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)

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.)

John's 1st Graphic Novel- Seth: It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken

Until Remi brought this book to my attention, I had thought it was just a Tragically Hip song. But when I found out it was first a graphic novel... er, picture novella... by some guy from Toronto who simply went by "Seth," it was enough to pique my interest. (According to Wikipedia, Seth borrowed it from a Maurice Chevalier song.)

So, when I joined up with the Graphic Novels Challenge, this one simply had to make my list. Not having ever read a graphic novel before I didn't know what to expect, but one look inside and I knew this wasn't it. With bold but minimalist lines (I'm no artist, so forgive me if I'm not describing this well), it wasn't the busy, grainy pictures I remembered from the few superhero comics I read as a kid. Likewise, there's no superhero action.

I also hadn't expected to be caught up in the words. The narration at the beginning, followed by the very realistic conversations when Seth (yes, he stars in his own book) visits with his mother and brother, is so engaging that I began to worry I wouldn't focus on the visuals at all!

Slowly but surely the artistry got to me. It's amazing how well he was able to set a mood with a few subtle shadows. Entirely wordless pages seemed as integral to the plot as the dialogue:



It's odd that such a slow-paced, sometimes depressing book, would engage me as much as it did (maybe he should illustrate a couple Alice Munro books for me). Perhaps the self-awareness won me over (at one point Seth even refers to his inclination towards "navel gazing"). Or, more likely, I was taken in with the irony. Seth is portrayed as someone never quite comfortable living in the now, someone nostalgic for a time before he even existed. Yet, for all that, the present-day Toronto seems drawn in such a fond, nostalgic light. If there's any message to be taken away, it's that a life is most beautiful when you appreciate the flaws.

(Cross-posted at The Book Mine Set)

John's Initial Choices

(Cross-posted at The Book Mine Set)

In 2008 I completed several challenges (The 1st Canadian Book Challenge, The Obscure Challenge, The Short Story Challenge, The Russian Reading Challenge, and The Shakespeare Reading Challenge). While I had fun with each, I wasn't exactly challenged. It's not to imply the requirements were too few, but basically I picked books I'd be reading anyway. I've always read Canadian, Shakespeare, and from the other categories listed above, so even had I not joined the challenges, my reading choices and habits wouldn't have looked any different. Next year, however, I'm truly going to be challenged. I'm joining the Graphic Novels Challenge. I've read only one book in my life that could even come close to being called a graphic novel: an anthology of works by Edward Gorey entitled Amphigorey. Nor was I really into comics as a kid. Joining this challenge should really broaden my horizons.

But not too much. Because it's my first foray into this genre, I'm working towards the bare minimum (6 books) and picking from what are probably obvious choices:

1. Art Spiegelman's The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
2. Seth's It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken
3. Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography
4. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis Boxed Set
5. Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira: Book 1
6. Joe Sacco's Palestine

This list could change depending on availability. I'm none too keen on buying books and I'll be looking to borrow, borrow, borrow if at all possible. Plus, the Spiegelman and Satrapi books could technically count as 2 each, so I haven't quite decided how to use them yet. Wish me luck!