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Summary
Summary
The alternative-comics master offers an indelible and idiosyncratic take on the protofeminist
"[ Woman Rebel ] is fine work from an excellent cartoonist and I urge you to jump right in."-Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter , from his introduction
Peter Bagge's Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story is a dazzling and accessible biography of the social and political maverick, jam-packed with fact and fun. In his signature cartoony, rubbery style, Bagge presents the life of the birth-control activist, educator, nurse, mother, and protofeminist from her birth in the late nineteenth century to her death after the invention of the birth control pill. Balancing humor and respect, Bagge makes Sanger whole and human, showing how her flaws fueled her fiery activism just as much as her compassionate nature did. Sanger's life takes on a whole new vivacity as Bagge creates a fast-paced portrait of a trailblazer whose legacy as the founder of Planned Parenthood is still incredibly relevant, important, and inspiring.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bagge is perhaps most famous for his slacker character Buddy Bradley, as well as Neat Stuff and Hate, and his recent work in the libertarian magazine Reason. He's an accomplished cartoonist and a master of satire and black humor, and Margaret Sanger, the influential birth control activist and sex educator, seems like a bizarre choice of subject for him. But his graphic biography is a modern masterpiece, both educational and entertaining. Bagge treats the famous activist as a real person, rather than an untouchable icon, though still handling her with great respect. The book recounts Sanger's life from her childhood (her mother had 18 pregnancies, and 11 live births) to her work as a women's health advocate. She bursts into life on the page, via Bagge's wonderful facial expressions and exuberant line work, in a manner that no historical text can match. Bagge has conducted meticulous research to separate the truth about Sanger from the fiction, and he documents his work with extensive notes. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
Comics can tell certain kinds of stories that prose, photographs and films can't. They can also tell familiar stories in drastically different ways. The artists of some of this seasons graphic novels transform history into broad comedy or rollicking adventure. Others show us worlds frighteningly different from our own, or aestheticize the realities we know with something as simple as a set of squiggly lines or a canny splash of color. Beakermania Thanks to the imminent 50th anniversary of the British Invasion, we're seeing a small wave of comics inspired by the Beatles, none more inventive than Eric Stephenson and Nate Bellegarde's NOWHERE MEN, VOL. 1: Fates Worse Than Death (Image, paper, $9.99). Its shuffled chronology requires multiple readings to puzzle out, but essentially: It's set in a world where a long-disbanded team of four brilliant scientists had the earthshaking effect on culture that the Beatles had on ours. The story, interspersed with fictional magazine clippings and book excerpts, is liberally sprinkled with sly allusions to the rock mythos. Shades of Love Julie Maroh's first graphic novel, BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (Arsenal Pulp Press, paper, $19.95), was published in France in 2010 and adapted by Abdellatif Kechiche into this year's Palme d'Or-winning film of the same title. The story begins with a woman named Emma inheriting her lover Clementine's diaries, which trace their relationship over the course of about a dozen years, beginning when Clementine was an uncertain teenager and Emma a confident, slightly older lesbian with a shock of blue hair. Maroh's text is as melodramatic as any youthful fantasy of romantic torment ("Today everything changed," one diary entry begins. "Today innocence died"), but her delicate linework and ink-wash effects illuminate the story's quiet pauses and the characters' fraught silences and wordless longing. In the book's flashback sequences, everything is gray except for the blue that lingers in Clementine's memory. Taking a Stand Peter Bagge's comics, notably his '90s-era "Hate" series, are built on broad satire and slapstick, his characters rubbery dolls who rage, fume and fret. WOMAN REBEL: The Margaret Sanger Story (Drawn & Quarterly, $21.95), a biography of the birth-control activist who defied the Comstock laws in the first half of the 20th century, is an unlikely but inspired pairing of author and subject. A more or less historically accurate biography, it's played for boffo yocks on almost every page. Bagge throws in cameo appearances by the likes of the labor leader Big Bill Haywood and the sexologist Havelock Ellis, and brashly squeezes black humor out of even the savageries Sanger was trying to mitigate. He treats her capacity for vain self-delusion as grist for comedy but reserves his funniest blasts of contempt for the sanctimonious moralists she perpetually reduced to fits of frustration. Make Some Noise Since early last year, Ed Piskor's HIP HOP FAMILY TREE has been lovingly documenting the early days of hip-hop music and culture. The online strip's first collection (Fantagraphics, paper, $24.99), printed on mock-yellowed newsprint to give it the look of battered old comics, follows the story from Kool Herc's and DJ Hollywood's 1970s parties to the 1981 showdown between Kool Moe Dee and Busy Bee. Piskor has an aficionado's eye for details and connections - his portraits illustrating how the Funky Four Plus One dressed before and after they signed to Sugar Hill Records say a lot about hip-hop's rapidly shifting image - and a caricaturist's knack for cramming in visual information while ribbing nearly everyone he draws. (Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin come in for particularly irreverent treatment.) When Casanova Fly or Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five rock the house, their sheer volume seems to blow the printing off-register. In the Cross Hairs The writer Alex de Campi's acclaimed comics series "Smoke," drawn by the Croatian artist Igor Kordey (panel below) and initially published in 2005, was a quirky but relatively straightforward political thriller, involving a plucky young journalist, an albino assassin, vicious aristocrats and a grossly obese terrorist cell called the Right to Beauty Brigade. It's now been paired with a longer, stranger sequel, as SMOKE/ASHES (Dark Horse, paper, $29.99). "Ashes," a crowdfunded project illustrated by 14 different artists, begins with the lives of survivors from "Smoke" already in ruins. As they're pursued by a malevolent digital ghost, the story goes from spy-style noir to sci-fi horror (a factory holds "five square miles of genetically engineered stem-cell bones growing pig meat"), and its art makes whiplash shifts - a section that looks like a scribbled-on Beatrix Potter book is followed by a pastiche of medieval illuminated manuscripts. By the final chapters, de Campi and her collaborators shoot out the support beams of typical plot resolution, and the closing sequence, painted by Bill Sienkiewicz, abandons even the comforts of visual realism. DOUGLAS WOLK is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean."
Library Journal Review
Bagge ("Hate") told website Comic Book Resources, "I'm shocked at how many people tell me they'd never heard of Margaret Sanger!" Yet Sanger (1879-1966), an American social reformer, helped revolutionize the modern world. Overcoming long-term opposition, she established the use of birth control in the United States, helped fund researchers Gregory Pincus and John Rock in developing the Pill, and founded the organizations that would later form the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The book's title takes its name from Sanger's own newsletter, which promoted the use of contraception. Educated as a nurse, Sanger loved as large as she lived; while being married twice and raising several children, she enjoyed liaisons with author H.G. Wells and pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis, among others. Bagge's rubbery, satirical art, here in color, works very well with this documentary biography, demonstrating how Sanger's humanity, both her strengths and weaknesses, fueled her activism. His research is exemplified in 18 pages of notes, plus an afterword. VERDICT This excellent take on an almost forgotten trailblazer will appeal to teens through adults interested in sociosexual issues and woman leaders.-M.C. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.