New graphic novels – Weekend – Kommersant
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Tardy “In the trenches”
publishing house Peter
Translation Evgenia Kirienko
First published in 1993, the award-winning and considered classic novel by French comics artist Jacques Tardy (usually labeled simply “Tardy”) is based partly on the stories of his own grandfather, partly on conversations with historians and a fair amount of literature about the First World War. However, it does not look like an illustrated essay or a typical historical novel. Rather, the opposite is true: the genre of the novel, which presupposes the story of a private person against the backdrop of the events of a big story, here is demonstratively disintegrating. The Tardy brings the character into focus, but a few pages later, he is killed by a bullet (either by the enemy or by his own commander), by gas, or by one of the many ways to die during trench warfare. The story moves on to the next one, but the same thing happens to him. This bad infinity, usually of extremely ridiculous deaths, a series of unfunny anecdotes, turns out to be an extremely convincing way of telling about the war as a territory where all meaning disappears. The slightly infantile comic drawing of Tardi itself suddenly begins to resemble either the caricatures of George Gross, or, of course, Goya’s Caprichos. The book, which seems to be extremely simple in its structure, turns out to be a really very strong anti-war statement.
Reza Negarestani, Keith Tilford, Robin McKay “Chronosis”
publishing house Ice
Translation Polina Khanova
The Iranian Reza Negarestani is one of the most popular authors of modern post-humanist philosophy, a paradoxical hoaxer who interferes with Hegel and Lovecraft, an idol of smart geeks. His main book, Cyclonopedia, published in Russian three years ago, is written in the form of a philosophical horror novel. In Chronosis, he goes even further in destroying genre boundaries. This is a comic book co-authored by American artist Keith Tilford and editor-translator Robin McKay. The main active force here, as you might guess from the name, is time. This is not just an abstraction, but a self-aware entity with a rather creepy character. There are also powerful Laskarian reptilians fleeing the attacks of time on prehistoric Earth and bringing life there, mysterious monazzeins who travel back in time and thus perform mystical rituals, and a rogue preacher from Earth who is living his last days before dying from brain cancer. Perhaps all this is his nonsense, but perhaps not. Chronosis is part dark philosophical joke with references to modern physics and German idealism, part colorful psychedelic trip, part postmodern sci-fi with lots of allusions to classic comics.
Nora Krug “Motherland”
publishing house Bookbook
Translation Evgenia Kreslavskaya
The book by the German artist Nora Krug clearly fits into the body of literature, which is described by the word “post-memory”. The question here is: to what extent are we defined by what we ourselves do not remember, gaps in family and national history? The canon of post-memory literature, from Sebald’s Austerlitz to Spiegelmann’s Maus, is linked in one way or another to the trauma of the Holocaust. The circle approaches the same story from a different angle. Her mother and father were born after the end of World War II, she herself grew up in the 90s, and yet life in Germany for her was riddled with guilt, a system of defaults and vague allusions to a terrible past. She felt this when she emigrated to America, and there she took up the book, trying to fill in the gaps and thus regain her family history, and with it, her homeland. Krug travels through archives, cemeteries, flea markets and Internet forums, talking to relatives and random strangers. She is trying to understand what happened to her uncle who died in the war and grandfather, who was a member of the NSDAP, whether they were real Nazis or just hostages of history. This frankly therapeutic book might look naïve were it not for the form. Krug alternates between delicate watercolors and harsh photomontage, popular comics and playing with post-war art styles, trying to find a language to talk about the unpronounceable.
Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon “Preacher”
publishing house ABC
Translation Alexander Lisovsky
The brainchild of the famous British comics artist Garth Ennis, Preacher was published from 1995 to 2000 by Vertigo (known for turning superheroics into serious literature). This book is just the beginning, the first volume of six. Plot: right during a sermon, an American priest Jesse Custer is inhabited by a creature named Genesis – the fruit of the criminal passion of an angel and a devil, the most powerful creature in the universe, who escaped from a heavenly prison with obscure, but obviously catastrophic goals for the entire universe. The priest inadvertently burns down his church along with his entire flock and sets off on a journey across America in the company of his ex-girlfriend and an alcoholic vampire who has nailed to them. Their goal is to find God and present him with an account for the whole world. On the way, they meet with the greedy mafia of the guardians of the Grail, the angel of death, who has the appearance of a gloomy cowboy, and other unpleasant characters. “Preacher” – to the limit of evil, ruthlessly cynical comics. Hatred of religion reaches Ennis, as it happens, quite religious fervor (affects childhood in Northern Ireland). But, in addition, this is a real American epic, which at the end of the twentieth century could only be written by a foreigner.
Anna Domini “Sanatorium”
publishing house Zangavar
A small book by the author, who writes under the pseudonym Anna Domini, can hardly be called a novel or even a short story. Rather, it is a pleasant, elegantly drawn – despite the emphasized digital graphics – handicraft. The story of a mysterious sanatorium, where the chief doctor, invisible to anyone, conducts experiments on his wards, and a brave girl makes her way through the haze of hallucinosis to a genuine terrible and strange reality, it seems, written only to shine with allusions: “The Magic Mountain” and “The Matrix” , cyberpunk anime and Arthurian legends. The charm of this not very innovative bundle of cultural associations is given by the layer of Soviet childhood. The architecture of rest houses and the Moscow metro, Row’s movie fairy tales, the song “Beautiful Far Away”, the screensaver of the program “In the World of Animals”. All this nostalgic abundance has a huge surrealistic potential, partly developed in the novels of Pavel Pepperstein (they willy-nilly come to mind when reading the Sanatorium), but still not exhausted.
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