Shintaro Kago’s ‘Dementia 21’ Showcases Surrealist Manga
As much as I admire Shintaro Kago's oddness as a writer, his artistic pen is even sharper (but not without problems) as evident in Dementia 21.
Chris Gavaler
Chris Gavaler is an associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University. His books include On the Origin of Superheroes (Iowa 2015), Superhero Comics (Bloomsbury 2017), Superhero Thought Experiments co-authored with Nathaniel Goldberg (Iowa 2019), and Creating Comics co-authored with Leigh Ann Beavers (Bloomsbury forthcoming 2020). He is the comics editor at Shenandoah magazine, and he blogs weekly at thepatronsaintofsuperheroes.wordpress.com.
John Pham’s J&K – It’s a Matter of Perspective
In J&K, John Pham explores perspectives in the psychological sense. Like Picasso, he views things from more than one angle.
You Become the Watcher in Eric Haven’s ‘Cryptoid’
In his latest work, Cryptoid, Eric Haven takes an idiosyncratically weird approach to the horror genre of the Weird to produce a hybrid graphic novella that belongs to no genre but his own.
The Two Worlds of Graphic Novel Umma’s Table
Where fiction typically emphasizes plot, Yeon-Sik Hong's Umma's Table emphasizes a rich layering of events that creates the artful impression of memoir-like fiction.
‘Goblin Girl’ and the Fiction/ Nonfiction Dichotomy
Moa Romanova's "semi-auto-bio" graphic fiction, Goblin Girl, explores the dating world with a mysterious mix of art and influences.
‘Sports Is Hell’ Narrows the Field to Identity Politics
Ben Passmore's Sports Is Hell is an apocalyptic parody of racism in US sports and politics.
Rikke Villadsen’s ‘Cowboy’ Is Warped
Rikke Villadsen's graphic fiction, Cowboy, is an aggressively peculiar take on an already aggressively peculiar genre.
What’s to Be Believed in Yoshiharu Tsuge’s ‘The Man Without Talent’?
Tsuge's narrator's mustache is no more convincing a disguise than Superman's Clark Kent glasses—which is the paradoxical point in The Man Without Talent.
gg’s Graphic Fiction, ‘Constantly’, Knows Where the Monsters Go
Where gg's I'm Not Here found its force in ambiguity and the maybe-fantastical, Constantly is comparatively straightforward in its portrayal of the protagonist's sometimes literal battle with her own psyche.
Sjöblom’s ‘Palimpsest’ Is Visually Unlike Most Graphic Memoirs
The title of Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom's graphic memoir, Palimpsest, is an excellent metaphor for adoption generally and especially the literally erased and rewritten documents that define many Korean adoptions. But it is also a visual metaphor.