Entertainment
Sex and Horror and the End of the World, in November’s Graphic Novels
This month’s offerings include a collection of warped horror stories, an apocalyptic flood narrative and a hero doing battle with a super-being who sees humankind as a race of pests to eliminate.
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.
