Starred review from January 29, 2024
Corman (Unterzakhn) weaves mythic resonance into a spiky, tragicomic tale of two Jewish women holding down the Brooklyn home front during WWII. While Rose’s stoic husband fights overseas, she works at a factory to support their young daughter, Eleanor—and off hours slips into a bittersweet tryst with a wounded veteran. Meanwhile, Ruth, a German refugee orphan in her early adulthood who has been taken in by Rose, is haunted by flashbacks and has trouble keeping a job, until she’s given a chance to channel her rage as a lady wrestler. (She has “the look of one who has good reason to smash something,” the manager who discovers her notes approvingly.) Though Ruth, already discriminated against for her accent, is less than thrilled to be recast as “Ruthless Ruby, the Killer Kraut,” she gets some of the best lines in Corman’s snappy dialogue, which mixes in Yiddish throughout: “When I hear that someone’s died, I get a little jealous,” she whispers as she hugs her heaving opponents in the ring. “I gotta tell ya... I hate the sound of my own heart beating.” Corman’s liquid, painterly art blends historical realism with fairy tale themes and pregnant imagery: waking dreams of water and dismembered body parts, a mermaid covered in ocean trash, panels based on the work of Nazi-banned “degenerate” artists like Otto Dix, and transcendent sequences that depict the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp and other haunted moments of WWII. The finest work yet from an always formidable artist, this is a revelatory meditation on the cost of survival. Agent: Elizabeth Wales, Wales Literary.
Starred review from February 1, 2024
The latest from graphic novelist Corman is a macabre meditation on cruelty and camaraderie, cycling through a cast of mostly Jewish characters amid the horrors of World War II in New York City, Berlin, and a liberated concentration camp. Rose Arensberg works in the shipyards of 1943 Brooklyn, helping the war effort (and enduring sexual harassment) alongside other women as their husbands fight overseas. She has begun an affair with George, a veteran who lost part of his leg in the war; despite their passion, both know they are on borrowed time until Sam, the husband Rose never intended to marry, returns from the European front. Living with Rose, Sam, and their daughter is a young woman named Ruth, who fled Germany during the Nazis' extermination of Jews in that country--Rose and Sam took Ruth in because of their shared heritage. Ruth nurses a bloodlust borne of enduring her family's annihilation back in Germany (her mother's restless spirit visits sometimes). Birnbaum, an enterprising fellow survivor of antisemitic pogroms, steers rageful Ruth into work as a professional wrestler he dubs "the Killer Kraut" to rile up his American crowd. Doom pervades the book, with characters falling into grotesque nightmares of dismemberment or drowning, engaging in physical combat, or meeting sudden deaths. Even after death, characters continue on, meeting loved ones or friends or spirit beings, the dead experiencing the freedom and communion and vengeance denied them in life. It is a brutal catharsis in a bloody, desperate, and haunted world. Corman's figures are striking, with angular bodies and faces, the latter punctuated by downturned lips and enormous eyes ringed by darkness. Vivid watercolors enhance the uncanny atmosphere, hues spilling and pooling into visceral shapes and strata. Savage and soulful.
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