A family of six flees a war-torn country, after American troops abandon it and let “invaders” from the other half of what used to be the same country conquer the portion they used to protect. The family has to sneak out by boat, crammed in with others, across an open sea, and hope for help and refugee status on the other end. They make it to the USA, the country they picked, and assimilate as best they can, working hard, living in small spaces, getting spat on by the natives.

Three decades later, one of those refugee children is a doctor; the others all productive members of society as well. The parents are naturalized citizens, and separated. And the third of those four children — Thi Bui, who was only a few years old when they fled — is becoming a mother herself, and investigating her family’s stories and history to learn more about where she came from.

This is The Best We Could Do . It’s an immigrant story, which is to say the most American kind of story possible. (If you disagree with me about that, the door is that way. Don’t let it hit you as you leave.)

Thi Bui had a complicated relationship with her parents — they were demanding and tough the way a lot of first-generation immigrant parents were, trying to keep up the traditions of their homeland and be more American than anyone else at the same time. She was the third girl of the four kids — the youngest was the only boy — which means her sisters, nearly ten years older, got to fight the battles so that she could have it a little easier. This book is the story of those complicated relationships, through the life stories of those parents, all the way up to the present day.

The Best We Could Do is a graphic novel that took Bui around fifteen years to make — not the writing and drawing, or not entirely, but gathering the stories of her family and writing her way into them. She had to find this story, to make it out of the materials in front of her, and that took time. This may be one of the best examples of the maxim “everyone has one great book in them” — but I don’t want to jinx Bui. She may go on to tell other stories as well, and they may take less than fifteen years. (I hope so: it would be a shame not to have other books by her, when she can make books this strong.)

But right now we have this book, and it’s an engrossing, encompassing view of the lives of one Vietnamese-American family. A book of tradition and hard work and fighting against outside forces and leaping at a chance for safety and happiness. Again, a quintessentially American story, and a great one.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Once again I see that I read the first book of a trilogy nearly a decade ago (The Color of Earth, in 2009), carefully shelved the following two books, and left them there for “someday.”

Well, “left them there” is understating it: I had to move these books around repeatedly, looking at them over and over again, and somehow (I’m not sure how) saving them from my 2011 flood that destroyed so many other things I thought I wanted to read more quickly.

But every one of us has a million things we didn’t do, and far fewer that we actually did do. As we get older, focusing on the first makes less and less sense — those things are almost infinite.

So I finally did read The Color of Water and The Color of Heaven , the bulk of a trilogy by Korean manwha creator Kim Dong Hwa, retelling the story of his mother’s adolescence, nearly a century ago in sleepy rural Korea. (Dong Hwa’s note, I realize only now, does not say this is his parents’ story, so I wonder about the strapping young man who is the hero of these books, and how he relates, if at all, to the author’s actual father.)

Ehwa is sixteen, or so the flap copy tells us — the books themselves never mention her age. There’s a lot they don’t mention, though: this trilogy is set in a small village somewhere in Korea, and if we weren’t told it was the twentieth century, there’s nothing here to clue us into that. Life goes on here as it always has, in a quiet, pastoral way.

In the first book, Ehwa had crushes on two local young men — first the monk Chung-Myung, and then the orchard farmer’s son Sunoo. But this is a romantic story — Dong Hwa spent most of his career making romantic stories for young women — so we know it will end with a true love, even if there are a lot of tears and long speeches about emotions before then.

And there are plenty of speeches about emotions: from Ehwa; from her mother, a widowed tavern-keeper; from the men they both love; and from nearly everyone else in this small Korean town, who are all obsessed with talking about women as flowers and men as butterflies and other unsubtle metaphors. Each page is pleasant, and the dialogue is true, but a reader may begin to wonder if rural Koreans ever think of anything else, or if that’s why they are still so rural and backward in 1920ish.

I’m picking on these books, which are sweet and lovely — Dong Hwa is good at drawing expressions, and at showing character in his faces. And the dialogue, as I said, is true — it’s only that there’s so very very much of it in the six-hundred-plus pages of these books.

I suspect the natural audience for this trilogy is both substantially younger and substantially more female than I am, so my reaction doesn’t mean much. My sense is that these books are exceptionally good for their kind, and I did enjoy reading them. It’s only that sweet romances tend to bring out the Marvin the Paranoid Android in me….

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Children know more than adults give them credit for. They know huge things, things too big for words, things they try not to think about. As they get older, they can corral those huge things with words and tame them into the pieces of normal life. But kids can’t do that yet: the world is big and dangerous and surprising and entirely out of their control.

Louis is one of those kids: old enough to know things, too young to do anything about them. He’s eight or ten, maybe — old enough to be responsible for his kid brother Truffle (who is not really named Truffle). And he shuttles between his separated father and mother, when he wants to focus on Billie, the girl in his class who he thinks about all the time, but hasn’t quite worked up the courage to actually talk to yet.

Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault (writer and artist, respectively) tackle a different story from their first graphic novel Jane, the Fox & Me here — Louis is younger than Helene was, and there’s nothing he can do to solve his own problems. Well, there is something he can do to solve his problem with Billie, and we’ll see by the end of the book if he’s able to do that.

But Louis’s father has a drinking problem, the kind that starts with wine at 11 AM to quiet the shakes and goes on to mania and then depression from there like clockwork. Louis and Truffle seem to only live with their father on weekends, or occasionally — but this all new. Their parents were together not that long ago, and Louis desperately wants things to go back to normal.

Their mother is the one keeping things together: getting the boys to school, hiding her tears from them, working and cooking and mothering as hard as she can. She moved them from that big, now-mostly-empty house the father is still rattling around about eighteen months ago, to a small apartment in Montreal. The parents are not divorced. Nothing is final. But even Truffle knows, on some level, that something is wrong with his father.

Louis Undercover , if you want to be reductive, is the story of a family broken by an alcoholic, seen by a child, told in comics. But it’s so much more than an “issue” story, deeper and more resonant. We all worry about our parents. We all worry about our children. We all are in families that don’t work as well as we want them to. We all want to both go back to the good times in the past and move forward to new good times in the future.

Louis tells us this story: it’s all in his words, and Britt makes them cutting and true, every moment. Arsenault’s softly colored pages, with their fuzzy panel borders, draw us into that story, and make it real while keeping it from being so cutting we can’t stand it.

This is a lovely, true book. Like so many books made for younger readers, it should not be restricted only to them. And, frankly, an adult — a parent — will get a lot more out of Louis Undercover than even the most thoughtful and mature child. But that’s what great books do: they meet you where you are, and also wait for you to grow up, so they can meet you there as well.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

If a webcomic is intended all along to become a book — if it’s being created as a book, and put up online as a teaser or buzz-builder along the way — is it somehow less of a webcomic? I’m sure there are webcomics purists who will insist it is: there are purists for everything, and we’re probably all purists for something. But, realistically, what difference does it make?

I discovered Andy Warner’s Brief Histories of Everyday Objects before the book came out, when he was serializing the individual pieces online . I read it like a webcomic, was happy when I heard it would be a book, and (eventually) found and read the book. That looks like success, from an ex-publishing hand and still-marketing professional. That looks like the way it’s supposed to work.

Warner’s introduction here doesn’t quite say either way: he developed Brief Histories as “an idea for a comic.” I think I’ve seen elsewhere that he had the book deal in place ahead of time…but maybe I’m making that up. (I like people to have book deals; it makes them happy, pays them for their work, and gets stuff for me to read. Win/win.) However it happened, Brief Histories was on the web, and it is now a book.

Warner gives the history, or a history, of forty-five random common objects, from toothbrushes to bicycles. Each one gets four pages, three and a half of them telling one main narrative, plus a few panels of “briefer histories” at the end for random fun facts that Warner presumably couldn’t fit into the main story.  These are not all necessarily the entire history of these objects, or even their original creation — it tends to be a funny story that’s reasonably close to the modern day, meaning a lot of 19th century and early 20th century inventors.

It’s all true, as far as I know, and it’s all pretty funny. Warner is an energetic cartoonist who uses a lot of blacks and tones, giving his pages vibrancy and depth. And, of course, they’re often about obsessed people talking about their creations in semi-anachronistic dialogue from Warner, which adds to the humor. (And will probably annoy purists, again — though purists are not likely to enjoy four-page quick takes on anything.)

To sum up: Brief Histories is funny, enjoyable, and, if you don’t watch out, you just might learn something.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

As you might be able to tell from the year in the post title, I’ve gotten more than a little lackadaisical about keeping up with this annual series of the best in comics created by North Americans. (I reviewed 2006 at the beginning of 2007, 2007 later in 2007, 2008 in 2008, 2009 in 2009, 2010 in 2011 after the next book was published, 2011 in 2012, 2012 in 2013,  2014 in 2014, and have so far missed 2015, 2016, and 2017. If it were still my job to keep up with things being published, I would probably be deeply ashamed of myself — but it hasn’t been for a decade now, so I’m not.)

But I’m still interested in good comics, as always. So here I finally am with the Jeff Smith-edited The Best American Comics 2013 , only four and a half years after it was published and six-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half years after the work in it originally appeared.

This is the point where one is supposed to say “better late than never,” but I don’t want to tempt anyone. “Best of” volumes always have a problem with age: even in the best of times, the beginning of the year they celebrate is about eighteen months before publication, and sometimes it can be even longer. The Best American Comics has an idiosyncratic September to August “year” to begin with, which makes it more convenient for their publishing schedule but can be confusing to someone trying to keep track of when things were published. (Although there’s no real reason to bother to do that, if you’re not running a media outlet or reprinting books for a living.)

Anyway, in this fine book are full stories and excerpts (more of the latter, as usual) from comics works originally published from September 1, 2011 through August 31, 2012 and made by people either currently resident in North America or “North American” (whatever that means). Translations would be OK as long as you’re French Quebecois or Mexican, I suppose, though I don’t recall seeing any of either in this series so far. (Too bad the old Yiddish publishing industry died out: it would be fun to see that in the modern comics world.)

The usual suspects are represented with the expected work: Alison Bechdel with an excerpt from Are You My Mother?, Craig Thompson with one from Habibi, Leela Corman with a bit from Unterzakhn, Eleanor Davis with “Nita Goes Home,” Derf Backderf with some pages from My Friend Dahmer, and stories from Laura Park, Kate Beaton (who also provides the cover), Gabrielle Bell, Vanessa Davis, and Paul Pope. There’s something of a tropism to cartoonists over teams, which is probably mostly a reflection of what the literary/artistic end of the comics world is like.

More obviously commercial work is represented, too, of various kinds: Faith Erin Hicks is here with an excerpt from Friends With Boys, Tony Puryear with a piece from Concrete Park (before it became a series, I think), and Terry Moore with some of Rachel Rising. All in all, there are 30 comics stories here from 33 creators, with Evan Dorkin showing up twice, as writer of a story with Jill Thompson and cartoonist of a collection of his “Fun” gag strips from Dork!

Some people you might expect are missing: the Hernandez Brothers, Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge, and Charles Burns are ones I thought of. But, without doing tedious research, I’m not sure what they published in that time period, if anything. And anyone interested in a book like this is going to know who they are to begin with — making room here for Sophie Goldstein and Sammy Harkham and Jeremy Sorese is probably better, if we’re making judgments like that.

As always, it’s a kaleidoscope of very different kinds of comics. I tend to check to see if the guest editor has tastes wide enough that there’s at least one story in the book that I don’t like or get at all — paradoxically, that’s what makes the best editors. Smith doesn’t manage to do that, which means either my tastes keep getting wider or they’re very in tune with his to begin with.

Any book in this series is worth reading, if you like comics and want a sampler of what’s good out there. I found 2013 a little less adventurous than some other years, but it’s always impossible to tell if that was the year or the editor. Libraries have a lot of these books; check ’em out there. It’s what I do, these days.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.