Siberia
Soft Skull Press
The story behind Nikolai Maslov's graphic novel is almost as interesting as the story it tells. Maslov, a middle-aged Russian peasant, marched into a little Moscow bookstore with the first three penciled pages of his life's story and all but demanded publication.
Luckily for Maslov, and us, the bookstore's owner was game, and this strange autobiographical graphic novel eventually made it into print.
Maslov tells his life's story in broad strokes, including only the most seemingly significant parts, from his early '70s childhood in a Siberian village to his time in the Soviet Army to art school to a bizarre, symbolically charged dream that precedes the millennial birth of a brave new Russia.
It all falls somewhere between Chekov and an American understanding of how rough life in Russia was: It's all vodka and hard work and nonsensical party propaganda; it's tractors and snow and social oppression. But this story of late Soviet Russia at least has a happy ending, as it stops shortly after the fall of communism, before any new problems can attach themselves to Maslov.
He's a gifted draftsman, but the book has the strange feel of outsider art, in part because it's so different from normal graphic novels—Maslov eschews ink entirely, and all 90 pages are sketched in the same heavily shaded pencilwork. Given the setting and subject matter, the primitive, inkless panels seem perfectly appropriate.
War Fix
NBM
David Axe watched the first Gulf War on TV as a kid, but when the latest one broke, he was on the other side of the media divide, even if he was just a small-town newspaperman. In 2003, for reasons he himself doesn't seem to understand, he told his incredulous editor and even more incredulous girlfriend that he was going to Iraq to cover that country's elections, even going so far as to pay for his flight, body armor and many-pocketed journalist's vest with his own money.
Axe seems to have written about the war for anyone who'd publish him, including The Village Voice, Salon.com and The Washington Times, but his most powerful work might be this gripping graphic novel, which chronicles his just-emerging addiction to war.
"War's about a lot of things," a friend of his tells him at the climax, once he's returned to the safety of the States. "But mostly it's about dying. Short of dying, you've never really known it." Those who want to know war will therefore never be satisfied until they die, and thus get to know it completely. It's a startling observation, with the ring of an especially depressing truth, whether you apply it to a single journalist or an entire country.
Axe's story is fast-moving, really little more than a string of telling anecdotes illustrated in punchy, poster-like black-and-white graphics, courtesy of Steve Olexa. The tragic fatalism of the work is tempered only by the thought that Axe and Olexa's tale can at least serve as a cautionary one.
Brownsville
NBM
Writer Neil Kleid and artist Jake Allen exploit the medium of comics to tell a complex gangster epic that has the weight and import of a history tome, but with the drama and momentum of a great film.
Named for the New York locale that gave birth to the thugs who would come to be known as Murder Inc., Kleid and Allen's work introduces us to Allie Tannenbaum and Abe Reles, two of the lesser-known figures in the story of Jewish kingpin Louis Lepke Buchalter.
Their story spans the '20s through the '40s, the golden age of the gangster. Like the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, Brownsville zeroes in on exactly what makes American gangsters such fascinating subjects for pseudo-Shakespearean stories—they're simultaneously hero and villain, and switch between those roles from scene to scene.