Word: comix
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Like the end of the harvest, we come to the last of our month-long survey of recent comix by women cartoonists. Leela Corman's "Subway Series," Debbie Drechsler's "The Summer of Love," Lynda Barry's "One Hundred Demons," and Phoebe Gloeckner's "The Diary of a Teenage Girl" are all semi-autobiographical stories about a young woman's adolescence. We saved the most difficult for last...
Phoebe Gloeckner is one of comix' most challenging artists. The company contracted to print her last book, "A Child's Life," refused to do it. The subsequent printer would only work on it at night with a staff who had read the book and did not object to it. With its raw, uncompromising tales of a young girl's experiences with sex, drugs, and neglect, told in a devastatingly clinical style, "A Child's Life" was a highlight of 1990s graphic literature. Gloeckner has since mostly dedicated herself to creating a single, book-length project. Finally arriving in November...
...amount of work she must put into each page. Bright watercolors fill in the brush lines and each vignette gets a carefully collaged title page, often containing artifacts from the story thereafter. Even when you close the book, the colored pages create a rainbow around the edge. Perfect for comix novices, the easy-to-read layout has just two big panels on each wide page. Barry uses the top half of each panel for her running commentary with the bottom part usually containing an illustrative dialogue exchange...
Drechsler has earned a comix rep since the early 1990s working exclusively in the genre of semi-autobiographical comix about growing up. Collected together in "Daddy's Girl," many of these deeply disturbing stories dealt with such taboo subjects as rape and familial sex abuse. Therefore anyone who knows her past work may be excused for feeling somewhat anxious with each turn of the page of her latest book. But worry not. "The Summer of Love" deals exclusively with the most typical of teenage experiences - alienation, confusion and anger...
...best feelings I've ever had in my life?" Steve abruptly ends their time together, leaving Lily to wonder what she did wrong. She frets over it wishing she could go back and do it right, though we can see that Steve simply got embarrassed. These are great comix, because, told with few words, Drechsler reveals the character's confusion and awkwardness through the details of her drawing. Her character's body language and facial details are among the most expressive in this medium without being the least bit photo-realistic...