Wrap-Up of the 10th Annual Manga/Graphic Novel Reading Challenge

I signed up for this challenge at the Modern Age level agreeing to read 12 books for the challenge.  By the end of the year I ended up reading 31 books for the challenge!  My reviews are shown below:

Beardo:  The Art Degree Guarantee
Exit Wounds
The Undertaking of Lily Chen
Rolling Blackouts:  Dispatches From Turkey, Syria and Iraq
The Arab of the Future
Hostage
Insomnia Cafe

Wizzywig
2 Sisters
The Big Kahn
California Dreaming:  Cass Elliott Before the Mamas and the Papas
The Best We Could Do
Patience
Sam Zabel and the Big Pen
Soldier's Heart
A Game for Swallows
How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less
Weapons of Mass Diplomacy
The Arab of the Future 2
I Remember Beirut
Dare to Disappoint:  Growing up in Turkey
The Customer is Always Wrong
Lennon: The New York Years
Soviet Daughter
Threads From the Refugee Crisis
Killing and Dying
Safe Area Gorazde
Nanjing:  The Burning City
Red Rosa
The Attack
Girl in Dior

My favorite book:  Rolling Blackouts:  Dispatches From Turkey, Syria and Iraq.  I loved this new book from Sarah Glidden and her new graphic novel sub-genre, reportage comics.  I also need to give a shout-out to Zeina Abirached for her I Remember Beirut and A Game for Swallows.  Both of these books affected me deeply and I probably remember them the most along with Rolling Blackouts.  Dan Dougherty's Beardo series is one of my favorites too. 

My least favorite book:  Nanjing:  The Burning City.  There was no story written in the book and it was hard to follow the drawings.  

Girl in Dior

Girl in Dior is the story of the rise of the fashion label Christian Dior. Intermingled into the story is that of a fictional budding journalist Clara Nohant who becomes one of Dior's models and after marrying into British royalty, a customer.

The book is supposed to be a biography of Christian Dior.  While his life is covered, the addition of a fictional character, Clara, mars the story and I do not know why the author chose to add her to the story. Clara was not necessary to write a great graphic biography.

The illustrations are exquisite.  I would love to see some of them framed on my walls. The question for many will be whether the price of the book is worth the illustrations given a botched storyline.  For me, the answer is yes.  It was the beauty of the dresses illustrated that made me buy this book.

It's hard to figure out how to rate this book.  I think anyone interested in fashion will like it because of the illustrations as well as the history of the House of Dior.  I just wish fiction wasn't added to this biography.

The Attack

When I bought this graphic novel I presumed it was about a terrorist attack in the Middle East, which it is.  However, the plot was much different than I expected.

Amin Jaafari is an Arab and a naturalized Israeli citizen living in Tel Aviv.  He is also a surgeon and lives a life of luxury compared to that of his fellow Arabs. When his wife Sihem is identified as a suicide bomber who killed 19 people in a restaurant, Amin has to comes to grips with how she decieved him. He had no idea that she had terrorist leanings. Amin then travels to Palestinian areas in order to discover how his secular wife became radicalized.

I loved this book. The author does not take a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unusual in a book taking place in the Middle East. He shows both sides along with the stress and grief that they both share in this conflict. 

Red Rosa

Kate Evans' Red Rosa is a graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg.  I was not familiar with Luxemburg before reading this biography but I found that she was a woman ahead of her time.  Rosa was a passionate socialist who did alot of writing and speaking to educate and inspire many people to her cause. She was the only woman of her era, the early 1900s, to have this power.

She was born and raised in Poland but also lived in Germany promoting her beliefs. She was tough enough to question the beliefs and actions of both Marx and Lenin. She also did not care for society's role for women and chose not to marry, prefer to have lovers instead. She was truly a woman in control of her life and I admire that.

As a feminist myself, I was surprised that I had not heard of Rosa Luxemburg before seeing this book.  She was certainly a female powerhouse of the twentieth century and belongs in studies on women's history.  Unfortunately, none of the courses I took in college mentioned her.

Ladies, this is a must read!

Nanjing: The Burning City

I was disappointed in Ethan Young's Nanjing. It is a wartime narrative of the fall of China's former capital city Nanjing to the Japanese in 1937. The book showcases 2 Chinese soldiers who were caught in the city after it was captured by the Japanese.

I did not learn much about the WWII fight commonly known as the Rape of Nanjing. Perhaps I am used to this type of story being told as a reportage comic which has tons of detail via the dialogue.  There is little dialogue in Nanjing and the artwork consists of black and white drawings in comic strips.

Unfortunately, I can only give this graphic novel 1 out of 5 stars. It just didn't teach me anything about this episode in history.

Safe Area Gorazde

Safe Area Gorazde is the story of the town of Gorazde in eastern Bosnia during the Bosnian War in the early 1990s.  It is told from the point of view of the reportage cartoonist Joe Sacco who was a U.N. journalist who traveled there 4 times during the war.  The U. N. had designated Gorazde as a safe area during the war but it was anything but safe. The community had been majority Muslim before the war began but most of them were slaughtered by the Serbs throughout the war.

The story is heavy on the fighting with interludes on silly teenage girls and parties with local residents. Much of the information on Gorazde comes from the author's guide Edin, a grad student.  Also, refugees arriving in Gorazde tell about the atrocities they saw in their hometowns, including mass executions, that they were forced to flee from. There is also information on Yugoslavia from the end of WWII to the beginning of the Bosnian War. After WWII the different ethnicities lived together peacefully under the authoritarian leadership of Tito. After Tito's death, Slobodan Milosevic took power and began inciting ethnic hatred.

While I had read much about this war while it was ongoing, I learned alot about it from the first person accounts that the author provided in the book.

The book offers a good history of this war. History lovers will want to check this one out.

Killing and Dying

This was not my favorite graphic novel. It is a compilation of 6 separate comics.  While they were amusing, I prefer to have one story told in a "novel."

The comics included "Hortisculpture," "Amber Sweet," "Go Owls," "Translated From the Japanese," "Killing and Dying," and "Intruders."  My favorites were "Hortisculpture" which is about a new art form that combines sculpture and gardening, "Amber Sweet" which is about mistaken identity and "Killing and Dying" which is about parenthood.

The style of the artwork is minimalist drawings done in comic panels. Most are black and white but every few pages there is color.

I hate to give an author a poor rating on a book when I am predisposed to not liking it in the first place.  I won't do that.  If you are the type of graphic novel reader who likes seeing a series of different comics in one book, you will enjoy this one. 

Threads From the Refugee Crisis

OMG!  I learned so much from this graphic novel on life in a refugee camp in Calais.  The book is about the author's volunteer work at the "Calais Jungle" refugee camp in Calais, France which was dismantled last year. She uses full color graphics and changing font styles to tell her story.

 

In Threads you will meet some refugees, see their living conditions, and hear their stories. 

This is a heavyweight book and it took me some time to get through it. I was shocked at how the camp looked and was run.  I was also shocked by how much the involvement of the local police had a negative effect on the refugees. It seems that while some of the refugees had established a sense of humanity in their living conditions, the police destroyed homes and disrupted that sense of normalcy. The author told a story about a pregnant refugee with 5 year old twins who was beat up by the police for no reason and lost her kids. Having the graphics drawn showed me much more than I have ever learned from a traditional news report. As the inside cover blurb states it is filled with "poignant images-by turns shocking, infuriating, wry and heartbreaking." This is an accurate decription. The images are drawn in a childish style that contrasts with the seriousness of the subject matter.

When I finished reading Threads I felt emotionally upset. The author did a great job at showing the horrors of being a refugee. However, her approach to the political issue of immigration, at the conclusion of the book, will probably only appeal to those who already agree with her viewpoints. I think she could have changed some people's minds about immigration if she had used a different type of appeal. 

Threads is one if the best graphic novels that I have ever read and everyone should read it.

Soviet Daughter

Soviet Daughter is a family saga about the Ignatovka family from Kiev. The graphic novel covers the family during the 20th century and into the 21st century from the author's great-great-great-grandmother to the author herself in the present time in America.

Julia Alekseyeva's great-grandmother Lola was born in 1910 to an impoverished Jewish family. Lola only attended school through the 4th grade due to her responsibilities to her family. She connected with only one person in the family, her own grandmother. However, she always had good jobs with the Bolsheviks, Stalinists, Red Army and the KGB. Her family was able to escape the pogroms and while they had little to eat they were better off than others. After the Chernobyl accident most of the family emigrated to the U. S., including the author who was 4 years old at the time.

This book gives a fascinating insight into life in Russia and the Ukraine during the 20th century. As such, it is an important history book for the younger generation to learn about the travails of this era. 

Lennon: The New York Years

Lennon: The New York Years is not really about John Lennon's life living in New York City but rather his life from birth until death.  The storyline of this graphic novel follows several sessions that Lennon had with a psychiatrist while he was living in New York during which he discusses his entire life.

I was quite surprised to read that both of John Lennon's parents abandoned him as a child and that he was raised by an aunt and uncle. With his mother coming in and out of his life as a youth he had serious mental issues. When he began to learn music Lennon started to come out of his shell, using music as therapy.

The book covers the forming of the Beatles, their rise to fame, the crazy years touring and recording albums and their breakup.  I thought it was interesting that when Lennon met Yoko Ono she was able to erase all of the pain he had lived with from his childhood.  I did not know that before. His murder by John Chapman is also covered.

I had read some negative reviews of the book before reading it.  I totally disagree with those reviewers.  This is a fabulous biography of one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century and I learned alot about him.  This is a must read.

The Customer is Always Wrong

"The Customer is Always Wrong" is a continuation of Mimi Pond's 2014 "Over Easy." It is the story of her life as a waitress in the 1970s. However, she does not use her real name. Her alter ego is Madge and she showcases the sleazy people that she works with as well as the customers.

Madge is a fledgling cartoonist who works at the Imperial Cafe in Oakland, CA which is managed by the goofy Laszlo.  Most of her co-workers are drug addicts who may or may not be able to work on a given day.  Instead of the story focusing on Madge, Laszlo's family life is prominent.  This does not mean that it isn't exciting.  The book was engrossing and I read all of its 450+ pages in one sitting.

What is special about this book is the author's ability to create a plot with many twists and turns. I do not usually see a graphic novel that is so heavily plotted. This is a must read for graphic novel fans.  It's a 5 out of 5 stars.

Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey

Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey is a graphic memoir of the author's life as a student in post-coup Turkey where she grew up. This coming of age story takes place in the 1980s and early 1990s covering the author beginning primary school in Izmer and attending college in Istanbul. The artwork includes both doodling and collage work.

Ozge Samanci's parents were both teachers.  Her mother taught sewing at a vocational women's high school and her father taught technical drawing at a vocational men's high school. Her father wanted both Ozge and her older sister Pelin to become engineers so that they could get good jobs and have a better life. Pelin wanted this career but Ozge had other ideas like being an actress, an oceanographer, or an artist. Wanting to please her father, both Pelin and Ozge cram studied in order to get into the best school that would guarantee their admission to the best colleges. Pelin was successful but Ozge could not pass her entrance exams.

While she was growing up Ozge was fascinated by Turkish leader Ataturk and frequently would apologize to his picture when she felt she did not live up to his ideals. She also idealized Jacques Cousteau and had a poster of him up on her bedroom wall. Together they would discuss what Ozge's role in life should be.  

Ozge eventually gets into the college Pelin was attending but could only get in as a math student. After flunking most of her classes she eventually graduates but knows she cannot work as a mathematician. As her Jacques Cousteau poster told her, she had learned how to learn by studying math and was prepared to learn whatever she wanted, including art.

I loved this book. It seems that the ending was abrupt and I believe a sequel is needed to finish the author's story. She is currently a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois where I live. I am curious as to how she got there.

I Remember Beirut

Zeina Abirached, in her follow-up graphic novel to A Game For Swallows, concentrates in I Remember Beirut on those things that she remembers about her life living in war torn Beirut in the 1980s. There is no formal plot. Each page begins with "I remember" and talks about a different memory she has such as the sound of unwrapping a Kitkat candy bar, never having running water and that the school bus did not stop in her neighborhood.

The artwork is the same used in A Game For Swallows.  The drawings are stark black and white.  Each time the letter "o" is used in a word the author placed a dot inside it. This is a bullseye and shows how victimized the residents feel about the war.  It is a most unconventional graphic style but works well for the story the author is telling.

I loved the book but must admit "Swallows" is better.

The Arab of the Future 2

This book is part two of the author's biography of his childhood.  It covers the years 1984 - 1985 and will be continued in another installment of the series.  Like the first book, the artwork consists of line drawings with color schemes for different places that the author lived at.  As he did in the earlier book, Sattouf uses pink for his life in Syria and blue for visits to his mother's native France.

When this story opens it is time for Riad Sattouf to begin school.  He is terrified because he does not speak Arabic, knows no other kids and stands out due to his blonde hair. Some of the kids think he is Jewish because he is blonde but Riad denies this. His Lebanese father is a university professor so the family has some status. Riad meets two kids who become his friends and together they all share a healthy fear of their teacher, a woman who enjoys hitting her students in the hands with a stick.

The story covers one school year, Riad's summer visit to his mother's family in France and the beginning of his second year in school. I think the first book was a little better.  It covered his life from birth to age 5. It had more action as the family moved to 5 different countries during this period of time. However, I am interested in reading however many installments to this series that are written.  The series gives an interesting perspective of a child with European and Arabic ancestry living in the Middle East.

Weapons of Mass Diplomacy

French author and diplomat Antonin Baudry, writing under the pen name of Abel Lanzac, has written a fictionalized account of his time working for the French Foreign Ministry during the time period leading up to the U. S. invasion of Iraq. It is a graphic novel.

The story begins with Arthur Vlaminck getting hired as a speechwriter for Foreign Minister Alexandre Taillard de Vorms.  De Vorms has a nasty temper and loves to quote poets and philosophers. He is never happy with what Vlamink writes. Never. Vlamink gets to travel with the Minister on diplomatic trips abroad and to the United Nations (U.N.) where he sees the American president (George W. Bush) and Jeffrey Cole (Colin Powell) address the U.N. concerning Resolution 1441 which provided for inspections on the nation Khemed's (Iraq) weapons of mass destruction in order to avoid war.

While this is a serious topic, the author has written a wonderful satire of this part of our recent history. He has shown the difference of opinions between France and the U. S. on the subject all while showing the reader how diplomacy works.

I do not understand why the author does not use his real name, the name of his boss, Bush, Powell or Iraq. I am certain there is a professional reason for this but I do not know what it is.

This book was pretty amusing.  I highly recommend it.

How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less

Sarah Glidden is a comic book author and illustrator who primarily writes nonfiction and reportage comics. Her artwork is usually done in watercolors and is usually drawn in traditional comic panels. I reviewed her second book, Rolling Blackouts, in May.  How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less is her first book which was originally published in 2010. It covers a Birthright Israel trip that she took to Israel with a friend in 2007.

The back cover blurb states: "Sarah Glidden is a progressive Jewish American twentysomething who is vocal about her criticism of Israeli politics in the Holy Land. When a debate with her mother prods her to sign up for a Birthright Israel trip, Glidden expects to find objective facts to support her strong opinions. What she gets, however, is a regimented schedule meant to showcase the best of Israel: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Masada, Kinneret and the Dead Sea, and other landmarks. Worries she may be falling prey to an agenda, Glidden seizes various opportunities to discuss the fraught complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But with self
-effacing humor and reflection, Glidden realizes that the opinion she is most surprised by may very well be her own."

I love the author's reportage comic sub-genre. This memoir of her birthright trip is part travelogue and part memoir. The arguments that she presented concerning the Israeli-Palestini issue were well thought out and show both sides of the issue. She is a non-observant Jew with Palestinian sympathies when she begins her trip but returns home confused about the issue. While the subject matter is serious, the book is an easy and relaxing read.

This is one of my favorite graphic novels of all time and everyone needs to take a look at this one.

A Game For Swallows

A Game For Swallows had a huge impact on me, challenging my American notions of what life is like in war torn countries. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. This is especially true in this graphic novel with its stark black and white drawings of the author's former Christian neighborhood in Beirut.  She shows how much of her community is safe by drawing a small circle on a page of paper. She also shows how barricades are set up to make it safer for people to walk outside without getting hit by a sniper. This tells me so much more than what I hear in tv and newspaper news reports.

The story begins with the author as a child being holed up in the foyer of her family's apartment, the only safe place in the apartment. Neighbors come by during bombings to join the family in the foyer for safety reasons. There is much hospitality present as coffee and alcohol are always being offered to everyone. Worry is present also as the family worries about other family members who got stuck in other parts of town when the guns and bombs began to go off. The neighbors create a homey atmosphere for the author and her brother by sharing cooking lessons, games and gossip.

The title of the book comes from a quote by Florian "to die  to leave  to return  it's a game for swallows." I am sure it was chosen to represent the fact that people have to constantly move to new places when they are living in a war zone in order not to get killed.

I thought it was interesting that the author placed a dot inside the letter "o" every time it was used in a word. It is a bullseye and let's the reader know just how much the country's residents feel they are being attacked by the warring parties. The font used for the dialogue was a plain style font that contributed to the seriousness of the story. The author, Zeina Abirached, used her artwork to the fullest extent in telling her story. It made the story much more compelling than if she had used a different style.

I was blown away by this book and cannot recommend it more highly.

Soldier's Heart

Soldier's Heart The Campaign to Understand my WWII Veteran Father is a wonderful graphic memoir by Carol Tyler. Tyler shows how her father's war experiences traumatically affected him and, in turn, affected his relationships with his children as they were growing up, including how they obtained their own emotional baggage from their upbringing. The book joins the author's angst over her present life, a failed marriage and mentally ill daughter, with the memories her father has from his war experience. The trauma has now affected three generations. At the time the book was published in 2015, he was still alive and was 95 years old.

Carol Tyler wants to be closer to her parents but is unable to penetrate the hard exteriors they developed from the trauma of the war experience. Like most members of the greatest generation, they did not talk about the past. One day Charles Tyler calls his daughter on the phone and talks for 2 hours about the war. His daughter, the author, then begins 2 projects. She begins a scrapbook of her father's war years and also begins to research his war experiences by going through government archives and interviewing her father. What she puts together is a magnificent history of how WWII affected the generation that fought it and how their battle scars affected their abilities to raise their future families. Having been raised myself by this generation I can truthfully say that every family I grew up with has the same baggage that Tyler family has. It is part of our American history.

The reason for the title "Soldier's Heart" is simple. This was the term used after the Civil War to describe the PTSD that soldier's suffered from. The artwork changes throughout the book from comic panels to full page drawings done in both pen and watercolors. The colors vary by page from saturated colors to desaturated colors.

A Soldier's Heart is a fabulous history lesson on WWII. If you did not live through it I highly recommend that you read it. For those of us that lived with the aftermath of the war, it may explain why your family life turned out the way it did.

Simply magnificent!!!!!

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen

Sam Zabel is a comic writer who has suffered from writer's block for six years. After giving a speech at a local university he meets Alice Brown who tells him about an old comic book called The King of Mars by Evan Rice. Sam gets a copy of the book and begins to read it. He suddenly sneezes and finds himself in the comic's world on Mars. Sam begins a fantasy journey that takes him through the history of comic books and a discussion on how women have been treated in comics over the years. He discovers that Evan Rice used a magic pen that helped him write the King of Mars.

The book involved time travel which I am not fond of. I cannot fault the author for writing a book in a genre that I do not like. The reason that I selected this book to read is because I knew it was considered to be comic book classic.

Time traveling fans, this one is for you.

Patience

I must start off this review with a mention of the artwork.  The author has used psychedelic sixties colors which puts me in heaven.  I wish that the story matched these lovely colors but for me it did not.

The story opens with a man named Jack finding his pregnant wife Patience murdered in their home. After years of living with his grief Jack finds a time traveling machine and uses it to go back in time to save Patience.

I am not a fan of time traveling stories so I found this book hard to follow. It does not seem right, though, to fault an author for writing a book that I am inclined to not like.  I pickd up the book at my public library based on the color of the artwork. So, if you love time travel books, maybe this one is for you.