4 new graphic novels to read and ponder this summer

Washington Post

8 hours ago

'Skin,' written by Versyp and illustrated by Clement, is a story of two women whose paths intertwine in an art class, where Esther is the teacher and Rita, the older of the two, is an inexperienced nude model. Its narrative alternates between vignettes from Esther and Rita's lives, and merges in the class. One day Rita asks Esther why she never simply draws the way Rita looks. 'Because it's boring,' Esther responds, and they become friends. As a child Esther was taught to draw things as she saw them, but that became an exercise of technical skill in which feelings had no place. 'I try to capture their deepest essence in a few lines, pure and simple,' Esther explains, a reflection of Clement's own artistic style.
Clement's silhouettes are sketchy and loosely lined, but she draws like someone so familiar with human anatomy that she can bend it, distort it, reducing it to careless lines or mere shadows that still exude sophistication. She can invoke the hollow cavern of lovelorn loneliness with a single hovering line. There's a distinct tactility in 'Skin.' Texture is emulated by both background and technique as Clement alternates between pastels, pencils, pens and watercolors. The palette hews mostly to green-blue-tinged washes, with pops of color. Yellow for Rita's dress and the ginkgo tree. Red for her hair and the wine.
A bar scene where Esther meets the man who will break her heart looks like something out of an impressionist painting: illuminated by light, built by shadows, and animated by fluid gestures and expressive movement. Usually mired in self-doubt, Esther dissolves into a gin-drenched haze and new-love-induced euphoria. In her pink boots, she saunters, dances across the street, exuberant. When the man leaves, like others before him, Esther retreats from the world.
'Everything that goes leaves a scar,' Versyp writes. Clement draws the ghost of Rita's mother in red ink, set against a background of corrugated cardboard, appearing out of a crack in the ceiling to comfort her. 'Lay down your armor,' she tells Rita. Flawlessly in sync, Versyp and Clement consider the masks we wear for other people and the skins we must shed to survive, despite the risks that come with giving other people a piece of ourselves. Aloof and wayward teenage daughters become forlorn, abandoned mothers. Someone falls out of love too fast. The tragedies in 'Skin' may be quotidian, but they are exquisitely explored.
'Skin,' written by Versyp and illustrated by Clement, is a story of two women whose paths intertwine in an art class, where Esther is the teacher and Rita, the older of the two, is an inexperienced nude model. Its narrative alternates between vignettes from Esther and Rita's lives, and merges in the class. One day Rita asks Esther why she never simply draws the way Rita looks. 'Because it's boring,' Esther responds, and they become friends. As a child Esther was taught to draw things as she saw them, but that became an exercise of technical skill in which feelings had no place. 'I try to capture their deepest essence in a few lines, pure and simple,' Esther explains, a reflection of Clement's own artistic style.
Clement's silhouettes are sketchy and loosely lined, but she draws like someone so familiar with human anatomy that she can bend it, distort it, reducing it to careless lines or mere shadows that still exude sophistication. She can invoke the hollow cavern of lovelorn loneliness with a single hovering line. There's a distinct tactility in 'Skin.' Texture is emulated by both background and technique as Clement alternates between pastels, pencils, pens and watercolors. The palette hews mostly to green-blue-tinged washes, with pops of color. Yellow for Rita's dress and the ginkgo tree. Red for her hair and the wine.
A bar scene where Esther meets the man who will break her heart looks like something out of an impressionist painting: illuminated by light, built by shadows, and animated by fluid gestures and expressive movement. Usually mired in self-doubt, Esther dissolves into a gin-drenched haze and new-love-induced euphoria. In her pink boots, she saunters, dances across the street, exuberant. When the man leaves, like others before him, Esther retreats from the world.
'Everything that goes leaves a scar,' Versyp writes. Clement draws the ghost of Rita's mother in red ink, set against a background of corrugated cardboard, appearing out of a crack in the ceiling to comfort her. 'Lay down your armor,' she tells Rita. Flawlessly in sync, Versyp and Clement consider the masks we wear for other people and the skins we must shed to survive, despite the risks that come with giving other people a piece of ourselves. Aloof and wayward teenage daughters become forlorn, abandoned mothers. Someone falls out of love too fast. The tragedies in 'Skin' may be quotidian, but they are exquisitely explored.
Sarah Huxley moves from London to Paris for a demanding but well-paying corporate job, expecting beauty and romance. She is quickly disillusioned when the language barrier estranges her from conversations and connections. Instead, she stumbles into Ping Loh, a young woman from Hong Kong, who works as an au pair for a rich Chinese family in the city and who, like Sarah, has a barely functional grasp of French. They talk in broken tongues, spanning Cantonese, French and English, half understanding each other, embarrassing themselves often but becoming friends anyway.
Punctuated by corporate drudgery and insufferable (sometimes sleazy) employers, their story unfolds with the help of text messages, dictionaries and outdoor activities. When they are together, no one seems to understand their 'strange patchwork of languages,' but, before we know it, this linguistic push and pull metamorphoses from painfully awkward friendship to earnest love story. Sarah's understanding of Cantonese remains shaky, but she understands Ping. 'When I speak another language, I can almost catch a glimpse, an entrevoit, of myself as another person,' Sarah muses.
Apart from Albon's clever use of lettering that effortlessly intermingles multilingual exchanges, 'Love Languages' is visually conventional, verging on ordinary in its composition and paneling. But Albon's rich watercolors — saturated and sumptuous — of people, food and cities make for a gorgeous and emotionally tender read about two foreigners falling in love, obliviously at first and then with sudden speed.
Sarah Huxley moves from London to Paris for a demanding but well-paying corporate job, expecting beauty and romance. She is quickly disillusioned when the language barrier estranges her from conversations and connections. Instead, she stumbles into Ping Loh, a young woman from Hong Kong, who works as an au pair for a rich Chinese family in the city and who, like Sarah, has a barely functional grasp of French. They talk in broken tongues, spanning Cantonese, French and English, half understanding each other, embarrassing themselves often but becoming friends anyway.
Punctuated by corporate drudgery and insufferable (sometimes sleazy) employers, their story unfolds with the help of text messages, dictionaries and outdoor activities. When they are together, no one seems to understand their 'strange patchwork of languages,' but, before we know it, this linguistic push and pull metamorphoses from painfully awkward friendship to earnest love story. Sarah's understanding of Cantonese remains shaky, but she understands Ping. 'When I speak another language, I can almost catch a glimpse, an entrevoit, of myself as another person,' Sarah muses.
Apart from Albon's clever use of lettering that effortlessly intermingles multilingual exchanges, 'Love Languages' is visually conventional, verging on ordinary in its composition and paneling. But Albon's rich watercolors — saturated and sumptuous — of people, food and cities make for a gorgeous and emotionally tender read about two foreigners falling in love, obliviously at first and then with sudden speed.
Curious in both form and content, 'From Above' is crime fiction told in color-coded dots from an aerial perspective. An oft-bullied kid, Simon Hope, bets on an unlikely racehorse based on the advice of a clairvoyant neighbor. He wins 16 million pounds. When his mother is brutally beaten into a coma and his father goes missing, he is unable to claim the prize money. There are twists, turns and constantly unfolding chaos as the plot devolves into a surreal whodunit.
There is a sense of interactive unraveling, because the story demands that the reader carefully decipher visual information delivered in the form of floor plans, flowcharts, maps and diagrams. In a particularly clever use of minimalist design, Simon's entire family history is summarized in one infographic. Each living thing in the story — people, ducks, dogs and pigeons — is represented by a dot of a certain color. One would think such a detached style — where we never see the characters — would undercut emotional expressiveness, but it is surprisingly easy to empathize with the solitary dot that stands in for Simon. The aerial perspective is punctuated by the occasional illustration in one-point perspective for emphasis, such as when the page itself becomes a door that leads to the hospital ward where Simon's mother is comatose. When he is handed a full report of her injuries, the blue book is upside down. This simple design choice puts us in his shoes, showing us the book as he sees it.
Panchaud's diagrammatic style, informed by his dyslexia, is conceptually fresh; it's somewhat reminiscent of the style of Chris Ware but pared down further: flat colors, schematic drawings, dots, lines. There is a distinct '90s computer graphic aesthetic that clashes absurdly with the film noir qualities of the plot. What results is a fine example of successful, if strange, formal experimentation.
Curious in both form and content, 'From Above' is crime fiction told in color-coded dots from an aerial perspective. An oft-bullied kid, Simon Hope, bets on an unlikely racehorse based on the advice of a clairvoyant neighbor. He wins 16 million pounds. When his mother is brutally beaten into a coma and his father goes missing, he is unable to claim the prize money. There are twists, turns and constantly unfolding chaos as the plot devolves into a surreal whodunit.
There is a sense of interactive unraveling, because the story demands that the reader carefully decipher visual information delivered in the form of floor plans, flowcharts, maps and diagrams. In a particularly clever use of minimalist design, Simon's entire family history is summarized in one infographic. Each living thing in the story — people, ducks, dogs and pigeons — is represented by a dot of a certain color. One would think such a detached style — where we never see the characters — would undercut emotional expressiveness, but it is surprisingly easy to empathize with the solitary dot that stands in for Simon. The aerial perspective is punctuated by the occasional illustration in one-point perspective for emphasis, such as when the page itself becomes a door that leads to the hospital ward where Simon's mother is comatose. When he is handed a full report of her injuries, the blue book is upside down. This simple design choice puts us in his shoes, showing us the book as he sees it.
Panchaud's diagrammatic style, informed by his dyslexia, is conceptually fresh; it's somewhat reminiscent of the style of Chris Ware but pared down further: flat colors, schematic drawings, dots, lines. There is a distinct '90s computer graphic aesthetic that clashes absurdly with the film noir qualities of the plot. What results is a fine example of successful, if strange, formal experimentation.
A history lesson, a travelogue and a memoir all wrapped together with elements of graphic journalism, Thompson's 'Ginseng Roots' spans the history of farming American ginseng, the trade relationship between the United States and China, and Thompson's lingering guilt over the gap between his ostensibly easy career as a cartoonist (he is the author of the classic graphic novel 'Blankets,' among other books) and his working-class childhood in rural Wisconsin.
At 20, Thompson moved out of Marathon, a town of 1,200 that was once the world's leading producer of American ginseng, where he spent many summers working in the fields as a child laborer along with Phil, his younger brother. Before the two were teens, they joined their parents plucking weeds and picking roots, rocks and berries — all for just a dollar (which eventually became three) an hour. With their earnings, they would buy comic books. 'When our dad came home with acid burns from factory welding and stories of wading neck deep in septic tanks … we dreamed of the cushy lifestyle of the cartoonist, indoors all day, playing make-believe, and doodling,' Thompson recalls.
On a trip to China, years later, Thompson injures his wrist. Worried it will affect his ability to draw, he seeks treatment and finds ginseng grown in America at a local pharmacy. Once he is back in America, he discovers that the injury is an aggressive form of fibromatosis, which will deteriorate whether he draws or not. When Thompson returns to Marathon for the International Wisconsin Ginseng Festival, he interviews people including his old bosses (who complain about environmental regulations and declining American work ethic), his childhood friend, Chua (whose family was among the first Hmong people to settle in Wisconsin) and Will Hsu, a ginseng farmer whose hard-won success is threatened by the anti-Chinese sentiment that has become commonplace since 2020.
Thompson traces the history of ginseng in the East and the West, moving easily from the Wausau Chamber of Commerce in the present to 1634, when the French explorer Jean Nicolet arrived in Wisconsin 'convinced he'd made it to China,' to the real China in the 1700s, where Jesuit cartographer and mathematician Pierre Jartoux received a gift of ginseng roots and became the first Westerner to experience the herb and record it with illustrations. But he also tells us stories that are closer to his own life: how Chua's family made it across the Mekong River to Thailand before eventually arriving in the ginseng farms of rural Wisconsin at the end of the Vietnam War, for example, or his own research trips to China and Korea. Thompson's intricately drawn maps and illustrations are dense, but they give way to a lucid network of panels and pages that braid these distinct threads.
'I want ginseng to be what heals me, especially if it's the industry that may have poisoned me,' he writes in a page where the younger version of Craig and an anthropomorphic ginseng root stand hand in hand, encouraging the adult Craig to start making comics again.
A history lesson, a travelogue and a memoir all wrapped together with elements of graphic journalism, Thompson's 'Ginseng Roots' spans the history of farming American ginseng, the trade relationship between the United States and China, and Thompson's lingering guilt over the gap between his ostensibly easy career as a cartoonist (he is the author of the classic graphic novel 'Blankets,' among other books) and his working-class childhood in rural Wisconsin.
At 20, Thompson moved out of Marathon, a town of 1,200 that was once the world's leading producer of American ginseng, where he spent many summers working in the fields as a child laborer along with Phil, his younger brother. Before the two were teens, they joined their parents plucking weeds and picking roots, rocks and berries — all for just a dollar (which eventually became three) an hour. With their earnings, they would buy comic books. 'When our dad came home with acid burns from factory welding and stories of wading neck deep in septic tanks … we dreamed of the cushy lifestyle of the cartoonist, indoors all day, playing make-believe, and doodling,' Thompson recalls.
On a trip to China, years later, Thompson injures his wrist. Worried it will affect his ability to draw, he seeks treatment and finds ginseng grown in America at a local pharmacy. Once he is back in America, he discovers that the injury is an aggressive form of fibromatosis, which will deteriorate whether he draws or not. When Thompson returns to Marathon for the International Wisconsin Ginseng Festival, he interviews people including his old bosses (who complain about environmental regulations and declining American work ethic), his childhood friend, Chua (whose family was among the first Hmong people to settle in Wisconsin) and Will Hsu, a ginseng farmer whose hard-won success is threatened by the anti-Chinese sentiment that has become commonplace since 2020.
Thompson traces the history of ginseng in the East and the West, moving easily from the Wausau Chamber of Commerce in the present to 1634, when the French explorer Jean Nicolet arrived in Wisconsin 'convinced he'd made it to China,' to the real China in the 1700s, where Jesuit cartographer and mathematician Pierre Jartoux received a gift of ginseng roots and became the first Westerner to experience the herb and record it with illustrations. But he also tells us stories that are closer to his own life: how Chua's family made it across the Mekong River to Thailand before eventually arriving in the ginseng farms of rural Wisconsin at the end of the Vietnam War, for example, or his own research trips to China and Korea. Thompson's intricately drawn maps and illustrations are dense, but they give way to a lucid network of panels and pages that braid these distinct threads.
'I want ginseng to be what heals me, especially if it's the industry that may have poisoned me,' he writes in a page where the younger version of Craig and an anthropomorphic ginseng root stand hand in hand, encouraging the adult Craig to start making comics again.