Rich Mintz  

Is there any doubt that Esther C. Werdiger is an awesome cartoonist?

If I could draw like she does, competently and freely and angst-riddenly and good-naturedly, I’d quit my job and just make cartoons about my imperfect but all-I’ll-ever-have life.

When I was in London, I stopped into Gosh!, the bright comic and graphic novel shop at the foot of Berwick Street in Soho (right down from Foxcroft & Ginger). I picked up a couple of gifts, and my eye was caught by the title and cover art of Gemma Bovery, so I threw that in too.

Simmonds (whom I never heard of before) is a British children’s book author and a cartoonist for the Guardian. Gemma Bovery is one of a short list of adult (by which I mean “for grownups,” get your head out of the gutter) books she’s written, and I think it was first serialized in the Guardian.

It’s a reimagining of Madame Bovary in a different context, populated (largely) by contemporary middle-class English people. The Bovaryness is a little heavy-handed, but this isn’t a book you read for the plot (although there’s more plot here than in some graphic novels) — I love the style, which combines first-person storytelling, omniscient-narrator editorializing,  flashbacks, illustrated tableaux, and diary entries. You never know from page to page what you’re going to see, or in what combination. And she is excellent at precisely mocking the absurdity of social-climbing English people (one nouvelle riche is drawn with a perfect horsey mouth, and her appalling French is precisely rendered).

I’ve already ordered Simmonds’ Tamara Drewe, which is apparently based on Hardy. For some reason that one’s easier to get in the US, and cheaper, so maybe you start there.

I’m delighted to see that Kate Beaton’s cartoon collection Hark, A Vagrant has hit the top of the Times bestseller list.

I never heard of Beaton, a Canadian cartoonist whose specialty is “literary and historical scenes rendered in four panels or less,” until Abe Riesman called my attention to her a few months ago. Since then I’ve devoured every word and every panel on her blog and have been eagerly awaiting the book, which is very much as good as advertised. In fact, I think it may be my favorite graphic-novel* acquisition of the past year.

*Technically it’s not a “novel,” but this is the term of art that the publishing industry has decided to use.

Man do I love me some Julie Doucet. When I was in Providence I picked up a copy of Doucet’s My New York Diary (available from the publisher, or from Amazon, or remaindered from the excellent graphic-novel curators-and-purveyors Symposium Books in Providence, where I got mine). It’s the story of her young adulthood, spent mostly in Washington Heights.

Doucet, a Montrealer, has that characteristic lack of self-consciousness that makes Montreal (the city, the culture, the people) so appealing to those of us in New York, where nobody can put on a pair of socks, or even sneeze, without worrying about what other people will think.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Julie Doucet talk in autobiographical-cartoon form about her pimples, slovenliness, alcohol problem, private parts, lady problems, and many other things-not-normally-spoken-of in far more detail than those of any living woman.

Buy, devour, enjoy.

Symposium Books delivered my order in five days, so now I have a ton of new graphic novels and plain-old reproduced comic books to enjoy. I’m starting with Julie Doucet, because I like the stuff of hers I already own….

…but I had no idea she was so … you know, graphic. Doucet’s subject matter in this book is more freewheeling with regard to sex, sexuality, gender, fear, and the unconscious than you normally see even among “experimental” cartoonists. In virtually every panel (indeed, in everything of hers I’ve ever seen), she draws herself, or some alternate version of herself, and in very few of them do things seem to be going well for her.

Below I’ve provided links to three panels which, believe it or not, are among the three least edgy panels in the book. Don’t click if you’re not a fan of the names of body parts, anthropomorphized plucked chickens, or the F word. (I was careful! Because I’m a nice guy, Julie is fully clothed in all these, and I spared you “male Julie copulating with female Julie,” “body part, yes the one you’re thinking of, severed by a jackknife,” and so forth.)

Julie in the kitchen after a long night (warning: contains expletives you can’t say on TV)

Julie and her woodland friends (warning: contains creepy-looking beaver-type creature with a coffee pot)

Julie concerned about her anatomy (warning: refers to a body part that rhymes with “Regina”)

All duplicated without permission, and deliberately (yeah, right) blurry so that you’ll run out and buy buy buy and make Julie Doucet a rich woman. Here’s a link to all the Julie Doucet you can possibly want to see in one place.

I saw this guy reading what I infer was Batwoman: Elegy in the subway, and I thought it was cool to see someone reading a graphic novel OPENLY AND WITHOUT SHAME in the subway. And so I took a picture. And then I talked to him, and he was really nice, and he found out I hadn’t read The Sandman or Watchmen and he said, “Dude, I read Watchmen every month.” And I was ashamed.

I was chatting briefly online with my friend “Dionysus” and the subject of graphic novels happened to come up (I think I brought up Paul). He suggested that I check out the authors Joe Matt and Seth, and I found their books remaindered at Symposium (and remembered seeing them in the store when I was in Providence). The upshot: I spent $70 on seven books, including theirs and a couple of Julie Doucet’s and this interesting-looking thing which is remaindered at $2.98. So thanks, Dionysus!

After coming across Paul Moves Out in the massive graphic novels section at Symposium Books in Providence — populated largely by remainders, so the prices are right — I’ve fallen in love with Michel Rabagliati’s gentle drawing style, and I’m in the process of ordering everything else he has that’s in print (which appears to be at least three more “Paul” novels of like size).

This one is the story of a young graphic designer from Montreal in the early 1980s, a time of promise and hope (remember the early 1980s, when I was only a few years younger than Paul) — going to school, first love, first apartment. It’s more than a little arch (despite the deceptively simple happy-face panels), encompassing Adult Themes (or at least Young Adult Themes) as well as lots of detail-filled daily life in Montreal, a city I’ve visited half a dozen times. (There were a few locations in this story that even I recognized.) In many ways it reminds me of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, but with a measure of darkness leached out of it.

I’ve mostly avoided graphic novels in the past because they’ve typically either seemed intolerably preachy or schmaltzy (remember Maus?) or required a concordance to keep the backstory straight (remember, you know, anything ever published with a superhero or an orc in it?). The Boon Companion’s been pushing me to read The Sandman for about three years, and it’s sitting right here behind me. Maybe if I start with something gentle and visually rich like this, I can graduate to the harder stuff.

This, and a lot more like it, is published by Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly Books.