Rutu Modan: Exit Wounds

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan marks my sixth and final book for the Graphic Novel Challenge. My reading list consisted of:

1. It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken- Seth
2. Absolute Sandman, Vol. 1- Neil Gaiman
3. Louis Riel: A Comic Biography by Chester Brown
4. Persepolis- Marjane Satrapi
5. Epileptic- David B
6. Exit Wounds- Rutu Modan

I'd like to say I ended the Graphic Novel Challenge on a higher note, but unfortunately Exit Wounds was my least favourite of the lot.

I'll start with the art work since most of my opinions in that area come down to personal preference. Though Modan uses red from time to time (as on the cover), the book is heavy on pastels. I don't like pastels. I feel like I should state some macho reason for this like "no self-respecting male likes pastels" but I assure you that's not it. They're just not dramatic enough. Even black and white seems bolder. Plus, while occasionally Modan plays with the lighting to indicate the time of day and so on, it's completely void of shading and shadows. Everything comes across as flat. The explosion on the cover is very misleading. The pastels, the uniform colouring, and the Tintin influenced simplicity, were not a good combination. It reminded me of the illustrations found on airplane emergency instructions.

But if the artwork was underwhelming at least it matched the story. Set in modern day Tel Aviv, it is the story of Koby Franco who sets out with a woman named Numi to learn whether or not an identified body, a suicide bombing victim, is really his estranged father. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it's as anti-climactic as they come.

Looking at the graphic novels above, I was a little perplexed why I'd like Seth's book and not this one, when it too could be described as anti-climactic. The only thing I could come up with was that Seth didn't promise as much. I knew from the get go that it wasn't going to be heavy in the plot department, so I settled into it all nice and cozy like. With Modan's talk of suicide bombings and explosions on the cover, I felt like I'd been promised more than she ever delivered.

David B: Epileptic

"When oh when will somebody give us a novel about epileptics?"
- Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz)

I just happened to be reading Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and David B's Epileptic at the same time. Imagine my surprise to find an epileptic character in both books. I love coincidences like that. Recently I got Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. The same day, I'm reading along in Anthony De Sa's Barnacle Love and lo and behold, there's a quote from Angelou's book. It's some sort of whacked out conspiracy, man!

That's all a side note to David B's Epileptic, a graphic novel that was recommended to me by Dale and Olga back in December.

Epileptic is David B's memoir about growing up in a family affected by his brother's epilepsy. "Affected" is to put it mildly. His brother Jean-Christophe may be the one with the seizures, but everyone suffers with helpless, embarrassment, guilt, confusion, and, and, and,

At times the story became tedious and repetitive. In fruitless efforts to cure Jean-Christophe, the family tries various medicines, psychology, diets (most notably a macrobiotic diet), religion and just about every esoteric practice known to man. It's the esotericism that started to get to me: Swedenborgism, voodoo, alchemy, and so on. This aspect started out really interesting but then I just found myself cringing everytime the family sought out a new guru. I get it, they were desperate. Enough already.

If it was a regular novel, it wouldn't have worked.

Fortunately, it's not a regular novel. The story is saved a hundred times over with David B's art. Not that I've read many graphic novels, but it's the best I've seen so far. The way he interprets and represents specific scenes and characters is beautiful and creative. Sometimes it's as simple as always drawing a particular character with a cat's face because as a child he thought the man resembled a cat. In one scene, onlookers are shown with grotesquely oversized eyes as they stare at Jean-Christophe while he seizures in the street. And one of my favourite techniques is the use of a dragonesque monster that eventually almost never leaves Jean-Christophe's side, representing the epilepsy, of course.



(Cross-posted at The Book Mine Set)

Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis

When I signed up for the Graphic Novels Challenge at the beginning of this year, I chose the smallest goal possible: 6 books. I'd not read a graphic novel before and had no idea how long each would take or if I'd even enjoy them. Here it is not even 2 months into the challenge, and I've already completed my 4th. Ranging from the 153 page Persepolis to the 612 page The Absolute Sandman, Vol.1 , none of these books have taken me more than a week. That's not bragging, I suspect it's just the nature of this genre. Add to that the pretty amazing storytelling and I just may be hooked. I must say, though, that I've enjoyed the black and white, artsy-fartsy ones (Persepolis, It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, and Louis Riel) better than the colour, comic-looking one (The Absolute Sandman, Vol. 1). Just two months in, four books down and I'm already turning into a graphic novel snob.

Persepolis is also my third book about 20th century Iran. The first was Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter and the second was Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. All memoirs, too. Anyone know any other Iranian books? Perhaps an Iranian challenge is in order. I only wish I could find one told from a male perspective for a change.

Persepolis is probably the funniest of the three Iranian books mentioned above. It's just as graphic (well, more so, I guess), but Satrapi's humour adds a much needed balance. Not only does it provide relief to the reader but reflects the fun times that had to break through all the oppression. When you set out to read books like this you always anticipate being disgusted with mankind ("how can one person do that to another?" etc) but time and time again they make me feel more optimistic than defeated. If the human spirit can be strong enough not only endure such hardships but actually have laughter as well, well that makes me feel all warm and giddy inside.

A favourite scene involves Satrapi being stopped by two women of the "Guardians of the Revolution" for wearing Nike shoes, denim, and a Michael Jackson button. There was a very real risk she'd be arrested and possibly whipped for her appearance. When questioned about the button, Satrapi says it's actually "Malcolm X, the leader of black Muslims in America." The caption at the bottom of the frame says, "Back then, Michael Jackson was still black."

I also enjoyed the artwork, especially the scenes in which she stressed repetition: soldiers, groups of girls covered in veils, protesters and the dead. Virtually cloning the people, Satrapi was able to make many strong statements using one single technique.

The real highlight of the book, however, was the precociousness of child Satrapi. She is such a lovable, smart, and melodramatic little girl that I wonder if the sequel, featuring a teenage Satrapi, will be as appealing.

Chester Brown: Louis Riel, A Comic Biography

I'd already read a biography of Louis Riel and I came pretty close to skipping over this one in favour of any other Chester Brown graphic novel. However, it was this book that first drew my attention to Brown and in all honesty, I remembered little from the other biography. So, when I found this one at the local library I grabbed it.

Apparently Brown and Seth (It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken) are friends. I'm not sure then if one's art influenced the other or if they came together out of respect for one another's art because both are very similar: black and white drawings with bold, simple lines. However, there are some differences: Brown seems to use more detailed lines in the background shading, and his characters seem more stylized. At first I thought Brown was using caricature. John A. MacDonald's nose, for instance, is drawn like a half-filled balloon. However, Louis Riel, A Comic Biography isn't remotely funny. I question if satirical drawings would fit. Also some aberrations are too consistent across characters to be merely an exaggerated attribute of one individual. The most common of these include the boxy bodies and over-sized hands. Had such a feature been isolated in one person, I'd guess Brown was merely poking fun. However, everyone was drawn that way and I figure it's just Brown's style. It took more getting used to than Seth's art, but I still enjoyed it.

I also enjoyed Brown's story-telling. Though he admits to misrepresenting facts at times, he is careful to point out inaccuracies in notes at the end. Some of these are done for dramatic effect, but the essence is the same. For example, in the opening scene John A MacDonald is shown in London negotiating with the Hudson's Bay Company. In reality, he had sent along representatives to do the negotiating. Small points like these are just fine with me.

For me, the biggest strength of the book was in Brown's compelling depictions of three characters in particular: Riel, John A. MacDonald, and Gabriel Dumont. Riel, though shown as wise and honourable, sometimes made some bad decisions out of trust or confusion (likely delusions). John A. MacDonald is shown as a calculating liar. And I thought Dumont was perhaps the wisest of all, except for his one mistake: letting Riel talk him out of using guerrilla warfare. Brown's portrayal seems to show Dumont of being more the type of person that the Canadian government tried to make Riel out to be, eventually hanging Riel and giving Dumont amnesty.

It's a phenomenal historical graphic novel, and a biography of Riel that, this time, I won't forget.

Neil Gaiman: The Absolute Sandman, Volume 1

I'm only on my 2nd book for the Graphic Novel Challenge and already I'm departing from my original list. It's been much harder to find my first choices at the local library.

I read Gaiman's short story "I Cthulhu" a couple years back and enjoyed it enough to promise exploring him further. It's taken me this long to come round to him again, but when I saw the massive Absolute Sandman, Vol. 1 (612 pages, comprised of the first 19 issues of Gaiman's Sandman comics first published in 1989), it refreshed my memory.

My first Graphic Novel Challenge book was Seth's It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, and the two books couldn't be more different. Where Seth's art had simplistic lines with white, black and shades of gray, Gaiman, who didn't draw himself, had a team of artists (including Sam Kieth, Michael Dringenberg, Chris Bachalo, Colleen Doran and others), who drew with lots of hatching, cross-hatching and general scratches for detail and worked in colour. But the differences didn't just exist in art. Whereas Seth's story was realistic, slow-paced, and tame, Gaiman's was surreal, fast-paced, and often pretty horrific. The Sandman (a.k.a. Morpheus, The Lord of Dreams, and a few other names) is supposed to be the anthropomorphic personification of dreams. With a description like that, you'd be correct in assuming he's a little more cerebral than Freddy Krueger.

I definitely prefer Seth's book, but after a while, I also came to enjoy Gaiman's. At the beginning I was enjoying the story but was distracted and unimpressed with the artwork. It reminded me of the style of Tales From The Crypt and seemed too stereotypically comic book (which for some readers might be a good thing.) Plus, I wasn't crazy about the Sandman's look. Resembling the unholy love child of Alice Cooper and the Cure's Robert Smith couldn't possibly be a good thing, but it was made even worse when the artists couldn't decide on a consistent head size. Eventually I either got used to it or Sam Keith's departure (after the first five stories) made the subtle difference. Towards the middle I thought it came together really well. Then, at the end, I thought Gaiman was stretching for story ideas. The Sandman's siblings started to get bigger roles, there was a whole story devoted to cats (apparently a popular issue with the fans), and while I enjoy Shakespeare, and although it's the one Gaiman won a World Fantasy Award for, I really didn't like the 19th Sandman story, "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It seemed silly and felt out of place with the rest of the collection, hardly having anything to do with dreams. I hope those last few stories are not representative of the later volumes because I'd still like to continue on with the series.

(Cross posted at The Book Mine Set.)