PIGEONS!: A Fable For Our Times, and many others throughout history

PIGEONS!: A Fable For Our Times
MARC CHALVIN
Street Noise Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$25.99, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A contemporary political allegory of power, to remind us of the dangers of following a dictator and surrendering your freedom.

Life is simple for the pigeons. They have no desire to contemplate their future or take control of it. Free from responsibility, they are all too willing to submit to a strong authority. This is precisely what a cruel and power-hungry crow was waiting for—a perfect opportunity to wield his natural talents as a tyrant. The crow enforces law and order, but also terror and arbitrary rules. Everyone seems to accept this situation—or maybe, they are too scared to resist. Until an idealistic seagull steps in, determined to challenge the system through debate and free elections.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really think everything I could say would be superfluous...if you wonder, like me, WHY people choose authoritarian social orders with such alacrity and frequency, this is your answer. Only told with sequential artwork, featuring pigeons.

Now look at the art.

I could go on, the publisher's been very generous with art for publicity, but I feel my point is made. Wisecracking birds in thrall to an authoritarian bird might make some of this make some sense.

Mostly I think the graphic-novel medium will let some messages slide through your at-risk young male giftee's defenses. It sure as hell can't hurt, it's cheap as a psychic inoculation against authoritarian/fascist bullshit goes.

HYBRED: A Graphic Novel, meditating on how bad the world will get set to *gorgeous* artwork

HYBRED: A Graphic Novel
JAMIE MUSTARD (illus. Francesca Filomena)
Street Noise Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in a future-adjacent, alternative Los Angeles, this is a story of staggering poverty, drugs, and violence and of an artistic child who finds beauty in the ugly and sublime hope in our conflicts.

HYBRED shows us how in our most marginalized communities lies an astonishing amount of genius which goes unnoticed and is so often tragically wasted.

Nine-year-old Johnny James lives in The Casque, the poorest neighborhood in Greater Angeles, where he shares a one-room apartment with his mother, stepfather, two brothers, and an army of cockroaches. He spends his days in the sweltering heat of the neighborhood, at the movie theaters, playing tackleball, or drawing—but there’s no money for him to go to school.

As death, addiction, and violence swirl through the neighborhood, Johnny grows up with friends, adventures, and magic around him. And he discovers how to use art, beauty, and personal strength to transcend the forces destined to hold him back.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This graphic story is a heightened, fictionalized alternate-history version of Author Mustard's real-life memoir Child X, recently published by BenBella Books. Added fantastical moments...levitating while in a flow state from making art, conjuring rain to ease "the Long Drought" afflicting his alternate LA...Author Mustard works within the world-view of a kid with no memories of brighter days, who can't conjure a brighter future.

we set our scene; Johnny exhibits powers

It comes to pass that, even in the direst, most terrible poverty, living with his four-person family in one room and unable (due to lack of money) to attend school, Johnny is capable of seeing true beauty, of creating from the drabness around him glimpses of a world imbued with the hope inherent in beauty.

Johnny's home is his world

I don't think you'll be surprised to learn that Johnny is magical, like so many trapped in his terrible circumstances...without hope, without prospects, paths to escape.

There is inside him the wellspring of beauty and art, and this story paired with the gorgeous artwork, does its best to show that anyone, no matter how deeply oppressed and neglected, can escape.

I don't know that Author Mustard really turned the trick of proving this point; in the end, I was more uplifted by the gestalt of the artwork and the story's points of view on the world Author Mustard created to hold his only mildly distorting mirror to our complacent, privileged faces.

Hold the image of the beautiful inside and out Johnny in your mind's eye; he will shine beauty back at you, nourish you with his goodness.

A treasure indeed.

MILK WITHOUT HONEY, elegant graphic non-fiction about bees gracefully translated from German

MILK WITHOUT HONEY
HANNA HARMS (tr. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp)
Street Noise Books
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What would the future of the world look like without bees?
MILK WITHOUT HONEY chosen for NPR’s BOOKS WE LOVE!

Bees are vital to securing our food supply. We could live in a paradise where insects, especially bees pollinate fragrant seas of flowers whose fruits we harvest. Instead, vast lawns are now replacing flower gardens, and agriculture is characterized by monocultures. Pesticides and climate change are also causing insect mortality, with dramatic consequences for the global ecosystem. As we destroy the insect populations, honey is just one of many foods that will no longer be available to us, unless we learn to honor our innate connection with nature before it's too late.

In gorgeous, limited palette artwork, using contemplative images as well as informative charts, Hanna Harms brings us into the world of bees: their hives, their colonies, and their interactions with the global ecosystem. This is the perfect gift book for anyone concerned about climate change and the environment.

About the Author
Hanna Harms is an illustrator and comic author. She graduated from the Münster School of Design in Germany. She is currently studying for an MA in illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Hanna is co-editor and author of the comic zine Sander. The German edition of this debut graphic novel Milch ohne Honig, won the Ginco Award in 2020 in the Best Nonfiction Comic category.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book receiving wide notice, a lot of praise, and all of it well-deserved. The author is German, and translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp did a seamless job of rendering the text into equally elegant English. Look at these spare, graceful pages:


Remember when I praised BIOGRAPHY OF A FLY by Jaap Robben? The style here is very similar, so of course I'm inclined to enjoy it.

The choice of yellow and black for the presentation is logical...what color is a bee, after all...but I wish they'd gone just a bit more bee-and-honey with the shade. As it is, the book is more pee-and-yellowjacket. It got a touch wearing. That's why the book only got 4.5 stars instead of five, which it otherwise fully merits.

That did not stop me from devouring the book, pardon my wordplay, eager to possess the images that Author Harms has created to explicate the nature of the problem that bees face. The depths of our species' dependence on the bee for its labors to feed itself, which thereby feeds us, makes this a very urgently needed book.

I hope you'll add it to your young ecowarrior's pile of gifts this Yule.

RESTLESS, gorgeous, surreal story of coming out, and getting out of a war zone

RESTLESS
JOSEPH KAI
Street Noise Books
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: What would life feel like without fear and oppression? Is it possible to find solace in the power of chosen family, underground art collectives, and ultimately revolution?

Set in Beirut, Lebanon, a city once known to be a vibrant cultural center of the region. It's 30 years after the end of the civil war, and a few months before the disastrous explosion of August 2020. Samar, a young queer comic book artist, wanders between anguished dreams, childhood memories, romantic experiences, and Beirut’s alternative communities. This abstractly autobiographical story tells of the author's anxiety over living in a complex city of changing colors and moods. Three powerful themes: art, sex, and political uprising, are interwoven in a compelling narrative and an otherworldly color palette.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Definitely for your older, out, college-age gay nephew or grandson. This is truly a heartwrenching story of being Other in a collapsing world of people stoked on rage and outrage. We begin with a dream sequence:

...that sets the tone of menace, in a place of not-quite reality, that I think every gay lad has experienced to some level. The story goes into the sadness and misery of feeling without a home, without anyone to call your own in a world that doesn't care at best, hates you for being you at worst.

The author/artist is a gay man from Beirut, so this is clearly autobiographical to some degree. It feels like he has lived these moments of passion, of fear, of loneliness. He is offering us his roadmap from a life at war, external and internal, to his present place of creative and engaged safety.

This being real life depicted in art, it isn't sugar-glazed:

...even when people are part of the life we make for ourselves, conflict continues, within us and among us. Every part of this message is worth delivering to your just-barely-fledged gay giftee as he starts reckoning with his complicated past, his unfolding present, his unknowable future.

GAY GIANT, a graphic memoir from Chile about being Different in a place at a time where that was Bad

GAY GIANT
GABRIEL EBENSPERGER
Street Noise Books
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A child who feels like an outsider in a world that’s set against him. A boy who sings on the playground instead of playing soccer, who likes Barbies, and whose secretly favorite car is the one called Tutti Frutti. Gabriel Ebensperger shares with us his struggles with his own inadequacy, his feelings of guilt, and above all, his fear that his “difference” will be discovered. The vibrant bright pink pages of Gay Giant paint a picture of what it was like to grow up being gay in the ’90s, through the voice of an endearing character, who on the way to becoming an adult realizes that the rejection of the world is never over, and that true acceptance comes from within yourself.

A gay giant can't hide. This charming coming-of-age and coming-to-terms with oneself story shows us what it feels like to grow up queer in a heteronormative society in the 1990s.

Filled with pop culture touchstones from Cher to Steven Tyler, from Jurassic Park to Grey's Anatomy, this book navigates both the joy and the pain of puberty surrounded by ignorance and homophobia. How do you love yourself if you've learned so well to hate yourself? For all of us who've ever felt bizarre, damaged, or strange, we are shown that all is full of love, and that true acceptance must come from within yourself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Chile isn't exactly famous for its history of QUILTBAG rights protections. The country legalized same-sex, um, relations in 1999. But like everywhere else on Earth, at every time since there have been humans on Earth, people been usin' what they got to get their groove on since forever.

What Author Ebensperger experienced, then, as a youth in a macho culture, wasn't external affirmation or even acceptance. He was, well, weird. And weird kids suffer at the hands of their peers. It's the hands of their parents that do the most damage, though it looks like Author Ebensperger's parents were either remarkably chill, if significantly out of their depth, or he glossed over some stuff. Frankly I don't think that is the case because he and I share a favorite car: The godlike Citroën CX. He prefers the first year, 1974; where I idolize the 1978 Pallas model. Probably because I drove one and had A Crisis. *shiver*

How do I know this about him? He draws all of his cars very carefully, so I can see them vividly. (I confess I don't understand why his parents' 1967 Peugeot was evil; but I totally support his assessment of the W114 Mercedes-Benz as the Vehicle of the Antichrist.) And at a crucial moment, the aforementioned Citroën CX does a Back-to-the-Future-esque cameo. And that explains why I rated this graphic memoir a full four stars when 1) I HATE PINK and b) I ain't wild about sequential-art storytelling in general.

Look:

Under normal circumstances, I'd struggle to find something polite to say about the pinkness of the exercise, despite the really wonderfully clear message of self-acceptance and a dropping of one's internalized homophobia about "nelly queens" or "femmes" or, generally, men who don't fit the masculine stereotype. I mean, no one's asking you to marry the guy! Just don't sneer at him, or belittle him, or even (if you simply can not keep your heteronormative judgments to yourself) pollute his air with your breath. (Pink was the only color my mother could really love so I was surrounded by it. I hate it for that reason.)

But let me say again for the rare newcomer to my ambit: I am always looking for ways to challenge my habits and patterns and prejudices because I am hell-bent on not dying above the neck before I do below it. I get lovely rewards, like reading this charming essay in knowing your true self and working until you're in a love relationship with that self. I get to look at people from countries so very far away from my own perch in the Northestern US tell stories that were true for me, thirty years before these stories took place. I am not alone; neither is the author; we are connected in an experience of the world as outsider other unwanted and, as a result, damaged in ways no one should be.

Here we are, in a new century, in a world that keeps trending towards a better, brighter future (if you ignore climate change) and yet there are always people who don't fit and whose pain is crippling. Yes, Our Flag Means Death was renewed, and there's a lovely clap-back against the vile racism recrudescing in the Star Wars stewpot, and still we hear the lunatic right-wing idiots braying their teeth out about pedophile faggots (almost exclusively a heterosexual crime, pedophilia, but we all know how much that crowd respects facts). I am still gruntled and kempt as I contemplate Street Noise Books's list in all its truth-telling glory. I am still wreathed in happy smiles as I leaf again through this 256-page bath of pinkness, because it tells me that my story is shared...right down to the survival and thriving of its main character.

Who has awesome taste in cars.

QUEER AS ALL GET OUT: 10 People Who've Inspired Me, inspired me in my turn

QUEER AS ALL GET OUT: 10 People Who've Inspired Me
SHELBY CRISWELL
Street Noise Books
$18.99 trade paper, available 23 November 2021

Rating: 5 shining, proud, delighted stars of five

The Publisher Says: Take a walk with one queer artist from Texas and explore the lives of ten LGBTQ+ people from history.

What does it take to live your truth? And how do we each navigate the struggle for personal acceptance within a society that is so often intolerant? In this galvanizing story of resilience, Shelby Criswell takes us by the hand and leads us through the lived experiences of ten inspiring people. Each an example of how to find your way as your own authentic self.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This US Thanksgiving, or "Happy Holocaust of the Native Americans" Holiday as I am prone to call it, I wanted to offer something I am truly thankful for: Young Queer creators telling their authentic stories from the places they live. It's not a luxury I had; it's not a luxury to be taken for granted anywhere, if you listen to Scholastique Mukasonga; and so it should be celebrated as much as we're able to do so.

This is a strong open, the simple act of getting one's order in a coffee shop made without awkwardness or fuss or hostility. The kindness of simply not assuming anything and still making the effort to be polite is, sad to say, still revolutionary and worthy of comment and praise. But it's a fruitful moment: It gives birth to the concept, "who came before me? who else struggled with the world's pig-headedness and intolerance?" As the marketing material offers this list of people profiled in the book, I can do no better than to offer it to you in my turn:

Mary Jones (mid 1800’s);

We’wha (1849-1896);

Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935);

Dr. Pauli Murray (1910-1985);

Wilmer “Little Axe” M. Broadnax (1916-1994);

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973);

Carlett Brown (1927-?);

Nancy Cárdenas (1934-1994);

Ifti Nasim (1946-2011);

and Simon Nkoli (1957-1998)

Comprehensive! Impressive! I loved the profiles, as brief as they were by necessity, because they were handsomely illustrated and clearly selected for Author & Artist Creswell's personal connection to their message(s). First up is late-life out lesbian Nancy Cárdenas:

I found the story of Cárdenas's coming out so touching, that she was inspired to do it by the horrors of the AIDS plague (Beauty Salon came out the same year she died of breast cancer). It is an ongoing tragedy that breast cancer's ravages deprive so many of us of people we love, and the world of so many bright and shining stars. Cárdenas led an exemplary life and I'm delighted to meet her here.

The other nine protagonists are equally well-chosen, equally share their space with the everyday bravery of a trans person living in Texas well. The idea of being openly anything in Texas is something that slightly stuns me. Yes, I grew up in Austin; I wasn't ever really *in* so coming *out* wasn't very necessary; but it was always, always clear to me in 1970s Texas that I was suffered to exist and that sufferance was revocable at any time.

That young Shelby Criswell isn't as threatened in their environment thrills and delights me. This lovely book exists because they made it; they made it because it spoke to a need in them; and that need, as is so often the case, is the normal human need to see yourself in the world, past and present.

Anyone out there who needs to hear this, here's the message in lovely images and direct words without fear or judgment. If you know someone who's got a tablet who needs to hear this message of being seen, being valued and valuable, being the heir to a lineage of ancestors, here's a #Booksgiving treat to gift to them.

POWER BORN OF DREAMS: My Story is Palestine, a graphic novel of the bitterness of Home-lessness

POWER BORN OF DREAMS: My Story is Palestine
MOHAMMED SABAANEH
Street Noise Books
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What does freedom look like from inside an Israeli prison?

A bird perches on the cell window and offers a deal: “You bring the pencil, and I will bring the stories,” stories of family, of community, of Gaza, of the West Bank, of Jerusalem, of Palestine. The two collect threads of memory and intergenerational trauma from ongoing settler-colonialism. Helping us to see that the prison is much larger than a building, far wider than a cell; it stretches through towns and villages, past military checkpoints and borders. But hope and solidarity can stretch farther, deeper, once strength is drawn of stories and power is born of dreams. Translating headlines into authentic lived experiences, these stories come to life in the striking linocut artwork of Mohammad Sabaaneh, helping us to see Palestinians not as political symbols, but as people.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The author/artist, whose lived experience this graphic novel is born out of, made a beautiful work of art out of suffering.

The linocuts used to create the illustrations are truly brutal, absolutely unsparingly blocky and confining, and that is the essence of the story he is telling us in his words and images. It's my worst nightmare, claustrophobia, made in art. There's nothing worse than the feeling of being TRAPPED, of having no agency in the workings of your own world...you exist that way, you don't live. In the beginning of the book, you're not told what happened to bring the author/artist into an Israeli prison. We're just...in there. We are, like him, forced to experience imprisonment, though we're unaware of why and presumably he is...there's a line that a guard shouts at him about wanting to become a martyr, so I can deduce from that there is a violent act in the man's past. Or the planning of one, or just the suspicion of the planning of one...societies that exist inside a conflict paradigm are noticeably more paranoid than ones that don't.

The flights of the bird the author/artist creates to make the stories of others come alive are beautifully imagined. The linocut technique carries through the sense of enclosure, of stasis within a field; the bird's flights aren't escapes but reminders of the nature of imprisonment, confinement. It is this essential feature of the story that I found least convincing, though. I wasn't sold on the narrative device providing an urgently needed contrast to the overall looming, enclosed tone of the book.

The awful entanglement of the body in the emotional and mental space of imprisonment, confinement, comes through more clearly than ever as the author presents us with the stories of other Palestinians, those not imprisoned with him, as they navigate the awfulness of never being allowed a sense of Home or even of safety in this place they, and their ancestors before them, once were masters of their own fates within.

The entire experience of this artwork, this passionately lived experience of being disempowered, unhomed, dehumanized for wanting what someone else has simply...taken...as their right, their just compensation for a world that you didn't agree with or agree to be identified with's abuse of them...there is no right? There is no Right? Who says? Why do you say there's no solution, because you don't want the one the other side wants? Then when will stories like this one ever cease? Can they ever become history, when they aren't even acknowledged as History?

This Yuletide, pick up a piece of Art, a fragment of story, that you really don't know how much you don't know about. A book like this, with its personal tales as well as a more scholarly, factual end-story, will give you the personal perspective of people you don't know or know about.

Then realize: The issues in this book are not solely Over There. They apply right here on your doorstep. So take a moment to recognize and realize that everything you possess, everything you take for granted, has a cost. And not solely to you.