Treason of Words

In a future wasteland, a family of four contends with familiar obstacles to make ends meet, eventually leaving the teenage children to care for themselves while their parents travel to find work just as their eldest discovers a wondrous ability and their youngest gets into trouble. Leila del Duca’s Afar draws from many recognizable sources and lovingly twists them into something unexpected that should reach new audiences. The parents, facing both the father’s unreliability and the mother’s bouts of depression, recall overmatched caregivers from fairytales whose struggles open the door to adventure for their offspring as well as well-meaning but often helpless parents from emotionally realistic sci-fi young adult graphic novels like Space Dumplins . The tale woven for Boetema and her brother Inotu is interesting in that it could easily play out in a more familiar world; the specific sci-fi elements have very little bearing on their relationship or how they interact with their world. Th...

Couri Vine #1: Young People for the Leader This is a fine introductory outing for Couri, combining tropes of children’s literature with good old-fashioned pulpy sci-fi. An outsider ripped from her everyday school & community life by revelations about her family and her world that she alone can resolve, Couri follows in the footsteps of Monica Huges’ Olwen in Keeper of the Isis Light with many of the lunar trappings of Paula Danziger’s This Place Has no Atmosphere. Lovise’s character designs are distinct and her linework approachable without being overly cute; rendering of sci-fi stables like robots and spacecraft bear recognizably classic influences, often with a whimsical twist. Panel structure is regular and easy to follow, generating some of its own vernacular for communicating speed and flow. Couri Vine #2: Journey to the Planet Earth Couri’s adventure takes her far from home in pursuit of her history and a way to rescue her grandfather as they tale takes on both the timeline o...

In the tradition of graphic novel journalism such as Sarajevo, Fixer and Palestine, Rolling Blackouts takes the reader into a world touched on only lightly by the nightly news. Glidden chronicles her travels with friends in a journalism nonprofit as they follow the aftermath of the Iraq war from Kurdistan to Syria, picking up stories from those they meet along the way as well as from the group itself as they contend with what it means to be journalists, friends, and Americans in the modern era. The key to the tale is transparency; it seems that practically everything makes it onto the page in one way or another, and Glidden scrupulously details when dialogue comes verbatim from a voice recorder, and when it is condensed from multiple episodes into one. This comports well with the general behind-the-scenes nature of the action taking place. Even as the author discusses the challenge of making the work itself, she is presenting her journalist friends grappling with similar issues of the...

  Dare to Disappoint: Growing up in Turkey felt like it should have been a longer tale. Özge Samanci’s early ears are richly detailed; as the protagonist ages, though, the granularity of the narrative stretches out, with discrete events replaced by more overarching sketches of longer periods of time and emotion. This may simply be an artifact of memory: disjointed and episodic recollections of early years giving way to more comprehensive understandings of later phases of life. This flow breaks down, though, near the end of the book when Özge decides to break with her and her father’s expectations to pursue a career more meaningful to her. She reaches her decision point, but the audience is left with an inspiring moral on the virtue of risk-taking, but little evidence apart from the book in their hands as to how it unfolded for the protagonist. The narrative is snappy and funny, with an informed but child’s-eye view of the dynamics of Turkish society in the waning days of the Cold ...

This title was provided to me at no cost for review purposes by the publisher. Fears seem to share some properties with dreams, as both spring from similar irrational, twilight corners of the mind. While it's practically axiomatic that among the most boring things one can discuss is the weird things seen while asleep, I've long found discussing fears to be far more interesting and instructive. Unless one subscribes to the notion that they're somehow prophetic or expressive, a dream is easily dismissed as random in origin and meaningless without some kind of post-hoc rationalization. A fear, though, whatever its murky provenance may be, is important. Fears shape the way we act, which shapes the world. They can also be illuminating about their owner, as one's fear may be another's fancy. Krause explores 100 fears in all, each a tidy first-person narrative expressed in a handful or two of panels. The linework is soft and casual, colored as with watercolors, pairing wel...

After a phenomenon like Scott Pilgrim , anything Bryan Lee O’Malley did next would naturally invite comparison. Seconds certainly has some things in common with Pilgrim , particularly by way of personalities, and even in terms of conventions which replace conventional exposition with a pithy caption. Our protagonist, Katie, is seemingly the polar opposite of young Mr Pilgrim, though: a skilled overachiever, career-focused to the point of self denial, and about to open the restaurant of her dreams after years of work running Seconds, her first popular and well-regarded eatery. What she does have in common with the previous spawn of O’Malley’s pen is an unusual living arrangement — she lives in an apartment upstairs at Seconds — and an uncanny ability to adapt in all the worst ways to bizarre situations. O'Malley's characters are highly stylized, in a much-hipper-than-reality sort of way, but still able to convey emotion well. The story mechanic breaks the narrative at critical ...

David Smith is a sculptor at the end of his rope, having blown his moment in the spotlight of the New York art scene and possessed of little save his idiosyncratic set of promises to himself. While spending his last few dollars in a diner, he is joined by his uncle, who he soon realizes is not the man he remembers. Death, bound in human form until its last link to the living is broken, offers his host's nephew the power to make the shapes in his mind reality in exchange for a hard limit on his remaining time among the living: 200 days. By the end of the first part, David is a real character. Not simply a sad sack, nor merely a victim of his own introversion and iconoclastic tendencies, his backstory and path to the state in which we find him are crisply laid out, but not with the excessive precision often lavished on exposition to get it out of the way; the other characters draw these details to the surface for us as the tale progresses. His chance transformation into a viral video...

My familiarity with the Pixies' music is shallow at best, and nonexistent when it comes to Black Francis' solo work, so I can't speak to The Good Inn  as a work reflective of any lyrical tendencies. In fact, when the characters break into song (as they do occasionally), the tunes I found myself reaching for to make words into music in my head were nursery rhymes. Nonetheless, this is an interesting work, taking on shades of Stoppard and Gilliam in following Solider Boy as he traverses newly-minted fiction, lost fiction, speculative reality, and known reality. Based on what the introduction claims is the first known narrative adult film, now known only from stills and remakes, this tale in screenplay form fleshes out the skin flick by giving the male character a life before he comes on screen, and continues as he tries to move beyond it. It's convoluted and even confusing at times to be sure; I'll admit to backtracking more than once to suss out what was happening; e...

This post also appears on the Deep Stacks blog at  Round Rock High School Library . It’s not news that comic books, or at least stories and characters that were born in that medium, have become more and more visible over the past several years. Even if you’ve never darkened the door of your local comic book shop (which you should, even if — especially if — you don’t think you’d be interested), you’re doubtlessly at least somewhat familiar with the exploits of Scott Pilgrim, Groot, or Enid & Rebecca. But even with their renewed cultural currency, comics are not without their detractors. In recognition of this, the American Library Association's Banned Books Week 2014 is focusing on comic books and graphic novels which have have been challenged in our school and public libraries. The Guardian published an interview on Friday with acclaimed comic book writer and artist Jeff Smith in which he discusses his views on challenges to library collections and his feelings about his best...

The integration of the internet into day-to-day and now moment-to-moment life continually narrows the distinction between still relatively abstract actions mediated by the network and those taken apart from it. Stories told since the popularization of the internet, especially those about young people, often include an element of moral panic, a concern that the new facet of modern life will somehow damage or corrupt the innocent and impressionable. In In Real Life , Cory Doctorow spins a compelling tale of ethical reasoning and moral awakening out of several popular bogeymen of the past generation: Stranger Danger! Video Games! The Internet! (No drugs, though). His protagonist, Anda, is an authentically drawn girl gamer (MMO & tabletop) and budding coder, invited to audition for an all-female guild in a popular MMORPG. Recognizing her skill in the game, an elder guild member invites her to turn that ability into cash by disrupting the activities of other players who sell their in-ga...

I just finished issue 3 of Dark Horse's Serenity comic, a story to fill the gap between the end of Firefly and the new Serenity movie, coming out September 30. VERY good stuff, highly recommended for filling in the gaps, as well as typically great writing from Joss Whedon, et al.