Word: comix
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Late Bloomer collects Tyler's published and unpublished works from the last 20 years, all of which share a theme uncommon to comix: domesticity. Thankfully these non-fiction vignettes do not constitute moments of adorable "wisdom" from the mouths of babes, or triumphs of motherly multitasking. Rather, the focus stays on the darker side of child rearing and family difficulties, told in the blunt and funny style of the family big mouth. One page, titled "Anatomy of a New Mom" sums up the book's appeal: A mock medical diagram of a baggy-eyed woman nursing a "totally oblivious...
...very long story," it details the origins of Tyler's feeling that "everything in my life existed around the edges." It dives headlong into her anger about giving up her own ambitions for the sake of raising a child while floundering in an apparently loveless marriage to the neurotic comix-maker Justin Green (who is also famed for his brutal auto-bio works). One memorable sequence, colored in bronze and blood-red, depicts the nursing author in her worst moment, as she imagines herself reduced to a suckling cow and briefly considers killing the baby and herself. Then, just...
...arrival of Halloween always brings with it a plethora of horror-related media, including comix. This season's standout graphic novel focuses on one of the scariest of all horrors: high school. The title of Charles Burns' long-awaited book, Black Hole (Pantheon; 368 pages; $25), says it all. For many people-including myself, naturally-high school felt like an endless, inescapable vacuum without air or light. Unlike more conventional horror stories set among high school kids, where each one gets "offed" by a masked killer, Black Hole uses the worst parts of emerging adulthood, like changing bodies, alienation...
Though Burns has been making comix since the early 80s, Black Hole is his first full-length graphic novel. Given that it took ten years for this book to reach completion, it may also be his only one. (It appeared over time as series of twelve comic books.) But you can't fault Burns for laziness. Once you see one of his illustrations, you see why it took so long. Possessing a graphical style as unique and instantly recognizable as Edward Gorey's, Burns works in meticulous detail using heavy inks that seem to bring out the worst horrors...
...jazz and a capacity for critical analysis. So, while toiling away at such unchallenging jobs as playground supervisor, beer inspector and file clerk, Pekar finds his self respect through writing about jazz for such publications as The Jazz Review and Downbeat. Later, of course, he also begins working in comix, a move he goes into briefly at the end. By the time it concludes, The Quitter will have you engrossed by its unpretentious and penetrating examination of the author's experience as a first-generation American, and, in an unexpected way, the embodiment of both this country's brutality...