Good Eggs: A Memoir
Phoebe Potts, Harper, $23.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-171146-6
First-time graphic novel creator Potts offers readers a sprawling and lovable memoir about her and her husband’s attempts to become parents. Documenting travails with insurance companies, doctors, family members, and her own body, she shows us the down and dirty details with warmth and humor. While the quest for parenthood structures the book, Potts makes plenty of detours into her past with tales of organizing uncooperative union workers in Texas; learning Spanish and trying her darndest to mix with workers in Mexico; experiencing paralyzing depression back at her parents’ home in Martha’s Vineyard. Potts also writes about her discovery and exploration of her faith. At one point, considering becoming a rabbi, she visits several rabbis; the encounters are funny and poignant and help her along the path of figuring out what truly matters to her. The loopy minutiae of her drawings, in which bodily functions are helpfully anthropomorphized, household pets project personalities as strong as those of the humans around them, and characters crowd the pages in a friendly cacophony of stories, is equally absorbing. Good Eggs joins other graphic novel memoirs about women’s lives, like Persepolis and Carol Tyler’s You’ll Never Know; a wonderfully told and deeply human story. (Oct.)
The Green Woman
Peter Straub, Michael Easton, and John Bolton, DC/Vertigo, $24.99 (152p) ISBN 978-1-4012-1100-4
First the good news: Bolton’s painted artwork for veteran horror novelist Straub’s first (co-written) graphic novel is as uncanny as it’s supposed to be--richly textured, vertiginous, built around creepily mottled flesh tones and images whose terrors always seem to be bubbling up from their darkest hues. In places, his characters are so obviously drawn from photographs the book might as well be fumetti, but Bolton’s feverish super-realism gives it a hallucinatory tone. Unfortunately, the story (by Straub and Easton, who’s best known as an actor) is a straight-to-video erotic thriller with supernatural elements, alternately banal and incomprehensible. An addendum to Straub’s 1988–1993 Blue Rose trilogy of prose novels, it involves serial killer “Fee” Bandolier reflecting on his formative experiences as his final destiny intertwines with that of a weary but sexually irresistible detective named Bob Steele. There’s a lot of gruesome Vietnam imagery, a number of central-casting stereotypes, a modicum of purple prose, and several pretty young women in various states of undress and intactness. The book’s jumbled chronology and conflation of heavy symbolism with actual plot points do it no favors. (Oct.)
Make Me a Woman
Vanessa Davis, Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95 (176p) ISBN 978-1-77046-021-8
These beautifully rendered watercolor and pencil collages capture confessional moments from bat mitzvah to the author taking her boyfriend home to West Palm Beach, Fla., to visit her mother. While treading in the autobiographical path of many cartoonists before her, Davis’s sweet and well-observed sketch-diary entries and more structured pieces for such magazines as the Tablet deal with growing up as a Jewish woman. Some time is given to fashion and dating, but the focus is mostly on the daily humor of surviving a boring day job and squabbling family. What sets Davis apart, as least as she portrays herself, is her general sanity and good humor. The problems are more Family Circus than Fun Home: a sisterly blowup comes down to the disposition of a doughnut, and a relationship problem involves several half-eaten packages of cheese. An early strip deals with a trip to a fat farm, but even that ends with remarkably little self-loathing. What this collection does show is Davis’s evolution from sometimes awkward swirls of penciled diary pages to constantly inventive and very accomplished painted art. It’s hard not to find something to identify with or smile at in these pages. (Oct.)
