Woah.

So... obviously... this piece was interesting in many ways.

I apologize again for my late post.

I've been dancing around a response to Mother's Urn.  Maybe because my brain has found habit in reading text and image along side one another, and to follow along with Kalamity J, I felt a disconnect.  The wedge was only pushed further when I realized at the end that the art had been done by someone separate of the author.  So much about this experience is different from our work thus far. 

I call it a "piece" because I relate it more to a piece of art, whereas the other graphic novels we've read I consider "works", as in literary work- they carried the weight of the label 'graphic novel.'  Let's face it, they were books.  Something that I like about this piece is that it felt like a comic book.  It was the same shape and expected weight, it opened like a comic book.  It didn't necessarily read like a comic book.  In fact, it read less like a comic book than any of the other works.

In the beginning, we are introduced to a romance.  And yet shortly after, the time changes, for "long before this love occurred, she was a mother."  I am still uncertain as to who the first romance involves, whether it is the narrator and her lover, or a romance involving her mother.  With my first read, I was convinced that the memoir started two years before the narrator's birth, and she was talking about her father or step father:

"'She's just like you,' he said. Such a step (dad) in the right direction... Dad. Daughter. Two. Years Old. Two years ago, this mother carbon copied herself petite brunette and baby.  'I'm ok with that,' he said..." (page 5)

Yet if it had started before her birth, why would the romance be long after the being "a mother?"  Are we introduced to her mother as she may possibly be now,  in love?  Or am I misreading, and is the man, the "step (dad)," the "dad" the actual father?  After my first read I thought that he was not the biological father- something about "I'm ok with that," read to me as, 'I'm ok you have a kid."  And the distance emoted with that last line on 5- "He bought the child mint chipped ice cream and fed bits to her mother"- everyone is so separate, the man from the child, the child from the mother... the mother and the man seem pretty cozy though...

It becomes clear on the following page that the man mentioned on page five is her step father, with the line "First marriage daughter."  Yet the question still begs- who is involved in the romance in the first few pages- if what happens on the following pages occurred "long before this love?"

In the first collection, the voice of the narrator is very young, and fragmented, very much like young memories.  This collection really felt like memory.  The diction was concise, in a very naive and child-like way.  The next collection reads with a sense of responsibility as the narrator has a hand in the upbringing of her brother.  The third collection reads as a period of understanding as a more mature narrator tries to justify her mother's actions, taking on her mother's experience- "in walks domestic violence stage left right-left-right, left hook and she's down/ downer's for breakfast." And what could be more fitting for the final collection that resolution?  The memories, unlike those in the first collection, are more vivid.  It was apparent that the narrator speaks throughout all four collections as an adult,  in the style of the age and time period it pertains to.  I am hoping that this makes sense.

Okay, what the hell.  Why does it say it's a work a fiction... what's going on here... tricksters.