You never know what’s going to go wrong, until you do.
The first indication that something is horribly amiss comes after 16 pages of indigo ink in the cartoonist Beth Hetland’s terrific debut graphic novel, TENDER (Fantagraphics, 157 pp., $19.99). As the heroine, Carolanne, prepares a meal, she cuts into a slab of meat she’s cooking and we get a glimpse of a new color: red.
It’s not quite right to say that the book is subtle — its lovingly rendered gore is profuse and shocking — but Hetland has a wide variety of scare tactics at her beck and call. She excels at incongruity, interrupting what seem to be spare, predictable renderings with creepy little details that suggest the infernal depths of Carolanne’s obsessions and fears.
Hetland’s broader subject is the unbearable weight thrust upon women who are expected to marry and have children no matter the cost to themselves. It’s a unique, textured dread, and Hetland eagerly explores the eccentricities of Carolanne’s mind as she imagines the worst that can happen, no matter how improbable or unhinged — and when it inevitably does happen, the lengths to which she will go.
Every work by the polymath video game designer Jordan Mechner is essentially about rewinding time, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that REPLAY: Memoir of an Uprooted Family (First Second, 318 pp., $39.99) braids together so many time periods so adroitly. There are three primary strands: Mechner’s own nomadic existence as he globe-trots seeking funding and staff for his latest projects, often at the expense of his family’s stability; his father’s boyhood fleeing the Nazis during World War II; and his grandfather’s misadventures as a conscript from a city in eastern Austria-Hungary that becomes part of Romania during the First World War and ceases to be home.
The binding theme is statelessness — imposed by chance, antisemitism and personal ambition — but memoirs are about memory, and so it is also a book about the subtleties and biases of recollection. Without their homes, memory and family records are all his characters have for years at a time. “I deliberately rationed the number of times I would sing certain songs, so as not to use up their nostalgic power,” recalls Mechner’s father of his childhood as a fugitive.
For the World War I sections, Mechner evokes Robert Graves (one chapter is called “Goodbye to All That”), but the work to which the book feels most similar is Mechner’s own wonderfully overwritten computer game The Last Express, a sort of screen-bound mystery novel about national identity in the days before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In that game, the player must rewind the story’s events to fully experience its many simultaneous plots. Here as well, recursion and synchronicity are impulses that, paradoxically, propel “Replay” forward.
“Even for a barbarian, that is barbaric!” observes one of the many horrified bystanders watching Groo eat a meal in GROO IN THE WILD (Dark Horse, 120 pp., paperback, $22.99). This is the customary reaction when Sergio Aragonés’s delightful doorknob-dim adventurer Groo dines in company, but — also as usual — his table manners are nowhere near as barbaric as the way the rich overlord of this story’s kingdom, helpfully named Putrio, has treated the local flora and fauna.
The master cartoonist Aragonés and his co-writer, Mark Evanier, have tended toward the topical in his recent Groo tales — their book “The Hogs of Horder” offered the best explanation of the 2008 housing crash this side of “The Big Short” — and this is a particularly good effort, its deceptively simple storytelling and deliberately stupid jokes masking a thorough examination of the economics of greed. But beyond Aragonés’s work as a satirist, the 86-year-old artist still draws some of the most purely beautiful pages of anyone working in comics, his spreads of battles and disasters filled to overflowing with sight gags and elaborate costumes that make every story worth revisiting.
David Small’s new collection, THE WEREWOLF AT DUSK AND OTHER STORIES (Liveright, 165 pp., $25), is as much a book of poetry as it is of stories. Good comics writing requires a base line of minimalism to avoid overwhelming the art; Small’s stories here gracefully slip between wordlessness and koan-like precision. The title story, adapted from Lincoln Michel’s remarkable “Wolf Aches,” pares down Michel’s already spare flash fiction, and the resulting piece’s 35 pages feel perfectly aligned with the text.
The middle story, about a psychiatrist who may — or much worse, may not — be dreaming about giant spiders, is Small’s own, and the cleverest with its words. The last, and best, is “The Tiger in Vogue,” adapted from “Le Tigre Mondain,” by Jean Ferry, a story first published by André Breton in Vichy France in 1940 and then immediately banned. It’s about an especially dangerous circus act in which a trained tiger is allowed to escort a beautiful lady to her theater box and hold a baby, all while its trainer’s grip grows weaker and weaker. The narrator considers leaving when he realizes what he’s about to see, but is too afraid. “Besides,” he observes, “I know the beast is already on its way.”
