In the wake of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Art Spiegelman's Maus comes cartoonist Carol Tyler's multigenerational graphic memoir, Soldier's Heart. The author chronicles her fraught relationship with her father, Charles, a WWII veteran, and how the war affected their lives through both childhood and adulthood. Soldier's Heart is also a tribute to servicemen and women, dramatizing the trauma of the war on the Greatest Generation and those who followed. Tyler's ink and watercolor narrative is in turns sprawling and gimlet-eyed: compassionate and enraged. Her father's memories are woven into her own, which span her Catholic, Midwestern childhood; her troubled marriage; her daughter's struggles; and her efforts to care for her aging parents. Even though Tyler's work has an accessible, homemade feel (the organizing metaphor of the book is a photo album with "snapshots" of Tyler family life), Soldier's Heart is a sophisticated graphic work about war, love, and loss.
