The sculptor
Scott McCloud’s first graphic novel in almost a decade is a story of desire taken to the edge of reason and beyond. David Smith is a young sculptor who is literally giving his life for his art. Thanks to a deal with Death, David gets his childhood wish: to sculpt anything he can imagine with...
Weapons of mass diplomacy
Written by a former speechwriter and adviser to French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, and set during the run-up to something very like the Iraq conflict, Weapons of Mass Diplomacy is a political satire that gets under the skin of modern politics and diplomatic relations. Published in France as Quai d’Orsay, it won the Grand...
Terra Australis
To begin with, the legend goes something like this: a nation born from a shipful of convicts. A gaggle of criminals sentenced to transportation who washed up onshore, knowing neither how nor why, who settled largely hostile territories and wound up staying, all while disregarding the indigenous peoples there already. A bit vague as stories...
Oscar Zarate’s urban oasis
The tranquillity of a glorious early summer day on Hampstead Heath is interrupted when an angry blogger and a timid musician get embroiled in a tit-for-tat spat that threatens to escalate into a fractious but comical revenge drama worthy of Laurel and Hardy. So begins Oscar Zarate’s beautifully drawn graphic novel The Park, which charts...
The Park
A silent movie plays and those existential clowns Laurel and Hardy are trading blows in their endless feud. In the real world, things aren’t always black and white. In the technicolour glory of summer’s day in a London park, another cycle of tit-for-tat revenge is about to begin… Award-winning graphic novelist Oscar Zarate’s latest work...
Lighter Than My Shadow
Like most kids, Katie was a picky eater. She’d sit at the table in silent protest, hide uneaten toast in her bedroom, listen to parental threats she’d have to eat it for breakfast. But in any life a set of circumstances can collide, and normal behaviour can soon shade into something sinister, something deadly. Lighter...
Ginny & Penelope Skinner channel their teens
Ginny and Penelope Skinner’s Briony Hatch is a warm and wickedly funny graphic novel about a (temporarily) displaced teen who tries to escape reality by immersing herself in fantasy fiction while her parents’ marriage crumbles and her so-called friends obsess about boys and self-image. Mark Reynolds fires off some questions about the book and the...
Briony Hatch
Briony Hatch hates reality. She prefers the fantasy world of her favourite novels: The Starling Black Adventures, in which ghosts are real and you can cast magic spells to defeat your enemies. In her real life, Briony’s parents are getting divorced and her friends are preoccupied by losing weight and shagging boys. Briony has tried...
