World Within the World
By Julia Gfrörer
WORLD WITHIN THE WORLD (Fantagraphics, 320 pp., $39.99) is both a collection of Gfrörer’s short works since 2010 and a sort of wide-ranging, loosely arranged survey of Western storytelling from cave paintings to the present day, including the NBC sitcom “Frasier.” Her taste in types of trauma and dismay is just as catholic — think of this book as the Norton Anthology of Violence.
Gfrörer’s stories would be unbearable if they weren’t so funny, and she salts this collection with the occasional page of, say, drawings of Ryan Gosling, or an aside between evil spirits wondering idly how humans even manage to stick to the furniture. One realistic story about a woman flirting with a bartender has a punchline right out of a dirty joke. It’s a good thing Gfrörer does this, because there are more bitter demises by volume here than in almost any other comic I can think of.
Horror artists tend to have different preoccupations, with some scary storytellers preferring to add grotesque designs or moments of monster-movie shock to traditional adventure narratives or folk tales. These approaches are all well and good, but Gfrörer is uncompromising: She gets her narrative momentum from the dread itself, rather than grafting it onto a story with its own form of forward motion, and so she seems to feel obligated to visit uncharted territory.
Even when she explicitly revisits Poe (a few stories, including two offering pornographic twists on Poe’s work, are written with her husband, Sean T. Collins), or tweaks Hawthorne or the stories of Roman Christian martyrs, she is replacing the hearts of these stories with her own inquiries into suffering: How much pain will there be? When will it stop?
Anzuelo
By Emma Ríos
It’s surprising in several ways that Ríos, a Spanish superhero comics veteran, would publish ANZUELO (Image Comics, 304 pp., $24.99), a sweeping magical-realist coming-of-age story set after the apocalypse with nary an Avenger in sight. But most shocking is the look of the book: Ríos is best known for her work in ink — Image Comics published an oversize volume showcasing her line art from the series “Pretty Deadly” just this year — and this new book is entirely painted in watercolor. In precise blots of orange and blue and sea-green, she spins a story of three kids who survive the worldwide tsunami that heralds the coming of a race of gigantic, unknowable beings who’ve been hiding deep within the oceans all along.
It’s a complex book, more concerned with its characters’ emotional development than with the intricacies of its sci-fi setting, many of which Ríos is content to leave ambiguous. Instead, she spends her time in her story’s increasingly porous boundary between human and animal, where characters given gills or the power to turn into a bird must reckon with huge questions of community and environmental stewardship. If you stopped being human, how would you treat animals? What would you eat? How would you provide for people who can’t help themselves? “Anzuelo” (Spanish for “fishhook”) has much in common with manga drawn by the ecologically minded animator Hayao Miyazaki — especially Ríos’s beautiful monsters — but her voice is her own.
The Legend of Luther Arkwright
By Bryan Talbot
Talbot has completed a 46-year-long sci-fi story with THE LEGEND OF LUTHER ARKWRIGHT (Dark Horse, 238 pp., $39.99), a carefully hewed capstone to the saga’s other two volumes, “The Adventures of Luther Arkwright,” which Talbot drew and published in installments from 1978 to 1989, and 1999’s “Heart of Empire.” The original “Arkwright” is a linchpin of British comics, both for its complexity and for its literate satire of U.K. politics, and Talbot mixes and matches his own styles here, drawing characters who debuted in the first volume in a wonderfully scratchy style and shifting to a cleaner line when he revisits the slicker “Heart of Empire.”
Like many others of his generation, including the French artist Mœbius and Talbot’s fellow English writer Alan Moore, Talbot has labored happily under the shadow of the great author and editor Michael Moorcock, whose novels about the inter-dimensional gadabout Jerry Cornelius gave admirers a template for a dozen more rapscallion heroes. Luther is among the very best of these, thanks in large part to Talbot’s adroit mixture of adventure-serial high stakes and passionately anarchist political commentary. In his first volume, Luther took on an immortal Oliver Cromwell; in the second, a shambling monster with a royal lineage; now, he battles his evolutionary better — a genetic supremacist super-being, Proteus, who sees humankind as a race of pests to be done away with. In the same way that Cromwell stood in for the conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Proteus has much in common with contemporary race science hucksters, though Proteus also possesses formidable superpowers.
Talbot delights in deploying melodramatic stock characters to unexpected ends, especially Luther’s companions, a deliberately Falstaffian cockney scoundrel and an apparently catatonic woman concealing vast psychic abilities of her own. If it’s not too surprising that selfless good triumphs over selfish evil in the end, there are certainly surprises along the way.
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