Review: ‘How to Love’ from Actus Comics
How to Love
By Batia Kolton, David Polonsky, Mira Friedmann, Itzik Rennert, Rutu Modan, and Yirmi Pinkus; translated by Ishai Mishory
Actus/distributed by Top Shelf, August 2008, $29.95
Actus is an Israeli comics collective that publishes one joint project annually; their members are the six contributors to this book. This book was published in Israel by Actus, but is being distributed on this side of the Atlantic by Top Shelf Comics. (And was translated by Ishai Mishory, implying that there was a prior edition in Hebrew.) It’s officially publishing in August, but I can’t find it on any of the US online booksellers, and I got my copy several months ago – so it’s anyone’s guess when it will show up in your local comics shop (if ever). Top Shelf is selling it directly, so there’s at least that way to get it.
[[[How to Love]]] has six stories, one by each of the contributors, each about twenty pages long. (The subtitle calls them “graphic novellas,” which stretches a bit too far for my taste – is there anything wrong with short stories?)
It opens with Batia Kolton’s “Summer Story,” in which pre-teen Dorit watches her nameless older neighbor kissing a boyfriend on the street, then has the neighbor accompany her family on a trip to the beach. It’s a very slice-of-life story; Dorit is clearly learning about relationships through the neighbor, but the story doesn’t get inside her head; we see everything from outside, so we don’t know what Dorit thinks about any of it. The art is a clean-line style, very reminiscent of Actus’s most famous member, Rutu Modan.
Next is “L’Elixir D’Amour” by David Polonsky, a series of full-page drawings with accompanying text. It borrows from the long history of fantastic voyages from European history, and seems itself to be set somewhere vaguely historical (Renaissance or Enlightenment, somewhere in that very large swath of time). An aged Baron is urged by his young mistress to tell her of love, so he tells her some pleasing lies about faraway lands – or maybe they aren’t lies, in this case. Polonsky’s art is detailed, and full of lines for shading, though his line is a dark gray rather than black, for whatever reason.
Mira Friedmann brings a slightly caricatured style to “Independence Day,” with figures that look a bit too large (particularly their heads) looming through the frames. It seems to be a story of the author’s own youth, about a girl in 1966 who sneaks across the Jordanian border during the Independence Day celebrations to steal a pen for the boy she secretly adores. Like “Summer Story,” it’s about finding out that love is fickle and the other people are difficult to understand.
“Love Love Love,” by Itzik Rennert, is another piece of illustrated prose, though Rennert’s style is more evocative, less illustrative, than anyone else in the book so far. A series of symbolic drawings accompany short passages about the various loves in the life of a nameless bisexual man – he has a fair bit of sex, but doesn’t find love until (possibly) the last page. That last page either changes the narration from third to first person, or is from another point of view – and that question could be important as to how to read it.
The most famous member of Actus is Rutu Modan, whose graphic novel Exit Wounds was published to great acclaim last year. She contributes “Your Number One Fan” to this book – it’s a story in which an amateur Israeli musician thinks he has a big break with a gig in Sheffield in the UK, but learns otherwise (as hinted by the title) once he gets there. I found Modan’s characters much more expressive here than in [[[Exit Wounds]]]; the emotions of Eitan, the musician, really carries the story.
And last is “8:00 to 10:00,” by Yirmi Pinkus, a nearly wordless story about one man’s morning routine. It’s visually inventive and attractive, but it’s pretty slight for the last story in the book. But it’s also the only story with a pure moment of happiness and actual love in it, so that may bee why it ends the anthology.
How to Love is a bit expensive for what it is, but that’s an artifact of how far it had to travel to get to us. It’s a solid anthology – none of the stories are spectacularly good, but none of them are bad, either.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
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