An Arranged Marriage by Nell Freudenberger

“An Arranged Marriage” singles out that brief moment in life when children abandon safe hand-holding parental guidance to reach for their freedom to create their own world.

Amina who considers her mother a partner is wrong in her assessment, the mother holds a more powerful influence then a simple partner which implies that decision are shared, which is not the case here where her mother makes the most personal decisions for...

“Second Lives” is the oil / water separation between starting a new life and being tied to an old one through family responsibility. Families hold the key to our history and ultimately to our identity while starting a new life forces us to adapt and reinvent ourselves. The two situations never blend but remain separate leaving the main character to abandon his family in the middle of a revolution and a neighbor to leave his wife to the neighborhoods ridicule of her situation.

The...

This famous novel by Oscar Wilde appears to have suffered considerably at the hands of Culbard and Edgington during their illustration and adaptation to GN format for publication by the Sterling Publishing. Before going into greater detail, I would briefly say that Culbard's artwork -- described elsewhere as 1920's Gothic style -- appears to this eye as drab, unimaginative and grotesque; Edgington's adaptation of the text seems to have had the purpose of including as many of Sir Harry's (Oscar...

This post is currently under construction and will be changing. It may change.

My favorite 'graphic novel' of all time is Prince Valiant by Hal Foster even though it seems to be counted as a comic strip. My father read it to me every Sunday morning from the comics section of the newspaper, beginning in around 1937 when it first appeared. It had serialized multi-week episodes set in King Arthur's time and had glorious color illustrations and detailed naturalistic pencil work for...

There is a Church of Christ affiliated college in the town that I live in. When I taught a night course there back in' 05, I happened upon some free books in the library that happened to be from an old professor who retired. One of the books was Emotional ills and the Christian. Psychology and religion are key interests of mine, and an interplay between both would be interesting, hence my interest in The Varieties of Religious Belief by William James. Emotional illness was written in 1969 and...