Graphic Novel Review: They Shot the Piano Player: The Graphic Novel

reviewed by Elk Paauw, PhD Student and Lecturer, University of Western Ontario

Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal; translated by Edward Gauvin. They Shot the Piano Player: The Graphic Novel. London: Self-Made Hero Publications, 2024. ISBN: 9781914224249. $34.99. https://www.selfmadehero.com/books/they-shot-the-piano-player-a-graphic-novel

While They Shot the Piano Player has been touted by The Indiependent as “a graphic novel to rival Maus or Persepolis,” this comic adaptation of the 2023 animated film of the same name fails to deliver the same syncopated rush as the jazz-soaked movie. The story follows a journalist from New York whose obsession with the mysterious 1976 disappearance of the Brazilian pianist Tenório Júnior on the cusp of a military coup in Argentina, takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the rise and fall of bossa nova and democracy in South America. This is the second graphic outing for Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, the writer-artist/co-director duo behind 2010’s Academy Award-nominated film and (subsequent comic book) Chico and Rita. Published by London-based imprint, Self-Made Hero, this book falls into a similar trap of being narratively invested in music only to be portrayed by a silent medium. Many of the visual choices in translating the film to the page are questionable, proving that ultimately this story worked better via moving images rather than sequential ones.

Jeff, an American journalist interested in Latin jazz, gets consumed by the story of an obscure Brazilian pianist who disappeared during the military coup of Argentina in 1976. The framing narrative consists of a book signing in New York City where the journalist launches into the saga of discovering the truth behind Tenorio's cold case through a series of talking head interviews, featuring a who's-who from the history of Brazilian popular music. The story follows Jeff flying to various South American locales in pursuit of anyone and everyone who might have information regarding Tenorio's disappearance, including the pianist's ex-lovers, musical collaborators, and surviving family members. So as to not spoil the mystery, suffice it to say the labyrinthine tale of Tenório’s disappearance is eventually revealed as being politically-motivated. It is unclear if the narrative arrives at the final truth of Tenório’s case, as the man who "confessed" was convicted later for fraud, but it also becomes clear that as a case of kidnapping and disappearance, there will never be any true relief for those who survived him as they never got to say goodbye. In the end, the book reads like a jazz documentary / travelogue meets a chilling whodunit, providing a history of the bossa nova movement and its downfall while also highlighting the material impact of the CIA-backed Operation Condor on the lives of everyday people.

                Some strengths do stand out in the adaptation, including the one I looked most forward to in the writing of this review. The sheer density of the scenic panoramic shots and the cozily-over-stuffed interiors made the film ooze with tiny background details. I craved being able to sink further into Mariscal’s visual world by poring over his drawings in book form. To get a widescreen shot of Rio de Janeiro, with mountains peppered with rooftops and beaches bursting with umbrellas, but only be able to glance at it for 20 seconds was downright cruel. For readers to be able to actually immerse themselves in the imagery and luxuriate in the tightly sketched locales was my justification for even considering reading the book version. Additionally, the color pallet of the film, particularly during the musical segments, was also ripe for adaptation, to let the saturated orangey reds and turquoises – and the iconic blue note blue of the cover – sing in print. The story itself is a fascinating history of the relatively brief zeitgeist of bossa nova music, while evergreen with its discussion of totalitarianism and the role of the state in the movements of culture. In the bonus essay in the back of the book, Trueba’s announces his goal for the film was to “resurrect” the vanished Tenório (233), arguing that animation was “the ideal form, the ideal language” for his story; this makes one wonder why he decided to make a comic book adaptation after all.

                The main critique of this work is that the comic does not have a cartoonist's touch; the “talking heads” style of documentary that the film pulls off in a novel way through the use of roto-scoped animation does not translate well into comics, except in parts where the interviews feel more like a dialogue (see the dinner scene with Suzana de Moraes, daughter of jazz musician Vinícius de Moraes, on pages 38-41). Every panel is taken directly from the film, without a shred of new material other than some sketches of Tenório in the back along with a handful of stills that were cut. The only change to the imagery was re-framing shots to fit into panels along with the addition of hand-drawn sound effects and emanata. In terms of framing, occasionally characters are zoomed in on to break up the monotony of the tripod interview segments. But, unlike zooming in with a real camera, these images are just blown up, showing the roto-scoped characters in even sparser detail. Compared to the intricate long shots of landscapes, these close-ups felt wildly out of place, making an uneven visual narrative. The shot-reverse-shot procedure for interviews makes for a tedious and formally bland comic as well, so transitions between scenes sometimes would make certain stills from the film into splash pages or two-page spreads to break up the rhythm of the text. However, the choice of spreads felt arbitrary, breaking up the narrative with images that did not scale up sufficiently, which looked cheap next to densely-packed panoramas jammed into tiny panels with no room to breathe. As a student of both comics and animation, I was surprised and disappointed with how jarring this visual mistranslation felt as a reader, but it did serve as a reminder that comics are not just film-lite.

                In terms of audience, ideal readers would be fans of the film or fans of bossa nova and Latin jazz generally. Those interested in a similar aesthetic experience but without the jazz might also enjoy the Aya series (Aya of Yop City, Aya: The Secrets Come Out, etc) written by French-Ivorian Marguerite Abouet and drawn by Clément Oubrerie, or Miss Don’t Touch Me by Hubert and Kerascoët. Oubrerie and Kerascoët both utilize a gorgeous color story, while Oubrerie portrays the bustling streets of Yopougon and Abidjan with loving detail. A more politically-charged work to read alongside Player would be Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds or The Property. While the Dramatis Personae in the back of Player is useful in keeping track of characters, and the special essay provides trivia and insight into the film’s production process from Trueba’s point of view, ultimately, I suggest just watching the film. Maybe next time, I should just buy a Mariscal print off his portfolio website instead to really sink my teeth into his drawings.

Book Review: Tell Me a Story Where The Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund by Caitlin McGurk.

reviewed by Alex Dueben

Caitlin McGurk. Tell Me a Story Where The Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund. Seattle:  Fantagraphics, 2024. ISBN-13: 9798875000041. $45. https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/tell-me-a-story-where-the-bad-girl-wins-the-life-and-art-of-barbara-shermund

Caitlin McGurk’s book about the late cartoonist Barbara Shermund makes plain its goal in the introduction: "we can’t claim that Barbara Shermund was the first to do anything, the last to do anything, or the best to do anything…But her work was good, and it was strong, and there was once a time when it was everywhere.” Throughout the book, the reader can see McGurk thinking aloud in the text, taking care to credit others while showing her work, but the introduction makes clear one of the impulses at the heart of a lot of comics studies: the work is interesting, and it compelled the author to learn more about the artist who made it.

Shermund worked in advertising and drew movie posters, but she was best known in her lifetime as a gag / panel magazine cartoonist and illustrator. One of the first three women inducted into the National Cartoonists Society, Shermund contributed to both The New Yorker and Esquire magazines for decades, in addition to her 1944-57 syndicated comic strip Shermund’s Sallies at King Features. The book is an oversized hardcover and McGurk and the book’s designers use the large size to present Shermund’s artwork in a variety of ways. From full page spreads, to pages showing four illustrations, to pages where the images are fitted in between the text, this might be considered the default option as far as presenting comic art in a book, but it seems an especially good choice considering that much of Shermund’s work originally appeared in magazines. Most of the images are presented in a larger size than they might have originally appeared, but it provides a sense of how people would have read them at the time, as well as how Shermund no doubt thought they would be seen.

What stands out most to me is how much McGurk was able to write about Shermund, given how little information there is about the cartoonist. An intensely private person, Shermund left little behind about the details of her life. This fact meant that McGurk had less to write about, but it also meant that she leaned into that gap and focused on Shermund’s artwork. Other times, like when detailing the generally shameful way that women were treated by the National Cartoonist Society, McGurk relies mostly on the writings and recollections of other people involved to give an accounting of what happened, the reader left to understand what being a professional female cartoonist meant at the time.

One reason that there is so few secondary sources about Shermund is that she was ignored or dismissed by decades of scholarship about these two prominent magazines, with her name misspelled and sometimes not even mentioned in surveys of the slick magazines’ cartoonists despite the hundreds of pieces she drew for Esquire with more than a thousand for The New Yorker. It is only in recent years that comics historians – primarily women – such as Liza Donnelly recognized and celebrated Shermund, and McGurk, who is the Curator of Comics and Cartoon Art at The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, and Associate Professor at Ohio State University, is careful to credit them.

This generosity towards previous scholarship makes clear McGurk’s perspective on comics, as one would hopefully expect from a comics librarian at one of the biggest collections in the United States. Just as she sees Shermund as an artist in conversation with others, McGurk sees her own scholarship in conversation with a network of people with shared and overlapping interests and tastes. That includes the responsibility scholars have in acknowledging these debts, both in our own works and those we write about.

The book’s title paraphrases the caption in one of Shermund’s most famous cartoons, but it also feels like a challenge and a description of what McGurk wanted to do in this book. To remind the world there once was a woman who became an artist, and though she was never rich, spent decades doing what she loved and helped to define an iconic American magazine. She lived a life of her choosing and spent years in a house on the shore where she fished and swam in the ocean. And decades later, upon her return to public awareness, people still read and love her comics.

The book is a great look at an artist. It is a comprehensive look at Shermund’s life as a commercial cartoonist and illustrator that is also an art book with scholarly integrity. More than that, it gestures at a way forward in comics studies, noting that there are still many cartoonists who have been ignored, forgotten and erased and that whatever canon exists should remain in flux for a reason and there is much work left to do. McGurk’s rediscovery of Shermund’s work and her life conveys a feeling of freedom and excitement about what is possible in comics studies, and the book celebrates that feeling and why Shermund’s work can remain relevant and visceral.

 Alex Dueben is a writer and historian who has written over 1,000 articles about comics and books, poetry and art for The Believer, Vulture, The Millions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications. Formerly a writer at Comic Book Resources, he has been a regular contributor to The Comics Journal and other leading comics publications for years, and is the writer and editor of the artist monograph Hurricane Nancy.

 

Graphic Novel Review: Trouble Is My Business, by Arvind Ethan David, Ilias Kyriazis, and Cris Peter

 review by Charles Henebry, Boston University.

Arvind Ethan David, Ilias Kyriazis, and Cris Peter. Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business. New York: Pantheon Books, 2025. 116 pp. US $29. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722904/raymond-chandlers-trouble-is-my-business-by-raymond-chandler-and-arvind-ethan-david/

It’s good. Really good. I approached this comic book adaptation with a twinge of apprehension: Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories have been adapted before, and not always to good effect, but the creative team on this handsomely-printed hardcover volume gets almost everything right.

Let’s start with Chandler’s writerly voice, equal parts style and cynicism: Arvind David’s script preserves the story’s best lines unchanged, except for revisions to update references like now-forgotten celebrity Fred Allen, who becomes Humphrey Bogart (p. 5). The staccato back and forth of Chandler’s dialogue is highlighted in splash pages like the one pictured below (p. 11), where word balloons stylishly interweave with strands of cigarette and cigar smoke. Deadpan line deliveries are enhanced by Ilias Kyriazis’ expressive cartooning.

 

 The plot is no less propulsive than the original. Marlowe is cold-cocked, held at gunpoint, shot at, and gut-punched. He escapes being murdered only by crashing his car into a wall. Chandler had a way of forcing the pace by having the bad guys show up and say something revealing before pummeling the detective unconscious. David and Kyriazis preserve and even intensify this pacing by making it more cinematic: the innovation of the car wreck being an excellent example.

While faithful to the tone and pacing of the original, the comic marks a vital departure in perspective. In Chandler’s fiction, there was always something wonderfully claustrophobic about Marlowe’s first-person narration: we see only what he sees, feel only what he feels, value only what he values. But David’s script periodically shoulders Marlowe aside to show the world from someone else’s point of view. And this choice has political resonance, because the characters so elevated happen to be Harriet Huntress, a suspected gold-digger, and George, a Dartmouth-educated African-American chauffeur. As the book’s cover suggests, this is no less their story than Marlowe’s, and trouble is their business, too.

 The comic owes a debt to the tropes of film noir: venetian blinds, smoke-filled rooms, expressionistic angles and moody lighting abound in these pages. But it is not a mere derivative storyboard. Kyriazis’ layouts make brilliant use of the flexibility of the comic-book page: for example, using a dead body as outline for panels in which characters debate what to do in the wake of that killing (p. 40). The character designs are excellent, with each given memorable and expressive features. Chris Peter’s colors provide subtle emotional cues, reinforcing the differing perspectives of the various narrators: Marlowe’s panels are largely greyscale, George gets moody reds, and Harriet greens and yellows. There are a few slips where the artwork doesn’t match the script, as for example a gun described as a .22 gets labelled in the illustration as a .45 (p. 82). But overall, the visual storytelling is dynamic and immersive, making this adaptation a delight for any fan of hardboiled detective fiction or film noir.

Graphic Novel Review: Raised by Ghosts by Briana Loewinsohn

Reviewed by Cassy Lee

Briana Loewinsohn. Raised by Ghosts. Fantagraphics, 2025. 224 pp.

ISBN: 9798875000508. U.S. $18.99

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/new-this-month/products/raised-by-ghosts

 

“Is there a word in the English language for nostalgia for the present moment?”, the teenaged Briana muses in one of the handwritten notes punctuating each deeply '90s nostalgic scene of this exquisite graphic novel. If not, Briana Loewinsohn’s Raised by Ghosts makes a compelling case that there should be. This beautifully drawn and deeply felt graphic memoir encapsulates the fleeting, bittersweet experience of adolescence—especially for those who grew up in the ‘90s—while simultaneously making the reader ache for a past that is just specific and relatable enough to feel like home.

Through an evocative layering of moments from her middle and high school years, via four-panel format pages punctuated by torn-out diary entries or letters, a picture emerges of a lonely, dreamy girl navigating a world that seems to exist slightly out of reach. Middle, and then, high school Briana is an artistic and observant latchkey kid, building a world for herself in the margins of neglect, loneliness, and a quietly persistent imagination. Raised largely by absence— her physically and emotionally unavailable divorced parents are never pictured, only spoken to through closed doors or just “off-screen” —she drifts through her neighborhood and her school life, documenting the world around her in a way that feels both intimate and alienating. This fragmented yet cohesive storytelling method allows the reader to inhabit the protagonist’s headspace, moving through her world as she does—half in the present, half in an internal landscape of memory and longing.

The book’s visual style is breathtaking. Loewinsohn employs a palette of rich, nostalgic earth tones—warm browns, amber golds, muted greens—that perfectly complement the wistful, melancholic tone of the story. Her young protagonist self is lovingly rendered, with expressive hands, long, flyaway hair, freckles, and a wardrobe that feels both effortlessly specific and deeply personal. Every panel feels like a memory does, slightly faded but still full of resonance. There’s a beautiful tension in the way Loewinsohn balances the digital medium with an analog aesthetic—paper textures and layered shadows make the book feel almost like an artifact, something lost and found again.

This is a book that thrives on specificity: the distinct details of Berkeley in the 1990s, the feeling of being on an AC Transit bus, the excitement of sifting through LPs at Amoeba Records, the ritual of recording a song off the radio onto a cassette and getting the liner notes just right. The Walkman, the folded notes passed in class, chatting on the floor of your room on a rotary phone with a cord, the Swatch watch ticking on the living room wall, microwaved TV dinners, the nods to comics like the Calvin and Hobbes t-shirt and the Charlie Brown special —all of these elements combine to create an atmosphere so rich with authenticity that you can almost hear the sounds of the ska show at the Berkeley Square or recall the feeling of being in the car with your best high school friends.

But Raised by Ghosts is more than just a nostalgia trip—it’s a deeply human exploration of adolescence, loneliness, and the small ways we find connection that will resonate with young readers now as well as adults who grew up in that time period. The protagonist is a dreamer, but she’s also someone struggling to fit in, to navigate the unspoken rules of high school, to figure out how to be seen in a world where she often feels invisible. Loewinsohn captures the ennui of youth with an almost aching precision: the boredom of waiting, the quiet desperation of wanting to be somewhere else but not knowing where, the way time feels both infinite and unbearably fleeting when you’re a teenager.

Perhaps the most poignant thread running through the book is the way friendships provide brief but vital lifelines—small moments of escape from the weight of isolation, of feeling alien. The protagonist may be alone much of the time, but she’s not without connection, and those moments of shared experience—having lunch on the grass together, passing notes, going to shows—offer glimpses of warmth and possibility, showing how friends help you pass the time. “Today we can try to not be here together.”

There’s also an experimental quality to the book, with a long interlude in which the protagonist literally steps into her own drawings, blending reality and imagination in a way that feels both playful and profound. It’s a reminder of how, we create worlds for ourselves as a means of survival, of understanding, of making sense of our place in the universe.

For readers who experienced high school in the ‘90s, Raised by Ghosts will feel like slipping back into a dreamscape of their own past. But it also speaks to something more universal—the strange, in-between feeling of being a teenager, of trying to construct an identity out of fragments, of existing in a liminal space between childhood and adulthood. Even younger readers who didn’t grow up in this specific era will recognize themselves in its pages; after all, nostalgia isn’t just about the past—it’s also about the now, about recognizing the fleeting nature of the present even as we live it.

Loewinsohn has created something truly special with Raised by Ghosts. It’s a book that lingers, not just in its imagery, but in the feelings it evokes. It makes you remember your own quiet afternoons spent staring at the ceiling, your own long bus rides with your buddies, your own yearning for something just out of reach. And perhaps, more than anything, it makes you nostalgic for the moment you’re living in right now—because one day, this too will be a memory.

 

Cassy Lee is an art teacher, a librarian, and a comics artist, currently working on her MFA in Comics at California College of the Arts to bring these passions together in the next stage of her career, in comics librarianship, visual narrative workshops, and creating her own graphic novel memoir about healing from intergenerational trauma. She also grew up in the ‘90s passing notes in class and going to shows at the Berkeley Square so may be a little biased about this book.

Graphic Novel Review: Wicked: The Graphic Novel Part I, by Scott Hampton

reviewed by Julian Lawrence

Wicked: The Graphic Novel Part I. Gregory Maguire, adapted and illustrated by Scott Hampton. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2025. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/wicked-the-graphic-novel-part-i-gregory-maguirescott-hampton

 The publication of Eisner-winning veteran Scott Hampton’s wonderfully illustrated adaptation transports the transmedial Wicked phenomenon into comics. The strength of this property lies in the range of themes that underlie its overarching tale of transformation. Elphaba’s character transformation in Wicked portrays her as going “from being a misunderstood outcast to being a friend, a love interest, and a social movement activist” (Schrader, 2011: 49). Furthermore, “Elphaba's peers initially ostracize her for her physical difference, but we soon see that her real difference is political” (Wolf, 2008: 9).

 Wicked has impacted a variety of mediums including literature, theatre, film, and now comics. I discovered Wicked when I attended a live performance of the show in the summer of 2024, over twenty years after the Tony Award-winning musical premiered, and almost 30 years since the novel’s publication in 1995. I have not read author Gregory Maguire’s novel, but now that I have read the graphic novel, I have added the book to my 2025 summer reading list.

 Themes relevant to LGBTQ+, race, and disability are clearly presented in the stage, film and comic book adaptations of Wicked, yet the theme of speciesism jumped out at me the first time I saw the musical performed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes speciesism as “the view that only humans should be morally considered” (Gruen and Monsó, 2024). The group of human animals with whom I attended the performance understood the show’s themes of identity and transformation, but they all overlooked the significance of speciesism in Wicked. This appears to be the case for most audiences with whom I discuss the topic; people downplay or ignore the catalyst that leads to Elphaba’s transformation, namely her advocacy for animals. Like the musical, animal oppression is important to the film, and this theme is explored in more detail in Hampton’s adaptation. Thus, in this review of the graphic novel, I will address the importance of Elphaba’s transformation into a vegan advocate for the animals, which ultimately leads to her vilification by Oz society.

 Like Elphaba, I have been an advocate for the animals since January 2000 and over the decades I have noticed a palpable anti-vegan bias in society that has compelled “scholars and legal bodies to recognise anti-veganism as a prejudice, resulting in the protection of ‘ethical veganism’ under the UK Equality Act 2010. Some evidence, reported by The Times, even suggests that vegan-related hate crimes may be on the rise in the UK” (Gregson, Piazza, and Boyd, 2022: 2). As such, the broad lack of media and critical focus on the vegan theme in Wicked is not surprising to me. For instance, it has been suggested that “the Animals stand in for the racialized Other, with strong associations with Jewishness in the musical” (Wolf, 2008: 10). However, a vegan reading of Wicked (musical/film/comic) aligns with critiques of unsustainable and inhumane practices that slaughter billions of land animals annually in factory farms. It can be said that Wicked is commenting on our contemporary animal holocaust rather than the Holocaust.

 Through a vegan lens, Wicked does not focus on racism or sexual orientation, but speciesism. As a woman, Elphaba brings an additional feminist layer because “both sexism and speciesism are not only positively correlated but are also underpinned by group-dominance motives, consistent with ecofeminist theorizing highlighting the role of patriarchal values of domination underlying attitudes towards both women and animals” (Salmen and Dhont, 2023: 5). Elphaba is vilified and hunted down by Oz society not because of her skin colour or the romantic relationship she has with Glinda; rather, Elphaba is perceived as “wicked” by Ozians because she is a woman fighting the Wizard’s patriarchal oppression of animals. Visually, Hampton creatively demonstrates the connection between speciesism and sexism on two pages: the large panel on page 59 portrays a white cockatoo in a cage (fig.1), and on the last panel of the next page, the male Munchkin Boq gazes lustily at two women in their white undergarments through a window whose frames simulate the bars of a bird cage (fig. 2).

fig. 1

fig. 2

 The graphic novel adaptation includes the animal rights theme and utilizes it as the motivation that transforms Elphaba into the story’s Wicked heroine: she wants to be a voice for the increasingly silenced and voiceless animals. The wise goat, Dr. Dillamond, becomes her mentor as they work together to fight legislated animal oppression. On page 76, Elphaba says to Boq: “I admire the goat intensely. But the real interest of it to me is the political slant. How can the Wizard publish those bans on Animal mobility if Doctor Dillamond can prove, scientifically, that there isn't any inherent difference between humans and Animals?” (Maguire and Hampton, 2025: 90). As such, Elphaba “notes the unjust treatment of Animals, the questionable conduct of the Wizard, and the ways in which greater equality might be achieved” (Kruse and Prettyman, 2008). Most of us acknowledge equality as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion for humans. However, the theme of non-human animal equity lies at the foundation of Wicked’s narrative as Elphaba “flies on a broom at night in order to free captive Animals” (Schrader, 2011: 57). Fighting animal abuse is a noble cause, but the authorities in Oz vilify Elphaba for defying the Wizard’s legislated oppression of non-human animals.

fig. 3

 Hampton’s effective portrayal of the Wizard as a deformed, monstrous animal evokes the spirit of the late comic book horror artist Bernie Wrightson’s fearsome creatures of yore. In her meeting with the Wizard (fig. 3), Elphaba implores him to “reverse your recent judgements on the rights of animals…The hardship on the Animals is more than can be borne” (Maguire and Hampton, 2025: 126-127). Her pleading falls on deaf ears, and the meeting is fruitless; thus, Elphaba’s resistance and activism is born. Parallels between humans and non-human animals are affirmed later in the comic when Fiyero walks into the bedroom while Elphaba sleeps: “a smell of perfume still in the air, and the resiny, animal smell…” (143).

fig. 4

 The graphic novel is indeed beautifully illustrated, and Hampton is a master of quality comic art. His depiction of Dr Dillamond’s violent murder is respectfully illustrated, with the hint of a glazed-over goat eye peering out from underneath the shroud that covers his unfortunate corpse (fig 4). The caption above this sad illustration explains that “his throat was still knotted with congealed ropes of black blood, where it had been slit as thoroughly as if he had wandered into an abattoir” (90).

 I note, however, that despite the careful detail in the art, some of the text renders could be improved. For instance, captions are sometimes casually applied, unfortunately obscuring interesting portions of the art (fig. 5).

fig. 5

fig. 6

 In another couple of instances, speech bubble fonts randomly change (fig. 6). These are typographical and editorial issues that can be rectified in future printings; they do not impact the detailed watercolour art overall. It is, nonetheless, a very wordy comic, with lots of telling rather than showing. However, moments where Hampton shows, rather than tells, effectively and wordlessly capture tone and mood. Pages 146-47 present a particularly touching sequence that clarifies the impacts of the Wizard’s laws on the oppressed animals (fig. 7).

fig. 7

 The graphic novel opens with a Leo Tolstoy quote: “In historical events great men – so-called – are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the last possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.” In contextualizing that quote with Wicked: The Graphic Novel, it can be said that greatness is achieved when individuals permit the moral progress of history to guide their actions. Elphaba’s advocacy for the animals presents a critical and ethical step forward for civilization, and that is Wicked’s underlying message.

 Tolstoy was a strict vegetarian, which inspired him to ask: “Who will deny that it is repugnant and harrowing to a man's feelings to torture or kill, not only a man, but also even a dog, a hen, or a calf? I have known men, living by agricultural labor, who have ceased entirely to eat meat only because they had to kill their own cattle” (Tolstoy, 1886: 16). Consider that quote before you bite into another’s flesh while eating a sandwich or a burger, because Dr Dillamond’s hypothesis is correct: there are no relevant scientific, biological, or theoretical differences between humans and non-human animals. We all want to defy gravity, including Elphaba flying on her broom, lambs gamboling in the fields, dogs running in a park, and caped children leaping from swings.

 References

Gregson, Rebecca, Jared Piazza and Ryan Boyd. 2022. ‘“Against the cult of veganism”: Unpacking the social psychology and ideology of anti-vegans’, Appetite, 178, pp. 106143–106143. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2022.106143.

 Gruen, Lori and Susana Monsó, "The Moral Status of Animals." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2024 Edition. Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.). Available at <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/moral-animal/>. Accessed February 22, 2025.

 Kruse, Sharon and Sandra Spickard Prettyman. 2008. “Women, leadership, and power revisiting the Wicked Witch of the West.” Gender and education, 20(5), pp. 451–464. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250701805797. Accessed February 22, 2025.

 Salmen, Alina and Kristof Dhont. 2023. “Animalizing women and feminizing (vegan) men: The psychological intersections of sexism, speciesism, meat, and masculinity.” Social and personality psychology compass, 17(2). Available at https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12717. Accessed February 22, 2025.

 Schrader, Valerie Lynn. (2011) “Witch or Reformer?: Character Transformations Through the Use of Humor in the Musical Wicked.” Studies in American humor, 23(23), pp. 49–65. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/42573612. Accessed February 22, 2025.

 Tolstoy, Leo. 1886. What I Believe. New York: William S. Gottsberger.

 Wolf, Stacy. (2008) “‘Defying Gravity’: Queer Conventions in the Musical “Wicked.’” Theatre journal (Washington, D.C.), 60(1), pp. 1–21. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2008.0075. Accessed February 22, 2025.

 

Julian Lawrence is a senior lecturer in comics and graphic novels at Teesside University, specializing in storytelling, graphic memoir, and comics pedagogy. As a cartoonist, researcher, and teacher, his work bridges creative practice and academic research, exploring comics as a medium for education, reflection, and social change. http://www.julianlawrence.net/

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 27:1

Graphic Novel Review: Sunday, by Olivier Schrauwen

reviewed by Luke C. Jackson

Olivier Schrauwen, Sunday. Fantagraphics, 2024. US $39.99. ISBN: 9781683969679. https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/sunday

Highly regarded Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen is known for producing both short- and long-form comics that combine moments of absurdity and surrealism with in-depth characterisation that often depict the inner lives of men living in isolation. He brings a new level of depth to this type of character study in Sunday, a 472-page graphic novel from Fantagraphics.

Sunday is regarded by many cultures as a day of rest, relaxation, and contemplation. In his eponymously-named graphic novel, Schrauwen depicts a fictionalised account of the life of his cousin, Thibault, a thoroughly ordinary man, on a largely uneventful Sunday. By offering a nearly minute-by-minute account of Thibault’s physical experiences and mental processes between 8:15am, when he awakens, and midnight, Schrauwen invites the reader to inhabit the world, and consciousness, of his protagonist. In this way, his approach is reminiscent of early Modernist novels, including Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses, both of which were set in a single location on a single day, and are particularly remarkable for their use of interiority, which creates a level of intimacy and identification with their lead characters. According to notes provided by Schrauwen in his introduction, he was attracted to the project because it would give him the opportunity to use the comics medium to create something ‘beautiful’ from what his cousin Thibault described as a ‘wasted day’. Such days are those filled with ‘procrastination, aimlessness and boredom, in which [Thibault] failed to do anything edifying’.

In trying to find a way to describe how Schrauwen achieves this feat, it might be most appropriate to look at music. Certainly, music features in the graphic novel explicitly. Thibault wakes up with the song ‘Sex Machine’ in his head, an ironic theme song to the first two hours of his day given what can only be described as his ambivalent relationship to actual sex with his girlfriend, Migali, a visual artist who is on her way home after weeks spent engaged in collaborative art in an unnamed African village. While she has been immersed in African culture in reality, the closest Thibault gets is playing West African music on his turntable while imagining the band surrounding him in his unremarkable apartment. Another live music performance is featured when Nora, a previous love interest of Thibault’s, and Thibault’s cousin Rik, are depicted attending a piano concert, while – much later – a parallel is drawn between a mole on Nora’s face and the symbol for a pause in musical annotation.

However, the graphic novel’s musical connection runs deeper than these explicit references to artists, bands, and musical notation. Like a conductor on a stage, Schrauwen has utilised words, images, and the spatial elements of the page control the reader’s perception and experience. Indeed, Schrauwen is ever-present within the text. In the introduction, he provides ‘reading instructions’, along with a self-portrait, and later appears as an illustrated version of himself, to offer a brief commentary on his cousin’s character. Schrauwen’s illustration style is equal parts impressionistic and realistic, like a rough and slightly naïve rotoscope. Spatially, while he has chosen to depict the world of the text largely from eye-level in a series of close-ups, mid-shots and wide shots of the type familiar to filmgoers, there are instances of more dynamic representation, as the camera floats above our protagonist and even tours the galaxy, the latter a product of Thibault’s fantastical imaginings.

Reinforcing the link between layout and Thibault’s subjective experience, when he smokes marijuana, the panels depicting the experiences of the secondary characters whose experience he is not privy to, become far less linear. Some panels snake around the page, while the frames of others melt and merge together. At the same time, the page numbers become unmoored from their usual place at the bottom of the page, rearranging themselves almost randomly before disappearing altogether. Thibault’s thoughts are similarly jumbled, with some of his words appearing enlarged, making them impossible to read, while others run in circles and even backwards. It is in these moments that Sunday’s most outstanding – and most musical – feature can be seen clearly. This is what Daniel Albright has referred to as Modernist music’s ‘testing of the limits of aesthetic construction’. 

In these ways, this graphic novel defies categorisation. It is a depiction of banality that is anything but banal, and an exploration of the life of an unremarkable man that is nevertheless remarkable. In this way, it’s a book about all of us … whether we’d like to admit it or not. Thibault (or perhaps it is Olivier Schrauwen, speaking through Thibault) says as much when he suggests, ‘I’m holding up a mirror … so you can recognize your flawed selves.’ Sunday shows how, when viewed from the right perspective, what might otherwise be dismissed as a ‘wasted day’ can have value and – yes – even beauty.

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

 

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)