From Joe Sacco's stark images of the Somme to overheard mobile phone chat and travels with grandma, it's been a vintage year for comics and graphic novels
‘A breathtaking achievement’: The Great War by Joe Sacco.
Another bumper year for graphic novels, which leaves me with only one problem: where to begin? Well, let's see. My comic book of the year, by a mile, is Rutu Modan's The Property (Cape), in which Mica Segal, a young Israeli woman, travels to Warsaw with her irascible grandmother to help her reclaim the apartment building she and her family were forced to give up in 1940. What happens next is… complicated. This, believe me, has everything you could possibly want in a comic: great pictures, a multilayered story, mystery, sharp wit. For the perfect Christmas package you could parcel it up with Modan's earlier graphic novel, Exit Wounds (set in Israel), or with Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, Guy Delisle's superb book of reportage from that city.
Also stunning is Joe Sacco's The Great War (Cape), a vast (and already bestselling) panorama of the first day of the battle of the Somme. This is a stark, uncompromising book, so much destruction and misery reduced to just 24 plates, the helmets of the massed ranks of the infantry coming to resemble (as I said in my review) the counters in a particularly heinous game of tiddlywinks. But it's a breathtaking achievement too, its beauty and power lying in its attention to detail, the way it forces the reader to look, and look again, at every aspect of the logistics of battle, from horses to trenches to foot soldiers to officers. I'm pretty sure it's already on many Christmas wish lists. But if it isn't on yours, add it right now: this is a real keeper of a book, the kind you need to own, the better that you might return to it again and again.
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Also stunning is Joe Sacco's The Great War (Cape), a vast (and already bestselling) panorama of the first day of the battle of the Somme. This is a stark, uncompromising book, so much destruction and misery reduced to just 24 plates, the helmets of the massed ranks of the infantry coming to resemble (as I said in my review) the counters in a particularly heinous game of tiddlywinks. But it's a breathtaking achievement too, its beauty and power lying in its attention to detail, the way it forces the reader to look, and look again, at every aspect of the logistics of battle, from horses to trenches to foot soldiers to officers. I'm pretty sure it's already on many Christmas wish lists. But if it isn't on yours, add it right now: this is a real keeper of a book, the kind you need to own, the better that you might return to it again and again.More
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