The cartoon universe is not what it used to be
Let’s assume that at best you have a cursory experience with comics by way of Saturday cartoons — Archie or costumed musclemen with silly names. Maybe it’s been years or even decades since you last read one.
Still you may have noticed the comics — or graphic novels — section in your local bookstore (if you still have one) has grown. Your local newspaper may be reviewing comics alongside books. Perhaps you yourself could be called “bookish” and have glanced at some of these “alternative” or “literary” comics. You may have noticed of all things substance.
So you’re not to be found under a rock but you’re still a comics novice. Nonetheless you remain a segment of the audience that leading publishers like Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly have targeted. Comics are also being released by venerable operations like Random House and are regularly reviewed in literary-minded publications including Esquire and The New Yorker .
Hopefully then you’re open to giving comics a spin which brings us to an inevitable list.
Various Fill-in-the-blank-Men are absent from the following recommendations. Some comic lovers may find that a welcome absence others may not. If you’ve got recommendations we’d love to see your comments at ffwdweekly.com .
Maus by Art Spiegelman
The only comic to win a Pulitzer Prize Art Spiegelman’s most famous work was also a formative step towards the kind of highly personal meta-narrative that characterizes many “alternative” comics today.
It’s also the gripping account of a Holocaust survivor’s ordeal and how his son has to reckon with that legacy. While never trivializing his subject Spiegelman’s use of cartoon devices mitigates the grimness most conspicuously in his famous depictions of Nazis as cats and Jews as mice.
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
The basis for an Oscar-nominated 2001 film this is one of the quintessential “alternative” comics of the last 20 years. It’s populated by oddball on-the-fringe characters that challenge our sensibilities and a story that touches on sad disquieting tragic human experience.
Melancholy is where Clowes’s characters seem destined to dwell. They try but fail. And while possessing some degree of self-awareness they boast little chance of change or escape.
Palestine by Joe Sacco
In his introduction to the original single-volume edition of Palestine the late Middle East scholar Edward Said wrote: “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.” That’s some high praise from an authoritative source on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
What this medium supplies Sacco is a wider range of journalistic tools to work with. He masterfully balances detailed realism minimalism and the kind of expressionism and caricature the drawn image allows to craft an engaging challenging dispatch.
George Sprott by Seth
As celebrated comics writer Alan Moore pointed out comics allow the planting of recurring motifs that acquire significance only later on and whose meaning can be unpacked at the reader’s own pace.
Renowned Canadian cartoonist Seth makes adroit use of that approach here. His fragmented narrative asks: what life episodes make us who we are? That’s the underlying question as the artist examines his foolish sad and possibly tragic titular figure whose disappointments embody life itself. From story content to art to design this is an affecting masterwork.
Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography by Chester Brown
Named by Time magazine as one of its best comics in 2003 and now one of the Top 10 titles in CBC’s 2012 Canada Reads competition this narrative of the Metis leader’s life is one of the most compulsively readable comics.
Canadian cartoonist Brown deliberately eschews pat explanations for what drove Riel. We’re left to decide whether he was a hero madman or prophet. What’s fascinating is how anti-literary that approach is. Whereas prose fiction can take us inside characters’ minds Brown uses visual devices — such as framing his figures from afar — to create distance. The book is a splendid illustration of what comics can do.
Ojingogo by Matthew Forsythe
Not only is this a delightful fantastical and surreal journey it exemplifies how younger artists are forsaking some of the most “classic” comic conventions drawing instead on new diverse inspirations.
Ojingogo about a girl who enters a land of weird creatures and amazing adventures has no resemblance to traditional comics; there are no panels and what text balloons exist may or may not reflect any known language.
Yet it never fails to captivate and its wealth of award nominations and wins — including a Doug Wright Award the highest cartooning accolade in Canada — reflect a recognition of the medium’s new formal and aesthetic directions.
