TOP 20 GRAPHIC NOVELS, SINGLE ISSUES, MINICOMICS (PART 2)15. Songy of Paradise | Gary Panter50-something new pages of oversized Gary Panter comics, in proportions similar to massive books like
Jimbo In Purgatory, blowing up these scratchy, ragged lines to an epic grandeur that makes each page an immersive experience, an invitation to wallow in the dense seas of lines. It's so great that an artist as punky and raw as Panter continually works at such a large size - and adapts such classical texts - so that there's this intense clash between the subjects, the visual aesthetic, and the presentation. Panter's irreverent tone and goofy humor work to undermine the seriousness of the John Milton morality tale he's adapting, but at the same time it's peppered with modern reference points that highlight the story's underlying themes about power, ambition, and material desires. The real treat though is Panter's versatile cartooning, and especially the way he consolidates various styles within a single panel, alternating between scratchy realism, clean cartoony humor strip drawings, abstract bursts of wild imagery, and all sorts of areas in between.
14. Spinning | Tillie WaldenWalden shifts from fantasy to a rather intimate autobiographical epic about her youth as a figure skater. Walden's a phenomenal cartoonist with excellent command of body language so naturally it's a pleasure to see her draw at this length, and on a subject that demands close examinations of figures in motion. The story focuses not so much exclusively on figure skating as on all the other things going on in her life in those years: coming out as gay, feeling disconnection from friends and family, uncertainty about her future, encounters with bullies and abusers. It's a quietly affecting book, its impact sneaking up on me across its length. From the moody nighttime scenes with their traces of yellow lights in the dark to the skating sequences with graceful forms against white space to the less stylized everyday moments of Tillie at school, this is all lovely. There's one scene in particular that sums up its grace and charm to me, when Tillie sneaks into her brother's room at night and they stay up watching TV: that's it, but the way Walden draws the faces, eyes wide, huddled close together, the dark all around them, before they both fall asleep cuddled up, is so touching, so real, that it's a memorable image.
13. Pretending Is Lying | Dominique GobletThis very distinctive memoir is the first translated work available from this important Belgian cartoonist. Goblet worked on this over the course of 12 years, and incorporated the drastic stylistic changes that happen over time into the structure of the narrative, reworking the early pages with thick oil paints and using the natural yellowing of the paper as an aesthetic element. This is an episodic series of encounters that dwell on Goblet's ambivalent relationships with her parents and her long-time partner, who for much of their early relationship was still embroiled with another woman. Goblet's restless style incorporates bold caricatures and abstract sections, and switches from hyper-detailed, lush un-inked pencils to the density and extreme stylization of the early sections where she piles textural paint onto the pages. The other fascinating thing is how much Goblet pushes herself to the side in her own story. The people close to her frequently treat her in shockingly shitty ways, and yet she's often presenting things from their points of view, subtly engaging in acts of imaginative empathy as she "watches" scenes she couldn't possibly have seen, trying to understand these people who both love her and hurt her. A really inventive and probing take on the memoir genre that sidesteps autobiographical cliches in favor of visual experimentation.
12. Boundless | Jillian TamakiNot strictly new but a great collection of Tamaki's short stories and anthology contributions. The result is a surprisingly coherent suite that explores the ways in which technology and media interact with identity. Her art is stylish, and expressive when she needs it to be, but more often she's aiming for a muted, dispassionate tone. The emotions she's exploring are intense but often hidden beneath seemingly placid surfaces, behind blank faces, behind elegantly blunt metaphors. In one story, a woman finds that she's shrinking, unnoticeably at first but eventually faster and faster until, as she puts it, the objects in her life seem to "reject" her. In another, a woman's relationships all seem to come to a sudden end when her partners betray their deep emotional connections to a dumb old action movie. And then there's the masterful "SexCoven," in which a 6-hour drone MP3 inspires a cult, and "1.Jenny," in which an alternate Facebook triggers a young woman's feelings of inadequacy. Each story is a perfectly structured little rumination on disaffection and disconnection, often ending with a note of ambiguity that leaves many questions and feelings hanging, unresolved but unforgettable.
11. Crawl Space | Jesse JacobsIn Jacobs' best book yet, a high school girl finds a portal to a spiritual plane in the laundry machines in her basement, and shares the experience with a friend. Jacobs renders the mysterious other dimension as a rainbow-colored world of malleable shapes and forms, with colors fluctuating wildly between panels and geometric shapes constantly morphing into new arrangements, all set against a solidly rendered, black-and-white physical world. The narrative proceeds in brief scenes spaced out with purely abstract, dialogue-free spreads in which colors and shapes simply dance across the page, acting out mysterious and joyful patterns. In contrast, the human narrative is infused with loneliness, betrayal, violence, and ignorance. Predictably, the more people learn of this strange portal, the more the other world seems compromised and changed by these intruding presences.