Now, End-Product-of-Laughter "Stitches" I Can Get Behind

My favorite sequence from David Small's Stitches (2009).

One of the reasons why I was underwhelmed by this book is that it feels like a series of painted cartoons instead of a comic. The last two panels on the page above are art school exercises: draw a curious and youthful eye (good!) and then a scary eye (good!). They are oddly free-floating illustrations, as if from a sketchbook, and it doesn't seem worthwhile to add them up. Add to the mix many pretty scenic double splash pages and there's almost too much independence.

As for the story, even though it's Small the small child who gets caught between Small the artist's tug-of-war between extreme innocence and extreme cruelty, my arms were hurt.

I am very close to declaring 2009 the Year of Trite Acclaimed Comics. Formal sophistication meets flat sentiment and thought. A thrilling style can't convincingly offset or reignite sitcom writing.

The following spring to mind:
1. George Sprott by Seth.
2. Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli.
3. Greg Rucka's unbearable Detective Comics dialogue.
4. AD: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld.
5. The Nobody by Jeff Lemire.

You can still use words, you know.

My comic of the year? Citizen Rex for its immense difficulty and absurd final issue "message"? Maybe. Gaiman and Allred's "Metamorpho" from Wednesday Comics? Maybe. The ever-reliable Joe Sacco's Footnotes From Gaza, which I haven't yet seen and may not even be out? I'll go with Sacco any day.

Sorry, The Graphic Novel, I'm wanted elsewhere.

More Like Dull-uge

My title's unfair but I wish more pages in Josh Neufeld's A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge were like the one above: distorted, detached, outside-looking-in. The book is generally concerned with one-note in-the-thick experiences of good will and survival. It's too earnest, its criticisms of Bush too tranquil, and its color-coded mood shifts arbitrary. But Neufeld manipulates panel size to great effect: scenes often lead up to dramatic and sometimes grim two-page spreads.

Mad Science

The "abstract" comic in my previous post was actually the British town of Thursdyke getting wiped off the map. Yikes. And for fear of devastation by big bombs we can thank J. Robert Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project. In the latest and all-comics issue of Taddle Creek Michael Cho tells Oppenheimer's tale.

When content precedes and dictates form . . . well, I'll just return to "yikes." The writing is anti-complex and nothing you haven't heard before: "In that cloud was contained all of our aspirations and achievements, both good and bad." It conveys information and adds pictures. The trickiest compositions are of the "one panel broken up" kind (I do like the above sequence's hanging time).

A lot of biographical comics are cropping up these days. They're labors of love or homages or corporate commissions. They're useful: we can educate with these comics. They lend respectability to a lowly medium. They reveal to us real and weighty subjects: Nelson Mandela, the Beats, and even the Space Race. No bloody thanks.

Back to the cheap moral ambiguity of the Oppenheimer comic: if the moral is this, then let it be this and be done with it.
(Thank you, Warren Ellis and this week's Ignition City #4. Art by Gianluca Pagliarani.)