Ruins

New York City cartoonist and illustrator Peter Kuper (Mad magazine's Spy vs. Spy, Kafka's Metamorphosis) lived in the Mexican town of Oaxaca from 2006 to 2008. Chronicled in the autobiographical Diario de Oaxaca (2009), his time in this historical Amerindian and agricultural center inspired him to return frequently to savor the rich Oaxacan life. Ruins is the story of a young married couple's journey from New York to Oaxaca in search of relief from city stress. Samantha is on academic sabbatical and determined to finish writing a discarded novel. Her amateur artist husband, George, has been laid off from his job as a museum entomologist. Their marriage is teetering over a disagreement about children--she desperately wants them and he is reluctant. They hope that time in a different venue will resolve their differences.

A graphic novel's success rests as much on the "graphic" as the "novel," and Kuper is a superb illustrator. His detailed and richly colored drawings of life in Oaxaca bring authenticity to the troubled relationship of Samantha and George. As he takes his characters into the rustic streets and markets, political protests and ruins of ancient civilizations, their personal concerns diminish in the face of bigger issues--just as their individual figures get lost in the large, mural-like illustrations. Kuper's art has always had an activist bent. Throughout are blue-line drawings of the United States' distressed political terrain below one monarch butterfly's long flight from New York to Mexico. As Kuper's novel illustrates, Samantha and George could look to the threatened monarch to find the resilience to make their way together in a difficult world. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

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