When you open Boundless, a new comic book of short stories by Jillian Tamaki, you have to turn the book sideways to read its first story – "World Class City." The sparse text, a couple of sentences per page, punctuates the large illustrations that take up the whole two-page spread and leak into the next page as one long continuous image, evoking the passage of time. It’s an unsettling effect, if only because of the subtle discomfort of turning the book.
In this ambitious book, Marcelino Truong tells his family’s story, intertwined with a history of the onset of the Vietnam War and contemptary reflections about that time. Truong offers a rare perspective for Western readers – that of a Vietnamese French person who experienced the conflict first hand. Originally written in French, the book has been translated to English by David Homel.
Ben Katchor’s Cheap Novelties is considered to have been one of the first modern graphic novels. First published in the late 1980s as a series of strips in the alternative weekly New York Press and then as a RAW one-shot in 1991, the comic has finally received the full Drawn & Quarterly treatment on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary.
Paul Up North is the eighth volume in the Paul series. Rabagliati says it might be the last, and if that turns out to be true, we’re leaving at an odd juncture. The new book disdains straight chronology to take a nostalgic trip back to the Olympic summer of 1976; Paul is an awkward, frequently surly adolescent discovering love in the Laurentians when he isn’t hiding out in his bedroom at home.
"I wish more food writers would write about going to the bathroom,” declares Lisa Hanawalt in her new comic book, Hot Dog Taste Test, shortly after giving her thoughts on the sanitary installations of a restaurant, “because it’s funny and interesting and it’s the inevitable result of all of this.” This encapsulates Hanawalt’s approach in this book: irreverent, funny, silly, and insightful.
The importance of Chris Oliveros to the world of alternative comics publishing is probably impossible to overstate. As the founder and publisher of Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly, Oliveros oversaw work by such seminal cartoonists as Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Seth, and Adrian Tomine, among many others, and his successes have been instrumental in carving out a cultural space for offbeat, alternative, and so-called “serious” comics.
There are two kinds of people in this world, as the saying goes. Michael DeForge uses this premise, normally the setup for a joke, to engage in some nimble psychedelic riffing with results more bleak than funny.
Fans of Kate Beaton don’t need a review to tell them what to expect from Step Aside, Pops, the second collection from the author of the web-comic Hark! A Vagrant. Beaton’s followers have no doubt been eagerly anticipating another feast of lumpy presidents, sassy dames, and unaccountably bitter superheroes since Beaton’s first collection (also called Hark! A Vagrant) came out in 2011. Step Aside, Pops won’t disappoint, and those who have yet to discover her work have a hearty spread awaiting them.
The third English-language instalment of Shigeru Mizuki’s gargantuan manga history of Japan’s Showa era (the period from 1926 to 1989, defined by the reign of Emperor Hirohito) is the best yet. This sprawling series gradually deepens its gripping narrative as new layers and perspectives are added to a story that is relatively unknown to most Westerners.
On Loving Women is a graphic novel, but only in the loosest sense of that often-ambiguous designation. Montreal- born Obomsawin, who made her English-language debut in 2009 with a comics version of the life of nineteenth- century German foundling Kaspar Hauser, has gathered 10 sexual awakening/coming-out accounts – her own and those of nine other women – and told them in discrete chapters: “Mathilde’s Story,” “Maxime’s Story,” etc.
Originally published in French in 2006, My Neighbour’s Bikini is the story of two shy neighbours living on the Plateau who meet on a sweltering summer day when everything grinds to a halt because of a power blackout. Simon introduces himself to his neighbour, Bernadette, on a downtown street, and, after they walk home together, Bernadette invites Simon to go for a swim at the neighbourhood pool.
