The graphic novel is clearly a genre that I love, and I often wish that I read most by female comics authors. This past year I discovered both Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry, to my very great pleasure. This explains my impulse to pick up Scheherazade: Comics about Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters, a "women's anthology" of comics fragments and vignettes edited by Megan Kelso, on a speed-browse through the library stacks.
Sadly, reading it has left me with very little to say about it, which is the most faintly damning comment I can make on a book. The strongest piece is the first, Andrice Arp's "The Fisherman and the Genie," which riffs directly on 1001 Nights and the Scheherazade theme by playing with modes of presenting stories within stories within the comics format (how do you lay this out on the page?). In moments of stress, Arp's characters often make reference to other, thematically related stories and then proclaim (to my delight) "This is no time for stories!"
Many of the other pieces are too straightforward to do justice to the innovation of their subject matter (which, the claim implicitly goes, is too often ignored by male writers and artists). Others are so fragmentary as to baffle my attempts to discern their sequential qualities, make meaning, or comprehend the nature of their devices. Too often I felt that I had gotten too little of a story (the peril of anthologies) without feeling a desire to seek out more (which is, in fact, at least part of their purpose).
Scheherazade: Comics about Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters
ed. Megan Kelso
**1/2
It's so nice for me to have found this blog of yours, it's so interesting. I sure hope and wish that you take courage enough to pay me a visit in my PALAVROSSAVRVS REX!, and plus get some surprise. My blog is also so cool! Don't think for a minute that my invitation is spam and I'm a spammer. I'm only searching for a public that may like or love what I write.
Feel free off course to comment as you wish and remember: don't take it wrong, don't think that this visitation I make is a matter of more audiences for my own blogg. No. It's a matter of making universal, realy universal, all this question of bloggs, all the essential causes that bring us all together by visiting and loving one another. However...
Some feel invaded and ofended that I present myself this way in their blogs and rudely insult me back.
Some think I'm playing the smart guy who wants to profit, in my miserable and ridiculous gain with Adsense (go figure!), from and with others curiosity and benevolence.
Some simply ignore me.
Some aknowledge that It's most important we all take notion that there's milions of us bloguing arownd the world and thus vital any kind of awareness such as I believe this my self-introduction card and insert apeal brings in.
May you be one of those open and friendly spirits.
You must not feel obliged to come and visit me. An invitation is not an intimation. Also know that if you click on one of my ads I'm promised to earn a couple of cents for that: I would feel happy and rewarded (because I realy need it!!!) if you did click it, but once again you're totaly free to do what ever you want. I, for instance, choose immediatly to click on one of your ads, in case you have them. To do so or not, that's the whole beauty of it all, however, blogocitizens must unite also by clicking-helping eachother when we know cybermegacorporations profit from our own selfishness regarding to that simple click.
About this I must say, by my own experience, that no one realy cares (maybe a few) about this apeal I make, still I believe in my Work and Dreams and thus I'll keep on apealing and searching so strong is my will.
I think it's to UNITE MANKIND that we became bloggers! Don't see language as an obstacle but as a challenge (though you can use the translater BabelFish at the bottom of my page!) and think for a minute if I and the rest of the world are not expecting something like a broad cumplicity. Remenber that pictures talk also. Open your heart and come along!!!!!
Aww. Sounds like such a great concept; I'm always disappointed when something doesn't live up to its potential.
It was dismaying, I have to say. But I would certainly be willing to read as many more anthologies on this theme as publishers will put out!