Drawing conclusions from the year’s best graphic novels
Comic book talent flowered in Japan in the aftermath of World War II. The major cartoonists who had witnessed the horrors of war addressed it in their work.
Shigeru Mizuki experienced combat as a soldier stationed in Papua New Guinea.
Named after the Showa era in Japan, which corresponds to the reign of the emperor, Hirohito (1926-1989), Mizuki’s epic Showa series presents an even-handed and scrupulously fair historical account, alongside his own personal story.
As with the previous two, the third volume in the series, Showa 1944-1953 (Drawn & Quarterly), charts Japan’s defeat by the Allies and subsequent occupation by America. Juxtaposing an arresting, photo-realist rendering of significant events with a more whimsical style (often in the same frame), Showa captures a small player cast amid a sea of great events, albeit he is guided by a growing sense of his own manifest destiny.
It’s an all the more remarkable story, given that Mizuki survived bouts of malaria and the loss of his arm in a bombing raid, and is still working at the age of 92.
Celebrated, in books such as Safe Area Gorade and Footnotes In Gaza, for his dispatches from conflict zones, Joe Sacco has brought a journalistic rigour to cartooning and has earned acclaim and respect for his reportage.
In his newest book, Bumf Vol. 1 (Jonathan Cape), he takes an alternative and acerbic approach to current events that glories in the anarchic spirit of Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix.
After years of reporting the facts, Sacco tackles the insidiousness of American foreign policy by revealing it in all its grotesqueness.
Reborn as Richard Nixon, Barack Obama oversees Abu Ghraib-style torture on an industrial scale. It would be funny if it weren’t true.
There have been two distinct trends in graphic novels in recent years: the increase of female authors and illustrators, and the pre-eminence of the memoir.
Subtitled ‘A Diary of Not-Your-Average Nine Months’, Matilda Tristram’s Probably Nothing (Penguin) finds the soon-to-be-first-time mum diagnosed with colon cancer four months into her pregnancy.
Undergoing chemotherapy, Tristram experiences many an anxious moment.
Meanwhile, Roz Chast, an only child of elderly and contrary parents, is left to confront their inevitable decline. This is a particularly trying assignment, as they appear none too keen on getting their affairs in order.
Both books are equally wonderful and affecting and neither is lacking in humorous detail, but the New York cartoonist’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury) is full of profound and painfully recognisable observations, and the inclusion of family photographs add real emotional weight.
The elder Hernandez brother’s career has been defined by his depiction of the comings and goings of the fictional Latin American town of Palomar, in the long-running comic, Love and Rockets.
Recently, he has turned his attention to a landscape more familiar to those portrayed by his younger brother, Jaime.
Last year’s Marble Season was a memoir, set in a similar Californian landscape to his home, and it was an affectionate tribute to a 1960s childhood fuelled by comics.
His latest, Bumperhead, is located in the same milieu, but this time the protagonist is a disaffected adolescent in the 1970s and the cosy childhood is replaced by uncertainty. It’s a more downbeat work, but it’s a warning against complacency that comes from a good place.
This was the year in which Spider-man was revealed to be from Cork.
Or, at least, the Spider-man 2099 version, whose alter ego is Miguel O’Hara. The artist behind this latest incarnation is Corkman, Will Sliney.
While he’s making international waves, a thriving independent comics scene has also developed in the county, with the launch of two local anthologies this year and more assured for next year.
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