Recently in Graphic Novels Category

Employing the form of a graphic novel, “Fearless Dave” is the story of Dave, a zealous, if somewhat ineffectual knight-in-embryo and his well meaning, though somewhat overbearing, mother.

Responding to an advert in the paper making a plea for a person to help a Princess in distress, Dave sets forth with trusty wooden-blade in hand, and a bucket on his head intending to rid the princess’ bedroom of the beast that dwells there. All, however, is not quite as it appears, although the outcome does mean Dave does has to contend with one of his fears and so prove himself as brave…

Good natured, playful jibes are made about the excesses and hyperbole of history and age-old stories as a tour-guide fervently embellishes the true story of Dave, presenting instead a heroic account to amaze his audience, the contrast between this and the true pictorial and narrative account of Dave’s deeds make for a tongue-firm-in-cheek romp of a read.

Tsubasa means wings in Japanese and these play a crucial role in this graphic novel both as a plot device for Sakura, princess of Clow Country, and as a metaphor for the spiritual ‘flight’ they enable.

Raised by her brother, King Toya who presides over Clow County, Sakura has a vision of a symbol. When visiting the archaeologist Syaoran, a childhood friend to whom she intends to profess undying love, Sakura discovers markings in the shape of the same symbol. Powers are unlocked creating the formation of wings upon her back and quickly threaten to pull her into the ruins Syaoran has been uncovering. With tremendous effort, he is able to save Sakura, but amidst this process her wings shatter and disperse across the dimensions

Syaoran and the comatose Sakura make their appearance before Yuko – as concurs with the first volume of “xxxHOLiC”, another series by the CLAMP creators that runs in parallel with this. Syaoran learns that to save Sakura, he must collect each of the feathers from her wings.

Increasingly distressed by the powers vested upon him, Watanuki seeks refuge in a shop that purports to grant wishes. Inside the shop, Yuko offers to aid Watanuki’s hope to be rid of his ability to see ghosts, however, to remunerate her efforts, he must work off a debt equal to the power taken to achieve this…

Yuko is a sage, a wise witch who helps cure her customers of the various addictions, obsessions and preoccupations from which they suffer. Yuko has two henchman, Maru and Moro, twin entities with a deathly pallor and an unnerving ability to communicate telepathically with their mistress.

The “xxxHOLiC” volumes cross with those in “Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE” and CLAMP, the creators of both, claim the two series tie all of their previous work together. Referential material and interplay between characters and artefacts alike add an extra dimension to the series by consequence.

“A love between dogs and humans can never be”

Caught somewhere between Melvin Burgess’ “Lady My Life as a Bitch” and “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” but enlivened and made highly accessible by the dynamism of the Manga form, with its characteristic, almost hyper-active revelation of drama and emotion, “Guru Guru Pon-Chan” makes for a high-paced and humorous reading experience.

The action of the story begins when Grandpa Koizumi believes he has created a ‘chit-chat’ bone, a device allowing animals to communicate with humans. The bone, however, unexpectedly transforms the canine Ponta into a homo-sapien.

Mayhem ensues as Ponta, who in human form initially struggles to speak her needs and desires, gradually falls in love with Mirai who saves her life after she runs out into the road.

Much of the frenetic, sometimes almost too-fast-paced – humour derives from Ikezawa’s perceptive observations of the behaviour of dogs. Alongside parading naked, vomiting and the inevitable sniffing of excretia, Ponta battles against the prejudice of her classmates and has numerous accidents along the way concerning appropriateness of canine behaviour when translated into the human form.

A fun-filled, highly accessible book that will serve as a great introduction to the Manga form and that will resonate with dog owners.

Underlying the desire to become a Magister Magi, is Negi’s wish to find his father Nagi Springfield, a once legendary mage who most now believe to have died. On leaving his school of magic, bizarrely Negi is given an alias as a professor teaching English to a class of girls, all of whom are older than himself, in Japan.

Negi comes across as a likeable, although extremely youthful, individual who is both sensitive and hardworking. His age and relative inexperience enable Akamatsu to parody and satirise a number of conventions in the graphic novel form creating a fiction that looks inward upon its genre challenging a number of its clichés and parameters.

Negi’s class respond to him more as a younger brother to be patronised rather than as a teacher and an antagonism erupts between him and one of the students, Asuna who had a crush for the teacher whom Negi replaced. The story as Negi continues to battle to fulfil his dream of becoming a Magister Magi follows in further volumes.

Mai Taniyama is a high school student with a job employed by the mysterious company, Shibuya Psychic Research. She examines hauntings and the supernatural. Seventeen-year-old Shibuya Kazuya boss of the Psychic Research centre and, to Mai’s mind a liar, cheat and a narcissist, throws her into a confused state of attraction and repulsion from what she initially perceives as arrogance accompanied by boyish good looks.

The company is employed to investigate an old school building that is believed to be cursed after a series of ‘accidents’ occur each time the site is attempted to be re-developed.

Mai’s curiosity over a camera that has been set up to record evidence of any paranormal happenings, leads to her working to pay for the damage. The principal of the school hires other psychics to assess the property including Ayako Matsuzaki who is a Shinto priestess, Takigawa who is a Buddhist monk, John Brown a priest who has learnt Japanese in the Kyoto dialect and believes this to be the polite method of pronunciation and one of the most renowned psychic mediums as featured on teleivison, Masako Hara.

The cross sections of different thoughts and systems of belief provides a backdrop for theological and philosophical discussion. Disagreements abound between all concerned, not in the least between Shibuya and Mai herself, whose wrangling it is implied shrouds quite another emotion as is suggested at the end of the novel when Shibuya offers Mai an administrative position and she keenly accepts.

"Another madman... All that's left are corpses, madmen and dogs..."

Stassen beautifully captures the colour and the sense of calm of the Rwandan environs by day and by night in “Deogratias”. There is an appalling juxtaposition between this and the horrors perpetrated against the Tutsi as the Hutu vie for supremacy of the land in the aftermath of colonial ‘divide and rule’ tactics.

Told in the form of a graphic novel, “Deogratias” follows a boy of the same name as he jointly wanders the streets of the present and achingly struggles, quite literally, to drown his sorrows through drinking Urwagwa, the banana beer that is traditional in his country.

Three depictions of Deogratias are presented within the book, the first sees him wide-eyed with horror, dressed in tattered clothing, the second as an immaculately presented young man, keen to impress the Tutsi young ladies Apollinaria and Benina. The third and most disturbing sees Deogratias take on the appearance and characteristics of a dog, the shocking reason for which becomes apparent as the story unfurls…

Essentially a story of love and of loss, what makes “Deogratias” such a memorable, abhorrent and at once vitally important read is the central role Deogratias plays in the genocide of the Tutsi, the pack-mentality that he becomes a part of and the dog-eat-dog attributes that engulf him both physically and mentally following this. As readers we live our experiences vicariously alongside Deogratias, feel his anger, hurt, sorrow and pain.

Alexis Siegel, the translator provides a useful introduction that contextualises the history of the decimation of the Tutsi people. This grounds the novel in a realism that cannot easily be shed and which, by consequence, spreads a chill throughout the course of the book.

If the cry of “never again” which followed the Holocaust is to have meaning, an understanding of the types of brutality exercised against a set of people, an awareness of the mechanics that drive conflict and that see difference only as threat needs to be located firmly into the consciousness of society. Creative works such as “Deogratias” play a key role in achieving that by making one think and feel more, stimulating empathy, understanding and the deep-stirrings of compassion.

The work’s convoluted and often discursive narrative strands form response to Roland Barthes’ proclamation that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’, to the Dewey Decimal Classification of graphic novels and presents an impressively wide-ranging commentary upon the arts, a fictionalised history and indeed a probing into the means employed to construct and to perceive identity.

Comprised of narrative accounts, of graphic interludes, of interspersed comic strips (aged and attached) and of interviews presented here through photos, the work draws question towards empirical evidence, constantly inverting and reverting upon itself the constructions of reality that it structures.

Eddie Campbell is missing yet at once is ever-present if only in the guise of constructed absence through this unusual and challenging latest addition to the graphic novel oeuvre presented here by the new imprint First Second This is a highly unusual and thought-provoking work that benefits from and rewards multiple close readings.

Since the novel’s wholesale acceptance into the canon of mainstream literature, it is difficult to look back to the time Jane Austen writes of above in “Northanger Abbey”, when its value was decried, its art-form denied, proof, if any be needed the bastions of the ‘literary establishment’ are not always equal to the challenge of realising the form in which literary classics will make themselves presented in future years…

Should the subject of performance recommend itself still through the genius, wit and taste Austen refers to above, readers could do far worse than to look to the much maligned graphic novel for inspiration. It is exciting therefore that Holtzbrinck Publishing in New York and Pan Macmillan should have collaborated in the formation of a new imprint, First Second, for the wide dissemination of the form across both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The first title published by First Second is the acronymically titled “A.L.I.E.E.E.N.” - ‘Archives of Lost Issues and Earthly Editions of Extraterrestrial Novelties’ by French artist and writer Lewis Trondheim. Cleverly masquerading as a journal of alien life-forms, as children’s literature and pedagogy for beings from outer space, the journal was purportedly found in Mid-April 2006 within the epicentre of a perfect circle of singed grass…

Comprising of nine interwoven episodic chapters, we meet a bizarre cast of characters and players. Starting off with what appears to be a charming idyll, events rapidly take a turn towards the depraved and the gratuitous as misfortune follows misfortune, bodily functions are taken to extremes and sado-masochistic tendencies are lived out. This is an unexpected yet somehow also a deeply satisfying read.

In the body of this text there are no words. Between individual frames and their guttering, we as readers are liberated to interpret and decide upon time-spans, probable actions and interactions and ultimately to sequence this narrative form. There is nothing derivative in an art-form that prompts us towards this and in an age when visual literacy exercises an increased dominance – whether through computers and the internet, the television, cinema etc – it can surely only be a matter of time before proponents of the graphic novel exert influence to ensure works such as “A.L.I.E.E.E.N.” assume their rightful place within mainstream literary discourse.