muslim mum only living in England until the family has enough money to retire to a mansion in her beloved homeland. It’s not an easy existence since her dad is a white man (a convert to Islam) who still remembers the freedoms of his old life. Moreover, the community treats them with polite disregard…

As seen in ‘Meet the Mongrel’, ‘Memories of Waterland’, and ‘The Forgotten Self’, Shuna and her siblings are pulled in so many directions growing up. She wants to be an artist, but her Amma is more concerned that she be ‘A Good Muslim’, believing ‘Life is a Test’ and her old ways such as ‘An Arranged Marriage’ are the only proper life to live…

For her parents, England ends at the front door and the household is pure Bangla within the walls. The lure of the outer world has already proved too much for one brother as seen in ‘My Poor Family’, ‘Suffocated’ and ‘The Disownment’ and soon Shuna too is living a secret life with an English lover mother could never approve of…

Continual contrasts with her perfect cousin in Bangladesh constantly wrack her conscience but Shuna has long capitulated to the wiles of Shaitan in her head. Life has a habit of upsetting all plans and exposing secrets and ‘Our Parallel Family’, ‘The Meeting’, ‘Judgement Day’ and ‘The Mongrel Children’ all reveal how even the harshest opinions may shift, leading to a truly romantic happy ending in ‘Goodbye Anger’ prior to a ruminatory ‘Epilogue’…

Begum weds brisk, informative line drawing with the dazzling traditional patterns of Islamic art and excesses of surrealism to weave a compelling and visually enticing tale of real people coping with ancient intolerances and the rapidly evolving family stresses of a fluid and fluctuating multicultural society. It’s all the more affecting to realise she’s bravely sharing the minutiae and intimacies of her own life to highlight a situation as old as humanity itself.

A magical story and a stunning debut, Mongrel is book you must read and one that has never been more timely or pertinent.
Mongrel © by 2020 Sayra Begum All rights reserved.

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Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood & Persepolis 2 – The Story of a Return


By Marjane Satrapi, translated by Anjali Singh (Jonathan Cape/Vintage)
ISBN: 978-0-22406-440-8 (v1 HB) 978-0-22407-440-7 (v2 HB) 978-0-09952-399-4 (TPB)

With Marjane Satrapi’s new book – Woman, Life, Freedom – due for publication next week, let’s take another look at the landmark cartoon biography that started her impressive career as a political commentator, activist and feminist icon before her appraisal of the changes (and not) of the current Iranian Revolution make her a target all over again…

No comics celebration/retrospective of women in our art form could be complete without acknowledging Marjane Satrapi’s astounding breakout memoirs, so let’s revisit both her Persepolis books (also available in a complete edition released to coincide with the animated movie adaptation) before you are inescapably compelled to graduate to later forays like The Sigh, Monsters are Afraid of the Moon, Chicken With Plums or Embroideries.

The imagery of a child, their unrefined stylings and shaded remembrances all possess captivating power to enthral adults. As the author grew up during the Fundamentalist revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran and replaced him with an Islamic theocracy, her recollections and comic interpretations of that time are particularly powerful, moving and – regrettably – more relevant than ever two decades later…

Originally released in France by L’Association between 2000 and 2003 as a quartet of annual volumes of cartoon reminiscence, in Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood Satrapi curated and related key incidents from her life with starkly primitivistic and forthright drawings depicting a sharp, unmoderated voice channelling perceptions of the young girl she was. That simple reportage owes as much to Anne Frank’s diary as Art Spiegelman’s Maus as Satrapi shares incidents that shaped her life and identity as a free-thinking “female” in a society increasingly frowning upon that sort of thing…

By focusing on content of the message and decrying or at best ignoring the technical skill and craft of the medium that conveys it, Persepolis became the kind of graphic novel casual and intellectual readers loved – as did kids everywhere but Chicago in 2013. Here the Public Schools CEO – apparently immune to irony – ruled years after translated publication that the books contained “graphic language and images that are not appropriate for general use” and banned them from “her” classrooms and high schools: a decision quickly reversed when students organised demonstrations and massed at public libraries to read them anyway…

However, graphic narrative is as much an art form of craft and thought as it is the dustbin of sophomoric genre stereotypes that many critics relegate it to. Satrapi created a work that is powerful and engaging, but in a sorry twist of reality, it is one that comics fans, and not the general public, still have to be convinced to read.

In the sequel Persepolis – The Story of a Return, the child-centric reminiscences of a girl whose childhood spanned the fall of the Shah and the rise of Iran’s Fundamentalist theocracy, Satrapi delved deeper into her personal history, concentrating more fully on the little girl becoming an autonomous, independent woman.

This idiosyncratic maturation unfortunately somewhat diminishes the power of pure, unvarnished observation that is such a devastating lens into the political iniquities moulding her life, but does transform the author into a fully concretised person, as many experiences more closely mirror those of an audience which hasn’t grown up under a cloud of physical, political, spiritual and sexual oppression.

The story recommences in 1984 where 15-year old Marjane is sent to Vienna to (ostensibly) pursue an education. In distressingly short order, the all-but-asylum-seeker is rapidly bounced from home to home: billeted with Nuns, distanced acquaintances of her family. a bed-sit in the house of an apparent madwoman. Eventually, in a catastrophic spiral of decline she is reduced to living on the streets before returning to Iran four years later. It is 1988…

Her observations on the admittedly outré counterculture of European students, and her own actions as Marjane grows to adulthood seem to indicate that even the most excessive and extreme past experience can still offer a dangerously seductive nostalgia when faced with the bizarre concept of too much freedom far too soon.

When she returns to her homeland, her adult life under the regime of The (first) Ayatollah is still a surprisingly less-than-total condemnation than we westerners and our agenda-slanted news media would probably expect. The book concludes with a decision to move permanently to Europe in 1994…

The field of autobiographical graphic novels is a proven and invaluable outreach resource for an art form and industry desperately seeking to entice fresh audiences for our product. As long as subject matter doesn’t overpower content and style, and we can offer examples such as Persepolis to seekers, we should be making real headway, any day now.
© Marjane Satrapi 2004. Translation © 2004 Anjali Singh.