Oddly Normal

Book 4

Otis Frampton

2/2023

I’d read the first three volumes of this collected comic series many years ago. The artist had some medical issues that delayed the release of this volume and in the time that passed, i pretty much forgot what the overall plot was. It was still enjoyable and excellently illustrated, though.

Young Hellboy

The Hidden Land

Mike Mignola, Thomas E. Sniegoski, Craig Rousseau, Dave Stewart, Clem Robins

2/2023

I never got into the full-grown Hellboy comics, but i liked the Hellboy Junior, so i thought i’d give this a try. Meh. Young Hellboy is pretty much a spectator in a servicable adventure story. Not much of a plot, but decent enough.

Firefly: The Sting

Delilah S. Dawson, Joss Whedon, Pius Bak, Wesllei Manoel

3/2023

I always like the Firefly graphic novels for their ability to continue on the stories from the original TV series, but i’m also always underwhelmed by the artwork. The drawings are somewhere between stylized and real representation and sort of fall short either way. This story is interesting in that it involves just the women of the crew, but overall it falls a little flat.

Gina and the Last City on Earth

Hilo: Book 9

Judd Winick

3/2023

The problem with these books coming out once per year is that i forget what’s going on. Still a good story, though, and this one packed some emotional punch as well as hilarious drawings. The whole series is just so good and this little three-book sub-series focusing on Gina was well done and satisfying.

Squire

Sara Alfageeh, Nadia Shammas

3/2023

Good story, good drawings. I didn’t know what to expect with this one, picking it up on a whim, but it was a nice tale of a young poor girl in ancient times who strives to be a squire—a second to a Knight in the army—in order to better her social position in life. The tale is well-constructed and it doesn’t quite go where it’s expected to go, which gives the story some heft.

Flight

Volume 3

Various Authors

3/2023

What a treat. This is a compilation of dozens of short (3-page to 25-page) graphic stories. I bought this one (even though it’s the third in the series) because it had a story by Ben Hatke in it, but now i’ve gotta go back and get more volumes (as i can find them—most are out of print). Not all the stories have complete narrative arcs, but it’s still a joy to be immersed in the worlds that each creates.

Shuna’s Journey

Hayao Miyazaki

3/2023

This was a story that Miyazaki never made into a movie and was printed before he started making movies—only recently translated to English. It’s a typical “hero’s journey” tale and like many Miyazaki movies, the hero is changed at the end and does not return home. The drawing is pure Miyazaki and the plot moves in ways that are unexpected, as in his films. Very enjoyable, even as it was printed Japanese style, reading from right to left. It was a little odd to progress through the book in what seems like a “backwards” way, but i got used to it quicker than i’d expected.

Bel Canto

Ann Patchett

4/2023

I picked this up at our summer house and decided to give it a read. It reminded me a lot of Chronicle of a Death Foretold in that it dripped with descriptions of a lazy country somewhere in South America. It’s the kind of book where a single moment can take up an entire page—the writing is heavy on description and light on plot. Indeed, not much happens between the action at the beginning and the action at the end, but it’s a glorious telling of people’s feelings in a constrained and foreign situation. And when the inevitable conclusion happens, it seems normal and accepted—the losses are part of life and the characters move on. It was a good read (from an author of about my age) even if i was slow to get interested in it.

A First Time for Everything

Dan Santat

4/2023

This is a very personal memoir graphic novel about Dan’s trip to Europe when he was thirteen. It’s a snippet of a life but told with heart and humor. I found it cool that some of the French and German bits of dialog were not translated, giving the reader a sense of how Dan didn’t understand what was being said. The drawing is crisp and engaging and the story satisfying. Speaking personally, i can’t imagine myself in that situation at thirteen. Dan meets a girl and deals with social pressures and all of that stuff was so far ahead of me at thirteen. He seems much older, but it’s a (mostly) true account.

Flight

Volume 1

Various Authors

5/2023

Skipping back to Volume One. This one was not quite as good as Volume Two, but still a treasure. The story by Kazu Kibuishi mentions “Bolt City,” which is his Twitter handle. As before, some of the stories have complete short plots, others are more a wash of a feeling, but they’re mostly beautiful to look at.

What If? 2

Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe

5/2023

I was a little slow to start this, but i’d forgotten how engrossing Randall’s crazy sciencey answers to ridiculous questions are (see What If?). The chapters rolled by in delight and i was sad to reach the end, wanting more extremes of science!

Little Earthquakes

The Graphic Album

Tori Amos and various others

5/2023

This is a compilation of graphic stories, each one inspired by or matching one song from Tori’s breakthrough album “Little Earthquakes.” It’s presented in album order, with a lot of bonus songs which i don’t think i’ve ever heard. Tori’s lyrics start each story and some only reference the lyrics slightly while others use nothing but the lyrics as the text/captions of the graphic story. Some of them work well, others are a little stilted, but it’s a beautiful presentation of the personal stories told through Tori’s music and lyrics.

Flight

Volume 2

Various Authors

6/2023

Another batch of great stories—some solid, some ethereal. This volume is quite a bit larger than the other two i’ve read. Every library should have these volumes.

Bea Wolf

Zach Weinersmith and Boulet

6/2023

Although this is ostensibly a children’s book, it sort of isn’t a children’s book. It is a retelling of a part of the epic poem of Beowulf, except that the characters are all kids with the evil next-door neighbor of Mr. Grindle. The text is written in clumps and bits with a heavy wash of alliteration throughout—taking cues from how Beowulf was written and formatted. It’s weird and wonderful and full of silly and serious black-and-white drawings that fill every page. It made me want to read Beowulf now.

Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere

Liniers

6/2023

Weird and wonderful. This is a collection of comic strips with a sensibility akin to the philosophical end of Calvin and Hobbes mixed with Life In Hell, Peanuts, Muttz, and who-knows-what else. The simple panels are illustrated in beautiful watercolors and the characters are thoughtful and hopeful while being simple and a bit askew. It’s at once familiar and something totally new.

Bot·9

The Witch of Wickerson

Derek Laufman

7/2023

I bought these two books from Derek Laufman’s website after seeing a tweet about them. They’re both nice clean well-drawn simple stories. Bot·9 is a wordless tale about a fish stuck in the glass-bubble head of a robot. The Witch of Wickerson is a fairy-tale-like quest of a father mouse off to rescue his son from the titular witch, who likes to eat mice. The drawings are vibrant, evocative, and emotional, and the artist includes many end-pages with information on the making of each book.

The She Series

Karen Hallion

9/2023

This is a book of Karen’s now-famous profile drawings of famous women in history. Each left-hand page drawing is accompanied by a short biography on the right-hand page. Some of the write-ups were well-written, others less so, but it was an interesting and eye-opening dip into the famous and unknown women who made differences in their lifetimes. I learned some things. It was also neat to see Karen’s drawings up close in large-scale.

Things in the Basement

Ben Hatke

9/2023

I thought that this book was more of a childrens picture book, but it’s a full graphic novel. Like many of Ben Hatke’s books, it involves a child stumbling into a mysterious world—in this case the ever-expanding basement below his new house, where he’s sent to fetch his younger sister’s missing sock. The pages of this book are packed with deep dark colors and magic and spooky spaces and minimal dialog. My only quibble is that the book wraps up a little too quickly. I would have liked to have seen a little more emotional heft in the character’s journey, but it still was a joy to read.

UTown

Cab

9/2023

Cab’s drawings are so intricate in their depictions of decaying city life. It’s a joy to immerse yourself in her work, even if it’s all in black-and-white. This is the story of punks and artists hanging on to their crumbling building which is scheduled for demolition. It’s a slice of life but also a deep story of life and art and motivation.

Squire & Knight

Scott Chantler

10/2023

I’m a fan of First Second Books. They put out a lot of graphic novels that fit my sensibilities: clean drawings, heartfelt plots, humor, and gorgeous illustrations. This book is a simple tale of a overly-confident knight who runs off to slay a dragon leaving his timid but thoughtful squire to solve the mystery of a curse on a town. It’s a family-friendly story of a different type of bravery.

The Wild Robot Protects

Peter Brown

10/2023

An unexpected third book in the Wild Robot series. This one is a bit heavy-handed in its environmental message, but it’s still a good story of the stoic and faithful robot Roz doing everything that she can to save the creatures on her home island. Short chapters and stark beautiful drawings make for a perfect middle-grade story.

Starling House

Alix E. Harrow

11/2023

Just like everything Alix E. Harrow writes, this book is filled with magic, torment, struggle, redemption, and a keen love of books and the written word. Although Starling House is not as immersively wonderful as her other books, it’s still an absorbing read that brings you into a rough, real, and very strange place. Basically it’s a haunted house story, but the ghosts have history and impact and the main characters, while fated to be where they are, fight and learn and stuggle and come out better in the end.

The Arab of the Future

A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978–1984

Riad Sattouf

11/2023

This book was in my mother’s collection and i brought it home when we cleaned out the house. It’s an interesting look at living in France, Libya, and Syria for very young Riad and gives a good feel of what life was like for people under dangerous regimes. His father seems like a total jerk and his mother seems really unhappy. I kind of want to see how the story plays out, but there are four more volumes. I may get them eventually.

Lost Time

Tas Mukanik

11/2023

I picked up this book because it had nice clean artwork and looked fun. It wrapped up well enough and it was certainly pretty to look at, but the writing was less than stellar and it had the kind of simplistic “then this happened” kind of storytelling without much explanation.

Super Boba Café

Nidhi Chanani

12/2023

Very middle-grade and the fact that the grandmother is hiding something is pretty obvious from the very start, but it flows along nicely and has a fun story line. The ending was a little unresolved, but for the age-level, it worked well enough. And there were some bits that were unexpected, which was cool.

One More Year

Megan Praz, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Allison Hu, Richard Mercado

12/2023

There were parts of this that caught me off-guard and other parts that seemed way over-done. It was okay, not great, but pretty cool. I wrote a review that focused on the positive.

There’s a fine line that needs to be walked whenever anyone writes a book of fiction about ultimate. How much needs to be explained? How much of the audience will be unaware of what ultimate is? Do the characters need to explicitly state what they’re doing or will the readers pick it up from context? And what about buzzwords and inside lingo? Include it? Drop it? Explain it?

“One More Year,” a richly-drawn graphic novel by Megan Praz, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Allison Hu, and Richard Mercado, treads that line for a bit near the beginning of the book, then abandons all hope of appeasing the newbies and dives horizontally into ultimate culture, trolling the depths of what it means to be an ultimate player.

The story, simply put, is reflected in the title. Club ultimate player Clint is thinking about hanging up his cleats, wallowing in the fact that he’s never made it to Nationals, when he’s pulled out of his almost-retirement by his friend to sign on with a mixed beach team, gunning for a berth at Nationals. Although the story begins with male-dominated ultimate, it quickly and effectively shifts to a more equal look at those who play the sport. One charming tool used in the story-telling is the use of two commentators who act as a Greek chorus, nudging the plot along, and it was refreshing to see the two male sportscasters flip to a mixed-gender pair as the narrative shifts toward equality.

For those familiar with Megan and Meghan’s online web comic “Contested Strip,” the drawings will at once feel recognizable but the graphic novel explodes with so much more detail in the spreads and backgrounds. For those in the know, there are nods and tributes to real ultimate players scattered throughout the text and in the images. It’s a feast for the eyes and only adds to the immersion of ultimate culture. As for the main characters depicted in the book, one can see the tropes and stereotypes. The book is filled with the players that everyone knows—the party player, the old veteran, the calculating nerd, the determined work-ethic player, the tall one, the young phenoms.... The characterizations are not deep, and in fact, may be a little over-the-top, but they show a broad range of the people that love this sport and how they find each other as a family over the love of the game.

The story rolls along (with, perhaps, a bit too much enthusiasm in some characters), and anyone familiar with an ultimate season (which is to say, nearly the whole target audience of this book), will feel the ups and downs along with the characters. There’s a lot of everything ultimate in this book and the only downside is the “enemy.” There is, of course, a rival team with players who have a particular connection to Clint, but the rivalry doesn’t quite mature enough, leaving the ending satisfying, but not quite the feel-good underdog story that it might have been.

“One More Year” is a remarkable achievement of design and storytelling, bringing ultimate into the graphic novel world. It might not be for younger kids, but if you’re a fan of ultimate and graphic novels, this would be a nice addition to your bookshelf.

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This is a review of the “Made in America” collector’s edition. Let’s hope that the general edition has an ISBN and will be available to the general public. They may not understand it, but reading this book might give them an appreciation for what ultimate players live and breathe every year.

Roaming

Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki

12/2023

Roaming is a hefty graphic novel but it never feels like too much. It’s a snapshot of a time and place—three college girls visiting New York City for five days—and there’s not an overload of plot, but it still flows along sweetly. It’s printed in tri-tone and there are pages that simply evoke the sights and sounds (and even smells) of New York. The characters are presented simply but their complexities are brought to life through their interactions with each other and their surroundings. I went in with zero knowledge of who these kids were and came out feeling as though i knew them personally. It brought back memories of kicking around a city, at once aimless and with purpose, where nothing much changes but everything’s different.