women use her as a sounding board to feel better about themselves. She gets along mostly fine because she has a steady job and comfort in the love and stability of a fiancé with whom she’s been involved for eight years and who assures her that he loves her, weight and all, until one day she sees him with another woman. Unsure how to react, she decides losing weight is the ideal plan: to win him back, to reinvent herself, to make a better life for herself where people will like her and treat her with dignity. There are many relationships in this book: the relationship of Noko and food, her one true comfort; the relationships that many of the characters have with body image—their own and others; and the relationships people have with their insecurities and the actions they take when they feel exposed. In Clothes Called Fat isn’t a pretty affair. No shōjo sparkles here. Instead, you’ll find a gritty read with perhaps no true heroes. Realistic circumstances married with raw emotion carried along by characters so flawed and realistic compel you to keep reading. Noko, once overweight and unhappy, keeps shedding pounds to become someone else, but she must ask herself, as the reader should, at what cost? And to what end? Carrie McClain Compton, California David B. Incidents in the Night Book 1. Trans. Brian Evenson & Sarah Evenson. Minneapolis. Uncivilized Books. 2013. 100 pages. David B. Incidents in the Night Book 2. Trans. Brian Evenson & Sarah Evenson. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Uncivilized Books. 2015. 120 pages. Cartoonist David B.’s work is a study in Western culture cast in rich illustrations. His graphic memoir Epileptic (L’Ascension du haut mal, 1996–2003) garnered comparisons to Max Ernst, but the two-part Incidents in the Night demonstrates a wider scope of influences, which are allowed to run free in this fictional escapade. Incidents in the Night is an incredible example of pastiche filtered through brilliant imagination. Book 1 follows the fictional David B. through Parisian bookshops, seeking the nineteenth-century journal Incidents in the Night. The search winds through dreams, conspiracies, and death. Gathering characters in his search, David B., the audacious Maria, the surly Commissioner Hunborgne , and the mystical bookshop owner Mr. Lhôm seek a rogue group of Parisian bandits, The Fleet, whom they believe are working for the undead Emile Travers. David B. begins gathering clues, which lead him to his femme fatale and a gruesome murder, and ultimately to his perceived demise. Book 2 picks up the story, and the fictional Jean-Christophe appears. In this context David B.’s brother, familiar to anyone who has read Epileptic, JeanChristophe is uncomplicated, with only a passing mention of his “disease.” It is difficult to separate David B. the author from his fictional counterpart, as Jean-Christophe is on the cover and a prominent character in the second installment. JeanChristophe , recognizable by his glasses, girth, and round, scarred face, has come to Paris to save David B. in a moment that feels exceptionally personal in the otherwise surreal landscape. In the true nature of bande dessinée, David B.’s narratives are incomplete without the illustrations, as the text and images work in symbiosis. Like woodcuts, his work calls to mind Lynd Ward or Frans Masereel, and the frames are imbued with a gravitas in the deep black and contrast of black-and-white. As David moves throughout stacks and piles of book, “Each of these bookstores secretes its own mythology and its own history,” and “we could continue to unroll the panorama of these places across the twenty districts.” Shigeru Mizuki Shigeru Mizuki’s Hitler Trans. Zack Davisson Drawn & Quarterly Drawn & Quarterly adds another critical piece to the legacy of Shigeru Mizuki in the West with this translation of Mizuki’s demythologizing biography of Adolf Hitler. A companion piece, of sorts, to his Showa series, Mizuki uses his unassuming style to place Hitler in his time and to address still-relevant questions of how Germany came to see him as a savior. 68 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 cover feature international comics Incidents in the Night immediately calls to mind postmodern works: Italo Calvino...