Words didn't tell me this story, Laura's face did.

It is hard not to compare each book I read in this course to those that preceded it and I have noticed an interesting arc in their formats and my perceptions of the stories they hold--from the accessible and accepted to the challenging and the hard to swallow.

The earliest works were the most accessible--equal parts quippy storytelling and sophisticated art styling that lent Bechdel, Bell and Sandell each a sort of currency to get my buy-in.  There seems to be a sort of engineering of the story and art interplay that creates a kind of popular authority that works on me in part because they are designed to work on me--they are formulaic.

The last work by Kalamity / Gribnikova (Mother's Urn) departed from formulas and conventions completely.  It is oubapo in the extreme.  But I still had buy-in but from a different angle because it captured me with its intensity.  Its artistry is in the design that allowed a complete separation of the art and the text for me. I barely could read them together and found my most profound meanings in allowing them to be separate.

Special Exits is a stealth read because even though it "looks" very much like a conventional graphic memoir (and even declares that it is one on its cover), I argue that it also embodies a quality of oubapo.

I entered the book.  When I began reading I almost immediately noticed that the drawing captured much more of my attention than the text did.  As I read along I found myself spending more and more time reading the drawings and less and less on the text.  The text almost got in the way and sometimes I think I skipped or forgot to read parts of the text, engrossed in the imagery and the story it was revealing to me.  In the conventional (not oubapo) graphic narratives that we've read, the art seems to take the role of illustration--drawing as a medium for expounding.  But in Special Exits I found it was the opposite--the text was ancillary to the drawing.

For the first time this semester a book's drawing is much more powerful than its text.  The text, in fact, is banal and at points boring.  At its most compelling it can be poignant but ultimately tells a not very interesting story by itself.  This is highlighted by the hyperbole of the title: Special Exits.  In fact, Lars and Rachel didn't have very special exits.  Their deaths are far from dramatic and their lives leading up to death are outwardly not very special.  Of course, like all loved ones, they are loved ones and to Laura, Barbara, Nick, and others, Lars and Rachel are special but their story, to an outsider, is not so much.

The gorgeous story here is found in the grotesque drawing.  It is in the facial expressions of the characters that the meaning behind the words is found.  This and that happened and the text reports it but the drawing, particularly the facial expressions, is where the emotion and tension lie.  Most of the action is also in the faces of the characters and not in their bodily movements or the pacing of the text. Lars and Rachel's story isn't very compelling but their anguish and their emotions are. The words in this book didn't tell me the story, Laura's face did.