Our project is coming to an end, and we are trying to submit all our papers and wrap everything up. Among other things we will make an Online End of the Project Event Friday 8 December (1-3pm in Sweden and 12-2 pm in the UK), please join in (email heathermendick@yahoo.co.uk for the Zoom link)! We will also end this blog, although we might come back a few times to brag about our future publications. In other words, this is the final post with advice from Maria Berge for buying comic books as geeky Christmas gifts. Enjoy, and keep supporting your local bookstore!
LOVE AND ROCKETS: For people who want to read comic book classics
Love and Rockets is a comic book series by the Hernandez brothers: Gilbert and Jaime (and Mario who was less productive). It was one of the first comic books in the alternative comics movement of the 1980s. But don’t be fooled, the art is neither sketchy nor amateurish: Gilbert and Jaime are two of the best cartoonists ever. From the beginning they had no publisher or contacts, but other cartoonists recognised their work (thinking they were much older because of the quality of the drawings). I myself got surprised by how two men could write about female experiences with so much insight: the explanation is their background in a Mexican-American family full of matriarchs. Gilbert’s Palomar tells the story of a fictional village in Latin America and its inhabitants. Jamie’s Hoppers (my favourite) follows the tangled lives of a group of primarily Chicano characters, from their teenage years in the early days of the California punk scene to the present day. These books are classics for comic-book readers.
Ducks: For people who are not afraid of strong feelings
Kate Beaton has always been one of my favourite cartoonists since I read Hark! A Vagrant, which made me laugh and scratch my head. Her work is full of strange Canadian reflections of historic events and literature. Her latest work Ducks (2020), however, is something different. It is a full-length graphic narrative about her dark experience of working in the oil sands among a majority of men, where danger and sexism are everyday occurrences, yet are never discussed. Although she writes from her own perspective it is clear that bad people are not the problem in this environment, but horrible structures that make people break down bit by bit. The illustrations in this comic book are brilliant, but it is the strong story that stays in your stomach long after you have put the book aside. Buy this book and learn about intersectionality!
Familjen fågel: For Swedish middle-class people who are afraid that their family is not perfect
This book by Marie Tillman is in Swedish, but it is so good! Do you think that your family is strange? Welcome to family fågel (bird) where the mother can’t do anything, the father is faking having a job and the grandmother is hiding in the balcony instead of living in Mallorca as expected. The children are normal and avoid following their parents’ advice (to drink whiskey because you are too old to play with cars and to go without clothes because Donald Duck did so). It does not seem fun, but the extreme craziness, that includes a lonely police officer, makes it surprisingly enjoyable. Read this one and you realise that your life is relatively okay if you can buy a loaf of bread instead of onions that taste like crisps.
