A Sleeper Hit of a Graphic Novel. (Well, it should be.)

Marx: A Tale Of Neglect by Onrie Kompan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I already liked Onrie Kompan's stuff--his graphic novels about Joseon Dynasty Korea are beautiful and tell an exciting story--but I wasn't sure about this one. This is a personal story, about his grandfather from Russia, and it's not my normal kind of reading. But Onrie is also a very good salesman, and he convinced me at the convention that I wanted this, too.

He was right.

This is biography, but partly autobiography. It tells the story of his grandfather's life in the Soviet Union before WWII, including his childhood, the part he played in the war, his years in the gulag, his relationships and return to normal life after that, and his final months, but it is mixed with the author's conversations and interviews with him during the last period of the old man's life, some of it in the hospital, some at home. This device grounds the story for me, helping me travel from 21st Century America to 20th Century communist Russia. It's the author's journey, when he learned how life was for his grandfather and how he became the man he was, and it's our journey, as well.

It's a tough story, and raw; his grandfather is an intelligent, educated man, but hard, a man with a past, a survivor who shows little affection or sentiment, and it's all laid out straight without flinching, with all the angry words and hurtful decisions and unhappy moments. Marx and the other characters--people from real life--are more genuine because of it, and our affection and sympathy for them emerges from that. If you know the story of the difficult old man, you don't just forgive him; you understand him.

Well done to the author. This is not a book I would naturally choose, but it proved to be something valuable, something I could appreciate--a graphic novel as instructive as it was entertaining.

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