In the Future, We Are Dead

I got this book as part of backing Birdcage Bottom Books' Kickstarter for 2018. In the Future, We Are Dead is a collection of nine short stories about death. They are rendered in black, white, blue, and red, via color pencils, and I was quite taken with the artwork. It is mostly done in a realistic style, which combined well with the prose to create great effects. In the excerpt below, for example, it punctuates a thoughtful, philosophic moment with a hilarious, if dark, counterpoint.

This book explores a topic that touches all of our lives, and I feel that Müller's comics are at once deeply personal and also surprisingly universal. I felt with her as she described the deep fears she felt as a child about death and the potential afterlife. Not only was she preoccupied by the potential terrible causes of death, including sickness, nuclear war, or grave injury, but she also wondered about what would happen after.

These various stories touch on different periods of her life, and it was fascinating for me to see just how her thinking transformed over the course of the book. She began to imagine the ghosts of her relatives in her grandparents' living room, which had formerly been used a place for viewing the recently deceased.

She pondered the fate of mummified Buddhists while she practiced  yoga and struggled with the corpse pose (Savasana). She thought about her relationship with an elderly neighbor and how personal and distant it was. She also explored her familial relationships, particularly at her father's funeral, and when she attempted to view her own life through the eyes of her brother. I found this book to be profoundly thoughtful, relatable, and personable. It is an impressive North American debut, a graphic novel that explores both life and death in excellent fashion.

You can learn much more about this book's creator Eva Müller and her work by visiting her website. I am looking forward to checking out more of her comics as they become available in the US.

All of the reviews I have read of this book have been glowing. Publishers Weekly concluded, "This reflective graphic novel looks the Grim Reaper in the face—and sees that he isn’t an enemy, after all." John Seven called it "a work of self-scrutiny that finds profundity by finding the commonality in what can seem so personal and singular to us." Robin Enrico called it "a strong North American debut for Müller as it showcases her artistic abilities and the breadth of her storytelling."

In the Future, We Are Dead was published by Birdcage Bottom Books, and they offer a preview and more information about it here. I also found another preview, featuring different pages here.

Red Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes

Red Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes was created by the same person who made Mind MGMT, my favorite graphic novel collection from last year. This book is similarly excellent, exploring similar themes about what defines crime and art while spinning a masterfully complex narrative full of quirky details and insanely compelling short tales.

The strange crimes that occur in the town of Red Wheel Barrow are myriad. There is a woman who steals only chairs, a thief who steals artwork so he can cut it into 100 pieces and sell them off individually, a magician who moonlights as a pick-pocket, a struggling author who steals street and building signs so she can create a warehouse-sized novel, and a photographer who creates personal conflicts and then profits from the images of them she captures.

There are two common threads connecting these capers: Detective Gould, who is infinitely perceptive and deductive, and who has never let a case go unsolved, and a mysterious Moriarty-type mastermind who tests him. Gould is a riff on Dick Tracy and named for his creator Chester Gould; he is a super-cop who always gets the culprit. He may have an excellent track record at work, but we catch glimpses into his personal life and see that his work obsessions have created distance at home from his wife, an art gallery owner.

This distance turns out to be a vulnerability where his enemy tests him, and in the process the areas of crime and art are blurred. The main conflict between Gould and his opponent is played out via a series of dialogue pages where the reader does not really know who is speaking. These sequences are text heavy and fraught with philosophical questions.

This existential, multidimensional, detailed, and addictive book was written and drawn by the  prolific Matt Kindt. He has created numerous graphic novels, including Super Spy and Revolver, worked on his own series Mind MGMT, and written a good number of titles at DC Comics, including Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E., Justice League of America, and Suicide Squad. He also has written a few comic books series at Marvel of late, including Infinity: The Hunt and Marvel Knights: Spider-Man. He has been nominated for multiple Eisner and Harvey Awards. Kindt speaks extensively about his work on Red Handed in this interview.

This book has perhaps been overshadowed by Kindt's many other works, but it has also been praised highly. CBR's Greg Burgas named it his favorite original graphic novel of 2013 and summed it up as "brilliant." NPR's Glen Weldon likened it to a mind trap that "snaps shut on the reader in a way that's ruthless, irrevocable and entirely satisfying." Booklist honored it with a starred review, and Kirkus Reviews called the book "elegant scribbles from an electric mind," "told by way of Socratic dialogue and pulp homage."

Red Handed was published by First Second, and they provide a preview and more information here.

Wilson

I have been struggling with ways to describe this book. Charlie Brown all grown up and even more disillusioned? Garfield meets Sartre? A Larry David comic strip without all the celebrity trappings? A Swiftian misanthropic parody of a daily comic strip? It's not quite any of these things, but what I can say is that I felt simultaneously repulsed and compelled to read this book in one sitting.

Daniel Clowes, author of acclaimed works such as Ghostworld and Ice Haven, created this series of 4-panel comic strips in slightly different styles. In them he follows the exploits of Wilson, who does little and is critical of everything. In time, we see him deal with the loss of his ex-wife, the death of his college professor father, the search for a daughter he didn't know he had, and periodically we sort of feel sorry for him. But Clowes punctuates all these moments with a reminder that Wilson is an egotistic jerk who cannot empathize with others. In many ways, his life reads like a stereotypical talk show participant, only he is supremely intellectual and self-important, and the result is a strange mix of humor and dread.

Clowes has making comics for the better part of three decades now, with most of his work appearing in independent anthologies and series such as his seminal Eightball. Wilson is his first original graphic novel to appear first in non-serialized form. Clowes has garnered many accolades for his work, winning multiple Harvey Awards for writing, artwork, and individual stories. Two of his works, Ghostworld and Art School Confidential, have been adapted into movies, and he has been working on at least two other screenplays since.

Reviews on the book have been somewhat mixed, though they all point to Clowes's skills as a storyteller. NPR's Glen Weldon comments on how Clowes grapples with "bleak truths" and self-laceration but also sheds life on the pomposity and humor of these situations. The Hooded Utilitarian's Ng Suat Tong wrote a very detailed and pointed analysis, ultimately criticizing the book and Wilson's "disjointed urban misanthropy" as "vintage Clowes made simple and unrelenting." Along with multiple spoilers he posts a good number of links to other discussions of the book. Sam Lipsyte reviewed the book for The New York Times and found it a mix of "tragedy and farce" that marks the lead character as a workable symbol for humanity, even if not in a universal manner.

As for me, I found the book alternately funny, horrifying, and unsettling, but I also found myself thinking about it days and weeks after I read it. I wouldn't call it a pleasant read but an evocative and thought-provoking one.

Tom Spurgeon has a large, in-depth interview with Clowes here.

A pdf preview is available here from publisher Drawn & Quarterly.