Beautiful Drawings of Bodies in Crisis Fill September’s Graphic Novels

This month’s top graphic novels include “The Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin — Silent but Deadly Edition,” by Geof Darrow, “Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees,” by Patrick Horvath, “Processing: 100 Comics That Got Me Through It,” by Tara Booth and “Something, Not Nothing,” by Sarah Leavitt. An exciting book with no words, a murder mystery, an author mocking their own pain and a poetic masterpiece highlight this month’s offerings. This month’s top graphic novels include “The Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin — Silent but Deadly Edition,” by Geof Darrow, “Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees,” by Patrick Horvath, “Processing: 100 Comics That Got Me Through It,” by Tara Booth and “Something, Not Nothing,” by Sarah Leavitt.Credit…Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times Sam Thielman is a reporter and critic based in Brooklyn. In addition to his monthly column for The Times, he has written about comics and graphic novels for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate and The Guardian. Sept. 18, 2024 The brilliant cartoonist and designer Geof Darrow makes a forceful case against his own writing in THE SHAOLIN COWBOY: CRUEL TO BE KIN — SILENT BUT DEADLY EDITION (Dark Horse, 256 pp., $49.99) , and not just with the fart joke in the book’s title. Darrow, who designed the look of “The Matrix” and its sequels, presents his most recent “Shaolin Cowboy” story completely devoid of text in this unexpectedly definitive edition. While the quantity of drawing covered by speech bubbles and captions might be a minor loss to another artist, Darrow, and the colorist Dave Stewart, pay such close attention to details that it’s a noticeable improvement on the work to be able to see every line. The mechanics of the story are, remarkably, still perfectly legible. Geof Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy flees a car driven by skeletons reanimated and piloted by a gigantic flying jellyfish, knocking over a fish-and-guns kiosk in the process. The plot is simple, but the execution is complex: The Cowboy, a stocky, stoic sword-and-gunslinger, fights enormous, grotesque creatures in noirish cityscapes, the comic-book equivalent of a big-budget action movie. Conventions like […]

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