There’s so much fear involved in being young, and Telgemeier excels at telling us not to deny it, but rather to, as the penultimate line of Ghosts says, just go with it.Ĩ. After all, a precarious thing is a precious thing, especially when it comes to your loved ones. Instead, Telgemeier uses her thick lines, synaesthetic backgrounds, and stark facial work to argue that we needn’t be paralyzed by the knowledge that death is always around the corner - we should be empowered by it. This isn’t a ghost story, per se, because the ghosts aren’t there to frighten any impressionable young readers. A local boy lets them in on a little secret: Folks take Día de Muertos pretty seriously around here because los muertos like to come out and celebrate it with them. In it, a pair of half-Latina sisters move to a new town in Northern California, where the climate might help the younger one bear the awful burden of cystic fibrosis.
The most recent of the works she ensconced there is Ghosts, a sweetly sad tome that merges YA coming-of-age tropes with the venerable tradition of Latin-American magical realism.
That’s Beatles-level chart dominance, and it’s well-deserved. Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier and Braden Lamb (Scholastic)Īs of November 27, 50 percent of the New York Times best-seller list for paperback comics consisted of books by Raina Telgemeier. It’s anxiety-inducing to read this account with the present-day knowledge of the death cult that would rise in the coming years, but one tiny bright spot in a dangerous world is the prospect that we might soon get to see Glidden’s next overseas chronicle.ĩ. Her lyrical line-work is pointedly unflashy, allowing us to lose ourselves in the maudlin dust. She’s ultimately too hard on herself, but her empathy for the people she saw breeds an empathy from those who are reading her story. As Glidden and her compatriots - including an American man who fought in the Iraq War and is frustratingly reticent to get worked up about it - traverse the former heart of the Ottoman Empire, the author struggles to understand both the powder keg around her and her responsibilities in representing what she observes. In doing so, she becomes something of an unreliable narrator, though by no means a deceptive one.
But by Glidden’s own in-book admission, she didn’t think of herself as a professional journalist - instead, she went with journalists she knew so that she could learn about their sticky profession. Given her demographic research and incorporation of the words of Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab interviewees, it’s tempting to refer to it as comics journalism. It’s hard to categorize Sarah Glidden’s dense and fastidious account of her marathon 2010 trip through the Near East. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches From Turkey, Syria, and Iraq by Sarah Glidden (Drawn & Quarterly) We only allowed first printings (or first English-language printings, if they’re foreign) and eschewed reissues of previously collected work.Įnough nitpicking. Comics is a tricky business, what with all the ongoing series, mini-series, graphic novels, graphic memoirs, and other formats, so we decided to simplify things by restricting our focus to bound volumes that were released in 2016, whether they were collections of individual issues or self-contained works. Below are ten of the best comics of the year. Even if we leave aside public affairs, it’s been a remarkable year for the industry: Circulation at comics shops has passed benchmark after benchmark, a National Book Award was given to a comic for the first time, and the cultural hegemony of superhero comics has been seriously threatened by the dominating ascent of other types of work on the best-seller lists.Īmid all this tumult, an array of stunning pieces have been released, many of which promise to resonate even after the dust of 2016 has settled. Some cartoons have become improbable symbols of upheaval and resistance others, as you’ll see below, have taken on a goosebump-inducing and unintentional significance.
It’s been a supremely weird year for comics and their creators.