Arab of the Future 4

Riad Sattouf's autobiographies are one of my favorite graphic novel series. In this installment of the series, Riad is now a teenager and the tension between his Syrian father and his French mother reaches a boiling point. His father accepts a teaching job in Saudi Arabia but his mother refuses to follow him and keeps the kids with her in France.  They do have family time during the summer when they gather in Syria, Riad's father's native country. Riad gets hounded by his father about losing his Arabic language skills and his refusal to begin an Islamic prayer life. Riad is more French like his mother at this stage of his life. The book closes with a shocker as his father kidnaps the youngest child, empties all the bank accounts and returns to Saudi Arabia.

As with the earlier books in the series, the color scheme of the artwork changes depending on where the family is located. When they are in France, the drawings are done in blue. When they are in Syria, the drawings are done in pink.  This book includes for the first time some red colored scenes when there is trouble brewing for Riad. This could be either dealing with bullying at school or while playing.

This installment of the series was a lot longer than the earlier books. I was delighted to spend an entire evening engrossed in this fabulous story. The only sad part is that I now have to wait for the next installment of the series to be published.

The Photographer

The Photographer, Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders is a reportage comic written by Didier Lefevre. In July, 1986 he traveled to Afghanistan with the French Doctors Without Borders during the height of the Soviet war to photograph their mission. The artwork of Emmanuel Guibert also helps to tell the story of their 3 months in Afghanistan. The book was published in three sections in France between 2003 and 2006. It was translated into English by Alexis Siegel who also wrote the Introduction and was published in English in 2009.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section is the month long trek to the mission location. The second section deals with the provision of medical treatment to the Afghans and the third section is the month long walk out of the country.

The graphic novel begins with the photographer leaving France for Pakistan where he meets up with other members of the mission and helps them prepare to enter Afghanistan. The first glimpse of local flavor is here.  The MSF (French name of Doctors Without Borders) packs up their supplies in boxes so that there is no room inside due to the battering that the boxes will go through during the expedition through the mountains to their post in Badakhshan. I was quite surprised to discover that the contents of a pack of pills could be crushed to a fine powder if they were to shift within the boxes. The boxes then must be covered in waterproof tarp in case they fall into a river. Negotiations over the purchase of animals for the expedition take place, where else, in a refugee camp.

The medical mission itself was pretty straightforward. Most of the harrowing stories dealt with how the group got into Afghanistan and how they got out.
The book ended with an update on what each member of the mission is currently doing with their life.

The artwork is colored in the browns of the region. While some of the drawings are detailed, many are not. They were drawn first in a black outline and later colored in by Frederic Lemercier. The photographs are all in black and white. A few of them are out of focus and I cannot understand why they were used in the book. Most of the photos are dark and I am not sure why.  Lefevre had good cameras with him. I wonder if the brown terrain made everything dark. However, in some places he said he was in beautiful terrain and the photos were still dark. His photos of the wounded and the surgeries were very clear. The comic print style of putting a page together is used regardless of whether there are photographs on the page, drawings or a combination of the two.

The story told here is an important one. It not only is an MSF story and an Afghanistan story, but a story of how the American war on terror began. The Introduction discusses the people involved in Afghanistan at the time of this mission who were also involved in the September 11 attacks in the U. S. The role of the CIA in Afghanistan is also discussed.

I highly recommend this book.

The Oracle Code

Marieke Nijkamp's newest book addresses the physical and psychological issues of newly disabled individuals.  The Oracle Code is a fictionalized account of a young girl, Barbara Gordon, who becomes a paraplegic after a shooting accident. Her father places her in a rehab facility in order to learn how to live with a disability.  Manuel Prietano drew the illustrations.

The publisher's summary:

"After a gunshot leaves her paralyzed below the waist, Barbara Gordon must undergo physical and mental rehabilitation at Arkham Center for Independence.  She must adapt to a new normal, but she cannot shake the feeling that something is dangerously amiss. Strange sounds escape at night while patients go missing.  Is the suspicion simply a result of her trauma? Or does Barbara actually hear voices coming from the center's labyrinthine hallways?  It's up to Barbara to put the pieces together to solve the mysteries behind the walls. In the Oracle Code, universal truths cannot be escaped, and Barbara Gordon must battle the phantoms of her past before they they consume her future."

The plot of the book is not only informative regarding the problems of the disabled, but it is also a mystery novel as our protagonist, teenager Barbara Gordon, has to solve a mystery in the center for independent living (CIL) where she resides.  Using the mystery format makes it easier, and more fun, for non-disabled persons to learn about disability.  The author chose her plot well.   The progression of Barbara's character is a highlight of he book.  She solves crimes from her wheelchair using her computer hacking skills and it is through these skills that she sees that she never really changed after her accident.  The secondary characters are not as strong and they do not progress as individuals.  This is Barbara's story.

The artwork enhances the story.  The colors focus on certain characters in each panel.  Only the characters of interest are in full color while the other characters fade into the background by coloring them all in the same color. Manuel Prietano did the drawings. The coloring was done by Jordie Bellaire and the lettering was done by Clayton Cowles.  Their joint effort was successful in telling this story.  In a Q&A with the Disability Visibility Project the author stated that she sent Prietano photos and videos of wheelchairs and other mobility aids so that he could accurately draw them.

Barbara Gordon, a/k/a Oracle, is an iconic disabled character in the DC Comics world.  The Oracle Code is her origin story.  Her transition from Barbara to Oracle happens here.

5 out of 5 stars.

Phantom Twin

The Phantom Twin is a young adult novel concerning siamese twins during the 1920s.  Isabel and Jane Peabody are conjoined twins working  in a traveling carnival show until an ambitious surgeon tries to separate them. Jane dies during the surgery and Isabel loses an arm and a leg that they both shared. Her dead sister now haunts her as her phantom limb. The traveling freak shows were a big attraction in the 1920s. Anything or anyone sho was considered different drew unwanted attention and that is why these "freak" shows became popular. The two sisters were called by their co-carnies "Jan-is" because they were two people within one body.  

The book shows the reader how cruel a world can be for those who are different. It is a sad story although the sisters and other carnival workers are portrayed with humor. They are shown as being normal people with normal personalities who have fun together. Their reaction to being physically different is heartwarming as life just goes on despite being cast aside by society. The reader can feel Isabel's emotions as she transitions her life from being two to being alone.  

5 out of 5 stars.

Fever Year

Fever Year is a history of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Don Brown published this book in 2019, the newest addition to his disaster novels. Brown has previously written novels about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Great American Dust Bowl, and about Syrian refugees.

Fever Year is a short, 51 page book that was written as a straight history book. There are no characters or plot. The author tells the reader how the pandemic began, how it worked its way around the globe and how people reacted to it. It is eerily similar to our current COVID-19 pandemic. With governments arresting those who violated the quarantine it provides some details concerning what may be next for us today. The 1918 quarantine was a real quarantine. It was not a stay at home order where you could leave your home to buy food and prescriptions. People had to do without. Those who needed medication for pre-existing illnesses died. Masks were required to be worn and there were several health care hucksters pedaling drugs that did not ease the symptoms of the flu. Sound familiar?

I liked this book. It is important to know about prior pandemics so that we can obtain clues concerning what can happen again.  Humans being humans, it does not matter how technologically advanced society is. We will act in desperate ways.  5 out of 5 stars.

Burma Chronicles

Somehow I missed reading one of Guy Delisle's travelogues, his 2008 Burma Chronicles. DeLisle has traveled throughout Asia with his wife who works for Doctors Without Borders.  He has written 4 travelogues from his travels with her.

In Burma Chronicles DeLisle manages to describe the daily struggles of life in a dictatorship without being political with his use of minimalist black and white drawings and his affiliative type of humor.  Each chapter addresses a different experience DeLisle had.  Some of these experiences include discovering a Time magazine that had been censored by articles being cut out of pages, finding the Rangoon neighborhood where the Army officers live and the supply of electricity and water is plentiful, and being prevented by armed soldiers from walking past Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi's home.

This is a serious book written in a humorous fashion but the author gets his point across.  If you haven't read any of the travelogues, Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Shenzen, and Burma Chronicles, I encourage you to read them.  For most of these places, society has not changed since the books were published so they should still be timely. 

Filmish

Filmish:  A Graphic Journey Through Film offers the reader a history of the film industry.  Drawn in black and white comic panels, author Edward Ross teaches readers about the biases that are built in to the movies that we watch.  He focuses on seven aspects of filmmaking. They are the eye, the body, sets and architecture, voice and language, time, ideology, and technology and a separate chapter addresses each of these topics. The information he gives is beefy enough to be a textbook on films. The words and writing style that he used are also typical of a textbook. I certainly see it this way. Knowing nothing about movies before reading Filmish, I have come away with a long list of movies that I need to watch in order to see more clearly what Ross is talking about in each chapter. 

The first films were only a few seconds long and were created by putting several photographs together. The human eye will see movement where there is none and a new type of entertainment was born. Subsequent filmmakers improved upon this technique with new technologies. One aspect of filmmaking that has never changed is "male gaze." In the early days of the movies, producers purposely used storylines that could be enhanced with female subjects in situations that men like to watch. While several films have been made recently showing male muscle and nudity so that women could have "women gaze," the author states that men primarily watch these films to determine what women want from them. Nothing has changed here in a hundred years of making movies. One interesting fact about the use of sets is that heroes are shown in natural environments and villains are shown in stark, monochromatic environments. I never noticed this before and can't wait to watch a movie to see this for myself. Censorship is an issue covered at length in Filmish. The author writes that filmmakers will sign a contract with the Pentagon agreeing to only show the military in a positive light in exchange for the use of their machinery in a film. Producers see this as a way to save money as they can be assured of making an "approved" movie that will not be banned by theaters. 

I have learned so much about films from reading this book. I can't recommend it more highly. Anyone who loves movies as well as students who concentrate on studying filmmaking should read this book. 5 out of 5 stars.

Soldier's Heart

Soldier's Heart The Campaign to Understand my WWII Veteran Father is a wonderful graphic memoir by Carol Tyler. Tyler shows how her father's war experiences traumatically affected him and, in turn, affected his relationships with his children as they were growing up, including how they obtained their own emotional baggage from their upbringing. The book joins the author's angst over her present life, a failed marriage and mentally ill daughter, with the memories her father has from his war experience. The trauma has now affected three generations. At the time the book was published in 2015, he was still alive and was 95 years old.

Carol Tyler wants to be closer to her parents but is unable to penetrate the hard exteriors they developed from the trauma of the war experience. Like most members of the greatest generation, they did not talk about the past. One day Charles Tyler calls his daughter on the phone and talks for 2 hours about the war. His daughter, the author, then begins 2 projects. She begins a scrapbook of her father's war years and also begins to research his war experiences by going through government archives and interviewing her father. What she puts together is a magnificent history of how WWII affected the generation that fought it and how their battle scars affected their abilities to raise their future families. Having been raised myself by this generation I can truthfully say that every family I grew up with has the same baggage that Tyler family has. It is part of our American history.

The reason for the title "Soldier's Heart" is simple. This was the term used after the Civil War to describe the PTSD that soldier's suffered from. The artwork changes throughout the book from comic panels to full page drawings done in both pen and watercolors. The colors vary by page from saturated colors to desaturated colors.

A Soldier's Heart is a fabulous history lesson on WWII. If you did not live through it I highly recommend that you read it. For those of us that lived with the aftermath of the war, it may explain why your family life turned out the way it did. 

Simply magnificent!!!!!

The Customer is Always Wrong

"The Customer is Always Wrong" is a continuation of Mimi Pond's 2014 "Over Easy." It is the story of her life as a waitress in the 1970s. However, she does not use her real name. Her alter ego is Madge and she showcases the sleazy people that she works with as well as the customers.

Madge is a fledgling cartoonist who works at the Imperial Cafe in Oakland, CA which is managed by the goofy Laszlo.  Most of her co-workers are drug addicts who may or may not be able to work on a given day.  Instead of the story focusing on Madge, Laszlo's family life is prominent.  This does not mean that it isn't exciting.  The book was engrossing and I read all of its 450+ pages in one sitting.

What is special about this book is the author's ability to create a plot with many twists and turns. I do not usually see a graphic novel that is so heavily plotted. This is a must read for graphic novel fans.  It's a 5 out of 5 stars.

Almost American Girl

Robin Ha is a new author for me. Almost American Girl is her second graphic novel, behind Cook Korean: a Comic Book with Recipes. It tells the story of her emigration to America when she was 14-years-old.

Chuna Ha and her mother have taken many international vacations while they were living in their native Korea. One day Chuna's mother tells her that they are going to Alabama for a visit with one of her mother's friends. Chuna doesn't think Alabama sounds interesting but packs her bags for the trip. After a month in Huntsville, Alabama, Chuna's mother informs her that they are staying here permanently as she is going to marry their host, Kim Minsik. Chuna is horrified.  She hates Alabama and misses her friends in Seoul. She did not even get the opportunity to say goodbye to them or pack up all of her belongings. While her mother arranges for their belongings to be sent to them in Alabama, China, now Robin, begins her awkward assimilation into American culture.

Almost American Girl is a wonderful coming to America story. It is told with so much emotion that the reader can "feel her pain" as she learns English while simultaneously attending school and trying to get along with her step family who ignore her most of the time.  It is easy for native born Americans to understand the immigrant experience by reading this story.

I loved the colorful drawings.  Ha used a lot of color when she was showing her life in America.  When she looked back on life in Korea the author used sepia tones.  You would think that she would have used the sepia for her life in America since she had such a difficult experience adjusting to life here.  However, she did eventually adjust and I assume she now enjoys living in America.

This is a must read especially for young adults.  5 out of 5 stars.

The Arab of the Future 2

This book is part two of the author's biography of his childhood.  It covers the years 1984 - 1985 and will be continued in another installment of the series.  Like the first book, the artwork consists of line drawings with color schemes for different places that the author lived at.  As he did in the earlier book, Sattouf uses pink for his life in Syria and blue for visits to his mother's native France.

When this story opens it is time for Riad Sattouf to begin school.  He is terrified because he does not speak Arabic, knows no other kids and stands out due to his blonde hair. Some of the kids think he is Jewish because he is blonde but Riad denies this. His Lebanese father is a university professor so the family has some status. Riad meets two kids who become his friends and together they all share a healthy fear of their teacher, a woman who enjoys hitting her students in the hands with a stick.

The story covers one school year, Riad's summer visit to his mother's family in France and the beginning of his second year in school. I think the first book was a little better.  It covered his life from birth to age 5. It had more action as the family moved to 5 different countries during this period of time. However, I am interested in reading however many installments to this series that are written.  The series gives an interesting perspective of a child with European and Arabic ancestry living in the Middle East.

Cub

Cub is a humorous graphic memoir about growing up in the 1970s. One of the reasons that I loved this book is that I too came of age in the 1970s and had the same experiences that our heroine Cindy had.  It was a walk down memory lane.

The publisher's summary:  

"Twelve-year-old Cindy has just dipped a toe into seventh grade drama - with its complicated friendships, bullies and cute boys - when she earns an internship as a cub reporter at a local newspaper in the early 1970s.  A rare, young female reporter takes Cindy under her wing and Cindy soon learns not only how to write a lede, but also how to respectfully question authority, how to assert herself in a world run by men, and - as the Watergate scandal unfolds, how brave reporting and writing can topple a corrupt world leader. Searching for her own scoops, Cindy doesn't always get it right, on paper or in real life.  Whether she's writing features about ghost hunters, falling off her bike and into her first crush, or navigating shifting friendships, Cindy grows wiser and more confident through every awkward and hilarious mistake."

I also was a cub reporter in the early 1970s. I wrote a weekly column for 3 years on high school activities for the Hammond Times newspaper.  Reading about Cindy's joy over getting the job and her pursuit of stories to tell was enjoyable.  She had a reporter for a mentor while I did not.  Her journalism class experiences mirrored my own and I began to miss my former classmates.  We had a good time together. Watergate was the big news stories of the day. Cindy was lucky to get involved in reporting that story.

Cindy was not popular in school and when her best friend left her for the clique of desirables she was devastated. I also had this same experience.  My life story is so similar to Cindy's that I felt like I was reading my own biography.  Similarities aside, this book was a fun, quick read.  

5 out of 5 stars.