A few years ago, I made a readolution to read more illustrated books and later I wished that I’d made more of an effort, so here are a few that I enjoyed in 2024.

This manga version of the classic 1905-1906 story by Sōseki Natsume, I Am a Cat, is iIllustrated by Chiroru Kobato and translated by Zack Davisson. It was a whimsical borrowing while locating a memoir in the neighbouring library section. It reminded me of the plays I’ve read from early English theatre (Restoration Lit) where everyone is equally privileged and silly. Except for the cat, in this instance, who observes the people with a knowing air.

The topics for the scholars’ research are entertaining (one lecture is “The Circumlocution of Acorns in Relation to the Heavenly Bodies) and the compliments between women are catty (“If it looks that good on you then it would look even better on me”). And I understand that we’re intended to reflect on how “modern” (i.e. western) ideas are affecting traditional (i.e. eastern) values.

But mostly I enjoyed how well the illustrator and storyteller understand cats’ behaviour in the drawings. “I’ve no longer been content to be a mere cat sleeping on the porch,” observes the central cat (there are two other cats who appear briefly in the story, but it’s his cat-ness that I appreciated most). The misjudging of distance (a gentle “bonk” of the head), the declaration of a crime when one steals salmon from a counter, the stances and tail thicknesses betraying states that anyone who’s shared time with a cat will recognise. (But, be warned, this story ends with a philosophical statement, and…not happily.)

JAJ: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (whose Carpe Fin I’ve written about here before) presses an eight-square-foot mural between two book covers. The inside of the dust jacket and a few spreads in the back of the book present different perspectives, so we can more easily imagine how the images on each page might feel on a different scale. The artwork was originally commissioned by a museum in Berlin to query the colonial practice of accumulating Indigenous artifacts. Even if you’ve never heard of Haida Gwai (islands once called the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of what’s now British Columbia), or historical figures like Israel Powell (once the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, in the later 19th century), it’s easy to see the advantages to shuttling Indigenous people onto “reservations” and declaring the land they’d previously inhabited to be the property of Europeans, for agents of European nations. It’s boldly coloured and succinctly captioned: if you’re new to reading about Indigenous relations, or craving a different slant on familiar issues, this is an excellent work. One still relevant in the present-day. “Let us be cautious,” he warns: “Business is never just business.”

Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith’s autobiographical essays in These Are the Stories (2021) are direct and succinct. There’s something almost hypnotizing about her clear-eyed expression as she shares her experiences of being pulled away from her family home as part of the Sixties Scoop. (Such a cosy term for a brutal policy: a change in the 1951 Indian Act allowed the Canadian Children’s Aid Society to intervene on reservation land and remove Indigenous children to assimilate them via the foster “care” system when the influence of the Residential School System was beginning to wane. After funding was settled in 1966, these interventions were increasingly sweeping and devastating.)

One of the most painful aspects of the story is her experience of being adopted into a family and subsequently being returned to institutional life, without explanation. The unanswered questions that haunt her in this situation mirror the unanswered questions about her birth family (she’s a Saulteaux woman from Peguis First Nation). There’s so much searching, so much yearning: it’s beautifully told and devastatingly delivered. The photographs add a great deal to the sense of getting to know her, and I wish the collection was longer (but it must have been draining and difficult to compile and shape it).

When I saw The Witness Blanket by Carey Newman (with Kirstie Hudson, 2022) on my library list, I was confused for a moment, sure that I’d read it already; when I picked up my copy, I realised it was a companion for Picking up the Pieces, but for younger readers. About the art project that began with the idea to gather one brick from each residential school in what’s-now Canada. Instinctively, I went to place the book next to the door, thinking that I already knew this story. But, on the way, I opened it to see the photograph of one of the artist’s sisters’ braids of hair. It reminded me of the powerful story about how they prepared to give their hair to the project, the rituals enacted to honour their father’s experience, and I carried the book back with me to read instead. This time, I was struck by the image of the three pieces of broken, blue, stained-glass, the first objects formally collected for the project. And by the tiny moccasins and the photograph of the far-northern “school” in the Arctic, comprised of eight tents, which opened in 1955 and “housed” 30 Inuit kids. The team travelled 200,000 kilometres to visit 77 communities and speak with more than 10,000 people, gathering more than 889 items: seeing it in pictures really brings it off-the-page.

Kent Monkman’s and Gisèle Gordon’s The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (2023) is “A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island” and it’s sumptuously illustrated. Miss Chief first emerged from the paintbrush of Kent Monkman in Artist and Model (a Cree artist) more than twenty years ago. “If we have not honoured her as she should,” the artists say, “we ask her forgiveness, for we would never want to let her down.” They proceed to boost her up, for the duration of this volume (I’ve haven’t read the sequel yet). It’s hilarious and smart and outrageous: for what more could one ask?

Mariko Tamaki’s I Am Not Starfire, a 2021 graphic novel illustrated by Yoshi Yoshitani is labelled Young Adult on the back cover, but locally it was shelved with the Adult graphic novels near the New Books, which is where I spotted it while picking up my holds.

Mostly I love Mariko Tamaki’s stuff (especially This One Summer and Skim) but I wasn’t the right demographic for her Lumberjanes chapter books (or, else, I wasn’t in the right mood—I liked the graphic novels quite a bit).

The very concept of this one—teen daughter of a superhero mom, with enough black lipstick and eye liner for the whole Marvel universe—didn’t feel like it was going to land. But, it did. The tone is just-aware-enough of its own silliness that I climbed on board.

“Just because you have super-whatever so you can track my movements doesn’t mean you should!
“I went to the first coffee shop near our house. That is not tracking!”

It’s also actually funny, but it’s not often the daughter who’s the funny one, even though she’s the main character. I give the comedy prize to her best friend Lincoln who answers their science teacher’s question about the difference between a dominant and a recessive gene with “Willpower?” but then answers correctly. But, generally, the kids are kids—their shoes are often simply shoes, not fashion statements—and they’re just-clever-enough, not overly clever. (One of Claire’s friends makes a snide comment about Mandy, who’s only interesting to the other kids because they know about her mom, and he calls her “Miss Apathetic Two Thousand”. She doesn’t get beaten up at school or anything but she’s not popular either.)

“At least my mom is off in another part of the universe saving people so I can spend the night eating macaroni and chocolate sauce in bed—”

Mariko Tamaki works with her sister Jillian on Roaming (2023): a story about how we see ourselves and one another, about how we connect and how we hold ourselves apart, about places we explore and how we create a sense of belonging. Zoe (who only wears black Ts and says corporate “retail is the opiate of the nation”) and Dani meet in New York City for four days, where they’ve always dreamed of travelling, with Dani’s friend Fiona who’s in her cultural studies class and rooms in the same dorm. In the city, everyone looks “like they own a lot of nice shoes”, says Zoe, who flips through the sidewalk vendors’ cartons of used books. Dani plans their subway routes and tracks the number of blocks between destinations. She’s the one who slips a keepsake into her purse (a paper coaster from a bar they visit). They all eat pizza slices as big “as a placemat” and go to the museum, but Fiona buys rye at the corner store and is more into shopping (and checks the tags on Zoe’s T—The Gap). Fiona’s parents are divorced and she moved around a lot, and she debates a certain jacket but ultimately isn’t sure if she’s “still doing leather”. Reviews often claim that books are love letters to cities, but this one actually is. I really love the panels where Dani is asking for directions at a ticket counter in one tourist venue and she’s speaking into the little mesh circle for help navigating to another destination, but there’s no other person visible and only partial replies, which culminate in “I’m from New Jersey.” This made me laugh out loud, but if you don’t think it’s funny, this probably isn’t the book for you.

William Kamkwamba’s memoir The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2009) was written with Bryan Mealer, and it begins with family and ordinary life for this teenage boy living in Malawi, where subsistence farmers believed in magic because “there were too many troubles for God and man alone”. The rhinos and lions and cobras are more present in the stories he hears as a boy than in his reality, but retelling them also sets an archetypal tone. His father was also a “born storyteller” and his life “one fantastic tale” but during famine years he can’t afford to send his son to school.

Nonetheless, William is a problem-solver; he’s an accomplished bawo player and he constructs traps that help keep the family fed. He realises he is just as hungry when he’s able to attend school as he feels when he’s working in the field. “I was still confused as to how the hunger had been allowed to happen, this much was certain: Every man for himself. We were on our own.” His fame resides in his having built a windmill for electricity and a water pump from common materials (including wires, batteries, the handle of a nylon bag, a bicycle wheel, fibre from a car tire, a crochet hook) as presented to a global audience via TED.

There’s a whiff of exceptionalism to the way this inventor’s story has been popularized, particularly with the marketing of the film I thought, but perhaps that’s my cynicism showing; Kamkwamba himself writes about how important TED was for him and his family, and how his favourite part was being able to connect with other Africans at this conference, who understood both his hardships and his accomplishments.

What have you been reading with pictures lately?