A selection of January graphic novels

 Battlefields: The Night Witches by Garth Ennis with art by Russ Braun (2009) 79 pages

It is fascinating that Russia did have women pilots in their air force during WWII. Half the story is following a German squad pushing into Russian territory with one conscientious young man as our narrator. The other half focuses on just a couple of the women pilots who fly night missions dropping bombs. One in particular, Nadia Anna, achieves the rank of Captain and is a survivor despite a brief romance with heartbreak and her plane going down. The story succeeds in showing the horrific tragedy of war. The art work is a bit cartoon-y, but not far-off in portraying the gritty realism.

Hokusai: A Graphic Biography by Giuseppe Latanza and Francesco Matteuzzi (2021) 128 pages

I really enjoyed the art and the biographical story. Like Hokusai making woodblocks to stamp multiple prints of his art, some of the graphic novel's images are repeated. In between the story of his life there are full pages of text with historical background about Japanese art, or explaining terms and historical periods. Some of this felt repetitive, unfortunately, like a different author had lost track of what had previously been explained. However, this did not drastically lessen my enjoyment. I thought the book was aimed at teens at first, but it does mention and show a bit of the erotic art that Hokusai made during one part of his life.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel (2021) 240 pages

I loved this even more than Fun Home. Bechdel is even more revealing about herself, and explores engrossing related topics. Exercise trends through the second half of the 20th century, Romantic poets, Transcendentalists, Kerouac, Zen Buddhism are all connected. She explores mountains as a symbol for human achievement. The aphorism "it is about the journey, not the destination" comes across.

Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City by Will Eisner (2006) 421 pages

I've read a couple of his other realistic graphic novels and highly recommend this one as well. "New York: The Big City" consists of short vignettes. "The Building" tells the backstory of four ghosts who hang around a particular intersection where a historic building has been torn down and a new one constructed in its place. These stories reveal the tragicomic world Eisner is drawn to portray. "City People" is filled with more observations in mostly one or two page vignettes. A longer tragic story is told in Collisions. "Invisible People" contains three longer stories. Sanctum tells the sad story of Pincus Pleatnik. The Power tells a symbolic story of a healer named Morris. Eisner says of Mortal Combat, "In relating the story of Herman, who became the unwilling prize in a clash of wills, I hoped to evoke the helplessness of a person caught in an intersection of the traffic of life."

Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy by Sacha Mardou (2024) 336 pages

A courageous memoir. I picked it up at my new comic shop because it is by a local St. Louis author. Her journey to overcome her anxiety and unpack her childhood trauma is fascinating. She specifically delves into a therapy model called Internal Family Systems (IFS) because she finds it helpful after some initial skepticism. Mardou's art style is a bit loose, but expressive. Freeing herself from generational trauma reveals truly healthy outcomes.

Homie

Homie / Danez Smith, read by the author, 98 pgs.

Wow, I'm not good with comprehending poetry but this has a lot of feeling.  I read more about the poet and this collection is influenced by the death of a close friend.  Honest and telling, we learn a lot by the deep feeling and language.  I'm so happy I listened to the author reading this because it reveals so much about the feelings of the words. Pretty fantastic.

Severance

Severance: a Novel / Ling Ma, 291 p.

Candace Chen - in two alternating before and after narratives - is devoted to the routine of work life overseeing the production of bibles, and heading cross-country with a band of survivors remaining after the American population becomes 'fevered.'   The fevered sound like zombies, except that they don't eat anyone, and are almost sweet, at least until their body parts start rotting away.  They remain stuck in loops of routine, setting the table, reading books, driving, folding clothes.  Ma stuffs a lot of motifs and ideas into a brief work: materialism, Chinese manufacturing, the challenges of 1st generation immigrants, not to mention finding love and meaningful work.  As heavy as that sounds, this is a great, consuming read, and frequently quite funny.  Recommended.

There there, by Tommy Orange

The “there there” in the title is not a comforting “There, there” but a quote from Gertrude Stein who famously said, of her hometown Oakland, “There is no there there.”  This isn’t, as I once assumed, an insult to the city, but means that what she remembers is gone.  Tommy Orange’s first novel is set in Oakland, where the author also was raised.  He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.  The reader is introduced to the fairly large cast characters in short vignettes.  Each person has ties, close or distant, to his or her Native-American past.  Through these various viewpoints, Orange portrays the situation of the “urban Indian,” which is largely unknown outside of their communities.  One character is a young man with fetal alcohol syndrome who is painfully aware of his limitations and the facial characteristics that mark him as different.  One is a grandmother raising her alcoholic daughter’s three sons.  Another has fallen in with a bad crowd.  Many are related in ways they don’t know and all will come together in a climactic scene at the Big Oakland Powwow.  The book owes a debt to Sherman Alexie, which the author acknowledges, but the fresh voice is his own.  294 pp.

IQ

IQ / Joe Ide, 321 pgs.

Isaiah Quintabe is a Sherlock-like private detective who works with his brain, not his brawn.  He solves crimes in his hood as a service and way to make things better.  He is still, many years later, smarting from the hit and run killing of his brother Marcus who raised him and made him a better person.  After Marcus dies, Isaiah is at loose ends.  He is still a kid and trying to finish school and live on his own.  He takes in a room mate, fast talking drug dealer Juanell Dodson and they somehow make it work.  Years later, Dodson is still around, still trying to figure out how to get rich off Isaiah's big brain.  They take a job to figure out who is trying to kill Cal, a popular recording artist.

This book told in flash-back and present day follows Isaiah as a young adult and through to becoming an actual adult.  There are a few unbelievable parts to the story but the characters and the writing will make it easy to leave that behind.  Great debut from the author.  Hope he is working on a second for what could be a great series.

Once in a great city: a Detroit story

Once in a great city: a Detroit story / David Maraniss 457 pgs.

Focused on 1963, this is a story of everything great in Detroit.  A manufacturing powerhouse thanks to the Big Three auto makers, visionary city leaders that came VERY close to landing the 1968 Olympic games, Motown, promising civil rights and race relations...it is really a city on top of the world.  So what happened?  Maraniss shows that signs of the upcoming problems were around even in 1963.  Detroit took it on the chin in many ways following its years of glory...could that have been prevented?  Was the decline inevitable?  I think Maraniss does a good job of discussing the change that was going on even as the city was on top.

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: a Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League / Jeff Hobbs 406 pp.

This may be the saddest book I've ever read.  Robert Peace grew up in a hard but not desperate neighborhood in Newark.  He was blessed with a mother of extreme dedication and strength who scraped to put Robert through solid Catholic schools.  This, combined with Robert's evident powerful intellect and capacity to work fiendishly hard saw him through a Yale bachelor's degree, funded by a wealthy donor to his high school.  He graduated with a degree in hard science, debt-free.  So far so good.  But Robert, who was also good-looking, athletic, compassionate and a born leader, carried substantial psychic debt.  Hobbs was his roommate at Yale for four years and traces Rob's life from birth until his heartbreaking death, nine years after college graduation.  Hobbs is incredibly sensitive, mostly avoiding the temptation to make Robert a symbol of wider social ills.  He paints an individual human being so clearly that the reader feels his death as a personal loss.

Urban Origins of American Judaism / Deborah Dash Moore 185 pp.

A solid and readable treatment of the intersection of religious and urban life for Jews through the course of American history from the colonial period through the present day.  A good many accompanying photos enrich the text.  Not exciting, but a worthy overview.