Review: The Great War, by Joe Sacco, with an essay by Adam Hochschild

With The Great War - July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme, An Illustrated Panorama, comics journalist Joe Sacco has created a single, 24-foot-long gatefold image which re-creates the events of this day of battle across time and space. Surrounded by two hard covers, the gatefold image comes in a slipcase which also includes a booklet with an author's note and annotations by Sacco, as well as an essay ("July 1, 1916") by historian Adam Hochschild.

Photo from this New Yorker interview with Joe Sacco.

Technically, Sacco's image is a tour de force, utilizing shifting perspectives to create the illusion of a single image while also presenting a chronological narrative of the battle's stages. The amount of detail Sacco includes is staggering, including scores--no, hundreds!--of soldiers, and mazes of trenches that seem to go on for miles. Explosions, debris, and devastation abound, and the passage of time allows us to contrast the idyllic pre-battle landscape to the horrific aftermath.

I was intellectually impressed by Sacco's artistic achievement, but it is only Hochschild's essay that really devastates on an emotional level. I already knew that the First World War, that horribly mis-named "War to End All Wars," was a ridiculous waste of human life,;but Hochschild's essay covering the myriad details of this particular battle--the blindly hubristic plans, the utterly devastating results--really drives the point home in ways that not even Sacco's massively detailed panorama can achieve.

The artwork is stunning technically, but without Sacco's annotations and Hochschild's essay, I'm not sure how affecting the end result would be. Actually, I do, and the answer is that it would appeal a lot to my eyes and brain, but much less so to my heart. Sacco's image needed to be a part of this complete package; the panorama alone, impressive as it is, is not enough to drive home the point Sacco strives for. Which he himself acknowledges in his introduction:

Making this illustration wordless made it impossible for me to provide context or add explanations. I had no means of indicting the high command or lauding the sacrifice of the soldiers. It was a relief not to do these things. All I could do was show what happened between the general and the grave, and hope that even after a hundred years the bad taste has not been washed from our mouths. ("On the Great War," Author's Note, p. 2)

Design-wise, The Great War is an impressive package, even if the panorama itself is an unwieldy read (but how could it not be, unless it were mounted along a wall?). One bravura touch it how the book begins and ends. The first image on what would normally be the front endpaper is a close-up drawing by Sacco of the famous Lord Kitchener WWI recruitment poster, followed by the title page; the rest of the book is the panorama itself, which extends all the way to what would normally be the back endpaper. In that final portion of the image, we see soldiers digging and filling graves. So the design leads us rhetorically from heavily romanticized recruitment to the devastating, utter finality of death. The end.

Make war no more!

With a Three Philosophers from Brewery Ommegang.

Review: The Hypo - The Melancholic Young Lincoln, by Noah Van Sciver

We're so used to seeing Lincoln portrayed as a magisterial president, that we (or at least I) have trouble thinking about him as a person in development, as a youth struggling, as all youth must, to discover who he is. In The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln, Noah Van Sciver gives us a fine portrait of that Lincoln-in-process by focusing on his private, internal struggles. "The Hypo" (Lincoln's term for his sometimes crippling depression) debilitates him, causing doubt and fear to sometimes rule his life. It's a portrait that any sufferer of depression will recognize.

Van Sciver's drawing is assured and highly detailed (backgrounds and environments are often rendered quite specifically, really grounding the story in its time and place), while remaining a bit "cartoony" - his is an engaging, highly readable style. My one complaint, visually, is that early on, Lincoln and his randy roommate, Joshua Speed, look so much alike that sometimes in conversation I became confused as to who was who.

Narratively, you can't help but empathize with young Lincoln in his struggles - his love life is a shambles, for example, although the book's happy ending reveals that he eventually (if perhaps only temporarily) overcame some of "The Hypo."

I understand the desire to focus on the details of Lincoln's personal life over those of his his professional career, but unfortunately this strategy at times makes for some confusing moments. References that other characters make in passing to Lincoln's growing political influence seem to come out of nowhere. I mean, of course we all know that Abraham Lincoln had a political career, but the Lincoln of The Hypo doesn't quite seem capable of sustaining one. We get a few small glimpses, but they're nowhere nearly as finely developed as are the more intimate moments in the young man's life. I would have appreciated a bit of a broader focus on Lincoln's life and work over the course of The Hypo - I can only imagine that in Van Sciver's hands, Lincoln's professional struggles would become as fascinating as his personal ones surely are here.

The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln

by Noah Van Sciver

Fantagraphics, 2012

ISBN-10: 1606996193

ISBN-13: 978-1606996195

192 pages, $24.99

Review: 100 DIAGRAMS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, by Scott Christianson

Scott Christianson's 100 Diagrams That Changed the World: From the Earliest Cave Paintings to the Innovation of the iPod will be a good book to spur curiosity: it's wide-ranging, both in historical focus (as the subtitle makes plain) and in terms of the types of diagrams it covers, from scientific discoveries (DNA Double Helix by James Watson, Francis Crick, and Odile Crick, 1953 [pages 190-191]) to information display techniques (Exploded-View Diagram, by Mariano Taccola, c. 1450 [pp. 70-71]) to theater design (The Castle of Perseverance, c. 1405-1425 [pp. 68-69]).

However, I'm sure that the title is entirely accurate. Did The Voynich Manuscript (c. 1404-1438, pp. 66-67), an illuminated manuscript written in a still-undecipherable code or invented language, really "change the world"? Did Leonardo da Vinci's unrealized plans for Helicopter and Flying Machine (c. 1493-1505, pp. 76-77)? They're fascinating documents, undoubtedly; but they don't really rise to the level of "world-changing," I don't think. 100 Diagrams and Concepts that are Really Quite Interesting would be a more appropriate title, but it's not as marketable.

For a book that celebrates the importance of visual representations, the book's own design is troubling. Each diagram is given its own two-page spread: One page for the diagram (and caption, although that caption is sometimes on the facing page), and one page for text. So far so good, but: Each text page begins with the title of the diagram, its author (if known), a one-sentence "highlight summary" of the object and its importance, and the date of the diagram; the paper is colored light grey rather than white. The date, in the upper corner of the page, and the highlight summary are printed in a grey that's only slightly darker than the background color of the page. The date is in a very large typeface, but the highlight summary, at perhaps 7-point size, is very hard to read without strong light (or, perhaps, a loupe). What's worse, the highlight summary usually repeats information in the longer essay on the page, which quite often is repeated yet again in the image caption. Thus, you often read the same information three times on the same two-page spread. No one could expect a lot of depth in a book like this - with only a few hundred words per essay, the book serves as an "intellectual sampler," encouraging further research - so repeating content so often in such a small space really seems like a misuse of precious informational real estate.

Still, the book reminded me of a lot of things I have always meant to read more about, and it introduced me to things I simply hadn't considered before (I had never thought about the importance of "Graded Sewing Patterns" [pp. 144-145] before, but Ebeneezer Butterick's 1863 invention made it easier for people [usually women] to make fashionable clothing for their families - no small feat!). As a pupu platter of interesting concepts, this book makes for a few diverting afternoons, and it just might encourage you to dig further and learn more about some of these fascinating - if not always world-changing - drawings.

100 Diagrams That Changed the World:

From the Earliest Cave Paintings to the Innovation of the iPod

by Scott Christianson

Plume, 2012

ISBN-10: 0452298776

ISBN-13: 978-0452298774

224 pages, $25.00

Review: Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, by Mary M. & Bryan Talbot

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes is a book unlike any other I've read, a combined graphic biography (of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce) and autobiography (of the graphic novel's writer, Mary M. Talbot, daughter of Joyce scholar James S. Atherton and a respected academic in her own right). Talbot had a pretty big "in" in terms of an artist for her first graphic novel, seeing as her husband is the legendary Bryan Talbot, the award-winning creator of many comics and graphic novels, from the groundbreaking The Adventures of Luther Arkwright to heartbreaking The Tale of One Bad Rat to the genre-busting Alice in Sunderland and more.

Given that I've long been a fan of Bryan Talbot's work and studied (and enjoyed!) a fair bit of Joyce in my undergraduate and graduate student days, I was prepared to love this book. Sadly, I only liked it well enough - usually that's fine, but I had such high hopes, given its subject matter and pedigree. Mary is a fine writer, without question, and Bryan's artwork is top-notch as ever (although this is not the bravura performance he gave in Sunderland), but I just didn't feel that these two stories really needed to be told together, or that they benefited much from their joining. It's true that there are obvious linkages between the two (Joyce, most obviously, plus enigmatic fathers), but those links don't really add up to much in the telling, apart from those basic means of comparison.

Lucia's story is heartbreaking, to be sure. A talented dancer, she found her life choices always constrained and compromised by her parents' constant moving from one country to another, even after Lucia reached adulthood. Her eventual committal to a mental institution in 1932 (her first of what became many stays) is as terrible as it is incomprehensible: After one of many rows, Lucia throws a chair at her mother, and "Her brother made a snap decision. He had her committed" (82). We're not given any hint previously that anyone in her family thought she had mental issue: She fights with her parents and chafes at their control, yes, but who doesn't, really? In this telling, this "snap decision" signals the end of Lucia's active life - the book ends less than ten pages later. It's a tragedy, without question, but an incomprehensible one here. Surely there has to be more to the story than a simple "snap decision" by her brother.

Mary's own story, growing up the only daughter in a postwar British household, is engaging, if sad: Eager to please but also intelligent and headstrong, Mary constantly runs afoul of her father and his snap-temper. Perhaps the book's most powerful and damning observation appears on page 30: "Claims about men being unable to express emotion irritate me to no end. My father did anger very well." The love story between Mary and Bryan charms though suggestion; there's enough tensions here to sustain a much longer, more detailed narrative.

Visually, the book is divided into three portions: The present-day frame story, in clearly inked full color panels; Lucia's story, in borderless blue-grey; and Mary's story, borderless and primarily in sepia. The borderless panels throughout both help to emphasize the flashback nature of the narrative and allow for some beautifully blended page layouts. In Mary's story, the artwork is the least polished, with preliminary pencil lines and paste-up markings visible. I'm guessing this is somehow to make that section feel more "authentic," perhaps, as it is the author's own memories? I don't know - it doesn't look incomplete, exactly, but it is rougher... maybe to mirror Mary's own pain at "becoming" an adult?

The pages also show evidence that it was a couple who created the book. There are several places where Mary inserts a footnote about something that Bryan got "wrong" (the frilly apron that her mother never would have worn, the favorite children's book of Bryan's that he "snuck " into a montage of her favorite children's books), and a place or two where we see "dueling footnotes" from both author and artist. It's a cute personal touch, but it creates a bit of tension when it comes to how the book presents history: If there are factual errors (such as they are) in the Mary sections, might the same be true in the Lucia sections? If the book were Mary's (and, to a lesser extent, Bryan's) story alone, these moments would seem utterly good-natured and fun; but they introduce questions of authenticity that seem strange in a book that's based as much on research as it is on memory.

Still and all, I'm glad I read Dotter of Her Father's Eyes. It's an enjoyable if at times painful set of true tales, of interest to readers of biography and history and literature. I imagine that, seeing as how it was awarded the Costa prize for biography, it will serve to introduce non-comics readers to the graphic novel format, which is a good thing, and I'm looking forward to what both Mary and Bryan have coming next.

 Dotter of Her Father's Eyes

by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot

Dark Horse Books, 2012

ISBN-10: 1595828508

ISBN-13: 978-1595828507

94 pages, $14.99

Review: Fidel: A Graphic Novel Life of Fidel Castro, by Kohan and Scherma

Fidel: A Graphic Novel Life of Fidel Castro, by Néstor Kohan and Nahuel Scherma isn't really a graphic novel; it's a heavily illustrated biography, with many of those illustrations appearing as cartoons (speech balloons and all). It's also more a hagiography than an objective biography, and the USA comes off pretty poorly - sometimes understandably, sometimes less so. Given those parameters, the book accomplishes what it wants to fairly directly, if didactically.

Those seeking a balanced portrait of Fidel Castro should look elsewhere; this one's for True Believers only.

Fidel: A Graphic Novel Life of Fidel Castro

by Néstor Kohan and Nahuel Scherma

Seven Stories Press, 2010

ISBN-10: 1583227822

ISBN-13: 978-1583227824

192 pages, $14.95

A version of this review was originally published at LibraryThing.