Woman & Man+
by Craig Yoe
Clover Press
ISBN-13 : 978-1951757090
$49.99
Today’s first entry in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide is a bit hard to describe. It’s a great gift for anybody who can handle challenging art.
It’s a graphic novel, told without the use of dialogue, with a surreal narrative and execution.
And…it’s freaking brilliant.
Craig Yoe’s name should be familiar to PopCult readers because I’ve been enthusiastically telling you folks about his work as a comics historian and preservationist for years. However, he’s also a creative force of no small talent, with stints as a creative director for Jim Henson Productions, Disney, Nickelodeon, MTV and others. Heck, he even hired Steve Ditko to draw an issue of Big Boy Magazine once.
But before all that, Craig was a cartoonist. To be specific, he was a second-wave underground cartoonist, turning up in the very early 1970s with a style that combined elements of Bill Holman, Salvador Dali, George Herriman and Robert Crumb.
His new book, his first full-on cartooning job in decades, is his reaction to the dissolution of his marriage, and dealing with starting over again in his twilight years after relocating to Europe with his wife and young children.
This is not a weepy “poor me” tell-all book. It’s a primal scream of surrealism and searching. Less a narrative story than an explosion of surreal art, Woman & Man + is like somebody gave James Joyce a pen, kept him sleep-deprived for a week and told him to tell a story without using using words.
I can’t even write a comprehensive review because this book demands more than one reading. I can see people studying it for years. It’s equal parts touching, frightening, erotic, action-packed, confusing, confounding and comforting…all at the same time.
Let me go to the publisher’s blurb:
Woman & Man+ is a wildly surreal autobiographical telling of its artist, Yoe, losing his love, his country, and, some say, his sanity–and his struggle to reinvent himself. His passion for drawing comics was sidetracked for over a half a century by a career as a creative director for Jim Henson and the Muppets, Disney, Nickelodeon, and MTV. Coming back to his roots, he now dives deep into sex, horror, and drama, with a hint of humor and a whiff of hope. This highly anticipated loudly wordless graphic novel Woman & Man+ has a revolutionary approach that breaks all the rules of conventional comic storytelling. Steranko meets Hieronymus Bosch by way of R. Crumb and Dali. The unique art style has been deemed, “Yoe-Brow!”
Woman & Man + can be ordered from any bookseller using the ISBN code above. You can also find slipcover, signed edition and more from Clover Press. And if you want to be cheap about it, you can go to Amazon.
This is the perfect gift for the thinking fan of counter-culture comix.
0 Comments
1 Pingback