Graphic Reads

S.A. Harkham's graphic novel Poor Sailor is a moving and evocative work. This is a work in true graphic form, with minimal dialogue and spare green, black, and white images. Each page contains a single panel taking up most of the 5"x5" space. The book itself is tiny and beautifully bound.

Poor Sailor is inspired by the classic work 'At Sea' by Guy de Maupassant, and tells the story of Thom, who lives happily with his wife Rachel in a thatched cottage. Their peaceful pastoral life is forever altered when Thom's brother Jacob returns from his latest sea-voyage and invites Thom to sail with him again, "like old times." Rachel, learning of this news, says no and reminds him of their little house, and their life together. But the seeds of adventure are planted in Thom, and he leaves Rachel sleeping in their bed one night and heads off to the sea with his brother. After many adventures, injuries, and tragedy, Thom returns back to his thatched cottage only to find his love buried outside the front door in a simple grave. Though the story is short and simple, it has the power to evoke strong emotions from the reader. The love and unity between Thom and Rachel is so sweet and powerful, and his decision to leave so painful, that the reader can't help but feel for the doomed lovers. Though Harkham shows them in simple everyday activities - building their house, having a quiet dinner, holding each other in bed - it is clear from the start that their bond is unusually strong. When Jacob arrives to pull his brother back to sea, the fragmentation of Thom and Rachel's marriage is heartbreaking. This is an excellent example of a book that, though seemingly simple, is powerful and forces the reader to question what is going on behind each panel. How strong is their union? Why does Rachel die, and how? What is Thom's motivation to finish building their little hut? Readers interested in the ways in which graphic artists communicate complex emotional scenes through single-panel art would do well to explore this wonderful little book.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi has been called the "grandfather of Japanese alternative comics," and Abandon the Old in Tokyo (given starred reviews by both Publishers Weekly and Booklist) is a masterpiece of gekiga, the term used to describe a more realistic form of the popular Japanese manga. In its most simplified form, gekiga is manga for adults, though this collection of stories is so much more than their comic form.

Each story follows an adult male narrator as he goes about his daily life. Daily life for these men is nothing if not prosaic, though routine is punctuated by moments of absurdity, revelation, and desperation. The overriding theme is human frailty, failure, and isolation in urban Tokyo. Each of the men struggles for a place of his own, both literally in the overcrowded city, and figuratively. Most of the male protagonists look very similar, and Tatsumi intends for them to "represent [his] view [about] the discrimination and inequality

rampant in. . .society."

Abandon the Old in Tokyo is clearly most suitable for adult readers, and while some scenes can be downright shocking, the overall impression that the book leaves is one of great depth and power. There is an immediacy and rawness to these stories that will stay with the reader long after the last page is read. "Beloved Monkey" and "Eels" are especially powerful and will force the reader to consider whether or not the lives of the protagonists are much different from the lives of the titular animals. Very highly recommended.

Time Magazine named Alison Bechdel's Fun Home one of the Ten Best Books of 2006 and wrote that "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006 is a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad. . . Oh, and it's a comic book". Time's decision to award a top spot on the "best of" list to a"comic book" may go a long ways towards giving graphic novels the respect they deserve. Certainly if any graphic novel of 2006 deserved the honor, it is Bechdel's gripping, engaging, immensely intelligent and sympathetic memoir of her childhood and coming of age.

Fun Home takes its name from the funeral home that Bechdel's father inherited and ran as a family business. The book chronicles life with her perfectionist father, a man who is more concerned with restoring their beautiful old house and collecting antiques than with raising his three children. As the book progresses, Bechdel details this love of things beautiful and desire to create aesthetic perfection. Her father goes to great lengths to create the perfect family life, including dressing up his daughter in dresses and ribbons, even while Alison rebels and the family slowly begins to lead separate lives inside their beautiful house. This obsession with image masks the inner secret of her father - that he is gay and perhaps in trouble for pursuing young men. Alison herself is a lesbian, and while she is critical of her father, and struggles with the way in which she and her brothers were brought up, she nonetheless is extraordinarily sympathetic to him.

The book is smart, even erudite, and the various references to literature and philosophy and Greek myth inform the text and lend it a richness of depth. Bechdel explores the often fraught relationship between fathers and daughters with tenderness, refusing to gloss over the many faults of her father while at the same time acknowledging their connection.