Drawn & Quarterly Showcase: Book Three - Softcover

Starred Review. Every year Drawn & Quarterly offers an anthology of lengthy stories by emerging young cartoonists; this installment is the strongest thus far, and a visually stunning book to boot. Elverum's "We're Wolf" is composed of a trilogy of adult fables about happiness, sadness and companionship drawn in a graceful, languid style. The vibrant colors, rarely seen in comics, give the artwork a fantastic life on the page, and the story announces Elverum as a major young talent. Occupying the middle spot is Kramer's Ergot editor Harkham's "Somersaulting," a tale of two friends and a long summer. Using a muted color palette of yellow, orange and black, Harkham effortlessly controls the story's mood, summoning the languid pace of summer as well as the gradual discovery of love and sex in the suburbs. Neither cynical nor sentimental, this tale plays like a long, clear-eyed tone poem to teenage summers. After two such dreamy stories, Broersma rounds out the book with the two-part "The Mummy," a charming and funny romp through a mythical mid-20th-century European locale, featuring tongue-in-cheek romance, intrigue and ghosts. Entertaining and wittily executed, it's the perfect complement to the more serious works in this essential new volume. (June)
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The latest in Drawn & Quarterly's series spotlighting up-and-coming talent again presents impressive work from three countries. French-Canadian Genevieve Elverum offers three connected minimalist fables dreamily portraying a young woman's reactions to depression, domesticity, and motherhood in delicate watercolors that, thanks largely to her keen graphic skills, make them whimsical without being cloying. Representing the U.S., Sammy Harkham--founder of the cutting-edge comics and graphic arts zineKramers Ergot--sympathetically, but with open eyes, recounts a teenage girl's languid summer of sex, boozing, and friendship. Harkham, whose visual approach is indebted to Chester Brown's Yummy Fur, uses a uniform, nine-panel grid to convey the slow, measured passing of the season. England's Matt Broersma is the traditionalist here. His grisly, humorous tale of the ghost of one Dr. Frobisher, walking the earth trying to retrieve his body, recalls French master Jacques Tardi in its art and storytelling; the story per se could be a Richard Sala yarn (see Sala's Mad Night, reviewed in this issue). The strongest Drawn & Quarterly Showcase yet. Gordon Flagg
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