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Heavy Liquid/100% by Paul Pope
Paul Pope's art is unlike anything else in comics. It feels like you've been awake until dawn, like dancing, like kissing someone before you know their name. Liquid is about a young man addicted to a dark substance that circulates the black market; it came from a meteor and gives the user a trip greater than any drug made by man. But the story is less about the intrigues of criminals and users as it is about lost love and addiction. 100% is less frenetic than Heavy Liquid, but it explores the same themes in a more direct fashion, through six characters finding love and making art. Pope's art brings future New York to life in hallucinatory washed-out strokes, but it seems so real that you can almost smell the rot coming out of the sidewalk grates. When I go up on my roof some nights, I can see Pope's city growing and his characters being born. — JC
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Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner
When fictional teenage girls have sex, it's usually because they're trying to manipulate someone, or are desperate for love and validation. When actual teenage girls have sex, it's usually more complicated. For Minnie, the narrator of Diary of a Teenage Girl, sex is not a means to an end; it's an important aspect of her life, as is the pleasure, power and fear that accompany it. Gloeckner's book, based on her own adolescent writing, inverts all expectations of a teenage diary: instead of angsty poetry, initialed crushes and doodles of hearts, we get frank prose, graphic sex scenes and graphic-novel versions of Minnie's memories. Gloeckner's technical skill as an artist is unsurpassed (she has a background in medical illustration), but her unflinching illustrations of Minnie's most private, awkward moments are more than skillful; they're storytelling at its bravest. Read the Nerve interview with Phoebe Gloeckner here. — GW
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Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi's coming-of-age memoir, about growing up through the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, got much attention in the mainstream media's traditional "Comics can be serious art!" fashion. It deserved the hype. As the child Marjane discovers punk rock and grows increasingly skeptical of the Islamist regime, the adult's sharp and tender re-creation of her precocious youth brings a vivid humanity to a piece of recent history many readers might think of as another world. Originally written in French, the book has since been translated into twelve languages, a fine measure of its universality. An animated film, directed by Satrapi, comes out this year. — PS |
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Blue Monday by Chynna Clugston
When I was younger, my closest friends were women. We had a lot of fun for the better part of a year (which, when you're seventeen, feels far more like a decade), and even when sex inevitably intervened, it was healthy and comfortable. Just not for very long. Awkwardness and hurt feelings ultimately destroyed what we shared. I did very well at forgetting the troubles of home until I started reading Chynna Clugston's Blue Monday. The trials and travails of Bleu Finnegan, the book's teenage heroine, and her friends Clover, Victor, and Alan read like stories you traded with friends on Monday morning your sophomore year of high school. I've kept reading over the past six years, finding myself repeatedly charmed and pained by Clugston's forgiving romances, and every time the series stops again, I find myself wanting to pick up the phone and call one of my old friends. I don't, though. I've never figured out what to say. — JC |
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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
First my mom made my dad read Fun Home. Then my dad made me read it. I made my girlfriend read it, and she made her mom read it, who made her dad and other daughter read it. Now I'm making you read it. Check out an interview with author Alison Bechdel here. — Peter Smith |
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