This graphic art is scratchy but the scratches cut deep
From the plight of refugees to a future free of men, here’s a look at the best graphic novels of 2018
IN THE end, Nick Drnaso didn’t win the Man Booker Prize. Indeed, his graphic novel Sabrina (Granta, £16.99) didn’t even make it to the short list. But the fact it was named in the long list in July was enough. A sign that the form’s cultural reach doesn’t start and end with Marvel movie adaptations. The graphic novel had been welcomed into the literary establishment. Another step up the ladder in terms of critical acceptance. And another reason why this has been another good year for cartoonists.
There were some – myself included – who weren’t sure Sabrina belonged on the Booker long list, but more because of form than content. Told in a clean, clear, style, Drnaso’s potent, pitiless vision of grief, the corrosive effect of social media and the rise of the digital alt-right is one of the most incisive visions of the Trump era we’ve yet had. It feels very of the moment, while never losing a sense of novelistic space, depth and mystery.
You could argue that the best of this year’s graphic novels revolved around one or other of those two approaches.
It is certainly difficult to imagine a book more timely than Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves (Myriad Editions, £19.99). This is graphic journalism that informs and angers. Kugler travels to Iraq, Greece, the Jungle camp in Calais, England and Germany to talk to Middle Eastern refugees about what has caused them to leave their homes and risk their lives. In doing so, he takes us behind the headlines and political rhetoric.
There are now 68.5 million people who have been forced to leave their homes in the world today. Kugler’s work reminds us that each and every one of them is first and foremost a human being. Listening to certain politicians you wonder if they have forgotten that.
Reading Jason Lutes’s epic graphic novel Berlin Drawn & Quarterly), which has taken its creator more than 20 years to finish, it’s difficult to ignore the contemporary resonances in its account of life in the German capital between the First and Second
World Wars.
You could even argue that Tillie Walden’s science fiction graphic novel
On a Sunbeam (Avery Hill, £24.99), with its vision of a universe populated solely by women, is itself a form of utopian thinking in response to the #Metoo culture we currently live in.
There is a danger, though, that in doing so we reduce the work to a series of a bullet points. Both books are much more than that. Once it finds its feet, Lutes’s Berlin is a sprawling yet adroitly marshalled vision of political, social and cultural life in the city. Laid out in crisp, black and white, Lutes follows his huge cast of characters – journalists and Jewish businessmen, cabaret singers and Communists, lesbians and Nazis – through the streets and years. The result is immersive.
Walden’s On a Sunbeam, meanwhile, is a beautifully rendered loving vision of female friendship. And spaceships.
Aminder Dhaliwal’s vision of a postmale world in her graphic novel Woman
World (Drawn & Quarterly, £14.99) would make for a fine double bill with Walden’s vision of the future. Dhaliwal’s work is both disturbed and intrigued by the idea of a world without men. It is also slyly comic; a smart sitcom pinned to the page.
Perhaps the best expression this year of the novel part of the graphic novel can be found in David Small’s Home
After Dark (Liveright, £19.99).
Set in America in the years after the Korean war it’s a coming-of-age story that takes in parental separation, bullying, and sexual awakening. Nothing new there, you might say, but Small’s vision of his protagonist Russell Pruitt is starkly told, dark in mood and action. The art is scratchy but the scratches cut deep.
For a gentler read try the latest volume of Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of
the Future (Two Roads, £18.99). This is the third instalment of Sattouf’s childhood in Syria, a life that takes in hardship, religious repression and poverty. None of which stops it often being laugh-out-loud funny. Sattouf can even find the humour in circumcision even as it causes a wince or two. (Or is that just a male response?)
The best reissue of the year, The New
World by Christopher Reynolds (£24.99) comes from New York Review Comics, who have, quite frankly, made something of a habit of impressive reissues this year. Indeed, Yvan Alagbe’s Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, Tadao Tsuge’s Slum Wolf and Edmond Baudoin’s wonderful Piero are all worth seeking out. But none of them are as beautifully presented as The New World which has been designed by the Canadian cartoonist Seth.
The richness of that design is a pleasing recognition of the worth of Reynolds’s strips which appeared originally in the 1980s in his comic Mauretania, part of the British small press scene of that era.
These strips are vaguely science fictional, but, really, these are mood pieces, wonderfully atmospheric, elusive evocations of place and time and memory. Easily the most haunting book on this list.
Other British entries share some of its qualities. John Harris Dunning and Michael Kennedy’s Tumult (Selfmadehero, £16.99) knows how to evoke mystery, even if it is a more linear narrative version.
That’s not to say that this primarycoloured psychological thriller is straightforward. It has echoes of Hitchcock and Highsmith in its cool, flat approach. You’d like to see the makers of Killing Eve have a go at turning into a TV series. You could even see it as the basis of a Nic Roeg movie if the director’s death this year had not robbed us of that possibility.
Two other British graphic novels to finish. Rachael Ball’s Wolf
(Selfmadehero, £15.99) is a family saga that is funny-sad and full of love and you should definitely seek it out.
Jon Mcnaught’s Kingdom (Nobrow, £16.99), meanwhile, proves you don’t need contemporary resonances, epic narratives nor knob jokes to make a great graphic novel. Mcnaught takes the everyday mundanity of British life – Tescos, motorways, electricity pylons, Burger King, seagulls and graffiti – and makes art from it.
As an account of a seaside holiday, Kingdom offers the merest scrap of a story. But it’s full of experience, rendered in immaculate panels. This is ultimately a quiet vision of boredom and weather and traffic. The place where, away from headlines and heartache if we’re lucky, most of us live.
You’d like to see the makers of Killing Eve have a go at turning this into a TV series