Graphic Novel Review: Bald by Tereza Čechová (text) and Štěpánka Jislová (ill.)

 reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

Bald by Tereza Čechová (text) and Štěpánka Jislová (ill.); translated by Martha Kuhlman and Tereza Čechová. University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press, 2024. 128 pages. $21.95. ISBN: 978-1-63779-080-9. https://www.graphicmundi.org/books/978-1-63779-080-9.html

Regarding the Czech comics domestic scene, as recently as 2020 scholar Pavel Kořínek could credibly opine: “[A]ny kind of subjective, personal recollection remains extremely rare. Czech comics seem — at least on their most superficial level — curiously de-personalized, de-subjectivized, with genre and fictional works predominant. For some reason, there have emerged very few overtly personal, autobiographical comics in the Czech tradition” (“Facets”: 91). 

    Such statements are less credible today, thanks to more recent publications such as veteran artist Lucie Lomová’s Every Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary (Každý den je nový: komiksový deník, 2022) — a work as personalized, subjectivized and autobiographical as anyone could want.

In fact, the landscape was shifting even as Kořínek’s original assessment was seeing print. That same year Czech publisher Paseka released the groundbreaking graphic memoir Bez Vlasů (literally “Without Hair”) by writer Tereza Čechová[1] and artist Štěpánka Jislová.[2] It dealt in intimate detail with the memoirist’s life after a diagnosis, at 30, of alopecia, an autoimmune condition that leads to hair loss. No comics work like it (certainly not in long form) had appeared in the Czech lands before. It would later win the Czech industry’s highest award, the Muriel Prize, for Best Comics Work.

2024 saw the English translation of Bez Vlasů, here rendered as Bald, from Graphic Mundi Press. It is translated by Čechová and Martha Kuhlman, professor of Comparative Literature at Bryant University in Providence, RI and one of the leading US scholars of Czech comics.[3]

It makes sense that Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press, would take up Čechová and Jislová’s prize-winning work, given its Graphic Medicine focus. Penn State is a major US node of the international Graphic Medicine movement, which centers graphic narrative representations of illness, disability and related medical themes.[4]

Bald certainly ventures deep into this territory; the heroine Tereza navigates — at times painfully — alopecia’s effect on her identity as a woman, love life, work relationships and even her pocketbook. I found these scenes on the day-to-day economics of her condition the most illuminating: she expounds on the cost of medication, therapists, wigs, head coverings of different sorts. We also get fascinating discussions on the hair of different races and ethnicities, as well as on the culture and mythology of hair (Samson and Rapunzel are just the tip of the iceberg).

All this is rendered in Jislová’s clean, almost schematic line that exudes a cartoony dynamism. The book uses a two-color scheme of black lines with light reds to produce numerous effects, like the “ghost hair” which Tereza has lost. (In this, Bald recalls Georgia Webber’s split-identity techniques in her 2018 memoir Dumb: Living Without a Voice.)

The author’s one-year journey as depicted makes for quite an emotional roller coaster: despair rubs elbows with enlightened self-acceptance. A storytelling workshop in Scotland proves cathartic. Tereza, like many people nowadays, seeks solace on the internet, only to find confusion and – who’da thunk? – misinformation. A brilliant page design reifies her anxieties and stresses into a fractured three-tier portrait as our narrator tries desperately to forestall the inevitable with useless pills and creams. Another rather chilling episode portrays her at her job, “dealing” with her hair loss by trying to ignore it with overwork. Over eight panels, she melts down in tears before her laptop, then resumes typing with a smile. Finally, another portrait, a splash, shows her weeping on an armchair as supportive comments roll in after her first posting online about her alopecia. This brief catalogue gives a sense, I hope, of Bald’s dizzying affective spectrum. Overall, it paints a powerful picture of physical difference and its mental health/social/cultural ramifications in late capitalism.   

As Čechová told Czech Radio, “I was really worried that the result would seem depressing, because the comic does describe something that is very difficult. But it also brings with it a lot of funny moments. We wanted to show that even if you go through something like this, the world doesn’t fall apart” (Jančíková, “Cesta”). Yet even the “funny moments” tend to have their edge. At one point, Tereza’s boyfriend tells her, “The hair is fine. But not having eyebrows is creepy.” Given that one of Tereza’s fears is living life alone due to her hair loss, that comment seems less than reassuring. 

Other moments I found borderline disturbing. Trying to make herself feel better about her condition at times leads to some dark corners, like this statement, which sounds lamentably eugenicist: “I often think we had it coming. Humans no longer need their hair. It’ll disappear in time. Evolution. Maybe I’m a member of a new … more perfected race. But let me tell you, it’s not easy being one of the first.” This textbox accompanies another portrait, of a half-naked Tereza crying in the mirror.

Something else which some may find rather distancing about Bald: what at times seems like a willful opacity. By that I mean the text proceeds with great economy, with an average of only about 20-25 words per page. It’s almost telegraphic. This puts more of a burden on the art to carry the narrative, which Jislová does more than capably. However, some choices have the effect of keeping the reader (this one, anyway) at arm’s length. Jislová’s figures do not have eyeballs, just black dots for eyes, and a puppet-like angularity to them (Tereza’s nose looks like a sort of stylized diamond or arrow point). This choice risks narrowing the expressive latitude of the characters, like watching a drama acted out with dolls. (Maybe Jiří Trnka dolls? Though a lot of them had eyeballs.) So that when Tereza has tears streaming down her cheeks it might look to some readers as simply grotesque, and be less likely to provoke empathy/understanding.

Furthermore, Čechová’s low word-count writing has a similar coldness and detached matter-of-factness, even when discussing depression, social anxiety, desire. The author seems to acknowledge this stance in a scene where she and her boyfriend are having trouble communicating. “How hard it is for me to talk to anyone about my feelings,” she says in a caption. Finally, I would have appreciated it if Bald had interrogated the class conditions underlying Tereza’s experiences; this is a very middle-class portrait of alopecia, despite the occasional nods to how people without Tereza’s privileges might fare very differently in contemporary Czech society.

These quibbles aside (which in any case might have more to do with my own tastes as a comics reader), Čechová and Jislová’s graphic memoir deserves its reputation for taking Czech comics where they had never ventured before – potently so. As Kořínek himself put it, in a quote highlighted on Paseka’s web page devoted to Bald: “Frankly authentic, light-hearted storytelling, in the context of Czech comics, feels a bit like an epiphany.” All this and cartoony anthropomorphic white blood cells too!

More than anything else, as a graphic memoir, Bald secures Czech comics’ further imbrication with global comics culture. Paseka itself leans into this facet on its web page, claiming the work “continues the rich tradition of autobiographical comics from around the world.” Transnational comics flows (analyzed so well by scholars like Daniel Stein and Kate Kelp-Stebbins) make such a work as Bald all but inevitable, it seems.

Its authors, both born in the post-communist 1990s, represent a younger generation much more closely tied to graphic narrative beyond Czechia’s borders, to say nothing of Central/Eastern Europe’s. Jislová told me she greatly admires Tillie Walden, Kate Beaton, Alison Bechdel and Ulli Lust, global stalwarts all. This makes Bald a work that is very self-aware about the non-Czech traditions that it’s tapping and incorporating. “We felt, as we were working on the book, that this is the first time we’re doing something like this in the Czech comics scene [on this scale],” she said (Jislová interview).

More than anything, the graphic memoir genre gave Čechová and Jislová a framework for a story that they felt had to be told this way. “I’m a big fan of autobiographical comics,” said Čechová, “because they can debunk (detabuizovat) many things and reveal that which we’re not used to talking about. That’s why I started to think that something could come from my experiences” (Jančíková, “Cesta”).

The genie is definitely out of the bottle now. Working on Bald led to Jislová first hitting on the idea of pursuing her own autographical work. The result was her own graphic memoir, Srdcovka (2023). The title is a hard-to-translate slang term that means basically something close to one’s heart and/or that inspires devotion/obsession. It deals with heartbreak, growing up as part of the first generation after communism, sexual abuse and artistic coming of age. Heartcore, the book’s English translation, is due to appear later this year (also from Graphic Mundi, with Kuhlman again translating).

Apart from the authors, the US press and translator deserve praise for bringing this work to an English-speaking readership. We on these shores are chronically, disgracefully bereft of translations of the world’s many vibrant comics cultures, especially those with less common languages like Czech. Thank you.

Kuhlman told me that she and Graphic Mundi had decided on Bald (instead of, say, “Hairless”) for the translated title in part because the English word resonated with “bold.” That adjective, though not at all implied in the original Czech, nonetheless applies to this book – in more ways than one.  

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 26:2. 

CORRECTION Feb 1, 2025:  "Pavel Koržínek" has been corrected to "Pavel Kořínek."

Bibliography

Jančíková, Šárka. “Cesta hrdinky. Autobiografický komiks Bez vlasů o zkušenostech s alopecií se nebojí těžkých témat ani humoru.” Český rozhlas (November 2, 2020). https://vltava.rozhlas.cz/cesta-hrdinky-autobiograficky-komiks-bez-vlasu-o-zkusenostech-s-alopecii-se-8352800.   

Kořínek, Pavel. “Facets of Nostalgia: Text-Centric Longing in Comics and Graphic Novels by Pavel Čech.”  Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections. Eds. Martha Kuhlman & José Alaniz. University of Leuven Press, 2020:

Interview with Štěpánka Jislová. Prague. June, 2024.

Paseka web page devoted to Bez Vlasů. https://www.paseka.cz/produkt/bez-vlasu/

 ------------------------

[1] Tereza Čechová (née Drahoňovská) (b. 1990) studied journalism and media sciences at Charles University in Prague. She and Jislová established the Prague branch of Laydeez Do Comics, a British women-led comics organization which advances the work of female comics-makers.

[2] Štěpánka Jislová (b. 1992) is a graduate of the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in Plzeň. She has published in several Czech and international comics collections. She also contributed to the monumental history comics series The Czechs (Češi, 2013-2016) and illustrated the graphic biography Milada Horáková (2020), written by Zdeněk Ležák. Her more recent work includes the superhero satire Supro: Heroes on Credit (Hrdine na dluh, 2023).

[3] Full disclosure: Kuhlman is a friend; we co-edited the collection Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (University of Leuven Press, 2020). She provided me with a copy of Bald for review.  

[4] Penn State published my 2019 co-edited study, with Scott T. Smith, Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability.

 

Graphic Novel Review: Woman & Man+

 reviewed by C.T. Lim

Craig Yoe. Woman & Man+. Clover Press, 2024. https://cloverpress.us/products/woman-man

Craig Yoe is best known as an editor and publisher of archival comic book compilations (usually those that have fallen out of copyright) that he put together under his own imprint Yoe Books and for other publishers like Abrams, Fantagraphics, IDW and Dark Horse. He has not drawn a comic book for decades, but since moving to Bagio City in the Philippines recently, he has come out with Woman & Man+. 

The backmatter of the book encourages an autobiographical reading: "A wildly surreal autobiographical story of Yoe losing his love, his country, and some say - his sanity - and his struggle to reinvent himself." Yoe himself proclaimed, "This humble underground comix / pretentious-art book is a psychedelic telling of my fleeing the U.S. to hook up with the underground comix comrades in Berlin, then booted out of Germany to find solace - then devastating heartbreak - in the Canary Islands. Finally the Philippines have granted me asylum... and hope." In his introduction, Yoe explains he was mentally and emotionally in a bad place where he had no choice but to draw Woman & Man+ to survive and to find hope. Thus, this book is art therapy. 

One would be hard-pressed to see the above-described journey of NY-Berlin-Canary Island-the Philippines in the art and story. As described in the backmatter, it is a surrealistic landscape of Dali and Hieronymus Bose mixed with Robert Crumb. Animation Magazine described this book, "like Dr Seuss on acid!" It is pop art by way of 1970s underground comix (the period when Craig started doing comics) as we have Minnie Mouse, Batman (Adam West), Nancy, Snoopy, Korky the Cat and even Mr Monopoly made their guest appearances. The art is reminiscent of Keiichi Tanaami, but without the vibrant colors. It is closer to what the late Rick Griffin (an old friend of Craig's back in the day) or S. Clay Wilson may have done if they were still alive, and working with the heavy black and whites. In a way, Craig is the link between the 1970s underground comix and the 2000s alternative comics of Dave Cooper. Craig's position has always been that comics are not meant to be taken too seriously. They are not high art but rather, in this book, it is “Yoe-brow.”

The bottom line: the way to appreciate Woman & Man+ is to let its stream of consciousness sweep over you and go with the flow. Is it about the eternal struggle between the passions of men and women? Maybe. Some might want a stronger narrative structure like the wordless comics of Phil Yeh (another artist of Craig's generation), but we should take Woman & Man+ as it is. Craig is approaching his mid-70s soon. It will be a pity if he does not write and draw more at this late stage of his career. Maybe the cool air of Bagio City will do him some good and we will see more of his art. 

In his 70s, Craig Yoe continues to be on the road.

( photo by CT Lim)

 

Graphic Novel Review: Adieu Birkenau: Ginette Kolinka’s Story of Survival

reviewed by Matt Reingold

Ginette Kolinka, Jean-David Morvan and Victor Matet (writers), Cesc and Efa (illustrators), Roger (colorist) and Edward Gauvin (translator). Adieu Birkenau: Ginette Kolinka’s Story of Survival. SelfMadeHero, 2024. https://www.selfmadehero.com/books/adieu-birkenau-ginette-kolinka-s-story-of-survival

If one were to compile a list of the subjects most-featured in Jewish graphic novels, the Holocaust would surely be the topic that has garnered the most attention. Since Art Spiegelman’s Maus was first serialized in Raw in 1980 and then subsequently published in two well-received and successful collected volumes in 1986 and 1991, license was afforded to authors and illustrators to creatively explore the Nazi-perpetrated genocide of 6 million of Europe’s Jews.

As the 21st century nears its quarter mark, the proliferation of graphic narratives about the Holocaust has not slowed despite the increased chronological distance from the original tragedy. In the past three years alone, a variety of works in English have been published that explore different facets of the Holocaust. This includes grandchildren trying to understand their grandparents’ experiences (Solomon J. Brager, Heavyweight, 2024; Jordan Mechner, Replay, 2024), child survivors telling their own stories (But I Live, 2022), speculative stories about what Anne Frank would do today were she alive (Ari Folman, Where is Anne Frank, 2022), and the horrors of the Holocaust on American soldiers (Leela Corwin, Victory Parade, 2024). Added to this group is Adieu Birkenau which first appeared in French in 2023.

Adieu Birkenau tells the story of Ginette Kolinka’s life from before the Holocaust and what she endured during it. The graphic autobiograhy was produced by a team of creators that included three writers (including Kolinka), two artists, and one colorist. The work is set in both the past and present, with readers learning about Kolinka’s upbringing in France, her eventual deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and how, in her seventies, she began to speak publicly about her wartime traumas. Much of the book is set during a 2020 school trip to Poland that was designed to introduce students to the horrors of the Holocaust. Kolinka’s role on the trip was as a survivor, there to speak to the students about her personal wartime experiences. Her co-authors, Morvan and Matet, joined the trip in order to document it for the graphic novel.

Readers who have deep familiarity with other Holocaust graphic novels will no doubt see vestiges of these other works in Adieu Birkenau. Using travel to Poland as a conduit for conveying historical traumas can be found in Jérémie Dres We Won’t Visit Auschwitz. Cesc and Efta’s superimposing contemporary experiences atop historical memories is also not novel; Rutu Modan did this in The Property. The use of history to inform reader reactions to contemporary injustices is also something that is present in other Holocaust graphic narratives. This includes Folman’s Where is Anne Frank and Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s Anne Frank.

My point in calling attention to the employed narrative tropes and the artistic decisions made by Adieu Birkenau’s creative team is not to suggest that their work is a duplication of previously issued works. Nor is it to offer a comparison that concludes that one rendering of the Holocaust is preferable to another. Rather, acknowledging what has come before - and with regards to the Holocaust, it is so very much - allows for a greater appreciation for what is new and novel in Adieu Birkenau’s exploration of the Holocaust.

First is the audience of school children who attend the trip to Poland alongside Kolinka. Though we do not know much about them, what we do know is that they are not students who attend a Jewish day school. Rather, they are average French school children who are taking advantage of the opportunity to learn from someone who personally suffered during a traumatic moment in world history. In fact, they are quite like Kolinka was as a child: an average French citizen. Kolinka loved playing sports and her closest friends were not Jewish. In fact, she openly shares with the reader that her family was not particularly religious. By calling attention to the ways that Kolinka is like the children with whom she is travelling and not someone primarily defined by something that makes her other, they bear witness to a tragedy that could have befallen them had they been born at a different time and to a different family. As witnesses, they, too, become owners of a sacred story and become part of the narrative of transmission. As readers, we, too, now become owners alongside the children, bound by the same obligation.

A second important feature of the work is its depiction of bodies. Maus’ power lay in its metaphoric depictions that highlighted the ways that Jews (and other groups) were seen as distinct from one another. Cesc and Efa do the very opposite. Their illustrated bodies are drawn in proportion and reveal the realness of the human physique and what happens to it when it is broken down and ravaged by hunger, disease, and violence. Readers see what naked bodies of average women look like as they await having their heads shaved and their arms tattooed. This includes flabby midsections, sagging breasts, and pubic hair. Their rendition eschews a Hollywoodization that presents bodies in an unrealistically idealized form. Instead, once again, what readers see are real people and real victims. Furthermore, the illustrations capture the women trying to cover themselves as they are exposed against their will. I cannot recall another example of a Holocaust graphic novel that so boldly and graphically depicts the human form at its most vulnerable and with this, the brutality of the Nazi regime.

The primary creative license that Cesc and Efa take has to do with a series of dark shadows. Used in panels set in Birkenau, they inhabit Kolinka’s memories and represent the many Jews who were killed because of Nazi persecution. As Kolinka guides the students through Birkenau, the shadows become illustrated in the present and no longer solely occupy space in Kolinka’s memories. Their enduring presence in her memory results in them becoming imaginatively rendered in the present. In these scenes, readers come to better understand the awful staying power of trauma and how, despite having lived outside of Birkenau for over 70 years, parts of her remain there too.

 It is the confluence of honest renderings of the past, depictions of the impact of trauma, and the invocation to create a different future that make Adieu Birkenau a valuable addition to the catalogue of Holocaust graphic novels. The children’s personal interactions with Kolinka at Birkenau depict the relationship that forms between the survivor who testifies and the audience who receives it. What we, as readers, gain from witnessing their transformation is the opportunity to also be transformed as we gain new understandings into one of the 20th century’s worst atrocities through the narrative power of a single survivor.

Book Review: Drafted by Rick Parker

reviewed by Nicholas Wirtz, doctoral candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Oregon

Rick Parker. Drafted. Abrams ComicArts, 2024. 256 pp. $24.99 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-4197-6159-1. eISBN 978-1-64700-660-0. https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/drafted

 Rick Parker, early in his Vietnam War-era memoir Drafted, reflects on his 1966 induction into the United States Army, indicating his small, uniformed figure among the many marching through the snowy night, and writes “I kept reminding myself that I was just in the army, and not in some prison or concentration camp” (7). Rick the artistic naif has little time for the broader geopolitical tensions or ideologies that demand his conscription after losing his S-2 student deferment. His energy is devoted instead to the effects of his conscription, to surviving his coming-of-age in the military culture, and living under the threat that he will be sent to fight and die for, as one sergeant declares, “motherhood and apple pie!” (47).

Parker illustrates his memoir in a bulbous, gangly, at times grotesquely detailed style reminiscent of EC’s publications, an affinity which should come as no surprise, given his involvement in the 2007 Tales from the Crypt revival. Parker viscerally and vulnerably captures the discipline, bombast, and often painful humor of his experiences through his expressive illustrations. Any sense of their stylistic anachronism, fifty years removed in time, also offers synchrony, drawing us closer to the times and places of those experiences. Parker’s expressionistic cartooning also evokes for me Justin Green’s influential autobiographical Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. Parker shares Green’s emphasis on his own insecurities and abuses by authorities around him, but where Green emphasizes his unique subjectivity, Parker positions himself as an everyman.

Parker’s history and personality are in the foreground of the book, but often his character and narrative focuses on representing a common experience; many sequences, especially in boot camp, approach instruction manuals or montages, and they offer a general image of military life as much they more specifically represent his life. Drafted devotes few pages to Rick’s artistry at the time. His skills occasionally earn him friendship or disapproval, but they rarely mark his role as distinct from his contemporaries. Rick the artist emerges in his attention to rare flashes of silent, natural beauty that emerge in contrast with situations and shouted orders that demand his reaction. Parker is a keen observer, and it is in his observation that Drafted excels as art and finds value as history. He effectively caricatures his own cluelessness or others’ antagonism for sympathy or a laugh, but I find his demonstrative style most engaging when he shows others’ more nuanced distress, resentment, joy, or sympathetic understanding. That soldiers’ emotions are so dramatically cartooned as to be inescapable here, often seems to speak to how unmistakable and unforgettable these emotions are to him, and how he feels their experiences and communicates his empathy and concern, such as when Rick witnesses a sergeant beat a man under his command nearly to death over a practical joke. This empathetic recognition becomes a painful confession of the harm he knows he causes when, for instance, he draws the fearful face of a fellow officer candidate he abuses as punishment, on orders which he is sworn to obey.

The Vietnam War itself is absent from Drafted. Parker’s memoir is occasionally punctuated by references to Vietnam, but because he was never sent abroad, his attention remains with American military culture; the locales of Drafted are domestic, and its depicted violence is American in origin. When soldiers are killed or their rights ignored, Parker identifies with their shared mortality and subjection to a dysfunctional system, but seems to speak from a desire to tell, more than to judge. Parker’s pages are densely packed—with information, detail, texture, with barely contained captions and expressively lettered dialogue—a telling both urgent and claustrophobic, but his commentary remains remarkably restrained. Parker occasionally alludes to, or implicitly critiques, positions or policies, but by refraining from savvy, critical, or sardonic retrospective reflection, these comments, like his expressive cartooning, demonstrate his disciplined commitment to voicing an everyman soldier’s experiences and effectively ground Drafted in Rick’s “present.” Whereas a predictable anti-war moral might have rendered Parker’s emotional—often visceral—telling overwrought or didactic, his mix of personal honesty and ideological restraint instead offers an insightful portrait of this important time in American history. Writing as a teacher, I feel Parker’s dense style may represent a demanding adjustment for students but, with some guidance or in an advanced context, I expect students of history or comics would be well-rewarded by his voice and cartooning that draws us into Rick’s time.

Book Review: Advocate: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice by Eddie Ahn

 reviewed by Margaret C. Flinn

Eddie Ahn. Advocate: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice. Ten Speed Graphics, 2024. 208 pp. US$24.99 (Hardcover). ISBN: 9781984862495; Ebook ISBN: 9781984862501. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/729254/advocate-by-eddie-ahn/

 

The subtitle of Eddie Ahn’s Advocate, A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice kind of says it all. Graphic memoirs are numerous and it’s difficult to stand out. Ahn’s book is an engaging look at a particular intersection of identities and experiences: unique in as much as each individual is unique. The book gives insights into Ahn’s family’s trajectory from Korea to Texas (and return visits for various reasons), and Ahn’s own relocation to California, initially as an Americorps volunteer. The book flashes back and forward between different moment of Ahn’s family history, including a mélange of documents (details from diaries, maps, drawings of photographs) as is frequently seen in the graphic memoir. While the story focuses on Ahn’s own journey, it thus includes stories recounted to him by family members, or pieced together between family stories and material in his grandfather’s diary.

            If Ahn’s story stands out, it will probably be for its ordinary weirdness. He shares the quirks of his life, like playing poker and health issues in law school, and the financial struggles through his life that lead to unexpectedly amusing, if melancholy, details like calculating the cost of everything in its burrito math equivalent (a tank of gas equals four or five burritos)—the burrito being the expensive, filling, and nourishing meal of choice for Ahn, particularly through his early years in the Bay Area. Ahn is at once informative and banal, educating the reader through his own story about the vicissitudes of environmental and social justice, the constant challenges of immigration and racism in the U.S. and depicting a quiet passion and dogged labor that allow anyone to imagine that what Ahn has done is doable, although most of us never will. It also documents recent realities such as the way COVID-19 impacted community organizing and social justice work.

            The self-taught artist’s realist lines are clean and clear, with single color washes in a soft palette changing by page or panel and includes a brief annex regarding the making of the book and environmental justice work. In all, the book is readable and informative. Many readers will be able to relate to parts of Ahn’s story, and young readers may even be inspired by the non-glamorized yet dignified representation of doing meaningful work in today’s world.

Trina Robbins' How I Became a Herstorian from 2002

"How I Became a Herstorian," IJOCA 4:1, pp. 78-83, Spring 2002.
 

It's Not My Fault: Confessions of a Comics Junkie - R.C. Harvey's autobiographical essay from 2005

Bob Harvey, a longtime comics historian and cartoonist passed away last week, suddenly after an injury. We've asked someone to write a remembrance, but here's R.C. in his own words, at least as far as he had gotten 17 years ago -

 

 It's Not My Fault
Confessions of a Comics Junkie. Or, How I Became a
Crazed Fanatic About Cartooning, Its History and Lore
R.C.Harvey

IJOCA 7-2 (Fall / Winter 2005)