The first collection in three years by the Israeli alternative comics collective, Actus, How to Love (distributed in the U.S. by Top Shelf) is a handsomely packaged hardcover anthology of six "graphic novellas" centered on the title theme. In the years since Actus' last group production, 2005's Dead Herring Comics, one member of the group, Rutu Modan, has gone on to greater critical notice with her graphic novel Exit Wounds. But her success hasn't led the artist into dropping out of the collection. Good thing, too, since her contribution, "Your Number One Fan," is one of the book's highlights.
The 142-page volume opens with its cover story, Batia Kolton's "Summer Story," a meticulously rendered recounting of a young girl's trip to the beach with her family and a teenaged girl our heroine has been observing from afar. Kolton's straightforward art style is especially attuned to her characters' body language: though we're never shown heroine Dorit's inner thoughts, the awkwardness of her nascent teen-hood is beautifully captured. Working similar territory is Mira Friedmann's "Independence Day," the story of another young girl who ventures across the Israel/Jordan border in a futile attempt to impress a schoolboy. Drawing in a less realistic mode -- her characters possess stunted bodies that approach more traditional cartoon proportions -- Friedmann still manages to convey the isolation of traveling through a culture not your own.
Two illustrated fictions work from a more adult perspective: David Polonsky's "L'Elixir D'Amour" features a series of fantastic Borges-ian vignettes about the nature of love as told by an aged decadent nobleman, while Itzik Rennert's "Love Love Love" is a catalog of a nameless bisexual narrator's less-than-satisfying sexual encounters. The first is rendered with lovingly fantastical old-fashioned illustrations, while the second is presented in a more impressionistic sketchbook/collage blend. Both approaches suit their respective stories, though I have to admit to personally favoring Polonsky's lavishly inked gray-and-white illos.
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