Sacrifice, The,     Bruce Mutard

As the world spins out of control into World War II, Robert and his family each deal differently with the challenges it presents. Robert offers his apartment to German-Jewish refugees who have been cast out by the community, Artie intends to join up as soon as the fighting breaks out, their mother despairs that a second world war will lead only to more death in her family, and Robert's communist sweetheart Elsa answers the call of capitalism. When Robert befriends Mata, the precocious young refugee with a yen for men in uniform, it is only the beginning of his long journey; a soul-searching journey with an uncertain ending. Set in World War II Melbourne, this evocative, compelling novel draws parallels between Australia then and now, and explores questions of courage, masculinity, tolerance and national identity that will resonate long after the book is read. (Publisher’s description)

Safe Area Gorazde,     Joe Sacco

Safe Area Gorazde is Joe Sacco's 240-page opus about the war in the former Yugoslavia. Sacco spent four months in Bosnia in 1995-1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stories rarely found in conventional news coverage. The book focuses on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which was besieged by Bosnian Serbs during the war. Sacco spent four weeks in Gorazde, entering before the Muslims trapped inside had access to the outside world, electricity or running water. The hardcover edition of Safe Area Gorazde put Sacco on the map as one of the pre-eminent journalists of his time, and the softcover edition will present his work to a wider audience. Safe Area Gorazde features an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, political columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair. (Publisher’s description)

Sandman, The,     Neil Gaiman

THE SANDMAN, written by New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman, was the most acclaimed comic book title of the 1990s. A rich blend of modern myth and dark fantasy in which contemporary fiction,historical drama and legend are seamlessly interwoven, THE SANDMAN is also widely considered one of the most original and artistically ambitious series of the modern age. By the time it concluded in 1996, it had made significant contributions to the artistic maturity of comic books and had become a pop culture phenomenon in its own right. (Publisher’s description)

Sleepwalk and Other Stories,     Adrian Tomine

Collecting the first four issues of Adrian Tomine's acclaimed comic series optic nerve, this book offers sixteen concise, haunting tales of modern life. The characters here appear to be well-adjusted on the surface, but Tomine takes us deeper into their lives, subtly examining their struggle to connect with friends and lovers. (Publisher’s description)

Sloth,     Gilbert Hernandez

The much heralded Love & Rockets cartoonist turns in his first original graphic novel and it showcases a creator still making vital work after two decades. The story is of young people too creative, too smart and too passionate for the constraints of suburbia. Miguel Serra wakes up from a yearlong coma, slower physically but not mentally. He is literally out of step with the rest of the world, a perfectly disaffected youth. Miguel, his friend Romeo and girlfriend Lita use rock 'n' roll, urban legends and sex to feel alive. It leads to a love triangle that complicates things nicely. Hernandez takes a big gamble in the middle of the book by having everyone change roles in the story. It's unclear at first whether it pays off, but eventually the reader sees the characters from different angles, making the humanity in the story stronger as our sympathies are challenged. Hernandez has been compared to García Márquez, and uses heavy symbolism, in this case the image of a lemon orchard, which represents both the unconscious and how plant life makes the rest of the world look artificial. Sloth packs a lot of emotion and complicated storytelling into an unusual tale. (Publishers Weekly review)

Uncle Sam,    Steve Darnall and Alex Ross

This truly subversive graphic novel, more explicitly radical than anything else from DC Comics in recent memory, almost makes up for the years of muscular patriotism and jingoistic violence that have long defined most of the company’s product. Alex Ross, who recently provided the lush paintings for Superman: Peace on Earth, here flexes his illustrative skills in the service of Darnall’s stunning text, a damning account of American political history that also affirms basic democratic ideals. From the first full-page illustration of Uncle Sam as a derelict reaching out to the reader, the visually rich narrative makes its overarching point: the spirit of everything great in American history is down on its luck. Uncle Sam, whose image here derives largely from James Montgomery Flagg’s famous I Want You poster, stumbles through a dreamy landscape. In the foreground, he’s an old nut, a psycho in the ER who spouts sound bites from presidential history and pop culture. Periodically, he finds himself elsewhere in time: preparing to fight the Revolutionary War; in Kennedy’s Dallas limo; at the Blackhawk Massacre of 1832; at Andersonville Prison; and at a labor protest in 1932; at a Louisiana lynching. Scenes blend into one another, demonstrating the continuity of American history; bedraggled present-day Sam interrupts a political rally exploiting his alter ego. The pictorial narrative here is so smart that political speeches are illustrated with voice-over balloons explicating the truth behind the double-talk. Supplemented with a fine essay on the iconography and legend of Uncle Sam, this portrait of a down-and-out American hero quotes visually from both fine art (e.g., Vermeer) and classic illustration; the spirit of N.C.Wyeth is very much alive here. Among the most captivating examples of left-wing agitprop since the days of the Popular Front: Darnall and Ross’s populist message comes draped in red, white, and true-blue. (Kirkus Reviews)

Top 10,     Alan Moore

Continuing his exploration of superhero comics, Moore speculates on what would happen if an expansion in the number of people who are able to develop their desires into super powers led to the creation of Neopolis. His world is populated by superbeings: people (and animals, space aliens, robots, etc.) who have extraordinary abilities and secret identities. Basic human nature leads to an urban society resembling today's, including the need to maintain law and order among the sometimes barely controllable superbeings. Based on that premise, overlapping, intertwined stories create a kind of skewed Hill Street Blues for the cops of Top 10, the police station in Neopolis. Sometimes their cases work out farcically, but sometimes very seriously. After all, Moore asks, if you could do almost anything, what limits would you accept? What kind of responsibility would you take for others? Most comics series are intended to be endless, so nothing changes much from issue to issue. That's not so in this case; Book One is necessary reading before picking up Book Two. The art helps this purpose. Much of today's manga-influenced comics art is designed to convey excitement, using motion at the expense of detail. The artwork here reverts to an older tradition of elaborate pen and ink text illustration (like Joseph Clement Coll's work), slowing readers down just enough to make them alert to the elegant details of the world Moore has created. Anyone interested in comics should be paying attention to Moore and this outstanding example of his recent thinking. (Publishers Weekly review)

Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, The,     Neil Gaiman

A dark and frightening fully painted novella, MR. PUNCH tells the tale of a young boy's loss of innocence results from a horrific confrontation with his past. Spending a summer at his grandfather's seaside arcade, a troubled adolescent harmlessly becomes involved with a mysterious Punch and Judy Man and a mermaid-portraying woman. But when the violent puppet show triggers buried memories of the boy's family, the lives of all become feverishly intertwined. With disturbing mysteries and half-truths uncontrollably unraveling, the young boy is forced to deal with his family's dark secrets of violence, betrayal, and guilt. (Publisher’s description)

Transmetropolitan,     Warren Ellis

There's a trick in getting people to actually think about the terrible world we live in and the cretinous beasts we usually choose to run it; it's a hallmark of science fiction from Verne to Asimov, Serling to Ellison. See, no one wants a lecture, no one wants to read notes on social and political injustices - especially if it's force-fed to them under the guise of entertainment which somehow makes the Message all the more disingenuous. We are a people sick and tired of Very Special Episodes. However, the wily writer may employ from his bag of tricks allusion, and talk of one thing while really talking about another. TRANSMETROPOLITAN is social commentary disguised as science fiction, which the most potent science fiction usually is. On its surface, TRANSMET is about Spider Jerusalem, a rogue journalist of the Hunter S. Thompson ilk rampaging through an orgiastic nightmare of the future trying to get at the truth for the benefit of his hopelessly fucked fellow man. Forced to return to The City (the techno-hellscape which serves as TRANSMET's backdrop), Spider finds himself a journalist once again neck-deep in a world full of sheep yet run by wolves. And, as he gleefully tells us in BACK ON THE STREET, "Journalism is just a gun... Aim it right and you can blow the kneecap off the world." Self-made alien half-breeds, riot cops with blood-caked truncheons and carte blanche orders to use them, government-compromised news outlets, drug-addicted computers and a zombified, media-obsessed populace are the backbone upon which Ellis and Robertson stitch their dystopic parable. Infused with righteous anger and acid-sharp observations (as well a pitch-black sense of humor), TRANSMETROPOLITAN is a shout, a scream against imaginary and savage tyrannies, so strange and so horrifying that they must certainly be true. (artbomb.net commentary by Matt Fraction)

Understanding Comics,     Scott McCloud

A comic book about comic books. McCloud, in an incredibly accessible style, explains the details of how comics work: how they're composed, read and understood. More than just a book about comics, this gets to the heart of how we deal with visual languages in general. "The potential of comics is limitless and exciting!" writes McCloud. This should be required reading for every school teacher. Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Spiegelman says, "The most intelligent comics I've seen in a long time." (Amazon.com review)

V for Vendetta,    Alan Moore

V for Vendetta is, like its author's later Watchmen, a landmark in comic-book writing. Alan Moore has led the field in intelligent, politically astute (if slightly paranoid), complex adult comic-book writing since the early 1980s. He began V back in 1981 and it constituted one of his first attempts (along with the criminally neglected but equally superb Miracleman) at writing an ongoing series. It is 1998 (which was the future back then!) and a Fascist government has taken over the U.K. The only blot on its particular landscape is a lone terrorist who is systematically killing all the government personnel associated with a now destroyed secret concentration camp. Codename V is out for vengeance ... and an awful lot more. V feels slightly dated like all past premonitions do. The original series was black and white and that added to the grittiness of the feel while the coloring here in the graphic novel sometimes blurs David Lloyd's fine drawing. But these are small concerns. Skillfully plotted, V is an essential read for all those who love comics and the freedom, as a medium, they allow a writer as skilled as Moore. (Amazon.com)

Vampire Loves,     Joann Sfar

Ferdinand is a vampire who lives in Lithuania, wears three-piece suits and receives regular visits from an adoptive "grandmother" witch who looks after his Siamese cat when he's off on trips to Paris. But none of this is any protection against the more mundane realities of being a newly single guy stuck forever in that period of new adulthood when hormones meet emotions and confusion results. Ferdinand's exploits, as detailed by award-winning French artist Sfar (Little Vampire Goes to School, The Rabbi's Cat), read like a classic slacker tale—when he isn't sleeping in his coffin, Ferdinand carries his favorite records around in a messenger bag. Ferdinand's adventures and companions are at once otherworldly and oddly familiar. A tree-man has a crush on Ferdinand's ex-girlfriend, Lani, a girl/plant who cheated on Ferdinand with his best friend. Ferdinand alternately longs for and is angry at Lani, finds himself the object of a teenage vampire crush and cruises bars in search of new love. Just when the troubled relationships begin to seem too commonplace, Sfar slips in a magical detail about a golem or a crying tree. As usual, Sfar's artwork is effortlessly charming, filled with classically stylish ink hatching and lettering, for a story that is funny and unpredictable. (Publishers Weekly review)

Violent Cases,     Neil Gaiman

An exploration of the trappings of violence and the failings of memory, Violent Cases marks the beginning of the astonishing and award-winning collaboration between author Neil Gaiman and the artist Dave McKean. Set only in the memory of its author, this brilliant short story meanders through levels of recollection surrounding a childhood injury. After dislocating his arm, a young boy is taken to see a doctor - an aged osteopath who was once the doctor of legendary gangster Al Capone. Through studied observations and painstaking attempts at truthful recall, the author reconstructs his tattered memories of the events surrounding his meeting with the doctor, and delves into the psychological complexities that emerged from the doctor's bizarre tales of Capone's life of crime. Gorgeously illustrated in mixed media by Dave McKean, Violent Cases is a sensuous and thought-provoking meditation on our memories. (Publisher’s description)

Waste Land, The,     Martin Rowson

Rowson recasts TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in terms of the narrative and visual conventions of hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir (Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep). He narrativizes The Waste Land by "translating" it into the narrative "language" of the hardboiled detective genre, and realizes it graphically it by supplying imagery culled from the visual vocabulary of film noir.

Watchmen,     Alan Moore

Has any comic been as acclaimed as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but Watchmen remains the critics' favorite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmen a more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmen in 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to gather praise since. The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterization is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling; rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control--indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000AD's Rogue Trooper and DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the fine pace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmen more than stands up--it keeps its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. (Amazon.com review)

Waterloo Sunset,     Andrew Stephenson and Trevor Goring

Waterloo Sunset is set in a future London but it's oddly medieval in that something happens about 30 years ago to suddenly deprive London of power, fuel supplies, decent medicine. You can imagine what that would lead to. And now, 30 years later, things have more or less stabilized. They've got a very odd social structure and power structure in which there's a group called the Cartel that wield absolute power through terror. There's sort of a representative of political control in the Lord Mayor of London. Then there's a guy called Esau the Hunter. He's nominally Vermin Control, he has a gun and he goes out shooting beasts. He nominally works for the Cartel and nominallly cooperates with the Mayor. The Mayor would very much like to see him dead because he considers him a menace. But Hunter, well he's a bit of an enigma. He has stuff that he shouldn't have, really, when you consider that everyone else has no electric power, no medicine. He's got a gun that allows voice control for example, a little alien beastie that serves as his observation platform. Entirely biological, there are no implants. Stuff like that. And there are aliens, and there's supertechnology. But the guiding principle is that it's hard SF. (Author’s description)

We Are On Our Own,     Miriam Katin

This moving WWII memoir is the debut graphic novel from Katin, an animator for Disney and MTV. It tells the story of toddler Katin—here called Lisa—and her mother, Esther Levy, Hungarian Jews who must flee Nazi persecution. With her husband off fighting in the Hungarian army, Esther is forced to abandon all their belongings and take on the identity of a servant girl with a bastard child. She survives however she can—whether making alterations on the bloodstained uniforms of dead soldiers or surrendering her body to an adulterous German officer. Katin shows Esther's harrowing experiences with an objective eye, but her own experience of the time is the fragmented memory of a child; unable to understand the vast tragedy unfolding around her, she focuses on the loss of a pet dog. The story flashes forward to the '70s and even later to show the long-term effects on Katin and her family's faith. Katin's art is an impressionistic swirl; early scenes in sophisticated Budapest recall the elegance of Helen Hokinson, while the chaos of war is captured in dark, chaotic compositions reminiscent of Kathe Kollwitz. This book is a powerful reminder of the lingering price of survival. (Publishers Weekly review)

Y: The Last Man,     Brian K. Vaughan

A mysterious plague has killed every man on earth except Yorick Brown, who was somehow spared. Thatis the provocative premise of the comics series whose first five issues make up this book. The sole Y-chromosomed survivor is an amiable, headstrong young man, the son of a U.S. congresswoman and, as it happens, an amateur escape artist. He spends most of the story on the run from a tribe of self-styled Amazons bent on eliminating the last vestige of patriarchy. He is also trying, with a bioengineer who may be responsible for the worldwide "gendercide," to figure out why he survived; hoping to reach his girlfriend in Australia; and, of course, contemplating the repopulation of the planet. Rather pedestrian artwork doesn't do much to liven the story, though its straightforwardness imparts deadpan believability to such ramifications as the female secretary of agriculture ascending to the presidency. Fast-paced anyway, the yarn introduces a large number of intriguing characters and plotlines as it lays the groundwork for what promises to be a compelling series. (Booklist review)

Yossel,     Joe Kubert

Kubert explores what might have been in this gripping account of WWII's Warsaw ghetto uprising. In the text introduction, Kubert recalls how his Polish family attempted to emigrate to the U.S. in 1926, but they were denied because his mother was pregnant with him. Luckily, they succeeded a few months later, and Kubert went on to become one of the most honored artists in comics history. But what if his family hadn't gotten away? In an immediate, sketchy pencil style, Kubert imagines an alternate version of his family history. Yossel is a teenaged boy with a gift for art. Uprooted and stripped of their possessions, the family is sent to the Warsaw ghetto with other Jews and undesirables, where conditions deteriorate as the Final Solution is put into action. Yossel's gift for artwork amuses the German guards and they give him special favors. Thus, when his family is sent off to a concentration camp, he is spared. He joins other young men in the underground resistance, however, including Mordechai, based on real-life ringleader Mordechai Anielewicz. An escapee from one of the camps makes his way to the ghetto and tells of the unimaginable horrors taking place, leading the resistance to stand up against the Nazis in an ultimately futile but memorable uprising. Kubert's loose pencil art excels at catching character and setting in a few lines, although the layouts are sometimes plain. A straightforward take on the events of the Holocaust, Yossel tells its tragic story with both emotion and dignity. (Publishers Weekly review)

Zero Girl,     Sam Kieth

Zero Girl is a five-issue comic book written and illustrated by Sam Kieth, published by Homage Comics. The plot concerns high school student Amy Smootster, and her attempts to start a relationship with her guidance counselor Tim. Another plot thread follows her relationship with circles and squares---it seems that circular objects tend to help or defend her, while squares try to hurt her. All of this has something to do with her feet producing copious but never-defined fluid when she feels shame. (Publisher’s description) (see my blog entry here)

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