#graphic novel memoir | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rachel-sylvan-author · 10 days

Text

"Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home" by Nora Krug

Thank you @yayyyybooks for the rec! ❤️

#Belonging a German Reckons with History and Home #Nora Krug #Belonging #Shame #Identity #Hope #Memoir #Graphic Novel #Graphic Novel Memoir #book recs #book recommendations #books #book #book rec #Healing

1 note · View note

afabstract · 1 month

Text

We Can Fix It - Graphic Novel Review

Jess Fink uses time-travel to take readers through her life's low and high point in the graphic novel memoir "We Can Fix It".

⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. Jess Fink travels back in time to save her younger selves from doing things that would either lead to embarrassment, discomfort or trauma in the adult graphic novel memoir “We Can Fix It”. So, one of the first few things Jess does is stop her younger self from making out with a “jerk” and instead makes out with herself to satisfy her hormonal rage. Yeah, that’s kind of…

View On WordPress

#comic books #graphic novel memoir #Graphic novels #Jess Fink #kindle unlimited #time travel books #We Can Fix It book review #We Can Fix It graphic novel review #We Can Fix It review

0 notes

pantheonbooks · 2 months

Text

“I feel like they want a kinder, gentler Holocaust to present.” —Art Spiegelman

Two years ago, the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee banned the first—and only—Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel from their 8th grade curriculum: Art Spiegelman's Maus.

1K notes · View notes

kjscottwrites · 7 months

Text

And, importantly, share some recs!

3K notes · View notes

morebedsidebooks · 2 years

Text

Bye Bye Babylon by Lamia Ziadé

I’ve shared books involving the Lebanese Civil War before. There are understandably many, from poetry, children’s books, adult fiction, and nonfiction. Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975-1979 by Lamia Ziadé is a graphic novel memoir published in 2010. Stunning in several ways, it is one of the most visceral I’ve read on the conflict. An album filled with pages of spots, scenery, businesses, homes, family, faces, film and TV, items mundane, ritzy and those of war, the soldiers, militias, flames, firearms, grenades, bombs, death, massacres, assassinations, terror. Interspersed like a journal with all too utilitarian font to the text of even more devastating recollections of childhood yet also the awareness of the adult. There’s a timeline at the back from 1918-1979 too detailing key points that also come up though, the book is most focused on those later years of the 1970s. A designer and illustrator excelling in Pop Art visuals Ziadé manages to put what one might not even think could be expressed on the page. Even though she’s lived in Paris for a long time, she has continued to sort out the trauma, revisit Bye Bye Babylon, and to not look away and bear witness to her country’s history.

Bye Bye Babylon by Lamia Ziadé is available translated to English by Olivia Snaije, in print from Interlink Graphic

#graphic novel memoir #bye bye babylon #lamia ziadé #Bye bye Babylone: Beyrouth 1975 / 1979 #WIT month #beat the backlist #Francophone Writers From 50+ Lands #Francophone50 #cw: war religious bigotry massacres torture fire

0 notes

haveyoureadthispoll · 5 months

Text

#polls #book: gender queer #author: maia kobabe #genre: graphic novel #genre: memoir #genre: lgbt

152 notes · View notes

the-book-ferret · 2 months

Text

Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour-de-force that tells the story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall’s efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record.

#thebookferret #books #booklr #book worm #book nerd #book pets #book addict #book photography #bibliophile #ferret #ferrets of tumblr #pets of tumblr #wasabi #wake #a hidden history of women led slave revolts #graphic novel #memoir #rebecca hall #hugo martinez

104 notes · View notes

haveyoureadthisbook-poll · 2 months

Text

#fun home #alison bechdel #graphic novel #memoir #book poll #have you read this book poll #polls

89 notes · View notes

ofliterarynature · 12 days

Text

We’re reading the graphic memoir Fun Home by Alison Bechdel for book club this month! So glad we’re finally starting to experience reading-outdoor type weather here in Ohio ☀️

#fun fact I accidently paired this with I’m Glad My Mom Died as my audiobook read 😅#lots of unhappy parent-child memoirs rn oops #bec posts #from Instagram #fun home #Alison bechdel #books #booklr #bookblr #book photography #graphic novel

33 notes · View notes

annasellheim · 17 days

Text

Next part

21 notes · View notes

haveyoureadthistransbook · 5 months

Text

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

goodreads

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

Mod opinion: I've read this one and I enjoyed it.

#gender queer #maia kobabe #polls #trans lit #trans literature #trans books #lgbt lit #lgbt books #lgbt literature #nonfiction #memoir #genderqueer #nonbinary #neo pronouns #graphic novels

34 notes · View notes

aroaessidhe · 4 months

Text

read in 2023: books that made me cry

Sheiné łénde

The Feast Makers

In Other Lands (reread)

Beating Heart Baby

Hungry Ghost

Monstrous

Lirael (reread)

#four of Made For Me books; a ya contemporary that hit harder than I expected and. two graphic novel memoirs that deal with very heavy topics #and yes I recorded this this year HAHA. it was just these 7.#this is like. cry cry lol #as for 'made me tear up or almost cry' that's about 40 #read in 2023 #laya talks

39 notes · View notes

afabstract · 4 months

Text

Spinning - Graphic Novel Review

"Spinning", the graphic novel memoir by Tillie Walden is like a slice of sadness wrapped in pretty paper - it's gorgeously drawn, but steadily melancholic, from page one until the end.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3.5 out of 5. Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram) “Spinning”, the graphic novel memoir by Tillie Walden is like a slice of sadness wrapped in pretty paper – it’s gorgeously drawn, but steadily melancholic, from page one until the end. “I was a competitive figure and synchronized skater for twelve years,” Tillie tells readers on the first page of the memoir, which only has one…

View On WordPress

#art #Beauty #book recommendation #Book review #comic books #graphic novel memoir #Reviews #Spinning Graphic Novel Review #spinning tillie walden book review #tillie walden #tillie walden memoir

1 note · View note

pantheonbooks · 2 months

Text

Art Spiegelman's Maus is one of Variety's “Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read”—have you?

Two extraordinary books. Sixteen pages of bonus material—including lithographs and comix—designed by the award-winning artist. One incredible box set.

2K notes · View notes

celepom · 2 years

Photo

How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual

By Rebecca Burgess

'When I was in school, everyone got to a certain age where they became interested in talking about only one thing: boys, girls and sex. Me though? I was only interested in comics.' Growing up, Rebecca assumes sex is just a scary new thing they will 'grow into' as they get older, but when they leave school, start working and do grow up, they start to wonder why they don't want to have sex with other people. In this brave, hilarious and empowering graphic memoir, we follow Rebecca as they navigate a culture obsessed with sex—from being bullied at school and trying to fit in with friends, to forcing themself into relationships and experiencing anxiety and OCD—before coming to understand and embrace their asexual identity.

---

Guh, This is one of those books that hit me upside the head with how much I related to it. “Not interested in sex, only comics.” Feeling pressure to be sexual when in a romantic relationship, whether that was from the partner or societal norms. Being the “weird kid” who was bullied (tho for me it was throughout elementary school, by high school I found my own weird group of friends). Not understanding the obsession with (romantic) relationships. And something that I haven’t seen anyone else explore as an Ace that I related to a lot; looking at anyone I was friendly with as a prospective “love interest,” even if I didn’t have any actual interest in them like that (and I usually didn’t). It’s like because you don’t have the ability to feel sexual attraction to point you towards partners, your brain tries to weigh a list of pros and cons about potential partners without asking WHY IS THIS NECESSARY? DO WE WANT THIS??? WHY ARE WE EVEN THINKING LIKE THIS????

Social Pressure/Expectations.

Exhausting.

(I’ve since stopped doing this, but maybe that’s because I don’t really meet a lot of people in this pandemic age)

BUT! YES! ANYWAY! A very relatable graphic memoir by Rebecca. The art is very expressive and has a very ‘friendly’ feel to it. It’s like a hug in art form.

And the first time I read it I was shocked and delighted to see my own work listed as reference material/further reading at the back. (I may or may not have had an excited run-around my apartment. You can’t prove anything...)

I’m also reading their current webcomic, ‘The Pauper’s Prince,’ and I’m looking forward to ‘Speak Up!” which is being released September 2022. Feel free to check those out too!!

#Book rec #book recs #graphic novel #memoir #comic #asexual #asexuality #Ace #middle grade #wholesome read #very relatable #very ace #pride 2022 #LGBTQIA #LGBT comic

678 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

Text

Kate Beaton's "Ducks"

It’s been more than a decade since I began thrilling to Kate Beaton’s spectacular, hilarious snark-history webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” pioneering work that mixed deceptively simple lines, superb facial expressions, and devastating historical humor:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/23/hark-a-vagrant-the-book/

Beaton developed Hark! into a more explicit political allegory, managing the near-impossible trick of being trenchant and topical while still being explosively funny. Her second Hark! collection, Step Aside, Pops, remains essential reading, if only for her brilliant “straw feminists”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/15/step-aside-pops-a-new-hark-a-vagrant-collection-that-delights-and-dazzles/

Beaton is nothing if not versatile. In 2015, she published The Princess and the Pony, a picture book that I read to my own daughter — and which inspired me to write my own first picture book, Poesy the Monster-Slayer:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/

Beaton, then, has a long history of crossing genres in her graphic novels, so the fact that she published a memoir in graphic novel form is no surprise. But that memoir, Ducks: Two Years In the Oil Sands, still marks a departure for her, trading explosive laughs for subtle, keen observations about labor, climate and gender:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/ducks/

In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them.

Beaton’s memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation.

The story that follows is — naturally — wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with — and empathy for — the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.

Early reviews of Ducks rightly praised it for this subtlety and ambivalence. This is a book that makes no easy characterizations, and while it has villains — a content warning, the book depicts multiple sexual assaults — it carefully apportions blame in the mix of individual failings and a brutal system.

This is as true for the environmental tale as it is for the labor story: the tar sands are the world’s filthiest oil, an energy source that is only viable when oil prices peak, because extracting and refining that oil is so energy-intensive. The slow, implacable, irreversible impact that burning Canadian oil has on our shared planet is diffuse and takes place over long timescales, making it hard to measure and attribute.

But the impact of the tar sands on the bodies and minds of the workers in the oil patch, on the First Nations whose land is stolen and despoiled in service to oil, and on the politics of Canada are far more immediate. Beaton paints all this in with the subtlest of brushstrokes, a thousand delicate cuts that leave the reader bleeding in sympathy by the time the tale is told.

Beaton’s memoir is a political and social triumph, a subtle knife that cuts at our carefully cultivated blind-spots about industry, labor, energy, gender, and the climate. But it’s also — and not incidentally — a narrative and artistic triumph.

In other words, Beaton’s not just telling an important story, she’s also telling a fantastically engrossing story — a page-turner, filled with human drama, delicious tension, likable and complex characters, all the elements of a first-rate tale.

Likewise, Beaton’s art is perfectly on point. Hark!’s secret weapon was always Beaton’s gift for drawing deceptively simple human faces whose facial expressions were indescribably, superbly perfect, conveying irreducible mixtures of emotion and sentiment. If anything, Ducks does this even better. I think you could remix this book so that it’s just a series of facial expressions and you’d still convey all the major emotional beats of the story.

Graphic memoirs have emerged as a potent and important genre in this century. And women have led that genre, starting with books like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006):

https://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-fun-home/

But also the increasingly autobiographical work of Lynda Barry, culminating in her 2008 One! Hundred! Demons!:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/one-hundred-demons/

(which should really be read alongside her masterwork on creativity, 2019’s Making Comics):

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/05/lynda-barrys-making-comics-is-one-of-the-best-most-practical-books-ever-written-about-creativity/

In 2014, we got Cece Bell’s wonderful El Deafo:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/11/25/el-deafo-moving-fresh-ya-comic-book-memoir-about-growing-up-deaf/

Which was part of the lineage that includes the work of Lucy Knisley, especially later volumes like 2020’s Stepping Stones:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/09/enhanced-rock-weathering/#knisley

Along with Jen Wang’s 2019 Stargazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/25/stargazing-jen-wangs-semi-autobiographical-graphic-novel-for-young-readers-is-a-complex-tale-of-identity-talent-and-loyalty/

2019 was actually a bumper-crop year for stupendous graphic memoirs by women, rounded out by Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/hot-comb/

And don’t forget 2017’s dazzling My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

This rapidly expanding, enthralling canon is one of the most exciting literary trends of this century, and Ducks stands with the best of it.

[Image ID: The cover of the Drawn & Quarterly edition of Kate Beaton's 'Ducks.']

#pluralistic #kate beaton #hark a vagrant #tar sands #oil sands #big oil #carbon #climate emergency #memoir #books #graphic novels #alberta #fort mac #fort macmurray #misogyny #boomtowns #gift guide #drawn and quarterly #reviews

191 notes · View notes