A life of Picasso, a brush with a shark and a gripping take on the Middle East
If I had to choose one must-buy from among all the fantastic graphic novels that were published in 2015, it would probably be Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics and Graphic Novels, a wondrous compendium featuring work by, among others, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes and Art Spiegelman. But honestly, why would you limit yourself to one? With new books from such leading names as Adrian Tomine (Killing and Dying) and Craig Thompson (Space Dumplins), and several excellent debuts, among them Evie Wyld and Joe Sumner’s lovely and strange shark-fest, Everything Is Teeth, this has been an exceptional year. Don’t let it end without a good splurge in the comics section of your favourite bookshop.
First, memoirs. They continue to come, and they continue to be mighty. Riad Sattouf’s shockingly blunt The Arab of the Future (Metropolitan Books), which tells the story of the French cartoonist’s itinerant childhood in the Middle East, is a must for anyone who wants to understand more about the failure of the pan-Arab dream, with all the consequences this has had for the situation in which we now find ourselves. It’s also a page-turner, dissecting as it does the psychology of a man (Riad’s Syrian father) whose increasingly deluded idealism results in a form of tyranny when it comes to his own family. Alison Bechdel is a fan, and I hope to write more about it soon. I also recommend The Art of Flying (Cape), Antonio Altarriba’s poignant unpicking of his father’s experiences in the Spanish civil war, and Invisible Ink (Fantagraphics Books) by Bill Griffith, which reconstructs a 16-year secret affair his mother had with a cartoonist in the 1950s and 1960s.
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