Sylvia Nickerson’s Graphic Memoir, ‘Creation’ Is an Emotional Thought Experiment
The differences between Sylvia Nickerson's realistically-depicted homeless and the blob-like privileged establishes Creation's central dichotomy and critique.
Chris Gavaler
Chris Gavaler is an associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University. His books include On the Origin of Superheroes (Iowa 2015), Superhero Comics (Bloomsbury 2017), Superhero Thought Experiments co-authored with Nathaniel Goldberg (Iowa 2019), and Creating Comics co-authored with Leigh Ann Beavers (Bloomsbury forthcoming 2020). He is the comics editor at Shenandoah magazine, and he blogs weekly at thepatronsaintofsuperheroes.wordpress.com.
Time, Space, and Ethnic Divisions Collapse in Aimée de Jongh’s ‘TAXI!’
De Jongh constructs a jigsaw puzzle of personalities, life experiences, and national identities, where even contrasts ultimately reveal connections in her graphic memoir, Taxi!
Who’s He in Connor Willumsen’s ‘Bradley of Him’?
Connor Willumsen keeps the narrative in his graphic fiction book, Bradley of Him, as lean and off-balance as his maybe-deranged main character.
Graphic Novella ‘Stunt’ Seeks Escape from Perpetual Entrapment
Like the title letters, the physical format of Michael DeForge's Stunt creates a kind of cage holding the main character inside rigid panels.
Keiler Roberts Creates a Gently Comic, Low-Suspense Universe in Graphic Memoir, Rat Time
Picking up where Chlorine Gardens left off, Keiler Roberts' graphic memoir, Rat Time, wanders artfully and unannounced into memories.
Frank Santoro’s ‘Pittsburgh’ Is a Permanently Preliminary Sketch of Life
The metaphor of imperfection and transition flows beneath every page of Frank Santoro's graphic memoir, Pittsburgh.
Compelling Grotesquery in Graphic Novel ‘Vivisectionary’
In Kate Lacour's graphic novel of imagined medical oddities, Vivisectionary, the viewer is the main character and the images the deranged antagonist.
Would the 2,000-Year-Old Zhuangzi Approve of Tsai’s ‘The Way of Nature’?
A Yoda-proportioned philosopher provides a humorous undercurrent in C. C. Tsai's adaptation of the Daoist text, The Way of Nature.
Ana Galvañ’s ‘Press Enter to Continue’ Gets Weird with the Storyboard Format
Is the ghost-child forming pixel-by-pixel in Ana Galvañ's Press Enter to Continue a repressed memory, a government-induced hallucination, or something weirder still?
The Art of Sequential Art in ‘The Book of Sarah’
While the art world is full of excellent artists, few have the comics savvy to construct the sort of complex narratives and image-text relationships that Sarah Lightman achieves in her memoir, The Book of Sarah.
It All Goes Sideways in Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore’s ‘BTTM FDRS’
Graphic fiction BTTM FDRS drags up our culture's biggest, ugliest globs of unconscious sewage and spreads it across a white page for us to see and acknowledge.