arts&life
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Another graphic memoir, Passing
for Human by Liana Finck offers a
deep view into the mind and soul
of the author/illustrator. Finck,
whose work frequently appears in
the New Yorker (and has 200,000
faithful Instagram followers), tries
to make sense of her lifelong feel-
ing of being different and how that
sparks her present life as an artist.
She explains, “A draw-er doesn’t
draw because she loves to draw.
She doesn’t draw because she draws
well. She draws because, once, she
lost something. And by drawing,
she will find it again.” (And then
she breathes.)
While she refers to her school
as a suburban parochial school, it’s
clear that she attended day school.
She maps out “The Elementary
School Hierarchy,” with names
of girls like Ilana and Aviva who
wished they were cool, and the
author alone at the bottom of the
facing page, looking away.
Her black-and-white illustrations
are powerful, yet done with a light
hand, mostly across grids. She
begins with her mother’s story, of
her encounters with her shadow,
and also tells of her father and
their shared legacy. The author,
who calls herself Leola here, deals
with her own shadow, too, in dark-
ness and light. The story is lay-
ered with melancholy and solace,
humor, too, and openings to free-
dom, creativity and love.

The Joe Shuster Story: The Artist
Behind Superman by Julian Voloj
and Thomas Campi (Super Genius)
is a story of imagination and drive,
the dream realized of two Jewish
kids from Cleveland. Voloj writes
in first-person as Shuster, who
posed his friend and co-creator
Jerry Siegel to draw Clark Kent. It’s
clear that the creative team of Voloj
and Campi loves their subject.
Campi’s images are beautiful
watercolor paintings, capturing
cityscapes and dreamscapes, a great
match to Voloj’s text, printed in a
typeface that looks like neat hand-
writing. The back story of their
man from the future who travels
to the present and fights crime
is one of loyalty and friendship,
deal-making, disappointment, law-
suits, settlement and the sometimes
triumph of “truth, justice and the
American way.”

36

December 13 • 2018

jn

The Three Escapes of
Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny
of Truth by Ken Krimstein
(Bloomsbury) is a graphic
biography, told in the voice
of the philosopher, from her
childhood to final days. Early
on, there’s young Hannah
being taunted on the street in
Konigsburg by a schoolmate,
“You are a Jew Jew Jew Jew
Jew Jew.” Her pigtails askew,
she says, “But I’m Hannah.”
Her father suffers a terrible
death, and he literally fades
out of the frame. To answer
questions like “why there’s
things like Poppa dying,” the
young girl takes up reading
Kant. By the time she’s 14, she
has read all of his books, but
still doesn’t have the answers.
She is seen in a tall narrow
frame, seated on a towering
pile of books. Then she moves
on to ancient Greek.
Her three escapes are from
the Nazis in Berlin, and then
from them in Paris, and then,
in New York, from her former
professor, Martin Heidegger.
Krimstein, a New Yorker
cartoonist and professor at
the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago, tells Arendt’s
story with eloquence in his
text and illustrations, as she
continues her quest for truth
and understanding, through
difficult times.
Arendt is usually seen, cig-
arette in hand, in Krimstein’s
two-color expressive draw-
ings. When she debates with
herself, arrows go back-and-
forth between two adjacent
frames. Toward the end,
Krimstein dedicates a page to
a beautiful drawing of Arendt
walking atop the globe, sur-
rounded by the stars, think-
ing, “To be alive and to think
are the same thing.” ■

