Scheherazade: Stories of Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters - Softcover

Megan Kelso attended The Evergreen State College between 1988 and 1991 where she began drawing comics. In 1993, she was the first woman to win the Xeric Grant, a cash award to self-publishing cartoonists. She self-published six issues of the comicbook Girlhero and in 1998 Highwater Books collected stories from those comics in the book Queen of the Black Black. She is currently serialising a graphic novel called Artichoke Tales, for which she won two Ignatz Awards in 2003.

For this anthology, Kelso has assembled an all-star lineup of women cartoonists—almost all under 35 years old—and given them the mandate to show what they can do. The result is a dizzying variety of work, most of it impressive and some superb. Andrice Arp takes on the "Scheherazade" theme most literally, adapting a tale from The 1001 Nights that nests stories within stories, and reflecting its structure in her page compositions. Ariel Bordeaux contributes a wordless story whose panels appear between everyone else's pieces. Some of the stories are solemn, like Leela Corman's "Fanya Needs to Know," a chapter from her graphic novel-in-progress about an abortionist in early 20th-century Jewish New York; others are cute and whimsical, like Sara Varon's adorable untitled piece about a dog that builds a robot. There are cartoonists who draw on fine art (e.g., Vanessa Davis, whose "I Wonder Where the Yellow Went" is a series of her fluid autobiographical sketches) and on prose literature (e.g., Gabrielle Bell, who adapts a Kate Chopin story as "One Afternoon"). Kelso's own contribution, "The Pickle Fork," is one of the book's highlights, a dark but loopy narrative, drawn with clean-lined elegance, about a museum of silverware and the people who have to polish it. This notable anthology could launch more than a few careers.
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