Special Exits

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Special Exits was to me, bittersweet.  The vulnerability expressed was one unfamiliar to me.  My oldest parent is 62, and my grandparents had past before I was born, so the age before death, while obvious, has been distant.  The deterioration of both, especially Rachel, was vivid and clear.  The image of her on page 132, holding her breasts up by her nipples while Laura bathed her, says so much about their character, and the level of trust between them, such open vulnerability.

What I liked so much about the form in Special Exits was the amount of detail given in the drawings- as I reader I gleaned so much from the visual context.  In the beginning especially, Farmer offers many panels without dialogue, and yet express so much about the people and the story.  On page 7, a panel illustrates Lars and Rachel’s diet via their shopping cart at the grocery store.  There is no dialogue here but the informative text is on the packages in their cart- these images are repetitive throughout and show themselves consistently in the kitchen scenes at their home. 

These dialogue-less panels sometimes dominate entire pages, especially, as I said above, in the beginning.  The top half of page 4 illustrates a habitual scene with Lars, which adds context equal to, in my opinion, that which would be found in a novel (sans graphic).  It’s easy to think of graphic novels as reliant on dialogue- perhaps because of the iconic speech bubble.  We talked once in class about the possibility of graphic memoir being the future of literature, in this current and upcoming world that communicates in brief text messages, and where image and information is so readily available.  I think this idea is valid, but that the general negative connotations these ideas generate are unnecessary regarding the graphic novel as literature.  I think Special Exits is a pretty damn good contender as literature.