![]() ‘An amazing first outing’: It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be by Lizzy Stewart. The result is transcendent, and does the reader far more good than a Peloton class and a cup of turmeric tea. Wrestling the notion of physical self-improvement from the clammy hands of the so-called wellness industry, Bechdel puts it instead in the context not only of her own struggle to be happy (exercise is her balm), but of centuries of literary and social history. It was wonderful to see Alison Bechdel, of Fun Home fame, return with The Secret to Superhuman Strength(Cape), a knowingly neurotic memoir of her lifelong obsession with fitness that covers so much territory – what other writer would detour into Jane Fonda and William Wordsworth? – it demands to be reread immediately. Modan is a genius and I hope lots of people will read this story with its ending that might have been borrowed from Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust – and then, perhaps, seek out her earlier books, Exit Wounds and The Property. But it works on a deeper level, too, its real subject being contested land, and all the ways in which competing narratives are imposed on such territory. It’s impossible not to think of Tintin as you turn this book’s pages: here are good guys, and bad guys, and museum-standard sarcophagi. Evens is a master of crowd scenes and colour, and his psychedelic symphony bleeds into a pensive, washed-out dawn that suggests that even the wildest trips must end sometime.I also loved Tunnels by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly translated by Ishai Mishory), in which two rival archaeologists attempt to find the Ark of the Covenant beneath the wall that separates Israel from the West Bank. Three characters, their lives on the edge of change, dance their way through lurid bars and dark passageways in a swirl of tall tales and lush inking. There was hedonism too this year, in the return of Brecht Evens, whose The City of Belgium (Drawn and Quarterly) explores a bacchanalian nightscape. The seasons change as war takes its toll, and earnest letters – adapted from real correspondence – beat with tension beneath their matter-of-fact surface. Brother Charles abandons pacifism to fight for the Union, while his sister Fanny deals with schisms at home in a book whose powerful images spring out of white space. Slavery shadows Dash Shaw’s Discipline (New York Review of Books), a startling, panel-free work that follows a Quaker family ruptured by the American civil war. Aided by Hugo Martínez’s stark artwork, Hall compellingly describes the terror and resilience of people who were brought across the ocean in shackles and enslaved for generations, speaking of reckonings still to come. She uncovers vital details, such as why women played a crucial role in slave-ship mutinies – they were often left unchained on deck. Hall combines re-creations of revolts with an account of her own research, which is held back by unhelpful archivists and myopic official histories. But while Windsor-Smith doesn’t shirk on spectacle, he’s more interested in pulling back the curtain on sordid military-industrial compromises, and showing how hate leaches from one man to another in a study of violence, redemption and parenthood.Įxploitation echoes down the centuries in historian Rebecca Hall’s Wake (Particular), which delves into the neglected story of female slavery and resistance. This big, bruising epic about an attempt to create a cold war supersoldier features Nazi scientists, helicopter gunfights and psychic powers. It has been some time since Barry Windsor-Smith was a promising newcomer – the comics veteran began his career drawing for Marvel 50 years ago – but Monsters(Jonathan Cape) is likely to be his defining work. ![]() This beautifully composed debut mixes nuanced observation with hipster satire, and scalpel-sharp one-liners about the things that don’t matter with stumbling attempts to articulate the things that do. ![]() by Will McPhail (Sceptre), a clever and touching account of a young illustrator dealing with his mother’s illness and his own ennui. The finest British graphic novel of the year was In. Vibrant illustrations sit alongside descriptions of her father’s cancer diagnosis and her attempts to conceive in an inventive debut memoir that’s as deeply felt as it is stylistically playful. Where Khan explains herself with scrupulous care, Shira Spector’s Red Rock Baby Candy (Fantagraphics) spins a chaotic spectacle of bright collages and strange visions, her text bouncing off drum kits and reaching into bloodstains and ink spills. A panel from Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith. ![]()
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