The Underwater Welder

by Jeff Lemire, 220 pages

Jack, an underwater welder, loving husband, and expectant father obsessed with the disappearance and death of his own father when he was a boy, feels uncontrollably drawn to the underwater depths of the bay in which his amateur treasure-hunter father drowned years before.  In the process, he risks losing everything and repeating his tragic family history.

This is an eerie, thoughtful tale that keeps you on the edge of your seat even when you've guessed at some of the mysteries it holds.  Lemire seems especially adept at depicting haunted places sparsely populated by equally haunted people.  Those inky scrawls communicate much and easily get inside the reader's head.  Good stuff.

Essex County: Volume 2: Ghost Stories

by Jeff Lemire, 223 pages

As he's moved from his farm to a nursing home, an old man suffering from dementia looks back on his life and his relationship with his younger brother in this second volume in Jeff Lemire's moving Essex County trilogy.

Sad and yet ultimately hopeful, this.  Lemire excels at making me teary-eyed and yet not bitter about it.

Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story

by Ari Folman and David Polonsky, 177 pages

A friend's dream about vengeful dogs triggers a surviving Israeli soldier's search for the truth of what happened during his service in the war with Lebanon and his memories of the massacre of Palestinian civilians his mind has sealed off to protect him.

This story is powerful and I'm sure the animated film from which this graphic novel is adapted is harrowing and visually arresting; but static as it is here, one aspect of the artwork kept me from investing in the story and characters as much as I'd have liked.  Largely consisting of altered photography from the war, the images have built-in realism that works great for backgrounds (crumbling buildings, burning tanks, low-flying fighter planes) but clashes with the way the creators chose to portray the modern-day characters (their remembered younger selves look more drawn and less photo-like).  Their designs look like drawn-and-air-brushed-over photographs that have been enlarged or shrunken or flipped to fit the needs of the various panels and then pasted on top of the more realistic backgrounds.  They almost never alter the expressions, so pages are filled with the same flat, lifeless faces over and over again, cutting the characters off emotionally and visually from their deep, painful conversations and the terrible events around them.  This could be intentional, to show how they've distanced themselves from the trauma and are just going through the motions, but I mostly found it distracting, lazy-looking, and a drain on the emotional umpf.  Some of the other imagery, though, is haunting and the story's questions about memory and trauma and guilt are important ones.  If only those few bland, frozen faces were different!

I'd say watch the film, instead, but only if you're prepared to be presented with frames of harsh reality, as I assume it does as this book and ends with a handful of unaltered photographs of the massacre's victims.  I was not ready and had to shut my eyes and close the book.