Word: comix
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...Blankets, about growing up in the devout Christian hinterlands of Wisconsin, became the first such work to gain both critical and popular success. This month will see the arrival of two more very strong books based on the authors' childhood. Harvey Pekar's The Quitter, comes from a veteran comix-maker, while, Shane White's North Country marks the author's debut. Though their early circumstances could not have been more different, the authors' childhoods share some remarkable similarities...
...Quitter (DC/Vertigo; 104 pages; $20), a hardcover book illustrated by Dean Haspiel, represents Harvey Pekar's first major work of original material since the release of the film American Splendor, based on his comix series. As anyone who watched that splendid movie knows, Pekar led a fairly unremarkable life as a Cleveland file clerk until he decided to turn that very mundaneness into comic art. Hiring others to illustrate his non-fiction vignettes of such quotidian occurrences as starting a car in the winter or talking with co-workers, Pekar's stories were driven by his intensely cranky, neurotic, highly...
...Pekar grew up as the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants in Cleveland during the 1940s and 50s. As a result, much of The Quitter involves the classic American literary theme of assimilation. Though extremely popular in other mediums, this theme, again, has gotten little attention in comix except obliquely, through such genre works as Seigel and Shuster's Superman character. Thanks to Pekar's obsessive self-examination and what he calls his "trick" memory of near perfect recall, The Quitter takes its place as a top example of the New World Experience in graphic literature (see also the outstanding Four...
North Korea's recent agreement to halt nuclear arms development, besides being a potentially important step for world peace, makes for a pretty amazing PR coup for Canadian comix publisher Drawn & Quarterly. They have just released a hardcover book that couldn't be more topical: Guy Delisle's Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (176 pages; $20), giving it one of the largest initial printings in the publisher's history. D&Q's ambitions seem justified given the surprising commercial success of other graphical memoirs set in dangerous or mysterious locations, such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis books, about growing...
...Filled with rich detail and told with the tightness of a thriller, Rick Geary's The Murder of Abraham Lincoln makes for a remarkably entertaining and compact work of historical comix. Smart and moving, such well-done books have more to offer than merely being an easy way to learn about the past...