Literally Graphic reviewed War in the neighborhood by Seth Tobocman
Review of 'War in the neighborhood' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Visually poetic and deeply honest, this book is going to be tough to beat as far as favourite book of 2017 goes. I really appreciated the nuanced way in which Tobocman approached this story, especially because while this is based off of his real life experience he does not seek to argue that it is a 100% factually accurate from everyone's perspective. So he had a lot more room to make himself look good and romanticize the cause in general, and he didn't take it. IMHO anyway, that's not to say his perspective isn't biased a certain way, based on his personal experiences, but that he's willing to even hold people who are on "his side" as well as himself to account for racist and sexist behavior.
I would not recommend this to people just getting into comics as they may have some trouble following the text, which sometimes ends …
Visually poetic and deeply honest, this book is going to be tough to beat as far as favourite book of 2017 goes. I really appreciated the nuanced way in which Tobocman approached this story, especially because while this is based off of his real life experience he does not seek to argue that it is a 100% factually accurate from everyone's perspective. So he had a lot more room to make himself look good and romanticize the cause in general, and he didn't take it. IMHO anyway, that's not to say his perspective isn't biased a certain way, based on his personal experiences, but that he's willing to even hold people who are on "his side" as well as himself to account for racist and sexist behavior.
I would not recommend this to people just getting into comics as they may have some trouble following the text, which sometimes ends up in very expressive (Rather then entirely user friendly) places. But as I said at the start of the review, as someone who is very comfortable in the genre I did not find that Tobocman's layouts were unskilled, but rather extremely poetic. He also uses visual metaphor similar to Maus.
Simultaneously thinking and not thinking about gentrification more than I used to, I did find this text highly instructional in the culture of gentrification. The very real war these sorts of creeps wage on the people they replace. Hopefully I will be able to integrate more anti-gentrification action into my life.