Karen Haber Reviews The Keeper, by Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes and Marco Finnegan; Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly: Volume Two edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner; The Corset and The Jellyfish: A Conundrum of Drabbles by Nick Bantock
The Keeper, Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes & Marco Finnegan (Abrams Comic Art Megascope 978-1-4197-5155-4, $24.99, 150pp, hc) September 2022. Cover by Marco Finnegan.
The Keeper is a gripping tale of family love and the supernatural, guaranteed to grab anyone interested in urban horror served with a slice of poignancy and social realism. According to the afterword, it began life as a script that had a hopeful journey through Hollywood until the pandemic hit. The graphic novel is a powerful story in its own right.
Authors Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes have penned a story that works on several levels: as a commentary about how Black families are forced try to keep themselves safe from institutional harm, how embracing a supernatural protector can backfire, and how far someone might go to protect those she loves.
Young Aisha has lost her parents in a car crash and is forced to move to a derelict neighborhood in Detroit to live with her ailing grandmother. As her grandmother’s health declines and fails, Aisha is forced to deal with a dark, frightening spirit upon which her family has relied for protection over generations.
The artwork is direct, realistic, with ‘‘lived in’’ characters and gritty urban locations. Artist Marco Finnegan has a nice touch, putting an outline around each panel, occasionally breaking out images allowing them to escape the box. His moody use of color and powerful two-page bleeds add to the impact. Even the endpages have a message, decipherable only after you’ve read the book.
With high quality matte paper, at 176 pages and 7 x 9.9 inches – ‘‘book size,’’ The Keeper, with its hard cover and dust jacket with lacquered details has far more visual impact that the usual graphic novel. Named Best Graphic Novel of the Year by The Washington Post, and A Book We Loved by NPR.
Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly: Volume Two, Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood Books, $25.00, 76pp, tp) 2022. Cover by Ed Binkley.
Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly: Volume Two, delivers a lot of tasty content in 76 pages. The large journal, full color. 12 x 12-inch format, has no advertising and no online or electronic version. The limited print run of 1000 copies guarantees that this is a collector’s item. It’s absolutely full to bursting with terrific art and content.
The heart of the issue is dedicated to the late artist Jeffrey Catherine Jones, with 39 pages of rarely seen artwork, photos, and personal reminiscence by George Pratt, Carol Zaloom, and Todd Adams. The rest of the journal offers 20 questions with art director Irene Gallo, an interview with the whimsical horror artist Ed Binkley, whose work is featured on the cover; Donato Giancola discusses inspiration; grandmaster artist Greg Manchess gives some advice; and Frank Frazetta’s granddaughter Sara talks about the family business. If you can find a copy of this, don’t miss it.
The Corset & The Jellyfish: A Conundrum of Drabbles, Nick Bantock (Tachyon 978-1-61696-407-8, $14.99, 200pp, tp) November 2023. Cover by Nick Bantock.
The Corset and Jellyfish is a charming compilation of the latest from Nick Bantock (of the Griffin & Sabine series). According to the author, an anonymous manuscript discovered in an attic in North London was forwarded to him, and he decided to publish it. It yielded brief, idiosyncratic tales and artwork, a collection of roughly 100 mini-stories (drabbles) with sketches that may or not relate to the text. (You decide.) The tales can be read in any order, and may – or may not – provide a puzzle for readers to solve.
By turns strange, Klee-esque, anatomically incorrect, and generally dreamlike, the illustrations look as though they began life as marginalia in somebody else’s story. Bantock encourages readers to create their very own 100-word drabble by selecting a word from each of the stories to complete the collection. He is silent on the possibility of readers providing their own drawings as well.
Tachyon has done a lovely job – nice paper, nice cover – on this whimsical volume, printed with full color illustrations. A November book, it would make a nice stocking stuffer for fans of Bantock’s work.
Karen Haber is the author of nine novels including Star Trek Voyager: Bless the Beasts, and co-author of Science of the X-Men.
She is a Hugo Award nominee, nominated for Meditations on Middle Earth, an essay collection celebrating J.R.R. Tolkien that she edited and to which she contributed an essay. Her recent work includes Crossing Infinity, a YA science fiction novel of gender identity and confusions.
This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.
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