Henry Jenkins’s recommendation,<\/a> I read volume one of Jeremy Love’s Bayou,<\/i> a comic about a girl whose father is a sharecropper and who faces a series of violent and historically apt horrors. This comic, in color, blends in a dreamworld of fabular elements to interesting effect, although the “truth” side of the story ends up being more terrifying and compelling than the “fiction.” For this reason, I think I enjoyed and learned from Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro<\/i> even more. This black-and-white comic tells of a black reporter who can pass as white and who goes to the South to document lynchings. Both comics show the strength of family ties and feature a sheriff who is, compared to the lynch mob, a somewhat good guy. Bayou<\/i>‘s play with fantasy and folklore is nice, but I think Incognegro<\/i> does even better, incorporating an incredible plot twist and keeping the action within a historical world.<\/p>\nThe most dark, bitter, depressing, and hopeless sequential thing I’ve seen recently was Josh Simmons’s House.<\/i> Three people meet up and explore a huge dilapidated ruin of a house. Guess what happens. Yep, except it’s even worse than you imagine.<\/p>\n
I liked Night Fisher<\/i> by R. Kikuo Johnson a lot. It’s the story of a high school student in Hawaii, a good student who ends up getting involved with drugs and then with despairing criminals for what seems like no particular reason – there’s not much else to do, though. Miss Lasko-Gross has a more amusing tale of school days in Escape from “Special,”<\/i> which chronicles a younger student’s educational, social, and religious difficulties.<\/p>\n
I really liked Dupuy and Berberian’s Maybe Later,<\/i> a collaboratively written and drawn journal of the duo’s experiences writing and drawing Mr. Jean comics. I’m now reading some of those comics, translated and collected as Get a Life.<\/i> Dupuy and Berberian don’t divide up the writing and drawing, but actually collaborate at each stage of the comic-creation process, from conception through to execution, much as I’ve collaborated as a writer with Scott Rettberg (Implementation<\/i>) and William Gillespie (2002,<\/i> The Ed Report<\/i>).<\/p>\n
Finally, David Mazzucchello’s Asterios Polyp<\/i> is brilliant, with incredible writing and art. It’s well worth the price and the effort of carrying the hefty book home. The book’s form recalls that of an architecture book and is perfectly apt for this tale of a architecture professor who is a jerk, flawed, and incomplete – who loses the most important thing in his life, loses everything else, and decides to live, to listen and watch life, and to keep searching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Comics are written by people whose lives suck, for people whose lives suck. Obviously, that’s not entirely true. Alternative comics do seem to be highly in touch with the lameness of life, though, whether they’re chronicling lynchings in the American South, exploring the emotional suffering of outcasts, or taking us through people’s decisions and indecision. … <\/p>\n
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