Boundless
Jillian Tamaki, Drawn & Quarterly, £16.99
IN MY favourite story in Jillian Tamaki’s new collection of graphic short stories – although, really, I like all of them – a woman, Jenny, who has just broken up with her boyfriend becomes intrigued and then obsessed by her own more successful life online.
On something called “Mirror Facebook” she watches as her alter ego, 1.Jenny seems to be living a more fulfilling life than hers. She even has a boyfriend.
It’s a story that is about human dissatisfaction and frustration, but it’s also a story that fits with the world as it is right now. Indeed, almost all of the stories in this elegant, strange, beautiful collection of graphic short stories operate in a world of social media, sound files, cult television. They explore the way we locate ourselves in the culture of our time.
They are also stories full of frustration, anxiety, misplaced desire and the quest for female agency.
Sometimes that takes a fantastic turn as in Half Life in which the main character Helen effectively becomes the incredible shrinking woman. Other times they are about how intention and reception are out of phase. (In Darla! The makers of a 1990s porno-sitcom are nonplussed by how it’s perceived by the next generation.)
Tamaki, whose SuperMutant Magic Academy was a New York Times bestseller and one of Graphic Content’s favourite books of 2015, is a master illustrator who can adapt her style effortlessly between bold loose art and tightly controlled panel work. What’s most rewarding, though, is the way the words and pictures rub up against each other: sometimes in sync, sometimes dissonant.
The result are punchy, open-ended comic strips that deserve the widest possible audience.
The Park Bench
Chaboute, Faber, £14.99
French cartoonist Christophe Chaboute makes his UK debut with this Faber reprint of his 2012 graphic novel The Park Bench. A silent dance through the everyday life lived around a particular bench in a park.
The bench is frequented by lovers, a homeless man, a skateboarder, a young woman, a dog that uses the bench to mark its territory, an unlucky musician, an unhappy ageing academic and more.
It is a clever idea cleverly realised, a book that is alive to the rhythm of passing time and the rhythm of panels on the page.
What it lacks, though, is a real element of surprise. You can’t help but admire the craft, care and commitment the cartoonist has put into this book, but admiration only takes you so far. In the end it’s perhaps a little too obvious to truly love.
Father and Son
E O Plauen, New York Review Comics, £14.99
The disconnect between this sweet, sunny, rather charming comic strip and the tragic story of its creator is startling. Erich Ohser was born in 1903 and moved to Berlin in 1927 where he quickly made a name for himself collaborating with the writer Erich Kastner.
However, his caricatures of Hitler and Goebbels during the Weimar era would catch up with him when the National Socialists came to power and he was banned from publishing.
To get around this he took a pseudonym, E O Plauen. Under that name he contributed the Father and Son strip to the Berliner Illustirte Zeitung. It ran for three years to great acclaim.
Ohser was allowed to contribute to magazines again in 1940 but he was arrested in 1944 for disparaging the Nazi regime. He committed suicide in his cell the day before his trial.
The comic strips gathered together here are a world away from that troubled biography. They narrate the adventures of said father and son. Father is bald and bearded, son is all hair. But both have the same sense of fun and adventure and are constantly playing pranks on each other. There is no strict parenting going on here. That said, there is quite a lot of spanking going on.
Ohser’s art is simple and effective and the humour is broad, at times scatological and quick. Towards the end of the collection Ohser offers longer narratives, firstly when father and son become wealthy and then when they get washed up on a desert island but they are rarely phased.
At one point they are haunted by a ghost with a detachable head. Or they are until Son kicks the head away. If only life was a cartoon.
Next week: Reviews of Chloe Cruchaudet's Deserter's Masquerade, Yeon-sik Hong's Uncomfortably Happy and more.
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