A beautiful, elegiac entree to an era of violent transition.
Hawke (Rules for a Knight, 2015, etc.) and Ruth (The Lost Boy, 2013, etc.) deliver an impressionistic overview of the Apache Wars, fought between the United States Army and several bands of Apache tribes in the southwest territories of mid-1800s America.
This graphic novel cruises along a quarter century of conflict, depicting poignant moments in the lives of Apache leaders and warriors and members of the United States Army charged with “civilizing” the land claimed as spoils of the Mexican-American War, land many Apache call home. It’s a brutal, bloody time, with violence begetting violence, exemplified by Goyahkla, an Apache warrior who lost his mother, wife, and children to an attack by the Mexican Army and earned a new name from the pleas for mercy of the last man slaughtered in the Apache’s revenge raid on a Mexican village (“San Jeronimo…por favor”). Hawke and Ruth interweave this Geronimo origin story and other legends of the era (Cochise escaping arrest by simply cutting an exit through the side of an Army tent; U.S. soldiers torturing and murdering Mangas Coloradas—who had come to negotiate peace—before finally boiling his decapitated head over a campfire) with historical fiction, allowing for some literary license and philosophical dialogue on the politics of settling an already-inhabited land. Bookending the work with the doomed Apache perspective underscores the tragedy and magnitude of the events. An afterword by Hawke explains his personal connection to the material, and a Further Reading section gives the nonfiction roots for the work. The narration is concise and lyrical, perfectly wed to Ruth’s wonderfully expressive illustrations, whose gorgeous photorealism—calling to mind the works of Alex Ross—breathes vivid life into the historical material. The paneling gracefully carries both intense action scenes (the book is exceptionally violent) and stirring cutaways (to the majesty and menace of nature).
A beautiful, elegiac entree to an era of violent transition.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4013-1099-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
A gorgeous symphony.
Illustrator McGuire (What’s Wrong With This Book, 1997, etc.) once again frames a fixed space across the millennia.
McGuire’s original treatment of the concept—published in 1989 in Raw magazine as six packed pages—here gives way to a graphic novel’s worth of two-page spreads, and the work soars in the enlarged space. Pages unspool like a player-piano roll, each spread filled by a particular time, while inset, ever shifting panels cut windows to other eras, everything effervescing with staggered, interrelated vignettes and arresting images. Researchers looking for Native American artifacts in 1986 pay a visit to the house that sprouts up in 1907, where a 1609 Native American couple flirtatiously recalls the legend of a local insatiable monster, while across the room, an attendee of a 1975 costume party shuffles in their direction, dressed as a bear with arms outstretched. A 1996 fire hose gushes into a 1934 floral bouquet, its shape echoed by a billowing sheet on the following page, in 2015. There’s a hint of Terrence Malick’s beautiful malevolence as panels of nature—a wolf in 1430 clenching its prey’s bloody haunch; the sun-dappled shallows of 2113’s new sea—haunt scenes of domesticity. McGuire also plays with the very concept of panels: a boy flaunts a toy drum in small panels of 1959 while a woman in 1973 sets up a projection screen (a panel in its own right) that ultimately displays the same drummer boy from a new angle; in 2050, a pair of old men play with a set of holographic panels arranged not unlike the pages of the book itself and find a gateway to the past. Later spreads flash with terrible and ancient supremacy, impending cataclysm, and distant, verdant renaissance, then slow to inevitable, irresistible conclusion. The muted colors and soft pencils further blur individual moments into a rich, eons-spanning whole.
A gorgeous symphony.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-375-40650-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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