Israeli graphic novelist Rutu Modan has won acclaim for her books Exit Wounds (2007) and The Property (2013), both of which are so tightly plotted, with a number of twists and turns, that Tim and Kumar find them difficult to review spoiler-free. What’s remarkable, though, is the emotional depth in books that are so plot-driven, as well as their social commentary on Israeli society, how violence there has become banal, and the popularity of Jewish tours of Polish sites of the Holocaust. With all this going for the books, we simply have to talk about them! (With few spoilers!)
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Big sweaty muscles, huge breasts, decapitations, and general dark ages carnage. Sounds like another everyday barbarian comic. That is, until you find out about the feminism, Celtic folklore, unreliable narration, matriarchy, humor, and unpredictable art. Kumar and Dana hew and cleave their mighty battle axes through Pat Mills and Simon Bisley’s 2000 AD classic Slaine The Horned God.
Chris Ware’s 2012 work Building Stories attracted a lot of attention because of its unusual format: a box of 14 publications of varying shapes and sizes, which can be read in any order. Ware says the work is about memory, in various ways, and reading the story in various non-chronological ways can give us different points of view on how its characters remember (or mis-remember, or forget) various things.
Nearly three months ago, way back before “Tim Across America,” Kumar and Dana discussed Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s classic graphic novel “From Hell.” Now they’re back with a discussion of last year’s From Hell Companion, which includes an annotated script and a lot of other behind-the-scenes information, inspiring our guys’ repeated forehead slaps and exclamations of “How come I never noticed THAT bit of symbolism before?”
In the early ’90s, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, based on the true story of Jack the Ripper, was published in issues, and collected in 1999. Kumar and Dana find that, upon re-reading (or re-re-re-reading), new questions still arise. What’s the story about? Why does the killer sometimes come off as a wise prophet? Many scenes are simply puzzling and need sufficient time to unpack. And then there’s the Star Wars reference…
Joe Sacco is surely THE trailblazer in the area of using comics as a medium for journalism; his work reads like a documentary film, or a remote report on the evening news. At his best, such as in Safe Area Gorazde, he not only gets you much more emotionally involved than the evening news ever could, he takes advantage of the medium to communicate in ways that video can’t. At the same time, he pulls back the curtain on how the presence of a journalist affects the actions of those around him.
In one of our longest episodes ever, Kumar discusses at length Garth Ennis’s epic run on The Punisher, the greatest comic book series of the 2000s. Dana listens and nods politely.
As it’s widely regarded as one of the best comic book series of all time, Dana and Kumar try their best to rekindle their love for Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN nearly twenty years after its conclusion, only to find the plotting leaden, the art inconsistent, and the world-building frustrating. Has time stripped the series of its lustre, or are these two jerks just too old for it?
