“Making Comics,” by Lynda Barry

“Making Comics,” by Lynda Barry. Drawn and Quarterly, November 2019. 200 pp. Paperback, $22.95.

Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review.

COVID-19 UPDATE: Amazon’s super-slow for books right now: you can get books from your local bookstore even faster, Goshen folks! E-mail or call Fables, and you can pick your books up curbside or have them delivered. Contact the store at fablesbooks@gmail.com or call (574) 534-1984 to order.

 And don’t forget about gift certificates, a great way to support Fables, as well as Goshen’s other downtown small businesses during the crisis.

Lynda Barry is like a crazy cat lady for drawings. She gathers and nurtures lonely, awkward, and abandoned drawings, the drawings that you gave up on when they didn’t turn out like you’d planned. “Making Comics,” the most recent book from this artist, novelist, professor, and creativity guru is a weird and beautiful hybrid—per usual for this recently recognized MacArthur “genius.” Part inspirational narrative and part activity book, “Making Comics” teems with recopied drawings that her students threw in the trash or left behind in class. Barry has been taking in stray drawings like these for years, not out of pity, but out of boundless and judgement-free love.

Continue reading ““Making Comics,” by Lynda Barry”

“Pittsburgh,” by Frank Santoro

“Pittsburgh” by Frank Santoro. New York Review Comics, September 2019. 216 pp. Hardcover, $29.95. Adult.

Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review. Visit the store or contact them at fablesbooks@gmail.com to find or order this or any book reviewed on this blog.

If you’re in the Michiana area looking for a last-minute holiday gift, Fables books has got your back! They’ll be open Monday 12/23 and Christmas Eve.

Think Pittsburgh—what do you picture? Most people imagine heavy, decaying industry: steel, rust, and grime. Frank Santoro sees color—really bright color. Witness this two-page spread:

In his new book “Pittsburgh,” Santoro, a native of the city, graciously invites readers into his personal history of the place, as he works to summon and piece together memories of his family, neighbors, and neighborhoods. Continue reading ““Pittsburgh,” by Frank Santoro”

“Rusty Brown, Part I,” by Chris Ware

Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review. Visit the store or contact them at 574.534.1984 or fablesbooks@gmail.com to find or order any book reviewed on this blog.

”Rusty Brown, Part I” by Chris Ware. Pantheon, September 2019. 352 pp. Hardcover, $35. Adult. 

“Sprawling” is an adjective frequently applied to the visual and narrative style of vaunted comics master Chris Ware. The above image is only a section of the unfolded cover of his new book, “Rusty Brown, Part One,” but it well conveys the nested, insular, and almost maddeningly complex narrative mapping for which Ware is famous. (See my review of his 2012 book in a box, “Building Stories.”)

“Depressing” is an adjective frequently—perhaps most frequently—applied to Ware’s characters and their stories. In “Rusty Brown,” however, though the characters’ lives are often bleak, the book culminates in an expression of the type of hope and determination that keep Ware’s characters—and, really, the human race—going, even in the face of despair. “Books can’t tell us how to live,” he explains in a recent ”Guardian” interview, “but they can help us get better at imagining how to live.”

As well as how not to live, as some of the characters in “Rusty Brown” suggest. The book runs one by one through the stories of seven protagonists, introduced at the start of the book with film-like credits. The names are all very similar: for example, “W.K. Brown as W.K. ‘Woody’ Brown.” All of the characters either teach at or attend a small private school in Omaha, Nebraska. Though the real-life Chris Ware is associated with Chicago—he lives in the suburb Oak Park, populated by Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and patterns that echo throughout his work—he grew up in Omaha. “Rusty Brown” could be an alternate, “what if?” universe for Ware, especially since an art teacher at the school shares his name. Continue reading ““Rusty Brown, Part I,” by Chris Ware”