{so, yeah … many months have passed. We’ll be catching up over the next few weeks.}
Another interlude …
Pierre Paquet and Tony Sandoval‘s A Glance Backward (2015) is a translation of Paquet’s original work in French, telling a fantastical story of a young boy’s journey through grief. It’s not terribly original material in this format, but the artwork is surreal and endearing, and there are some truly creative and touching moments.
Roz Chast‘s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant (2014) is a brutally honest telling of the final decades of her parents’ lives. Chast is an experienced and established artist, and her skill never wavers here, including a level of critical self-presentation that is striking. At the same time, there is such a level of emotional incompetence in her family that the story serves best as a dramatic and forceful warning: if you have parents and you haven’t begun to talk with them about death and end of life care and how all that should happen, you need to do so. Now. No matter how difficult those conversations are.
Gale Bertrand‘s A Land Called Tarot (2017) is gorgeous and wordless, which really is a sub-genre of graphic novels all its own. It rewards a slow consumption due to the quality of the art, and the narrative that emerges maintains its own coherence, even without language.
Blutch has been producing cartoons for jazz magazines (predominantly in Europe) for decades; Total Jazz (2017) collects a series of these. The more of an aficionado of the music you are, the more amusing the pages will be, as they both pay tribute to artists and the art form and effectively skewer some of the cliches of the relationships between audience and artist.
My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies (2018) by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips is a great one-shot: a tightly paced noir tale with enough of a twist to make the payoff worthwhile. As you may guess from the title, it’s not the most optimistic and happy of tales, but still excellent.