[ATDrake]

Took a break from all the mystery/crime thrillers to finish up some graphic novels that need to be returned to the library.

Rick Geary's Jack the Ripper, another installment in his excellent A Treasury of Victorian Murder series (which has since expanded to non-Victorian murder cases) does a marvelous comic-book interpretation of true crime, as usual.

Geary's carefully laid-out documentation of major players, timelines of events, known evidence, and mild speculation combine wonderfully with his woodcut-style line drawings for a characteristically atmospheric pseudo-Victorian read.

While I've run into enough Ripperiana to not care anymore, I quite liked this, although not nearly as much as Geary's bringing to light more obscure past true crime stories and it reminds me that back during one of those Humble Bundle purchases, I got a copy of the reader's companion to Alan Moore' From Hell, which I should read at some point (the companion, not FH, that is).

Firmly recommended for aficionados of meticulously detailed true crime in comic book format.

World War 3 Illustrated: 1979-2014, edited by Peter Kuper & Seth Tobocman, was a collection of the eponymous underground comics 'zine, and was a pretty mixed bag.

Story topics were mostly political/political-made-personal, with not only comics, but also poetry, illustrated/photo mini-essays, and random drawings on the subjects of the increasing politicization of religion, inner-city poverty and housing displacement, the use of banned drugs in 3rd world countries with deleterious effect on the local populace/environment, and the ramping up of public paranoia in response to the disproportionately spread fear of terrorism, past and current wars, etc.

Very much a Sturgeon's Law sort of mix, with some of the best stories being Kuper's own account of a Comic Book Legal Defense Fund case where he was called upon to provide defensive testimony for a zine distributor accused of obscenity, an artist's story about the importance of brand name sneakers and their subsequent theft in their youth, the various stories from artists who visited both Israel and Palestine over the course of the decades of the on-going conflict (there were several of these, all quite insightful), and Tobocman's summary of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

There's also a nifty timeline of all the WW3 issues, with bits on their feature stories, as well as other events going on in the comics/political world around the time they were originally released).

Mild recommend as a curiosity-read if you're interested in politically-oriented underground comics. Overall quality and appeal is too uneven for a general recommend, but a good sampler of what people have been doing in the field over the past few decades.

Israeli artist Rutu Modan's short comics collection of her early work, Jamilti and Other Stories. I originally picked this up because I wanted to get her Exit Wounds, about the ordinary people whose lives are directly affected by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict specifically, after having re-read Joe Sacco's excellent and recommended GN Palestine and some of the short stories in his more recent Journalism, as well as Guy Delisle's also excellent and recommended GN Jerusalem: Chronicles of the Holy City, which are both in part about that same subject.

But Jamilti & was what the branch of the library I visited actually had, so I got that out instead to give her storytelling a try.

These are early works, and I found the artwork at first to be rather disappointingly crude for my tastes, as far as character proportions and facial design go. But it does improve noticeably in later stories.

Modan has a decided taste for stories with a twist, where what you think you're seeing turns out to be very slightly to very much different from what's actually revealed at the end.

Best of the lot are the title story, "Jamilti", from the perspective of a nurse in a major city, and "Homecoming", set on a kibbutz, both of which are bittersweet takes on the realities of life in Israel. There's also a nifty faux-paper doll to accompany "The King of the Lillies", a story about a plastic surgery patient (the doll includes paste-on segments for bandaged body parts as well as their post-surgical versions).

Mild recommend, I suppose. Nothing really outstanding here, but decently done and I'll certainly be looking up her other GN which was the one I was originally interested in.