Image: Galit Seliktar and Gilad Seliktar, from “Farm 54”
February brings our annual celebration of the international graphic novel. Dodging bullets in Beirut and facing divorce in Paris, scaling Chinese peaks and prowling the Cairene underworld, these international artist-writers delineate character and plot with all sorts of lines. See how Zeina Abirached, Blutch, Albert Cossery and Golo, Marc Legendre, Galit Seliktar and Gilad Seliktar, and Wei Tsung-Cheng make every picture tell a story. In related pieces, Michael McDonald draws out translator Marina Harss, and Tomas Kołodziejczak considers the intersection of Polish politics and comics. And elsewhere, Sony Labou Tansi courts the body politic, and David Albahari tries to shrink a weighty head.
from “King-Ma Has Come”
Wei Tsung-Cheng produces a mock-heroic Chinese political history
from “Farm 54”
Galit Seliktar and Gilad Seliktar map a soldier's first evacuation
from “A Game for Swallows”
Zeina Abirached dodges bullets in the Beirut of her childhood
from “Proud Beggars”
Albert Cossery and Golo slouch through a seedy Cairo
from “Waiting for an Island”
Marc Legendre's daydreamer waits for his past
from “That Was Happiness”
Blutch charts the end of a marriage
Translating Dino Buzzati: A Conversation with Marina Harss
Michael McDonald interviews Marina Harss about translation and the work of Dino Buzzati.
Animal Farm; or, a Short and Somewhat Political History of Comics in Poland
On the intersection of politics and comics in Poland
Book Reviews
Nicolas Bouvier’s “The Way of the World”
Reviewed by André Naffis-Sahely
