Great graphic novels from 2012

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

While connoisseurs of the graphic novel form will undoubtedly be reserving most of their comics budget for "Building Stories," Chris Ware's enormous, years-in-the-making boxed set of 14 miscellaneous paper items, not everyone with a yen for visual storytelling wants to tackle broadsheets, pamphlets and charts in order to get it. This year saw the publication of an ever wider and richer array of graphic "novels" -- some of the best of which are not novels at all, but nonfiction. The success of Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" has spawned a bunch of quirky graphic memoirs by women who like to label their drawings with little arrowed explanatory labels, and there are still plenty of square-jawed heroes punching their way through this or that hellscape between bouts of stagey despair. Look further, and you'll find books like the 10 stand-out gems included here, a mix of ancient tales and the latest news, private lives and public problems, the beautiful, the horrifying, the wondrous and the melancholy. Why not dive in?

A world of “hillbilly heroin”

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 18:00:00 +0000

During the two years Joe Sacco and I reported from the poorest pockets of the United States, areas that have been sacrificed before the altar of unfettered and unregulated capitalism, we found not only decayed and impoverished communities but shattered lives. There comes a moment when the pain and despair of constantly running into a huge wall, of realizing that there is no way out of poverty, crush human beings. Those who best managed to resist and bring some order to their lives almost always turned to religion and in that faith many found the power to resist and even rebel.

On the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, where our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt opens, and where the average male has a life expectancy of 48 years, the lowest in the western hemisphere outside of Haiti, those who endured the long night of oppression found solace in traditional sweat lodge rituals, the Lakota language and cosmology, and the powerful four-day Sun Dance which I attended, where dancers fast and make small flesh offerings.

Salon.com > Joe Sacco

Great graphic novels from 2012

A world of “hillbilly heroin”