The accomplishments of female creators in the graphic novel medium have reached such an impressive individual and collective magnitude recently that lumping their work together into a survey essay based primarily on the gender of the artists appears almost an antiquated response to the wealth of stories. Each publishing season seems to bring another stellar book from veteran or newbie female artist, and Alison Bechdel‘s recent receipt of a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” stands as a kind of celebratory milestone in the evolution of women comics artists from rare and unheralded to common and renowned.

Nonetheless, it’s still somewhat useful and productive, I think, to gather together books by women, if only to highlight the immense variety of styles and topics, themes and genres at their command, a spectrum that might be lost among the trees if the forest as a whole is not surveyed.

So here we go.

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Gast

By Carol Swain

There broods over Carol Swain’s Gast an air of quiet menace, like the ambiance of a Shirley Jackson or Ian McEwan story. While we do not encounter a lick of overt violence or terror in the tale, yet a sense of melancholy, at the very least, imbues this simple, unhurried narrative. We’re on the borders of Thomas Hardy country. By the story’s end, we realize that the source of the discomfort is existential, perpetual, yet somehow consolable. We are brought face to face with the insignificance of any single life, human or otherwise; with the loneliness of being, even in the midst of crowds; with the implacable demands of nature and bodies. And yet there is no despair but rather a celebration of the human spirit in the face of cosmic and societal indifference.

Our protagonist is ten-year-old Helen, newly transplanted with her parents to a lonely home in rural Wales. Without friendly peers, she takes to keeping a nature journal. (The journal as mirror to character was a technique employed nicely in Birdseye Bristoe by Dan Zettwoch as well.) By a strange quirk of conversation, this hobby leads Helen to a slightly morbid fascination with the history of a neighbor, Emrys, who recently committed suicide. The rest of the tale follows Helen’s detective work to ferret out the lineaments of a life overlooked by all. Helen is aided in her pursuit by her blithely accepted ability to converse with animals. The two dogs formerly owned by the victim and a large ram named Tup are particularly forthcoming, within the parameters of their animal otherness. (Helen’s ability to converse with beasts seems to desert her outside the rural setting, perhaps a testament to her feelings of insecurity elsewhere.)

Somehow both rough and elegant, Swain’s expressive pencil work — now and then, especially in the depiction of animals, reminiscent of M. K. Brown — is contained within a mainly invariant template of nine-panel pages that lend a stately cadence to the story. Her ability to depict the keenly felt passage of time is facilitated by a steady accumulation of frames when, for instance, Helen takes a bus trip or goes for a long walk. Swain’s figures are all nicely individuated, although Helen’s face is rendered with the fewest strokes. Nonetheless, when the girl smiles, as she infrequently does, it’s radiant. Thoughtful camera angles — quite often an aerial vantage is employed, reflective of a bird-and-flight theme — enliven the telling.

“Onscreen” continuously, Helen proves to be a deeply enigmatic visionary and searcher fully equal to the immense weight of her impulsive yet somehow fated quest for her own redemption and that of Emrys as well.

How to Be Happy

By Eleanor Davis

The art of Eleanor Davis sits proudly and comfortably on a continuum with the celebrated work of David Mazzucchelli (Asterios Polyp), Jeff Lemire (The Underwater Welder), and David B. (Epileptic). Cartoony yet naturalistic, her art limns a world that can shift from very real to utterly surreal, sometimes within the same story. Simultaneously, I detect a strong influence from one of the underrated illustrators of the twentieth century, Mary Blair. Perhaps this ancestry is heightened by Davis’s incredibly striking and beautiful color work, a tropical profusion of primary colors in subtle gradations.

Davis’s new collection, How to Be Happy, features a dozen or so short stories, some black-and-white, some mimetic, some fantastical. All of them exhibit an ironic and intense storytelling mind at work. Certainly the centerpiece of the book is “Nita Goes Home,” which is a fully realized science fiction tale worthy of Le Guin, featuring a future that is at once utopian and dystopian. The narrative tension arises when the two realms rub up against each other. As well, a poignant domestic drama unfolds. Meanwhile, in the fabulistic story “Seven Sacks,” colored masterfully in a range of browns, a hardworking ferryman encounters procession of monsters worthy of Miyazaki and counts himself lucky they were already sated. “Summer Snakes” has the affect of a David Lynch film, and its beautiful final panel is almost an abstract composition. The satirical “No Tears, No Sorrow” takes the piss out of every self-help regimen ever invented, while still leaving the reader with an uncomfortable lesson.

Like the body of a dead fox as depicted here by Davis in all its gruesome magnificence, these stories hide thick raw sinews beneath their glossy pelts.

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

By Roz Chast

As arguably the senior cartoonist among this crowd — her first professional sale took place in 1978 — Roz Chast possesses a high-profile drawing and writing style whose attractive salient points are well known. A jittery, flustered line somewhat akin to R. O. Blechman’s or William Steig’s and a set of wry, self-mocking neuroses that cock an eye toward life’s banal yet poignant concerns. Simply seeing her drawing of a retail establishment labeled “Bruised Fruit Store” or a bank passbook with the legend “Flatbush Scrimpers” is enough to trigger full-blown Chast worship.

All of these familiar wonders are on display in Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a memoir the final years of her parents’ lives, with byways into the author’s formative years. But Chast’s trademark excellences are amped up to new levels of intensity, prompted by the unprecedented intimacy of her material. Her meticulous ability to capture the crazed mundanity of life, and her unsparing treatment of her own foibles and those of her folks, ensure that this volume conveys more pathos than any of her prior collections.

Through Chast’s well-wrought prose — on display here at greater length than ever before — and inimitable drawings, we share the story of her quirky, prickly parents: their dyadic codependence that alienated Chast herself but sustained them right till death parted them. Chast’s anecdotes concerning her daughterly duties as the parents aged and failed are unsentimental yet tender, wry yet mournful. The unique details of the Chast household assume a universal significance.

In one nicely encapsulated set piece after another, Chast chronicles a lost era of Brooklyn life and charts the end days of her parents and her own shifting reactions to their mortality. This book is a bold Baedeker of a journey we all have to undertake, leavened with courage and uncertainty, anger and angst, regrets and small victories.

This One Summer

By Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

Mariko Tamaki (writer) and Jillian Tamaki (artist) are two creator cousins who seem to function seamlessly as one comics-making gestalt. From brain to fingertips, the script and art for their new graphic novel, This One Summer, are as complementary and unified as if issuing from a single multitalented master such as Dan Clowes. I mention Clowes deliberately, since the Tamakis have created what amounts to a junior high school version of Ghost World. And this proves not to be derivative or superfluous but rather a wonderful counterpart running in parallel with Clowes’s classic.

One of our adolescent protagonists is older than the other. Rose is slim, sprouting tall, and beginning to be interested in the opposite sex. Windy, a friend whom she regards as her “younger sister,” lags behind in all areas by a year and a half or so. That’s a big gap at this age. Nonetheless, the two pals have for a long while been inseparable during each summer they spend at Awago Beach. The place is respectable, albeit somewhat shabby in parts, a lakeside agglomeration of cabins and town. It delivers all the pastoral pleasures of such places but also the seamy social scene of the locals. Making regular trips to the variety store, Rose and Windy have occasion to try to unriddle the dynamics of the older teens in their semi-snarky, semi-serious, semi-confused fashion, while sorting through their own evolving feelings about life and family and love. Meanwhile, for Rose at home, her mother and father are undergoing a trying time in their marriage. Can this summer ever be like any of the idyllic others?

Looking at the separate halves of the graphic novel, we find scads of greatness in both writing and drawing. The dialogue is revelatory and plot-propelling without being factitious. The characterizations are organic, sincere, subtle, and deep. The plotting is diffuse yet cumulatively powerful. Each scene gets just the length it needs for success. There’s no fake moralizing.

The naturalistic art, colored in a palette of blues, is richly captivating. Each panel is filled with glorious details, of nature or human expression. Jillian’s character designs are completely in accordance with the nature of the players. Rose’s mom wears the thin, beaten-down look of a sufferer trapped in her own head. Her dad is big, bouncy, and exuberant. Windy is drawn with a trace of manga styling — resembling Miyazaki’s Ponyo — that symbolizes her naïve immaturity. Intelligent page layouts, featuring many single-page and double-page spreads, contribute to the telling.

The triumph of this book is that as Rose and family depart their cabin at summer’s end, we see all the growth she has undergone, though nothing is outwardly different, and we can readily envision her next summer back at Awago Beach, as different from this one as this one was from the last.

Over Easy

By Mimi Pond

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine Rose from the Tamaki novel all grown up and turned into Mimi Pond, and starring in Pond’s autobiographical volume Over Easy. Reading the two books back-to-back is a playful and educational experience illustrating an archetypical continuum that starts with young girl and ends with young woman. And although Pond’s drawing style and her narrative angles of attack are completely different from those of the Tamakis, Pond does also employ the single-color strategy, illuminating her tale in a spectrum of empathetic greens, creating a certain small synchronicity between the books.

The year is 1978, and “failed” college art student Mimi Pond is looking to turn her existence around, to connect with life’s fundamentals and to earn some dough. Fate brings her to the Imperial Café in Oakland, a soap opera–rich den of mild iniquity. Hired first as a dishwasher, graduating to waitress, Pond finds herself living a vivid stage play without benefit of proscenium. On the cusp between hippiedom and punk, the counterculture is vibrant and exciting, a feeling shared by all the drifters, wastrels, thwarted dreamers, and slackers who inhabit Pond’s new sphere. She soaks it all up, getting bruised and knocked down, laughing, picking herself up off the floor exalted, and going at her day with fresh vigor and appetite.

Pond — whose long career did not start much after Chast’s — is a veteran, a maestro of page composition, scene setting, dialogue, and character portrayal. Never has her line been more assured and robust. Her characters leap off the paper, each unique. For instance: page 147 is filled entirely with a single panel depicting two lovers named Neville and Helen, and their wordless, louche skinniness tells us all we need to know about them.

This novel is drenched unrepentantly in nostalgia, but not cloyingly so. It functions more like a time machine that brings the reader back to an unduplicatable era, to experience it firsthand. Our charming, rueful pilot opens the door of the chrono-ship, gestures proudly, and says with melancholy affirmation, as on page 215, “No time soon, no time like the present, because the years, we know, will stretch on and on. We have plenty of time.”

An Age of License

By Lucy Knisley

Not yet quite thirty years old, Lucy Knisley is one of the standout artist-writers of her generation, her storytelling assured and inviting. Her third book, An Age of License, picks up the themes of her first two books with increased sophistication.

Knisley’s métier is crafting autobiographical accounts of her travels and her culinary experiences. Although we get incidental information on her family and friends and lovers, she’s not as confessional as Sophie Crumb or Julie Doucet. Nor is she a fiction writer. She’s intent on precisely and deftly affixing to the page a certain slice of what she objectively observes and internalizes.

French Milk, her first book, is a calm yet spirited account of a trip to Paris she made with her mother, on the eve of Lucy’s college graduation at age twenty-two. Its text-heavy black-and-white pages resemble those that might have been torn straight from a notebook or journal but are actually sophisticated compositions. Her style brings to mind a fusion of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s art and that of the punctilious Gluyas Williams of old New Yorker fame. An expressed fondness for Tintin’s creator, Hergé, is another path of influence.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is not short on travelogues — there are a number of cities on display, from Tokyo to Chicago to New York — but even richer with culinary adventures. Interspersed with actual recipes, Knisley’s chapters recount how she came to love good cooking and junk food alike. Her drawing style here is more cartoony, perhaps in response to a perceived young adult audience, a market the publisher First Second caters to. And this time around, Knisley gets to exhibit her fine color sense.

An Age of License finds Knisley back to her more “mature” style as she catalogues the myriad experiences of a second European trip, involving a comics convention, a reunion with her current boyfriend, and more time in France with Mom. Alternating with her B&W artwork are single-page color pieces that approach “fine art” impressions. While the delights of the palate are not scanted, and while meticulous attention is paid to capturing the scenery, the focus this time around is on Knisley’s inner life, as she faces a welter of choices about her future. Insights accumulate slowly, but as befitting a travelogue, she is content to capture the process without forcing any certain outcome.

In her first three books, Lucy Knisley has displayed much craft and maturity, as well as a zest for transcribing and generously sharing her life. Further work from her pen can only enhance her fine reputation as an artist whose growth and exploits we delight to share.

Unlovable: Volume 3

By Esther Pearl Watson

In the mode of Lynda Barry and Aline Kominsky, Esther Pearl Watson has gifted us with an adolescent heroine whose nightmare life is touching and alienating, sad and hilarious, naïve and knowing. Think of the hypothetical 1980s high school days of the Onion’s Jean Teasdale, and you might start to have a notion of what the life of Tammy Pierce is all about.

The series takes the the form of Tammy’s diary: text in a distinctively scrawled style leavened with her copious and daft drawings. In Unlovable: Volume 1 we are introduced to Tammy and her schoolmates in Wylie, Texas. (A small flavor of King of the Hill infuses the books.) Tammy’s best (only) friend Kim is a bit of trampy bad girl, and not much of a friend, really, bonded to Tammy only through frequent borrowings of burger money. Tammy’s parents are annoying nonentities, her younger brother an obnoxious thorn in her side. Tammy herself is overweight, hairy-legged, and ungainly, with a poor complexion and no style sense. She’s the butt of many coarse jokes, especially from the cheerleaders. All the available hunky boys at school are out of her reach, although this exclusion does not stop her fantasies about them. One of her prime heartthrobs is as obviously gay as Liberace, but Tammy fails to notice.

Tammy’s first diary entry is for August 30, 1988, and we step through the calendar with her consistently across all three volumes to date, rendering this series one enormous novel broken into installments. Tammy chronicles every aspiration, every insult, every failure, every small victory with merciless precision, although she does strive to put the best possible interpretation on things. Her lugubrious, hopeful incompetence is both excruciating to witness and impossible not to laugh at.

Unlovable: Volume 2 features numerous new indignities for Tammy, including being caught out in the locker room wearing a pair of her brother’s BVDs, due to a lack of clean panties at home. Watson’s energy and invention are unflagging in Unlovable: Volume 3, putting Tammy through one humiliation after another.

Secondary to Tammy’s personal odyssey is the crawl through the cultural detritus of the 1980s. Tammy’s brain is filled with the worst and most saccharine pop culture, and she uses it as visual commentary in her diary. Clever if offbeat mashups — the sight of Rambo or Robocop offering dating advice is likely to stay with you — reveal a spark of unconventional brilliance inside Tammy, that might one day lead her to a better life.

One final note: Fantagraphics gets extra credit for their brilliant design, giving us books shaped like typical diaries and full of actual glitter, as if Tammy had decorated each one just for you, her new best friend!