COMICS: A World Tour

Bardín the Superrealist


Fantagraphics

This beautifully designed book collects one-named Spanish cartoonist Max's Bardín the Superrealist comic strips, translated and re-presented for consumption by an English-speaking audience. I'm not sure who exactly will be doing the consuming, however, as this is a deeply odd little book. Max's art style evokes Europe's Tintin comics and our own Midwest's Jimmy Corrigan comics from Chris Ware, an evocation helped along by the fact that his Bardín resembles the protagonists of both a little, but with a more bulbous, cartoony head. In the very first story, Bardín is summoned to the realm of the superreal by the Andalusian Dog (named after 1929 surrealist flick Un Chien Andalou), who claims to have stolen the "supperealist powers" of Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, and he passes them on to Bardín.

What follows reads like a collection of Sunday comic strips, or what would pass for Sunday comic strips if the only people who ever read the funnies were philosophy, comparative religion and art history professors.

Bardín, an intellectual, seems to spend all of his time going on walks and having cognacs with his friend Cirlot. In one running gag, he is repeatedly confronted by a deity that resembles Mickey Mouse with three giant eyeballs for a head.

As heady as the material gets—and there are whole strips devoted to debating the nature of the universe and perception—Max paces and punctuates them like a comic-strip adventure, and his clean, colorful art style reduces Hindu gods, Christian saints and the Kabbalah symbols alike into simple, animation-ready cartoon stars. It's rare to see such high-falutin' subject matter conveyed in so accessible a fashion.

Yakitate!! Japan Vols. 1 and 2

Viz

Teenage baker Kazuma Azuma has embarked on a seemingly impossible quest: To create a bread that the Japanese people will like more than they like rice, a bread so famous and distinctive that it will represent Japan to the world in the same way that French bread represents France. He calls it "Ja-pan" ("pan" being Japanese for bread), and he's already on his 55th version of Ja-pan when we meet him in Takashi Hashiguchi's incredible new manga series.

Azuma is a sort of innocent, idiot savant, blessed with a good heart, the warm "Hands of the Sun" the greatest bakers possess and an intuitive baking genius, but very little in the way of street smarts (he's never heard of a "croissant," for example). He competes for a place on the staff of Pantasia, the greatest bakery in the country, and ends up at the company's small branch location, working alongside a scheming rival, a cute young love interest and an eccentric manager with a permed 'fro.

Like the longer-running cooking manga Iron Wok Jan, Yakitate!! Japan (which translates into "fresh-baked Japan") brings the tropes of action, fighting and comic manga and anime to the world of cooking, but Hashiguchi's tale benefits from a tighter focus on bread-making and a more likable cast. Infused with food science, baking trivia and even an occasional recipe, Yakitate!! Japan is by far the best bread-baking comic book you'll read this year.

Mendel's Daughter: A Memoir


Free Press

In 1989, illustrator Martin Lemelman videotaped his mother talking about her life growing up in what is now the Ukraine, and how she survived the Holocaust by hiding with two of her brothers in the woods for two years. In Mendel's Daughter, he tells us the stories he was told, hand-lettering his mother's words into narration, and pairing a few surviving old black-and-white photos with his own stark black-and-white art to turn that story into a graphic novel that is at turns elegiac and at others nostalgic. Lemelman doesn't bother to correct his mother's quirky syntax, so that we can hear her just as she would have spoken, giving the tale an affecting immediacy.