December 2017 – Commons Comics

Another lost post from the Elkhart Truth archives: this is one of my favorites. Check out the video links at the bottom if you don’t have time to read the whole thing. Enjoy your holidays, all, and stay tuned for more reviews in 2018!

Thanks to Better World Books, 215 S. Main St. in Goshen, for providing me with books to review. You can find all of the books I review at the store.

When veteran animator and illustrator R.O. Blechman graduated from high school, his art teacher refused to write him a recommendation. As Blechman told Jeet Heer in a 2011 interview in “The Comics Journal,” “She basically said ‘Look, I can’t say anything good about you, and I won’t say anything bad about you so I won’t say anything.’”

Blechman and his now-signature wobbly lines probably didn’t translate very well to traditional high school art assignments. Fortunately, his professors at Oberlin College encouraged him to develop his own style, however idiosyncratic. When he graduated and got his first break—to write a Christmas story for the publisher Henry Holt—he chose a simple story to match his simple illustrations, and drew up a manuscript in a single night. Continue reading ““The Juggler of Our Lady,” by R. O. Blechman”

Everything Is Flammable, by Gabrielle Bell, Uncivilized Books (Minneapolis), June 2017, $25.95, mature teen to adult

Thanks to Better World Books, 215 S. Main St. in Goshen, for providing me with books to review. You can find all of these books at the store.

It’s hard at first to put your finger on why the rambling, fragmentary work of Gabrielle Bell adds up to such a powerful whole. Her first full-length book, the new memoir Everything Is Flammable, drifts from her anxiety to her neighbors to her obsession with her garden. But the method to her accumulated mental wanderings becomes clearer and clearer as the book unfolds, and the sum total is well worth the wait.

Which isn’t to say that you have to wait long at all to appreciate Bell’s mastery of the form. The book begins with the one-page, six-panel vignette, “I’m Doing Fine.” As with any autobiographical work, there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell if that statement were true. Witness her closing frame:

Continue reading “Everything Is Flammable, by Gabrielle Bell”