Category: Non-fiction

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Erased – An Actor of Color’s Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood


By Loo Hui Phang & Hugues Micol: translated by Edward Gauvin (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-681123-38-7 (HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect. If any such use of slurs, epithets, terms, treatment or attitudes offends you, you really should not be reading this book – or maybe you need it more than most.

Cinema was the great and dominant art form of the 20th century. There have been untold tons of film books (even I’ve got one coming out later this year!) and loads of graphic biographies about movie stars and Hollywood – so many, that humanity shares a communal/mutual vision capable of supporting more subversive dalliances with those mediums. Here’s a smart and powerful biographical account employing that common ground to probe some of the deeper social issues stemming from the dominance of the fabled tinsel town Dream Factory through eras where the playing fields were never ever equal…

In 2020, Laotian-born writer Loo Hui Phang (Bienvenue Au College, Delices De Vaches, The Smell of Starving Boys) and veteran French illustrator Hugues Micol (Tumultes, Les Parques, Agughia) collaborated on European reminiscence Black-Out, describing the unseen, forgotten and retroactively redacted career of a mixed race actor who was a contemporary film phenomenon before his political ideals and subversive acts against discriminatory movie making practises led to his contributions being excised from acceptable Hollywood history.

Employing a dreamlike semi surreal narrative delivered via symbolic tableaux and straight strip art storytelling, it told the compelling, inequitable and tragic tale of a gifted entertainer who could have been America’s first black film star…

In 1936 Los Angeles, rich, famous and utterly acceptable foreign immigrant Cary Grant meets a beautiful boy orphan at a boxing gym. Taken with his looks and attitude, the transplanted Londoner takes the kid under his wing. Soon the lad is playing those always anonymous minor “ethnic roles” in epic box office masterpieces like Lost Horizon and Gone With the Wind.

Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Lena Horne, Rita Hayworth and dozens of other starlets seek his company. He is schooled by David O. Selznick and gulled by Louis B. Mayer, and in later years Paul Robeson gives him life advice as he instinctively and unwisely makes enemies like John Wayne and Senator Joseph Mc Carthy…

A truly beautiful and visual striking man, Maximus Ohanzee Wildhorse AKA – and against his own wishes – “Maximus Wyld” always turned heads in cosmopolitan, covertly egalitarian, boldly bohemian but officially segregated Hollywood. Of course, that casually collegiate acceptance never made it into the roles or onto screens where culturally-conscripted stereotypes were peddled to ignorant, scared, easily riled John Q Public. Throughout his many appearances Wyld cleverly subverted the medium, using it to propound his views on a two-tier system and diminution of his peoples: a stance that led to his downfall and even greater erasure from historical view…

He is a proud, politically radical socialist enjoying every forbidden fruit accruing to his obvious physical attractions. In the new Sodom and Gomorrah, that means intimate entrée into the twilight world of homosexuality, decadence and hedonism, and those charms and willingness to listen also make him a constant true confidante and companion to Hollywood’s most contentiously defended commodity and obviously enslaved minority – lovely women…

The tale of his not-rise and inescapable fall touches on all areas of engrained traditional white privilege. Wyld is a human melting pot and walking (tap dancing, really) metaphor: exotic, universally attractive, unconventional but morally sound and sexually ambivalent. He stems from many races (plantation negro, First Nation/“red Indian”, Chinese) previously and still subjugated and used by the transported-but-aggressively dominant European culture.

Cloaked in shamanic mysticism and force, Max’s saga unfolds with him holding another secret. Professionally lauded, but officially uncredited he is inescapably in touch with his metaphorical ancestors – particularly a Comanche medicine man, a spirit stallion, coolies and slaves – all silently reminding him his career and livelihood are built and still thrive on the desecration and degradation of his ancestors…

A totemic figure – albeit shrouded in shadow and his own judiciously-kept council – Max played a vast range of non-white characters from house slaves to African tribesmen to Tibetans to painted savages, but was constantly denied honest moments in the spotlight, just as were all marginalised peoples of that period of US history. However, his unshakable dream of being the breakout actor of color in Tinseltown never really dies. It’s taken from him.

Or it would have been if he ever really existed…

This tale is a masterfully researched and constructed faux expose: a deviously fanciful conceit acting as if this poor guy really was there. A symbolic amalgamation of so many untold stories, Erased employs the facts of past ethnic experience to make a unifying myth: telling of an Invisible Man left out of history – like how many of today’s electronics won’t register people of colour because they were calibrated by white male Silicon Valley nerds…

The deeply moving personal journey ends with a powerful ‘Epilogue 1986’ as lingering heyday survivor Rita Hayworth ruminates on Max Wyld, after which the entire affair is awarded an effusive appraisal in an Afterword by author, publisher and critic Leland Cheuk.

The major themes, issues and delivery of the tale were previous covered in I An Not Your Negro author Raoul Peck’s erudite and challenging ‘Preface’, prior to ‘Maximus Wyld: A Bibliography’ providing a selected listing of all the major movies potentially graced by his presence in advance of the main event…

So sleekly, mesmerizingly effective is the result that Erased – An Actor of Color’s Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood won Loo Hui Phang the Grand Prize for Excellence in Non-Fiction (publication & translation) as part of the Albertine Translation Foundation project, as well as garnering the Prix René Goscinny 2021 at Angoulême International Comics Festival.

This is a mighty and memorable missal of metafiction: one no mature reader of comics or lover of film can afford to miss. Just remember – it’s not real it’s only a non-movie of a movie…
© Futuroplis / 2020. All rights reserved. © 2024 NBM for the English translation.

Erased – An Actor of Color’s Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood is published on 16th July 2024 and available for pre-order now. NBM books are also available in digital formats. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/

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Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful


By Darryl Cunningham (Myriad Editions)
ISBN: 978-1-91240-822-1 (PB)

Just in case you missed the last few days here’s a sly reminder of what we’ve just voted to end – at least as concerns direct involvement in public life…

There are books to read, books you should read – and some, certainly, that you shouldn’t – and there are Important books. The relatively new field of graphic novels has many of the first but still boasts precious few important books yet. Thankfully, British documentarian, journalist and cartoonist Darryl Cunningham seems to specialise in the latter and apparently never rests…

It’s hard enough to get noticed within the industry (simply excelling at your craft is not enough) but when comics does generate something wonderful, valid, powerful, true to our medium yet simultaneously breaking beyond into the wide world and making a mark, the reviews from that appreciative greater market come thick and fast – so I’m not going to spend acres of text praising this forthright, potentially controversial and damning examination of Earth’s Newest (but hopefully not Last) Dark Gods – the Super Rich.

Multi-disciplined artist Cunningham was born in 1960, lived a pretty British life (didn’t we all?) and graduated from Leeds College of Art. A welcome regular on the Small Press scene of the 1990s, his early strips appeared in legendary paper-based venues such as Fast Fiction, Dead Trees, Inkling, Turn and many others.

In 1998, he & Simon Gane crafted Meet John Dark for the much-missed Slab-O-Concrete outfit and it remains one of my favourite books of the era. You should track it down or agitate for a new edition.

Briefly sidelining comics as the century ended, Cunningham worked on an acute care psychiatric ward: a period informing 2011 graphic novel Psychiatric Tales, a revelatory inquiry into mental illness delivered as cartoon reportage.

As well as crafting web comics for Forbidden Planet and personal projects Uncle Bob Adventures, Super-Sam and John-of-the-Night or The Streets of San Diablo, he’s been consolidating a pole position in the field of graphic investigative reporting; specifically science history, economics and socio-political journalism via books such as Science Tales, Supercrash: How to Hijack the Global Economy, Graphic Science: Seven Journeys of Discovery and The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality and the Financial Crisis.

This offering details the rise and pernicious all-pervasive influence of three icons of the plutocratic ideal, all while debunking such self-deluding and damaging public myths as “self-made”, “coming from nothing” and “fair and honest”…

It opens with a pictorial Introduction outlining how late 19th and early 20th century robber barons of the Gilded Age set the scene for the rise of today’s financial overlords – and how governments responded to them…

Depicted in clear, simple, easily accessible imagery, Cunningham then deconstructs carefully crafted legends and official biographies of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, energy barons Charles & David Koch and internet retail supremo/space cadet Jeff Bezos with an even-handedness I’m not sure any other investigative author could match – or would want to.

Via an avalanche of always-attributable, deftly delineated facts and reported events, the artist delivers the very opposite of hard-hitting polemic, instead massaging and lathering readers with an ocean of appetising data allowing us make up our own minds about proudly ruthless apex business predators who have controlled governments, steered populations and reshaped the planet in their quest for financial dominance.

Best of all, Cunningham even has the courage to offer bold – and serious – suggestions on how to rectify the current state of affairs in his Afterword, and (should anybody’s lawyers or tax accountants be called upon) backs up all his cartoon classwork with a vast and daunting list of References for everything cited in the book.

Comics has long been the most effective method of imparting information and eliciting reaction (that’s why assorted governments and militaries have used them for hard and soft propaganda over the last century and a half), and with Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful we finally see that force being used against today’s greatest threat to continued existence…
© Darryl Cunningham 2019. All rights reserved.

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Proxy Mom – My Experience With Postpartum Depression


By Sophie Adriansen & Mathou, translated by Montana Kane (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-334-9 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-335-6

All human existence and every interaction is basically about chasing the same dreams and aspirations: do something, find someone, stay alive, be happy. Of course, it doesn’t always happen that way. That’s particularly true for women and never more clearly seen than in how our entire species now views perpetuating itself.

Generally speaking, nowhere on Earth does a significant proportion of male humans ever get hands-on with childrearing – at least until the next generation are largely ambulatory, vocally communicative and self-sustaining if not self-supporting. In fact, as increasingly seen in most first world countries, actual day-to-day maintenance of infants, as well as the majority of household domestic duties are regarded (with near-religious devotion and fervour) as the female human/recent mother’s sole responsibilities…

Moreover – as so many deucedly-reasonable chaps on the internet keep insisting – once a lass has completed all the icky female stuff involved in hosting a burgeoning biological parasite inside them, finished undergoing frequently life-threatening physical stresses and appalling corporeal changes, ceased playing natal roulette with medical midwifery systems and/or other far-less-rational religion-poisoned birthing alternatives and at last delivered – in the shame-packed, painfully embarrassing human equivalent to extracting at excessive speed a tugboat from the basement it was unwisely and so rashly built in, any new mother should be up and about: offering sex, biscuits, resumed cleaning services and due deference to the hard work the guy put in by having sex. This she should do in a miraculously fully-restored pre-birth nubile body by the time nurses have taken the infant’s details and recorded its footprint…

Then again, there’s this differing view.

Having a wanted baby is magical, but a moment’s passion demands massive commitment from all involved, right up to and definitely including the national and societal levels. Incubation of a baby inside a completely separate, autonomous human causes massive alterations – many permanent and some of them life- and mental health-threatening.

Smartly underscoring these points by sharing their own expertise as mums, exceedingly well-educated bande dessinée novelist, author and comics writer Sophie Adriansen (Max et les poisons, La vie d’adulte, Nina Simone in Comics) and similarly super-schooled artist/ illustrator Mathilde (Nina & Bruno, Dans le coeur gros d’Anouk, Peurs bleues) Virfollet – AKA Mathou – here compile a cartoon precis of the whole farago from dance floor to domestic domination by relating what so often happens and subsequently deconstructing the so-useful eternal myth of “maternal instincts” as manipulated by men and their mothers…

As La remplaçante, Proxy Mom was first released in 2021 and with wit, brevity and deceptive jollity detailed the story of a woman doing all the right things. Marietta was young, free and single, with a good job and friends. She met Chuck, they fell in love and settled down. One day they decided to have a child together.

And that’s when Marietta’s problems started…

In seductive cartoon style, Marietta discovers every minute of every day what being pregnant means: body-downs and ridiculous changes, diminishing capacities and limitation of faculties, how nine months feels like 40 years and a thousand more minor but ever-escalating shocks and surprises.

This is no scary story shocker and there are no major medical mishaps. That’s the point. This account is all about little stuff that gets to be too much. Chuck is not a first-time dad, and his easy ability to negotiate stuff Marietta is overwhelmed by makes her feel inadequate and unable to cope, as do her friends and relatives who see new baby Zoe but seemingly forget Maritta is still there.

And that’s not even considering the days before the weeks before the birth: extended and terrifying Braxton-Hicks contractions, debilitating pre-partum episodes of “patience and pain” compounded by a frankly sub-par, poorly managed delivery apparently done for the hospital’s convenience.

In the hours and days post-delivery Marietta wallows in acute discomfort, indignity, mounting mental stress and with a growing sense of loss and failure. Even Zoe “latching on” to feed sparks heartfelt conviction of ineptitude and inescapable failure. No wonder Marietta in her doldrums invents the concept of a “proxy mom” to subtract all that pressure and unrevealed further inadequacies before it’s too late…

Gradually, however, stability returns as confidence grows and new mom digests the knowledge that it’s okay to feel crap (like when castigating herself for forgetting to read hospital leaflets on hormones and postpartum depression): admitting that at least she is not that worst of all failures… a Bad Mother…

Ultimately, peppered and forearmed with salient alternative ways women anywhere but Here and Now have stepped up and congregated to raise kids by actively supporting new mums, Marietta weathers her crisis, stops seeking validation and throws off the toxic, hostile pressures of societal expectation…

Delivered lightly and breezily but deadly serious for all that, Proxy Mom finds cheery ways to provide encouragement, support and vital information that will delight women and girls and might just get through to some guys also in need of guidance and tutelage…
© Sophie Adriansen, for the text, 2021. © Mathilde Virfollet, for the illustration, 2021. All rights reserved.

Proxy Mom – My Experience With Postpartum Depression is scheduled for UK release June 18th 2024 and is available for pre-order now.

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

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The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia


By Mary M Talbot & Bryan Talbot (Jonathan Cape/Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-0-22410-234-6 (HB Cape) eISBN: 978-1-63008-697-8 (DH)

The power of comics to resurrect historical figures and tap into their lives whilst potently and convincingly extrapolating their deeds and even characters has been a recent revelation that has completely revitalised graphic narratives. One of the most telling and compelling of these narratives was crafted by British National Treasure Bryan Talbot and his even more impressive wife.

Academic, educator, linguist, social theoretician, author and specialist in Critical Discourse Analysis, in 2012 Dr. Mary M. Talbot added graphic novelist to her achievements: collaborating with her husband on the first of many terrific comics tales. Award-winning memoir/biography of Lucia Joyce Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes was followed by Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (drawn by Kate Charlesworth), today’s recommendation, Rain and Armed With Madness: supplementing an educational career and academic publications such as Language and Gender: an Introduction and Fictions at Work: language and social practise in fiction. Dr. Talbot is particularly drawn to true stories of gender bias and social injustice…

Bryan has been a fixture of the British comics scene since the late 1960s, moving from Tolkien-fandom to college strips, self-published underground classics like Brainstorm Comix (starring Chester P. Hackenbush – the Psychedelic Alchemist!), prototypical Luther Arkwright and Frank Fazakerly, Space Ace of the Future to paid pro status with Nemesis The Warlock, Judge Dredd, Sláine, Ro-Busters and more in 2000 AD. Inevitably headhunted by America, he worked on key mature-reading titles for DC Comics (Hellblazer, Shade the Changing Man, The Nazz, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Fables, The Dead Boy Detectives and The Sandman) and was a key creative cog in short-lived shared-world project Tekno Comix, before settling into global acclaim via steady relationships with Dark Horse Comics and Jonathan Cape. These unions generated breakthrough masterpieces like The Tale of One Bad Rat and a remastered Adventures of Luther Arkwright.

Since then he’s been an independent Force To Be Reckoned With, doing just what he wants, promoting the art form in general and crafting a variety of fascinating and compelling works, from Alice in Sunderland o Cherubs! (with Mark Stafford), to Metronome (as Véronique Tanaka) and his fabulously wry, beguiling and gallic-ly anthropomorphic Grandville sequence, as well as his mostly biographical/historical collaborations with Dr. Mary…

In the interest of propriety, I must disclose that I’ve known him since the 1980s, but other than that shameful lack of taste and judgement on his part, have no vested interest in confidently stating that he’s probably Britain’s greatest living graphic novelist…

Here their vast talents combine to capture and expose the life of a woman who arguably reshaped the history of the whole world, but one largely lost to history…

On May 29th 1830, Louise Michel was born out of wedlock to a serving maid at the Château de Vroncourt in Northeastern France. Her father was the son of the house and his ashamed parents gave their unwelcome granddaughter a liberal education and set her up as teacher. In 1865 she opened her own progressive school in Paris, whilst corresponding with social and political thinkers such as Victor Hugo and Théophile Ferré. Embracing radical ideas, Michel co-founded the Société pour la Revendication des Droits Civils de la Femme (Society for the Demand of Civil Rights for Women) and forged links to Société Coopérative des Ouvriers et Ouvrières (Cooperative Society of Men and Women Workers) and when revolution came again to France was amongst the first to man the barricades of the Paris Commune. She fought for The National Guard and was known as “the Red Virgin of Montmartre”…

Michel loved the notion of science and fairness building a better world, and spent much time discussing utopias with scientists and engineers. She was an author, poet, orator, anarchist, educator, rabble rouser and revolutionary whose activities as a Communard saw her exiled to New Caledonia in 1873. Once there, she befriended the subjugated Kanak people, acting as a teacher and healer, and participated in their abortive fight for liberation. Surviving the French colonisers’ reprisals she was returned to France after seven years as part of a general amnesty for Communards. She had become a political celebrity, and began touring the world and lecturing – especially to groups seeking change such as the Pankhurst family’s suffrage followers and adherents. Apparently tireless, the Red Virgin began campaigning for an amnesty for Algerian rebels…

Leading a poverty demonstration of French unemployed, she coined the slogan “Bread, work or lead” and adopted the black flag which remains to this day the symbol of the anarchist movement. The act earned her six years in solitary confinement, imprisoned with political visionaries like Peter Kropotkin, but when she was released she went right back to work…

Over her lifetime she wrote dozens of books and tracts, with another five published posthumously: all entreating people to be better and rulers to be fair and just. At least she died – in January 1905 – before her beloved ideology and trust in technological advancement were seen to be corrupted by the old ruling forces that manufactured the Great War…

Under the Talbots’ curated guidance what is seen in The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia is not dry polemic or radical hagiography, but a wryly witty examination – via flashbacks and clever character interplay – of an indomitable force for change with a marvellously human face. Depicted in monochrome and judicious splashes of reds. pinks and scarlets, the tale unfolds from a time of Michel’s latter triumphs, as seen through the eyes and conversations of admirers and converts. These are mainly other women seeking to change society working against a backdrop of scientific breakthroughs that the would-be emancipator was convinced would elevate everyone together…

Also included here are a copious list of ‘Sources’, and extensive personal commentary, photos, maps and historical context in ‘Annotations’.

Gripping, infuriating and utterly compelling, this is a tale of achievement and frustration that is still unfolding but which confirms that all change starts with someone extraordinary saying “I have a vision”…
© 2016 by Mary Talbot & Bryan Talbot. All rights reserved.

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The Emotional Load and Other Invisible Stuff


By Emma, translated by Una Dimitrijevic (Seven Stories Press)
ISBN: 978-1-60980-956-0 (TPB) eISBN: 978-160980-957-7

It has never been a fair world, although it’s a concept we all apparently aspire to create – at least in public. In recent years, many people have sought to address imbalances between the roles and burdens of men and women in a civil cohesive society, but the first problem they all hit was simply how to state the problems in terms all sides could understand and would accept. We have a lot more names and concepts to utilise now in discourse, but none of the difficulties seem to have diminished…

In 2018, software engineer, cartoonist and columnist Emma crafted a book of strips reflecting upon social issues particularly affecting women and dissecting The Mental Load – all the unacknowledged, unavoidable unpaid invisible crap that makes up and comes with almost all modern relationships and revealing how most of that overwhelming, burdensome life-tonnage inescapably settles on one side of the bed in most households…

The book – and the strips from it published in The Guardian – caused quite a commotion and as much whiny, pseudo-scientific, apologist and – let’s be frank and use a pejorative term – bitchy trollish kickback as you’d expect from all the old familiar places, so she came back with further explanations and revelations in searingly brilliant follow-up The Emotional Load and Other Invisible Stuff.

Because a large proportion of privileged humans who won the genital lottery don’t really give a damn about other people’s woes – especially if the food keeps coming and the appropriate drawers magically refill with clean clothes and groceries – I fear there’s a segment of truly needful folk who won’t benefit from Emma’s treatises, anecdotes, statistics and life-changing stories, but since many guys are honestly clueless and baffled but say they’re willing to adapt, maybe enough of us will give pause and thought a chance.

Best of all, most women reading this will realise it’s not just them feeling the way they do and might risk starting a conversation with their significant others, or at the very least, talk to other women and organise together…

Working in the manner of the very best observational stand-up comedy, Emma forensically identifies an issue prior to dissecting it: offering advice, suggestions and a wearily humorous perspective. Here that’s subdivided into chapters opening with personally autobiographical essay ‘It’s Not Right, But…’, wittily exploring the concept of consent for women and revealing how, at age 8, Emma first learned it was regarded as perfectly normal for men to bother girls…

That debate over sexual independence and autonomy in established relationships is then expanded in ‘A Role to Play’ before seemingly diverging off topic (but don’t be fooled) with ‘The Story of a Guardian of the Peace’. This cartoon saga traces the life of honest cop Eric and how he fared over years of trying to treat suspects and villains as fellow human beings in a system expressly created to suppress all forms of dissent and disagreement.

The oppressive demarcation of family duties and necessary efforts are then dissected into Productive and Reproductive Labor roles via the salutary example of Wife & Mother ‘Michelle’…

‘The Power of Love’ deftly explores how women are implicitly expected to police the emotional wellbeing of all those around them, and the crushing affect that unasked-for burden has on mental wellbeing before the irrelevant and shabbily sanctimonious “not all men” defence resurfaces – and is potently sent packing – in ‘Consequences’, with a frankly chilling reckoning of the so-different mental preparations needed for men and women to go about their daily, ordinary lives…

As previously stated The Mental Load caused many ructions when it first gained popular attention and ‘It’s All in Your Head’ deftly summarises reactions, repercussions, defanging, belittlement, dismissal and ultimate sidelining of those revelations – particularly in relation to sexual choice and autonomy – with a barrage of damning quotes from France’s political and industrial elites. ‘Sunday Evenings’ then traces the history of work by oppressed underclasses – like women – and the gaslighting head games employed to keep all toilers off-balance, miserable and guilt-crushed and comfortably, beneficially oppressed.

These hopefully life-altering cartoon lectures conclude with an exposé of the most insidious form of social oppression as ‘Just Being Nice’ outlines tactics and effects of sneakily debilitating Benevolent Sexism; and yes, old gits from my generation – including me – thought it was okay to do it if we called it “chivalry” or “gallantry”…

Reinforced and backed up by a copious ‘Bibliography’ for further research (and probably fuelling some more carping niggles from unrepentant buttheads) and packed with telling examples from sociological and anthropological studies as well as buckets of irrefutable statistics, The Emotional Load is a smart, subversively clever examination of the roles women have been grudgingly awarded or allowed by a still overtly male-centric society, but amidst the many moments that will have any decent human weeping in empathy or raging in impotent fury, there are decisive points where a little knowledge and a smattering of honest willingness to listen and change could work bloody miracles…

Buy this book, pay attention and learn some stuff. Be better, and to all the women and girls, please accept my earnest apologies on behalf of myself, my generation, its offspring and probably my entire gender.
© 2018, 2020 by Emma. English translation © 2020 by Una Dimitrijevic. 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.

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Phoolan Devi: Rebel Queen


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Wolf of Baghdad


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Baggywrinkles – A Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea


By Lucy Bellwood with Joey Weiser, Michele Chidester & various (Toonhound Studios)
ISBN: 978-0-9882202-9-4 (TPB/Digital edition)

Everybody needs an abiding passion in their lives, and born storyteller Lucy Bellwood seems blessed with two, as this superb compilation of her comics about tall ships and the history of sailing delightfully proves.

In her Introduction Bellwood describes how at seventeen she fell under the spell of rigging, sheets and wind after spending some life-changing weeks crewing aboard Lady Washington – a fully functional replica of a 1790s Brig. How that inspired her to produce a succession of strips detailing her time afloat and many of the things she learned (then and since) make up first seafaring snippet ‘The Call of the Running Tide’: a funny, fact-packed evocation of the immortal allure of sea and stars. Following that is an utterly absorbing data page deftly describing and exactly explaining ‘What is a Baggywrinkle?’ I now know; so does my wife and one of our cats, but I’m not telling you because it’s truly cool and I’m not going to spoil the surprise…

‘Sea of Ink’ details with captivating charm and sheer poetic gusto ‘The Baggywrinkles Official Guide to Nautical Tattoos’ covering history, development and specific significance of the most popular symbols worn by mariners across the centuries. It’s followed by a definitive ‘Fathom Fact’ and account of Bellwood’s first days at sea traversing ‘Parts Unknown’ whilst nailing down the very basics of the ancient profession. It’s backed up by the nitty-gritty of seaman’s staple ‘Hard Tack’…

‘The Plank’ outrageously, wittily and saucily debunks accumulated misleading mythology surrounding pirates’ most infamous human resources solution, counterbalanced by an evocative look at the first Lady Washington’s forgotten place in history before ‘Pacific Passages’ reveals how, in 1791, the Boston trader and accompanying sloop Grace deviated slightly from a voyage to Shanghai and discovered Japan by anchoring in Oshima Bay. A tale of remarkable restraint and mutual respect which ended happily for all concerned, whereas  the real trouble started 63 years later when Commodore Matthew Perry showed up and forced isolationist Japan to open her doors to foreign trade…

That salutary tale is bolstered by a ‘Glossary’ of Japanese/English terms, and followed by a superbly succinct history of the greatest scourge ever to afflict nautical travellers. ‘Scurvy Dogs’ relates the effects, causes and raft (not sorry!) of solutions postulated and attempted by every stripe of learned man in the quest to end the debilitating condition’s toll of attrition. It’s followed by ‘Scurvy Afterword’: an engrossing essay by Eriq Nelson relating how we’re not out of the woods yet and why Scurvy still blights the modern world from individual picky eaters to millions suffering in refugee camps.

Wrapping up this magnificently beguiling treat is ‘The Scurvy Rogues’: an outrageously enticing and informative ‘Guest Art Gallery’ with strips and pin-ups from fellow cartoon voyagers Lissa Treiman, Betsy Peterschmidt, Adam T. Murphy, Kevin Cannon, Ben Towle, Steve LeCouilliard, Isabella Rotman, Dylan Meconis & Beccy David.

…And while we’re at it let’s not forget to applaud the colouring contributions of Joey Weiser & Michele Chidester.

Meticulously researched, potently processed into gloriously accessible and unforgettable cartoon capsule communications, the salty sea-stories shared in Baggywrinkles are brimming with verve and passion: a true treat for all lovers of seas, wild experiences, comfy chairs, good company and perfect yarn-spinning.
© 2010-2016 Lucy Bellwood. All Rights Reserved.

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It’s a Bird…


By Steven T. Seagle, Teddy Kristiansen & various (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-0109-8 (HB) 987-1-4012-7288-3 (TPB)

Since his debut in June 1938, Superman has proven to be many things to billions of people, to the point of even changing their lives and shaping their actions. It’s a Bird… was first released in 2004, offering a departure from typical Superman graphic novel fare with author Steven T. Seagle working through his understandable creator-angst about writing the ongoing adventures of the Man of Steel without simply rehashing what has gone before.

Seagle (whose other comics work includes Uncanny X-Men, Sandman Mystery Theatre, Big Hero 6 and Genius, and is part of TV cartoon creation collective Man of Action) actually scripted Superman #190-200 – published between April 2003 and February 2004. The intriguing, demi-therapeutic exercise revealed in this slim and beguiling pictorial introspection deals with the author’s misgivings about contributing to the canon of an eternally unfolding legend.

However, underpinning what might so easily become a self-gratifying ego-stroke is a subtle undercurrent of savvy verity that struck a chord with many fellow industry professionals and insightful consumers as the professional writer finally found themes he needed to explore to be satisfied with his commission.

Let’s be honest here, every comic fan, indeed every twitcher and hobbyist, looks for a way to present and explain their particular passion to the “real” or perhaps “civilian” world and not feel like an imbecile in the process…

Employing barely One Degree of Separation, “Steve” is a writer working through some emotional baggage. He is still coming to terms with his family’s gradual but inescapable disintegration – mental, physical and spiritual – from hereditary genetic disease Huntington’s Disease (Chorea, as was).

In everyday life, his father has gone missing, and his mom and partner are making the “let’s have kids” noises whilst Steve is helplessly waiting for a hammer to fall regarding his own potential prognosis with a condition that cannot be beaten…

He never wanted to write comics – even though he’s successful at it – and now his editor wants him to write Superman. Steve has never had any feeling for the character or the medium and his damned editor just keeps on and on and on about…

You get the picture?

It’s a Bird… is slow and lyrical in its deconstructive self-absorption as Steve – eventually – makes his choices, whilst Teddy (The Sandman, The Dreaming, Grendel Tales, Genius) Kristiansen’s range of enticing drawing styles provides an eye-catching display of sensitivity and versatility – one which won him the 2005 Eisner Award for Best Painter/Multimedia Artist (Interior). If you feel the urge to go beyond panel borders of your private obsession, this one is well worth a look, and a book demanding a digital rerelease ASAP.
© 2004, 2017 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.