Word: comix
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...Spanish language and Latin American cultures continue their slow creep into the American mainstream, it should come as no surprise that comics have begun to reflect that change. But where lesser comix have settled for throwing a token Latino into the story, La Perdida ($20; 275 pages), Jessica Abel's intense new graphic novel from Pantheon, goes deeper. In fact, it goes "native." Featuring a story about an idealistic American living in Mexico and written in Spanglish dialogue, La Perdida examines what is increasingly becoming a major cultural shift in the U.S. by looking at it from the other side...
Abel has made a name for herself by writing short fiction that mostly features loquacious urban hipsters. (Also a tireless supporter of the medium, she was one of the organizers of a short-lived series of slide-show comix "happenings" in 2001.) Her first novel-length work, La Perdida has an unusual style for comix: Unlike most of her fellow North American graphic novelists, Abel doesn't use humor, irony or traditional comic book genres. Instead, she has created something all too rare in the medium: a realistic drama for adults told in a straightforward manner. The approach makes sense...
...While comix travelogues have become a burgeoning sub-genre, Jessica Abel's La Perdida goes one better. It processes the experiences of the foreign traveler into a focused examination of the relationship between foreignness and being "native," particularly the nature of "Americanness." Even its liberal use of Mexican colloquialisms in the original Spanish puts the book at the edge of today's controversy over the purity of English. La Perdida includes a glossary for all the Spanish at the end, except strangely, a translation of the title. My crude Google-based research roughly translates it as "The Lost...
...Fifth in a line of upscale comic books that the co-publishers hope will fill the gap between more cheaply produced pamphlets and pricey full-length books, the other authors in this "Ignatz" series have all been Europeans until now. Huizenga hails from Illinois and creates the most suburban comix to be found in the alternative market. His regular series Or Else has been reviewed by TIME.comix, and he specializes in small-scale narratives of riding bikes or bringing home the groceries that end up becoming part of larger cosmological considerations. His principal character, a bland looking...
...back or did Glenn actually appear in the past for a moment? Does the memory of a thing constitute a kind of reality so that we can be said to be "time traveling" when we think of the past? Huizenga plays with such considerations using the unique language of comix. The panels, which essentially frame a finite period of time, begin to overlap. Glenn steps out of the panel border and walks around to another panel. Soon Glenn has come up with a fairly reasonable argument for how time is illusory. Huizenga takes the quasi-profound day-dreamy musings...