Great graphic novels from 2012

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• "Blue" by Pat Grant
  Grant's sly story of a tidy Australian beach town on the brink of a new era is a funky blend of nostalgia, satire and fantasy. Three hooky-playing surfer kids bum around (the fictional) Bolton, trying to work up their nerve to check out the spot on the railroad tracks where "some bloke went under a train" the night before. Meanwhile, newcomers appear on the town's streets, blue-skinned octapoidal creatures who have the presumption to act as if they're as entitled to live there as anyone else (despite the fact that they eat noodles). Most of "Blue" depicts Bolton just before it's transformed by the immigrants, and suggests that the idyll they've "ruined" was really no paradise. Grant's drawings are at once complex, economical, funny and gross, and this exquisitely produced volume also includes a bonus essay on the history of Australian surfing comics.
• "Unterzakhn" by Leela Corman
  Twin sisters in early-20th-century New York's Lower East Side meet very different fates as they grow to adulthood in the roaring '20s. Corman's title, Yiddish for "underwear," alludes to the way each girl's life is determined by sex, men and the vulnerability and power inherent in the female body. Fanya becomes the apprentice of a "lady-doctor" (a sort of amateur OB-GYN), but bridles at her mentor's puritanical refusal to provide contraception and other care to unmarried women. Esther, dazzled by the stage, becomes a maid and eventually the star performer at a burlesque house that doubles as a brothel. (There's also a flashback interlude depicting their gentle father's flight from the pogroms in Russia.) Corman's bold, simple art can nevertheless display remarkable subtlety and for all the intimacy of its subject matter, "Unterzakhn" conveys a sumptuously textured swath of Jewish immigrant life at that time.
• "Goliath" by Tom Gauld
  Starkly droll, there's more than a touch of Beckett in Gauld's retelling of the biblical myth of the hulking Philistine warrior defeated by David and his sling. The tale becomes a parable on the absurdity of war and heroism. Goliath, the self-described "fifth-worst swordsman in my platoon," is enlisted as the centerpiece of a primitive attempt at psy-ops devised by an ambitious captain. "All you need to do is act like a champion and the enemy will cower before us," he's told. "There won't be any actual fighting." Which is good, because as Goliath tells it, his expertise lies in paperwork. With no one but a bored 9-year-old shieldbearer for company, he is stationed at the outskirts of camp and ordered to shout bellicose challenges at the Israelites all day. Rendered in rounded geometrical forms with an abundance of delicate crosshatching, Gauld's art suggests that there is indeed an eternal meaning to this story -- just not the one we're used to finding there.
• "Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary" by Keshni Kashyap
  Tina Malhotra, a sophomore at a private school in Los Angeles, is like an Indian-American Daria, wised-up and sardonic, but not above crushing on a cute skateboarder. "Tina's Mouth" purports to be the diary she's keeping for her English honors class. It's addressed to Jean-Paul Sartre, whose observations on the importance of self-knowledge she finds especially relevant amid the flux and drama of adolescence. You'll find the classic stuff of high-school angst here -- turncoat friends, gossiping peers, boorish boys and intimidating parties -- combined with the equally classic elements of Indian family fiction -- matchmaking parents, celebrity-crazed cousins and a gaggle of eccentric, chattering aunties. Tina is smart and eminently likable, and Mari Araki's drawings bear an ancestral relationship to the doodlings of teenage girls everywhere, mutated into a fabulous architecture in which to express both the universal experience of coming of age and the blossoming of a distinctive individual.
• "Gloriana" by Kevin Huizenga
  Call Huizenga the Virginia Woolf of comics; his aim is to represent fleeting, multilayered moments, impressions and processes of thought in words and illustrated panels. What happens in "Gloriana"? Glen Ganges' wife, Wendy, gets a phone call at work. The couple picks up a couple of bags of groceries and imagines their soon-to-be-born child. Glen looks out the window of the library and sees a sunset, then comes home to find his neighbors staring apprehensively at an enormous red moon, which prompts an elaborate explanation of the optical illusion at work. But just as Woolf and James understood that worlds of meaning and emotion can take place during such quotidian moments -- and so tried to do justice to them in stream-of-consciousness narratives -- Huizenga's drawings seek to show time split open and flooded with images, memories, associations and ideas. A tiny, lovely book, with a whole universe tucked inside it.
• "Sailor Twain: Or: The Mermaid in the Hudson" by Mark Siegel
  The web-comic in which Siegel originally told this story soon developed a fanatical following, attracted by his lush, smoky charcoal images and romantic tale. The title character, captain of a steamboat that goes up and down the Hudson River in the late 1800s, is only one of a number of people who have apparently encountered a mermaid in the river's waters. Twain finds the creature wounded on his deck, and hides her away in his cabin while she heals. Soon, he comes to suspect that his former employer (who disappeared mysteriously) and a reclusive writer might possess vital knowledge about the river's mer-inhabitant. With its wealth of lively supporting characters and subplots, "Sailor Twain" has an unusual narrative density for a graphic novel, and its underlying mythology can be a little tricky to follow. (I still don't understand why one of the major characters goes around dressed in the costume of the previous century.) But these are just the sort of alluring mysteries to invite endless speculation and net a whole new school of fans.
• "Journalism" by Joe Sacco
  The celebrated Sacco has published fact-based comics about his travels in the Mideast, the Balkans and other troubled areas. This is a collection of commissioned stories, create for such publications as Harper's, the Virginia Quarterly Review and the New York Times Magazine. Although Sacco's notes scrupulously disclose his own dissatisfactions with certain pieces (and even, on occasion, the editorial relationships that produced them), in many respects this makes for his most engaging book. Sacco argues persuasively that what he does is journalism, and his meticulous drawings also feature a fair amount of explanatory text. In a longer work, where the focus is a single place or conflict, this approach can feel a bit overbearing, even oppressive. These shorter pieces -- reports on displaced Chechen civilians, the never-ending skirmishes over the city of Hebron, a community of "untouchables" in Uttar Pradesh and especially the plight of African refugees in the overburdened Mediterranean island nation of Malta, among others -- still register as substantial, serious and moving.
• "The Graphic Canon: Vol. 1" edited by Russ Kick
  This ambitious anthology invites established and emerging comics artists to illustrate humanity's greatest literary works, from "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and the sayings of Confucius to "The Divine Comedy" and Boswell's "London Journal." Some of these adaptations work better than others. Having R. Crumb illustrate the ambivalently overindulgent Boswell's memoir is a stroke of genius, and Tori McKenna's striking swampland rendition of "Medea" is capable of replacing all other visual representations of that fearsome figure from Greek tragedy. The sketchy noirish drawings of Seymour Chwast, however, are much better suited to Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" than to Dante. Nevertheless "Lysistrata," drawn by Valerie Schrag in the style of a naughty Tijuana bible, is great fun, Gareth Hinds evokes the poetry amid the guts and gore of "Beowulf" and Molly Keily's "The Tale of Genji" is a ravishment in black and white.
• "Right State" by Mat Johnson and Andrea Mutti
  Lean, mean and ingenious, this near-future political thriller should appeal to devotees of "Homeland." It's 2020, and the (unnamed) president is still black. The primary terrorist threat, however, comes in a different color. Right-wing militias, the festering die-hards of Tea Party-style conservatism, thrive in remote, impoverished rural areas. The comic's story -- illustrated with accomplished, if not dazzling skill by Mutti -- begins with Asif, a Muslim secret service agent, hot on the trail of a renegade fed who has defected to lead the insurgency. To get inside the compound run by the group, Asif enlists a veterans' advocate and conservative talk show pundit named Akers, who then emerges as the protagonist. Much of the piquancy and intelligence of "Right State" arises from the fact that Akers is not entirely unsympathetic to the complaints and demands of militias, and this lends depth to the expected, if enjoyable, exploits that follow: shootouts, drug trips, betrayals and red herrings. Good, smart fun.
• "Anya's Ghost" by Vera Brosgol
  Another winning high-school tale, this one begins with Anya Borzakovskaya, the daughter of Russian immigrants, tumbling into an abandoned well. There she finds a skeleton, and the disembodied spirit of its former owner, Emily, who tags along with Anya after she's rescued. Eager to assimilate as smoothly as possible among her American peers, Anya at first tries to shoo this new companion away -- the last thing she needs is another reason for people to find her weird. The ghost, however, proves eager to help her with everything from passing tests to winning the attention of an older boy. In exchange, Anya tries to solve the mystery of her new friend's murder, an investigation that turns up some very disturbing information. Despite the eerie subject matter, Brosgol's often hilarious drawings and Anya's many misadventures keep the tone light; this is more John Hughes than M. Night Shyamalan.

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