Edward Gauvin's Reading List

"Buzzelli has been called ‘the patron saint of all Italian cartoonists.’ A painter’s son, classically trained, he debuted at nineteen with newspaper caricatures. He moved into comics and cover illustrations— Zorro , Flash Gordon , The Phantom , Alex l’eroe dello spazio —even a regular strip, Angélique , in the Daily Mirror during a spell in London. His first graphic novel, a fantastical black-and-white satire of class revolt, hit a post-war, 1966 Italy where comics were very much for kids and there was no creator-driven graphic novel work. Buzzelli’s book was critically lauded in Italy—even by Umberto Eco !—but with a 200-copy print run, dead in the water. Then cartoonist Georges Wolinski, a Charlie Hebdo mainstay (and victim of the 2015 shootings), spotted it at a Neapolitan newsstand and was blown away. His decision to serialize it led to classic status. Buzzelli had a career in France: prizes, collaborations, more magazines. “The Franco-Belgian scene, central to Europe, is usually considered one of the world’s three major comics cultures…in broadening my remit to ‘European,’ I’ve tried to get out from under this 800-pound gorilla” The Labyrinth is paired with Zil Zelub in this first volume of his collected works. The first concerns a literal everyman (‘ uomo medio’ ) right after an unspecified apocalypse—talk about in medias res ! I defy anyone to look at the largely wordless first five pages and not think, ‘This is a comics master.’ The action ranges from mad scientists experimenting with new human-animal hybrids to an ethereal upper world ruled by rationality, whose inhabitants’ perfect bodies are assembled with parts taken from those left outside its walls. In Zil Zelub (an anagram of the artist’s own surname), the eponymous protagonist’s limbs have come off and taken on lives of their own. Dubbed ‘the Michelangelo of monsters’ and ‘the Goya of comics’ for his deft grotesquerie, Buzzelli purées influences high and low into an appealingly contemporary brew of politics, absurdism, and body horror. There’s a line from Buzzelli that his translator Jamie Richards includes in the afterword: “Comics is theater in paper and ink made for pockets and libraries, where the actors stand motionless, waiting for someone to turn the pages and bring them to life.” This is lovely. Posture must convey so much in the static panel; media scholar Henry Jenkins has traced comics’ use of them to vaudeville’s exaggerated poses. Buzzelli, with his alarming command of anatomy, greatly expands our vocabulary of gestural expression, and his words speak as well to the kind of participatory, imaginative readership that comics ask of us. That’s right. From Floating World, a store that’s a staple of the Portland comics scene. They’ve got a bright space in an older mall slowly reinventing itself; they believe in comics as art, and their offerings reflect that: zines, indies, an extensive international section. And this very handpicked curation is what they’re carrying over to the press they’ve started."

"Irmina spans 1934 through to the 1980s. Yelin found a box of her grandmother’s memorabilia—photos, letters, diaries—and based the book on that woman’s life story. And it belongs to that evergreen German subgenre of ‘What did you do in the war?’ As Yelin writes in her sensitive preface, “What I really discovered in that box was a question — a disturbing question about how a woman could change so radically. Why would she turn into a person who did not ask questions, who looked the other way, one of the countless passive accomplices of her time?” It starts out with Irmina at Oxford, falling in love with a fellow student, a Barbadian, in blithe youthful ignorance of world events. They’re drawn together as outsiders, so it’s illuminating to see the difference in the freedoms denied them by race or gender. Then Hitler’s laws make it impossible for Irmina’s family, poor already, to continue wiring money for support. Increasingly demoralized, she is forced to return to Germany, where she lives out the war, eventually if ambivalently marrying an ambitious SS officer. The book’s second and longest part ends when the war does; the third then leaps forward to the 1980s and a reunion for the would-have-been lovers in a different world. This is also a work that affords readers many ways in: the first part lulls you into thinking it’s a love story, an idyll history rudely interrupts. And while it certainly has its place among family memoirs, or postwar ruminations on willful blindness and complicity from Böll to Ishiguro, Irmina’s story powerfully illustrates a woman’s limited options for achieving any semblance of autonomy in those dark and complex times. Whereas the coda moves, with the character’s age, into more universal territory of regret. Yelin insightfully pairs the external restrictions of a dictatorial regime with the increasing mental censorship that Irmina performs upon herself. Much of what Irmina sees during the war is filtered: through parted curtains and doors ajar, in narrow panels—a visual staging of how much she’s willfully or desperately shutting out. These are punctuated with cannily deployed double-page spreads in which we see history at work: cityscapes, massive rallies, marches, burnings. And while Yelin had, prior to this book, worked largely in shades of gray, here the different eras and locations each have their own overriding color schemes: blue for London, red for the war, and turquoise for the rueful, hopeful coda."

"Stripburger styled its 2009 double issue as a travel guide to the ‘transnational entity’ of Cartoonia, inviting artists to select objects from each other’s homelands as inspiration. Foreign artists had to depict Slovenia, and vice versa; the result was emblematic as anything of their cosmopolitan mission and position. I picked Dirty Thirty instead because it’s newer, bigger, retrospective, and all in English: 400 pages celebrating 30 years, 20 countries—a great gateway drug to a true comics institution. The few familiar names Americans will find there have, apart from Peter Kuper and Julie Doucet, all come to us in translation: Jason, Rutu Modan, Anke Feuchtenberger, Danijel Žeželj. The rest is… discovery! Anthologies are a riot for the eyes. The sheer diversity of styles, palettes, stories, minds on display is staggering. You find things there in a raw state that may go on to become parts of larger pieces, or just gems that go on to become legends, never to be seen anywhere else. We’re often said, what with the various franchise universes ruling screens silver and small, to be living in the ‘Geekdom Come.’ What was once a subculture has gone mainstream. Comics as a medium is still less understood, even as there’s more factional policing than ever about what gets to be called a comic and who gets to be a fan. What, then, would it mean to have a comics culture, not just a culture of the bottom line? It would, I think, look a lot like the Strip Core collective . It would be local AND global, in Slovenian and English: fostering talent and interest with gallery shows, workshops, contests, lectures, a publishing house, while also facing outward to open and sustain international conversations of mutual influence. Stripburger blurs the line between book and periodical—the former’s heft and density, the latter’s ephemerality."