bookblogging

[cerusee]

Graphic novels:

Watson, Andi, writer, Josh Howard, artist: Clubbing
(Minx. This is the second time I tried to read this. I still hate it. I'm really striking out with Andi Watson--of the three books I've tried from him, I've hated two, and Little Star...I should have liked it more than I did, but something about the thought processes of the protagonist kept me at an emotional distance...although I don't think the protagonist of Little Star a bad person, and I sympathize with his frustrations, I don't like him. At all).

Tomine, Adrian: Summer Blonde
(everyone in this book is a jerk! I respect Tomine's craft, but I don't think I like his comics).

Friedman, Aimee, writer, Christine Norrie, artist: Breaking Up
(Didn't finish. This may be a perfectly respectable teen-oriented graphic novels about the changing allegiances of adolescence etc etc, but I don't care and I want to smack the writer for being so goddamned cliched. I'm biased against these the-trauma-of-losing-your-best-friend-to-the-fashion-crowd stories, though; I tire of them quickly because they are not anything like my own high school experience. Oh, it was nasty, to be sure, but it was preferable by far to what had preceded it. I've never yet read a book about the high school experience that has ever made me think that the author would understand mine).


Now, stuff I liked!

Kibuishi, Kazu: Daisy Kutter: The Last Train
(I'm assuming the book was indeed created as black and white, but it throws me, because I'm used to Kibuishi's work in brilliant colors, and I wished this had been colored, too. Other than that quibble, I liked it. And Daisy/Tom OTP, dammit, dammit, dammit).

Lemire, Jeff: Essex County Vol. 1: Tales from the Farm
(damn, this is good. Lemire's style feels like it would be better suited to a horror comic--the white eyes and shadowed faces are unsettling to the point of creepy--but the thing coheres beautifully, heartbreakingly. What an fantastic book).


Pedrosa, Cyril: Three Shadows
(it didn't make me cry, but it made the back of my throat tight.

I found many of the sequences in the second half of the book to be rather odd, almost jarringly out of place with the central theme and the metaphor, but I can't say I didn't enjoy them as a sort of separate adventure story. I would, no pun intended, kill to see another book by Pedrosa focused on the Shadows, doing similar things to what they do here. It'd be awesome).


Niffenegger, Audrey: The Three Incestuous Sisters
(let me get my one qualm out of the way: Niffenegger, who is both the artist and the writer, explains in the afterword that she calls this a visual novel to differentiate it from graphic novels. I hate to assume the worst, but I have a feeling she wants to differentiate this work from a graphic novel because "graphic novel" means "comic books," and those are for kids and other people with bad taste in books, and are not capable of conveying the Deep Emotional Structure of a real novel, the kind that made her famous.

And I'll leave off speculating, because Niffenegger actually doesn't explain how this isn't a graphic novel, or speak on graphic novels and their relation to novels, and I may be doing her a terrible disservice; she only says that she wanted to acknowledge her debts to the wordless woodcut print novels of Lynd Ward.

What she may or may not have realized is that the book she created is what's called, in the parlance of Children's Literature, a picture book; I imagine you're already familiar with the concept? Scant text on one page, art on another, related to each other, but not entirely mirroring each other, words and image creating an effect together that they could not achieve individually and yet--and to me, this is probably the only thing that could meaningfully distinguish the term "picture book" from that broad umbrella term that is "graphic novel"--words and image separated enough from each other not to create a visual fusion.

The Three Incestuous Sisters is an adult picture book, an exquisite, gorgeous picture book with mature subject matter, but it's not the first adult picture book, and if there's anything unique in the form, I missed it. This is not conceptually ground-breaking, and it doesn't merit a special new name. There are already words that describe this kind of book, whether or not Niffenegger likes the cultural connotations. Welcome to the world of the marginalized art form, and try to remember how long it took for the novel to be accepted as a worthwhile medium.

Aside from that long caveat--and oh, how I wish I had not read that afterword, because it was a sour note at the end of a magical experience--god, I adored this. It's a weird and stunning work of art; I love to have wall prints of some of these illustrations. The process for creating the pictures was some kind of ungodly difficult acid etching print thing that creates a subtlety of color and texture I can't describe but to say it is captivating. Read this book. Buy this book. This is a wonderful book).

Comments

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

I didn't care for Clubbing at all--the heroine was too much priss and fake attitude, and the ending revelation was treated so strangely by the major characters. I'm all for "fish out of water" stories, but this one bugged the hell out of me.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Between me hating it so much I can't get past the first fifteen pages, and people whose taste in books I respect also not liking it when they'd finished, I think it's time for me to give up on this.