> GRAPHICS MIKE DONACHIE
GRANDVILLE: FORCE MAJEURE By Bryan Talbot Dark Horse, $33.99, 176 pages
It’s described in its subtitle as “a Detective Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard scientificromance thriller,” but there’s so much more to it than that.
For a start, LeBrock is a hulking, humanoid badger hunting criminals through an alternate world in which the French won the Napoleonic Wars — and almost every character is an animal, from fish to fowl, that walks upright.
This is a thriller, but it has more twists and turns than a Paris back street and a density of storytelling that hearkens back to Talbot’s 1970s/80s masterwork The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. And as emotive as Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, which Talbot created with his wife Mary and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Grandville is also a beautiful series of books. This is the fifth and, tragically, last of the colourful, intricately-designed hardbacks featuring LeBrock. Every one is a treasure. They even smell good.
ALL STAR BATMAN VOLUMES 1 AND 2 By Scott Snyder, John Romita Jr, Jock and others DC Comics, $33.99 and $29.99, 160 and 144 pages
If you’re looking for a Christmas gift for that special someone, and they have geeky tendencies, these supercool volumes should be on your list.
All Star Batman is one of DC’s biggest and best books of recent years, and the first storylines have been collected for the first time. Snyder and his collaborators have done a difficult thing here: they’ve presented a modern, gritty take on Batman that is still lots of fun.
So we get the flamboyant villains, starting with Two Face and the Riddler, but they’re also a bit scary. We get the gadgets, which are exciting but not too unbelievable, and we get daring escapades that will make you grin, not sigh heavily. Batman wielding a chainsaw may even make you laugh aloud.
This is good for serious bat-enthusiasts and lapsed readers who might appreciate neatly-packaged, complete stories.
THE UNQUOTABLE TRUMP By R. Sikoryak Drawn & Quarterly, 48 pages, $21.95
“Such a nasty woman!” declares Donald Trump, president of the United States, as Wonder Woman throws him over a wall. In the foreground, he drops the cellphone that, presumably, he was using to tweet.
The line was real, as we all know, and the scene recreates the cover of Wonder Woman #2, first published in 1942. Welcome to the clever work of Sikoryak.
The Unquotable Trump, which depicts the president on its cover in a redrawn image of the Incredible Hulk, is sheer guilty pleasure. Shock at Trump’s real quotes is mixed with amusement at how they are aptly used in recreated comic book covers from down the decades.
With appropriate speech bubbles using his own words, Trump is depicted as Magneto, Uncle Scrooge and more, in styles from Watchmen to The Walking Dead.
And all covers, original artists and quotations are carefully attributed in footnotes. This isn’t fake news.
THE GOOD TIMES ARE KILLING ME By Lynda Barry Drawn and Quarterly, $24.95, 184 pages
Absorbing and deceptively simple, Lynda Barry’s 1988 illustrated novella is back in a new edition, and it feels like the right time. Difficult conversations about racial divides are still happening, so this story of a young girl’s friendship with a Black neighbour is affecting and relevant.
Narrator Edna Arkins begins by describing the racial makeup of her neighbourhood and how it’s been changing.
But, as a kid in a white household, she displays, matter-of-factly, the attitudes of her parents and she echoes the way they talk.
With sparse punctuation and breathless, run-on sentences, the story is presented with a naive voice in a powerful way.
The illustrations are stark and appropriate. It’s quite a package.
This is a coming-of-age piece, too, with stories of summer friendship, trauma in the family and Edna’s desperate need to be popular. It’s about music and community and, above all, race.