Thinking of Holiday Gifts? How About a Graphic Book?

Expand

The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On by David Wondrich with Dean Kotz

We drew pictures before we could write, and even after picture-based writing was supplanted by alphabets in much of the world, words continued to be coupled with images. Graphic books have an ancient pedigree and have gained renewed interest in our increasingly visual age.  

Here is a selection of recent graphic titles, including biographies, horror stories, literary adaptations and fresh fiction. 

The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On (Penguin Random House), by David Wondrich with Dean Kotz 

Distilled spirits mixed with other libations have been consumed for uncounted centuries. David Wondrich wrote the authoritative book on the subject, The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, and returns with illustrator Dean Kotz to write that history in picture book form. By the 1700s rum punch was all the rage—Wondrich includes a recipe—and the American South discovered the mint julep. As the availability of ice increased in the 1800s, cocktails proliferated. Prohibition was a problem in the 1920s but cocktails rebounded on the wings of Hollywood glamour. Wondrich is pleased to conclude his boozy history tour with the cocktail revival that spread through the ‘90s and continues today. 

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery (SelfMadeHero), by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard

Largely forgotten today, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth was a popular English writer of the early 1900s. She wrote romance novels drawn from her life in the Lancashire mills. This Slavery (1925) was a departure into explicit, radical social criticism, including the exploitation of women as well as workers in a society with few options. Scarlett and Sophie Rickard paint their graphic novel adaptation in dark hues as they relate a story focused on impoverished women eking out as existence as wage slaves in a factory town. This Slavery is a call to resist. 

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Champion: A Graphic Novel (Ten Speed Graphic), by Raymond Obstfeld 

Soon after arriving in Milwaukee in 1969 with the Bucks, Lou Al Cinder became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the new team’s star. The graphic novel focuses less on his record-breaking NBA career than his social activism. Champion’s fictional protagonist, Monk, is a talented Black high school athlete who gets in trouble and is handed a way-out by his coach: Write an essay on Abdul-Jabbar’s advocacy work—his worldview, not his free throws. Monk learns that Abdul-Jabbar met Martin Luther King Jr., rallied to support Muhammad Ali, boycotted the ’68 Olympics in protest of American policies and later became a U.S. cultural ambassador, advocate for cancer research and author of books on overlooked figures from African American history. 

MrBallen Presents Where Nightmares Live (Ten Speed Graphic), by MrBallen with Robert Venditti and Andrea Mutti 

This present-day Rod Serling reaches audiences through podcasting, not television. MrBallen’s second hardbound collection presents adaptations of his digi-media tales as well as four new ones. He asserts that his stories are “based on true events,” at least as reported and rumored. Working with a pair of artists, MrBallen jumps between centuries and continents, relating tales about the persistence of malevolence, menacing crypto creatures, anomalous disorientations and strange hypnotic powers. Perhaps what’s scariest about Where Nightmares Live is the bibliography, the list of sources. Yes, it seems strange things are afoot in our universe. 

Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen (Verso), by Kate Evans 

Jane Austen’s long afterlife continues. With her “graphic biography,” illustrator Kate Evans uses a patchwork quilt Austen sewed as inspiration for following the various threads of her life. As Evans admits, Patchwork is less a strict bio than a “fictional account of factual events.” She works like a good historical fiction novelist, hewing to what’s known and filling the gaps with plausibility as she takes Austen from birth through death. In between those bookends, a creative life unfolds amidst small town gentry as Austen devours the contents of her father’s library, especially novels, denounced by the era’s moralizers as a bad influence on impressionable minds. Evans wonders about the social context: was Austen aware of the imperialism and slavery that undergirded the fabric of her life? 

Photographic Memory: William Henry Jackson and the American West (Abrams Comic Arts), by Bill Griffith 

Bill Griffith, a star of ‘70s underground comix with the mordantly ironic “Zippy the Pinhead,” has turned to making graphic biographies. His latest, Photographic Memory, concerns one of his ancestors, William Henry Jackson, acclaimed as seminal by Ansel Adams for his photography of the American West. Jackson is as remembered for capturing indigenous people as well as natural wonders; he helped inspire the National Park System but paid Native Americans minimally and his autobiographical writings reveal the common prejudices of his time. For the most part, Griffith has fun with his topic, drawing a line between Jackson’s Yellowstone pictures and the popular ‘60s cartoon Yogi Bear, set in fictional Jellystone Park.