Today on the site we have Greg Hunter's review of Mana Neyestani's graphic memoir, An Iranian Metamorphosis. Neyestani was sent to prison in Tehran after publishing deemed offensive. Here's a bit of Greg's review:
In 2006, protests broke out among Iran’s Azeri peoples based on a perceived slight in one of Mana Neyestani’s newspaper cartoons. The Iranian government’s response to the situation involved a series of interrogations and imprisonments for Neyestani. An Iranian Metamorphosis (Une Métamorphose Iranienne in its original, overseas edition) is Neyestani’s first book-length comics narrative and a memoir of his time as a captive and later a refugee. The work reads like that of a cartoonist unsure which tools to use in the reconstruction of his story but willing to try all sorts of things. It is eclectic and sometimes frustrating.
An Iranian Metamorphosis features many plot-level details that bring to life the prison experience: a guard consenting to pass along soccer scores; the onset of psychological isolation even while sharing a cell; the workings of an intra-prison black market. Neyestani even gambles with his readers’ sympathies to portray the range of his ordeals: A particularly uncomfortable scene shows him becoming a sort-of informant, as he provides benign information about fellow cartoonists that (we understand) Iranian intelligence officials could still distort for their purposes.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Charlie Hebdo. Articles and editorials worth reading continue. One of the murdered cartoonists, Tignous, was buried in a coffin covered in cartoons and graffiti.
Sigolène Vinson, a writer who survived the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, describes what happened.
I know I've linked to a lot of people defending or attacking the tenor of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons, but here are two more worth reading, and two of the best so far. Taking the defense is Leigh Phillips at Ricochet, and on the prosecution is ex-staff-member Olivier Cyran. The Turkish Muslim cartoonist M.K. Perker also defends CH.
And two longer articles about the political angle of these cartoons come Farhang Jahanpour and Jonathan Guyer.
—Profiles & Interviews. Jeet Heer writes a piece for The Paris Review about the late John Updike's relationship to cartooning.
The New Yorker interviews Adrian Tomine about his just announced upcoming book, Killing and Dying.
—News. Star Clipper, a great comics store in St. Louis (and my own favorite local comics store back in my college days) is going out of business.
Somehow we missed this Montreal Gazette story celebrating Drawn & Quarterly.
—Reviews & Commentary. The novelist Neel Mukherjee includes Mary Talbot, Kate Charlesworth, and Bryan Talbot's Sally Heathcote, Suffragette in a list of the ten best books about revolutionaries.
For Dissent, Paul Buhle reviews Richard McGuire's Here.
