Kinkiness, conversation, crimes of war
Each time I write about graphic novels, I look for new examples of their marvelous and distinctive voices, as well as their echoes elsewhere. Among those of the past few months: the Robert Rodriguez-Frank Miller-Quentin Tarantino film ''Sin City," which brought Miller's lurid graphic novels to the big screen in a visually unique fashion; Will Eisner's ''The Plot," his text-heavy swan song about ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; and semiotician Umberto Eco's latest novel, ''The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana," peppered with full-color illustrations from pop culture, stamps, and travel. It seems that the graphic novel is in the vanguard of cultural expression, whether dense and talky, like Daniel Clowes's ''Ice Haven," or minimalist, like Max Estes's ''Hello Again."
''Ice Haven" (Pantheon, 89 pp., $18.95) (above) is a dark, eerie, ''comic-strip novel" by Chicago native Daniel Clowes, the narrative wizard best known for ''Ghost World," a graphic novel that became an excellent Terry Zwigoff movie in 2000. Here, Clowes conjures Ice Haven, a superficially normal community in what I assume is the upper Midwest. This is a tale of competitive bad poetry, what seems to be a Leopold and Loeb-style murder case, and unrequited, faintly kinky love. Although it appears and feels like the 1950s, when life looked pastel and reassuring, it gives you thoroughly modern creeps. Clowes tells his interlocking stories through multiple points of view, giving each narrator his or her own visual style and even, at times, coloration. The more mysterious the character, the fewer the words, the more limited the palette. The styles span the pulpy, Edward Hopper-derived look of panels featuring a bickering husband-and-wife detective team, an O. Soglow ''Little King" takeoff for Leopold and Loeb, and garish ''True Romance" casting. Image and word coexist in an unusually creative and disturbing way in this portrait of a place where deviance bubbles just below the placid surface.
''Persepolis" creator Marjane Satrapi, who works in black-and-white, explores the Iranian equivalent of the kaffeeklatsch in ''Embroideries" (Pantheon, 144 pp., $16.95) (left), her affectionate, occasionally exasperated homage to Iranian women. In ''Persepolis" and ''Persepolis 2," her probes of politics and coming of age in the Iran of the '80s, Satrapi deployed a largely regular, rectangular style, occasionally highlighted by dramatic circular contrasts. In this ''ventilation of the heart," she's far looser, befitting her less charged field: conversation. The casually presented, provocative ''Embroideries" doesn't refer to flowers on linen or patterns on millinery here; its meaning is more intimate and political. I don't want to give away the conversation these women conduct -- the topics span everything from nose jobs to a tea consisting of select, startlingly fresh ingredients -- but it reads easily and realistically. Satrapi distinguishes her friends and relatives by dress, face, and attitude, and the pages flow as naturally as good conversation. Eavesdropping on this small world is a pleasure.
Two little books caught my eye: Max Estes's ''Hello Again" (Top Shelf, 156 pp., $10) and Johnny Ryan's ''Blecky Yuckerella" (Fantagraphics, 102 pp., $11.95). Estes's first book (below) is about the pangs of conscience attending apartment manager William for having an affair with his best friend's fiancee. William's ''conscience," a fisherman named Oliver whom William has suppressed for very good reason, sets him straight in Estes's guileless, heartfelt book. ''Blecky Yuckerella" (above) is Ryan's broad-stroke conflation of Nancy and Little Orphan Annie transmogrified into a nightmare so creatively scatological you can't help but laugh. Fans of potty humor will split their pants following Blecky and her friend Wedgie.
''Why Are You Doing This?" (Fantagraphics, 48 pp., $12.95) (above) is a graphic novelette by Jason, an Oslo native who goes by first name only. It's a slacker thriller in which Alex, a 20-something depressed over breaking up with his girlfriend, is accused of murdering his best friend, Claude. It evokes Hitchcock's ''Rear Window" (Alex ''previews" the killer through Claude's apartment window) and the eloquently simple style of the graphic novelist Seth, another master of the lonely modern urban scene. There's a lot of plot and resonance for such a tight, clear package, and the anthropomorphic ''characters" are faintly feline but never whimsical. Although Jason's art is attractive and his use of color superb -- the colors are crisp, oddly autumnal, and as lucid as the action -- it's his grasp of sociopathy that stays with you. Jason is a master of the frisson.
Joe Sacco's ''War's End: Profiles From Bosnia 1995-96" (Drawn & Quarterly, 80 pp., $14.95) (left) collects separate stories about Radovan Karadzic, the fugitive Serb held responsible for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 7,500 Muslim men and boys, and Soba, a warrior-rocker on the other side of that area's bloody fence. The Karadzic story details how Sacco and two other war correspondents dealt emotionally with the Serb, whom they encounter at a church service. What's most unsettling about the meeting is the lack of affect on the newsmen's part; even though Sacco says he and his colleagues consider Karadzic a beast, the anger never rises. The Soba story is less gray and perhaps a bit more upbeat. At the end, Soba gives up war for rock 'n' roll and decides to make his stand at home, no matter how torn up it is. Sacco's dense, peaked black-and-white graphics and meticulously drawn and straightforward text are as convincing as a newsreel and likely far more honest. I can't wait to see his take on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cleveland freelance writer Carlo Wolff regularly reviews graphic novels for the Globe. 
