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1.
Jason The Left Bank Gang
'What would happen if F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce all worked as cartoonists who one day decided to rob a bank? And what if in the world in which they lived comic books had become the top form of literature? Norwegian artist/ writer Jason dreamt up this scenario for his 2006 graphic novel The Left Bank Gang, published by Fantagraphics Books. The result is a look at the highs and lows of the creative life and the challenges of keeping up with talented peers. Jason has also given us a glimpse of what it must have been like to have been a struggling artist in 1920s Paris, where this tale is set.
'In Jason's book, Hemingway, Joyce and the rest are depicted as walking, talking animals, dogs, cats and birds toting suitcases and slaving over drawing boards. The most interesting twist here is that Jason’s characters live in a Paris where comic books have become the literary form of choice, not novels, short stories or plays. It’s an interesting thought, and leaves the reader wishing that comics did engender more respect today.' -- firefox.org
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2.
Jamie McMorrow & Garry McLaughlin The Abortion
The story is simple enough, all told in completely silent, wordless style; An aborted fetus crawls it’s way through the streets searching for it’s parents with murder in mind. Told without any captions or dialogue throughout, The Abortion begins with an unnamed young couple who leave a clinic after having had the procedure, returning home to their young son and idyllic home life. Things don’t end there though as the titular character – an evil-eyed and tentacle sporting creature, decides it doesn’t want to be left behind and so slithers its way back home, seeking revenge on Mom and Dad for abandoning it. For mature readers only. "A success ... I’m looking forward to seeing more from these two creators in the future" -- Indy Jones, Ain't It Cool News. "Ambitious, isn’t pulling any punches ... pretty sweet horror one shot" -- Costa K, Fistfight at the Arthouse. “The Abortion is so wrong on so many levels, but that is only part of its darkly amusing charm." -- Comics Waiting Room, Avril Brown..jpg)
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3.
Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie Lost Girls
'Lost Girls is a graphic novel depicting the sexually explicit adventures of three important female fictional characters of the late 19th and early 20th century: Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan. They meet as adults in 1913, and describe and share some of their erotic adventures with each other. The story is written by Alan Moore, and drawn by Melinda Gebbie.
'Alice (now a grey-haired old woman named "Lady Fairchild"), Dorothy Gale (now in her 20s) and Wendy Darling (now named "Wendy Potter", in her 30s, and married to a man named Harold Potter who is 20 years older) are visiting an expensive mountain resort hotel in Austria on the eve of World War I (1913–1914). The hotel, named "Hotel Himmelgarten", is run by a man named Monsieur Rougeur. At the hotel, Dorothy meets a man named Captain Rolf Bauer. The women meet by chance and begin to exchange erotic stories from their pasts.
'Lost Girls has come under fire from critics who have argued that the book's sexual content involving children might open up stores that carry the book and people who buy the book to be charged with possession and/or trafficking in child pornography. Many retailers have stated that they will not stock the book out of fear of possible obscenity prosecution, though some said they might make the book available to their customers via special order and simply not stock it.' -- Wiki
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4.
Derf My Friend Dahmer
'The whole point of My Friend Dahmer is that people think of Dahmer or think of Hitler, Mengele, or Osama bin Laden, and they seem like absolute evil. But, you know, they were all kids once. They weren’t always evil.
'It really does a disservice in some way when you just say, “He’s pure evil.” That’s too easy. That’s an out. There’s a reason they become what they become. In Dahmer’s case, it was this severe dysfunction he had which nobody saw but his contemporaries. All the adults in his life failed him. Every time an adult could have stepped in and said, “Okay, there’s something wrong with this kid, let’s get him some help,” they didn’t. That’s the real lesson of the book.
'The motivation was that I had a story to tell. It was a different perspective than anyone else had presented. Here’s this guy, and here’s what he did. He was actually kind of a tragic figure, which a lot of people have trouble with when they think of Dahmer. Once he becomes a monster, I lose interest in him. I mean, I’m not a serial killer fan, and God help me, there are people like that out there, and they write me, and they find me. I’m interested in the spiral down.' -- Derf
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5.
Bryan Talbot Alice in Sunderland
'Alice in Sunderland is an argument about history, couched as a lecture in a dream. It is, specifically, an argument about the history of Sunderland, or perhaps at a stretch the history of England, but in its general form, as a provocation to think about who writes history and what they write and why, it could be applied to just about anywhere. From a stage in the Sunderland Empire, and in another guise (referred to in the text as “the pilgrim”) wandering around Sunderland itself, Talbot narrates, explores, and invigorates the history of the city he has made his home with a fluidity and range of reference that is dizzying, and certainly more than I can decode in one reading. Some individual stories or legends are highlighted, such as the story of Jack Crawford, Hero of Camperdown (and source for the phrase “nailing your colours to the mast”), or the Legend of the Lambton Worm; these are generally presented as traditional panel-driven comics, some with guest art or script by such luminaries of British comics as Leo Baxendale. For the most part, however, Alice is a work of collage, a tremendous mish-mash of many different styles of artwork. The signature look is a black and white line-drawn figure against digitally manipulated photographs of the area being discussed, perhaps with other elements – manuscript pages, older artworks, and so on – overlaid. Such a variety of styles is no doubt intended to reflect the variety of ingredients being thrown into the melting point that is Sunderland’s story.' -- Torque Control
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6.
Dash Shaw The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century
'The story for Unclothed Man started in 2006. I'd graduated SVA [The School of Visual Arts] and my main focus at SVA was figure-drawing, mostly James McMullan's High Focus drawing class. After I graduated and moved to Richmond, Virginia, I wanted to stay connected to figure-drawing so I got a job as a figure-drawing model there. I did that because I thought it would improve my drawing, and wasn't expecting it to make me as self-conscious as it did. It's really hard, not just physically to hold something for hours and feel unusual parts of your body go through different stages of numbness, but psychologically. It's like a self-conscious paranoia. So that combined with all of these different, almost warring, ideas of how drawing classes should be taught.
'The McMullan class at SVA was a polar opposite to the kinds of classes in Richmond, where there was one pose for months and months and it was more about slowly charting and mapping a figure. There are different schools of drawing all over the world. And then that combined with technology being introduced to drawing classes. People were starting to bring Wacom tablets into classrooms. And then it also combined with the obvious sexual undercurrent to figure-drawing classes, that kind of weird clinical atmosphere; it's like if you flip through an old "how to draw the figure" book it's always pin-up girls in reclining poses -- it's comical how absurd the whole thing is. So the story was a combination of all of these different things.' -- Dash Shaw
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7.
Diane Dimassa The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist
'Can't get enough man-slashing, het-hating action? Check out this dangerous volume, which brings together two earlier collections of the adventures of Diane DiMassa's popular independent comic. Join coffee-addicted lesbian terrorist Hothead Paisan on her restful vacation in Provincetown, and learn how she deals with gawking straight couples. Watch her surgical assault on scary male doctors. Admire her preventive treatment of rapists. Hothead Paisan goes where the rest of us only dream of going: "Sentenced to life in a rich white banker's scrotal sack," she takes revenge on the gapers and gropers of the city streets, offering her potent "Blow-You-Away Job" in the form of grenade, gun, and Lysol attacks. But she has a softer side, too, as shown in her devotion to her cat, Chicken, and her wise old grandmother. Not for the faint of heart or the satire-challenged.' -- Regina Marler
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8.
Kazuo Umezu The Drifting Classroom
'The titular classroom in Kazuo Umezu's The Drifting Classroom is actually Yamato Elementary School, which due to unknown circumstances finds itself ripped out of time and flung into a devastated future. The school, housing 863 students and teachers, becomes an ark adrift on the sea of toxic sand that covers the remains of Tokyo and the rest of the world. The school's temporal realignment brings the kids and adults face to face with the deadly consequences of Japan's famed “economic miracle.” They become the last remnants of civilization and, at the same time, the last hope for humanity's survival.
'It's clear that Umezu perceives adults as part of the problem, for he dispenses with the teachers early on. One by one the grown-ups succumb to madness and die off quickly. They can't process what is happening to them—the idea that the school might be in the future is utterly impossible—and unable to imagine the impossible they have to die off, like dinosaurs. The children, not yet saddled with dogmas of adulthood, are able to imagine the possibility of time travel and thus grasp the reality of their predicament. Their capacity to imagine the impossible becomes their salvation, but also the source of the horrors to come.' -- Tom K, Rain Taxi
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9.
Marcel Proust/Stephane Heuet Within a Budding Grove
'The Remembrance of Things Past series is a remarkable multivolume graphic novel adaptation of the classic that stirred up the literary world. Stephane Heuet's lavish illustrations catch the nuances of Verne's musings on technology on nearly every page. In this latest volume of Heuet's adaptation of Marcel Proust's classic, Proust, now a teenager, describes his first separation from his mother, a vacation taken in a high class beach resort in Normandy. Besides the feeting visions of young girls, he also keenly observes, without acidity but detached amusement, the petty sophistry of the French upper class in its genteel environs, safely removed from the lower ones. "An important social question is to know whether the pane of glass will always protect the feast of the marvelous beasts and if the obscure people peering at them through the night will not come and pick them out of their aquarium and eat them."' -- The New York Times
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10.
Emmanuel Guibert & Didier Fefevre The Photographer
'Originally published in three volumes by French publisher, Dupuis, and presented in English in one graphic novel by First Second, Guibert and Lefevre's The Photographer is an incredible piece of documentary art. Composed of hundreds of Lefevre's photographs taken during a Doctors Without Borders mission to Afghanistan in 1986 and illustrations by Guibert reconstructing his journey, the book resembles an exhibition catalogue as much as it does a comic book. The stunning visuals are more than a little added by Lefevre's incredible adventure, the lasting effects of which ultimately led to his death, aged 50, in 2007. As Afghanistan remains in the news as a front in America's "War on Terrorism," The Photographer provides an honest and accessible account of the country and its people in a landscape that was ravaged by war even twenty years ago, while emphasizing the difficult and necessary work of non-government agencies like Doctors Without Borders.' -- Shaun Manning, Bookslut
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