Year End Graphic Novel(ish) Write-Ups: Cho, Collins and Fitzgerald&MacNaughton
Michael Cho���s first graphic novel, Shoplifter, centers on the life of Corinna Park, a young woman one immediately misplaces as middle-aged thanks to the dark lines under her eyes and the stress wrinkles she���s already inducing. Stuck in an advertising job (the story starts with her trying to come up with a slogan for a perfume marketed towards 9 to 12 year old girls), Corinna contemplates other ways she thought her future could lend to, satisfies her stuck-in-a-rut moods by stealing magazines from the local convenience store. Bouncing between being treated like nothing from her absent-minded coworkers, her cat and guys she���s crushing on, eventually Corinna realizes: no one can give her the future she wants except herself. Walking a fine line between mundane, almost tedious and exhilarating, Shoplifter is a quiet work depicting the trapped life struggle between financial freedom and daily happiness too many of us understand.
��THE GIGANTIC BEARD THAT WAS EVIL by Stephen Collins
A little disappointingly, the beard is not, in fact, that evil. It doesn���t really kill people, which is kind of what I was picturing when I saw the cover of this book. The beard is evil in more subtle ways: On an island in which the men and clean shaven, the women���s hairs never fly away and the curls fall just so, Dave���s gnarly, unruly beard is symptomatic of a chaos the people of the island cannot control. The story is simple enough: one day, Dave cannot shave / cut / pluck his beard without it growing back stronger, and soon, he���s left carrying his beard in his hands. Soon, it outgrows his house. Before long, it���s looming over the entire island. The beauty lies not in the complexity of the story, but in the sheer gorgeousness of Collin���s drawings. Hair is seldom a beautiful thing to be drawn, but Collins attends to the mountains of hair with a Van Gogh-like attention to each strand. This is one of the few cases in which letting half the plot fall on illustrations to explain is a good, good thing.
��PEN & INK: TATTOOS & THE STORIES BEHIND THEM
Not really a graphic novel, Pen & Ink is a curated collection of drawn depictions of real people���s real tattoos and the stories about what they are and why the people needed them there. Wearing tattoos, especially visible ones, strangers are constantly asking about them, why you would get them and what they mean. Often, when people ask about mine (mostly, the small heart on the inside of my elbow, right where you���d get blood drawn), it���s hard to tell a stranger what it means in a way that���s not too personal but doesn���t sound too shallow and also doesn���t take so long the person regrets even asking about it in the first place, so I���ll chicken out and just say I got it on impulse (which is half-true as well). The great thing about this book is that it allows the individuals a space to talk about their tattoos, get the whole story out in as many or as few words as they please. And the people they included? Phenomenal. There���s everyone from Roxane Gay talking about the many tattoos she���s put all over her arms at 19 in order to ���be able to look at my body and see something I didn���t loathe,��� to Thao Nguyen (of Thao & The Get Down Stay Downs) letting you know what the little ���Sullivan��� on her wrist means, as well as just rad everyday people like this warehouse manager who got the letters of ���Pizza Party��� written across his toes and is probably now my hero.
