This comic book is a collection of stream-of-consciousness poetry and elaborate, swirling, artwork. The four sections of the book each present separate stories accompanied by a slightly different choice for the artwork.
Kalamity J's text appears on the pages, unboxed, unfiltered. The words are, in general, printed in rows like regular text, but every once in a while appear bold, highlighted, or in wavy lines across the page. The illustrations are almost like those in a picture book, appearing on the facing page, (separated from the text, contrary to traditional comic book style,) or are arranged amongst the text.
The book focuses on the trauma of being raised by a coke addled then later Valium popping mother who, after Kalamity's father is gone, goes through a string of unfortunate boyfriends or just plain disappears. Retelling traumatic events often seems to give artists license to free-associate, vomit emotionally, and publish without editing. Editing would make it dishonest? Remove the grit? I doubt it.
The project seems to attempt to extricate the author from her poisoning past without too much thought for the reader's experience. The text is sloppy, with statements like, "I think of her, laughing like in pictures with babies and birthday cakes. Pictures of us. Pictures I can't remember." Clearly, she remembers the pictures, she is describing them. I believe she meant to say she didn't remember the event, the smiling moment itself. The text contains loads of sentence fragments and relies heavily on line breaks, as on page 33, "a rib/ broken/ heart," (5-7). The language slithers fiercely across the page using strong internal rhymes and alliteration. It reads like slam poetry. I started to question her choice of words, unsure if she had chosen them for their meaning or for their sound.
After reading Allison Bechdel's careful pros, Mother's Urn felt clumsy and rudely done.
The artists describe themselves on the back cover of the book. They seem to apologize for their work with statements like, "do not shoot the artist, she was doing her best", and describing their own work as something they were "jotting down", "abstract", and of course, sign off with,"enjoy the kalamity". These words are meant to be heart-wrenchingly honest, I'm sure, but they seem at best, to be fishing for compliments.
Showing posts with label Martha. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martha. Show all posts
Monday, March 11, 2013
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Allison Bechdel's book, Are You My Mother? is another brilliantly rendered account of her life. The book is wrapped in a waxy red dust jacket replete with gold text and gold highlights. Hating to have it slip up and down as I read, I tore it off and tossed it to the floor. To my delight, I discovered the wonderful artwork on the flat-white vinyl cover underneath.
The picture shows Allison as a child, having her photograph taken in a field by a mother age woman in one, and a grandmother age woman in the other. The pictures are very warming and evocative, candid. They seem to be snapshots of a road trip in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by endless fields. The lack of background besides the car and a tiny bit of road emphasizes her smallness, her vulnerability. Her littleness seems so little. She even has a band aid on her knee in one. The end papers have beautiful grey wash paintings of, we assume, Bechdel's face as a child. In the first, she is serious, downcast, the second, brooding angry, perhaps a bit older. Bechdel invested a lot in her portrayal of the speaker's/ her child-self. She goes to great lengths to proves how innocent she was, how impressionable, how hard she worked at being lovable. The cover art really sums that up for me, she has hidden her exposed, waifish girl self under a cover littered with the trappings of adult feminine persona: golden nudes sit on either side of a box that pearls spill out of, compacts, puffs, brushes and perfume scatter across the dresser top. The title of the book floats in a shiny gold mirror above the desk, a flag to her deepest fears, are you my mother?
Thanks to her meticulous documentation of her own life: her child-hood journals, her transcribed telephone conversations with her mother, typing up her father's letters, and carefully reading and re-reading corresponding literature, Bechdel is able to patch together a narrative as intricate and cohesive as a well-made quilt. Without careful handling, these disparate shreds of insight would be no more than tattered remnants, but she manages to use them in a way that is even-paced and cohesive. She finds several meta thread-throughs that tie the different bodies of work together. At the center of this collaged text, are the works of Donald Winicott, whose theories about the "false self" and the "good-enough mother" intertwine with her own reflections on her mother in a balletic call and response. She uses the quotes to highlight the "elephant in the room" within her sketches- the gaping, awkward holes in her character's life are filled and explained and validated by the external voyeur of the psychoanalyst.
She introduces great literature, skimming some and quoting large swaths of others. It's exciting to see references to Adrienne Rich and Anne Bradstreet. Her inclusion of so many drawings of book covers was great, her bibliography is illustrated, each drawn cover complete with tiny cramped author's names. This was a quiet but solid shout-out to the powerful body of work she was referencing. It gives the reader the impetus to read some of these works as well, having already been given a crash course in their major themes.
After visiting Bechdel's website, I felt that she had misrepresented her fame and her body of work. I looked at her wikipedia page and saw she'd published so, so many books before Funhome and Are You...? She seems to want the reader to believe that she is a creative ingenue. She makes very little reference to the success of her earlier books- collections of her comics, "Dykes to Watch Out For"- which have been widely published and even translated. The speaker in the book talks only in dismayed tones about this body of work, dismissing it's success and constantly feeling strapped financially. This (unconscious?) belittling of self reinforces her portrayal of herself as helpless and vulnerable.
The picture shows Allison as a child, having her photograph taken in a field by a mother age woman in one, and a grandmother age woman in the other. The pictures are very warming and evocative, candid. They seem to be snapshots of a road trip in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by endless fields. The lack of background besides the car and a tiny bit of road emphasizes her smallness, her vulnerability. Her littleness seems so little. She even has a band aid on her knee in one. The end papers have beautiful grey wash paintings of, we assume, Bechdel's face as a child. In the first, she is serious, downcast, the second, brooding angry, perhaps a bit older. Bechdel invested a lot in her portrayal of the speaker's/ her child-self. She goes to great lengths to proves how innocent she was, how impressionable, how hard she worked at being lovable. The cover art really sums that up for me, she has hidden her exposed, waifish girl self under a cover littered with the trappings of adult feminine persona: golden nudes sit on either side of a box that pearls spill out of, compacts, puffs, brushes and perfume scatter across the dresser top. The title of the book floats in a shiny gold mirror above the desk, a flag to her deepest fears, are you my mother?
Thanks to her meticulous documentation of her own life: her child-hood journals, her transcribed telephone conversations with her mother, typing up her father's letters, and carefully reading and re-reading corresponding literature, Bechdel is able to patch together a narrative as intricate and cohesive as a well-made quilt. Without careful handling, these disparate shreds of insight would be no more than tattered remnants, but she manages to use them in a way that is even-paced and cohesive. She finds several meta thread-throughs that tie the different bodies of work together. At the center of this collaged text, are the works of Donald Winicott, whose theories about the "false self" and the "good-enough mother" intertwine with her own reflections on her mother in a balletic call and response. She uses the quotes to highlight the "elephant in the room" within her sketches- the gaping, awkward holes in her character's life are filled and explained and validated by the external voyeur of the psychoanalyst.
She introduces great literature, skimming some and quoting large swaths of others. It's exciting to see references to Adrienne Rich and Anne Bradstreet. Her inclusion of so many drawings of book covers was great, her bibliography is illustrated, each drawn cover complete with tiny cramped author's names. This was a quiet but solid shout-out to the powerful body of work she was referencing. It gives the reader the impetus to read some of these works as well, having already been given a crash course in their major themes.
After visiting Bechdel's website, I felt that she had misrepresented her fame and her body of work. I looked at her wikipedia page and saw she'd published so, so many books before Funhome and Are You...? She seems to want the reader to believe that she is a creative ingenue. She makes very little reference to the success of her earlier books- collections of her comics, "Dykes to Watch Out For"- which have been widely published and even translated. The speaker in the book talks only in dismayed tones about this body of work, dismissing it's success and constantly feeling strapped financially. This (unconscious?) belittling of self reinforces her portrayal of herself as helpless and vulnerable.
Monday, February 25, 2013
This short starts so abrutly I thought I had the printed pages mixed up. The title, But I Can't, is embedded mysteriously in second row of frames. At first glance the title appears to be a dramatized portion of the story, but on reading, is completely out of context. The story focuses on the relationship between two girls during their middle school and teen years. The narrative seen through the eyes of one of the girls, as she relates the story to a group of friends.
The story is organized in soft bubbles delineated by background shading rather than lines. The story begins with a dialogue between several characters in word bubbles but is then narrated in solid blocks of text that are the same size as the frames themselves. This gives the feeling of a very close first person voice. The rounded frames are punctuated here and there with objects: a picture frame, computer screen photos, and a newspaper clipping. The objects stand out in sharp contrast next to the marshmallowed images.
The characters in the pictures are all fairly nondescript sweatshirt-wearing, long-haired teenagers. The only character who really stands out is the lost mother. She is wearing a very low cut blouse with ric-rac trimming and has on bracelets and rings. Her face is animated, and her hair falls loosely across her chest. The narrator is a long-haired girl whose gender doesn't really become absolutely clear until the second page, where she is seen younger, in a school uniform skirt get-up. Interestingly, though they are all so seemingly similar, clearly the friend in question was the odd man out. She was made fun of, picked on, teased. She is "too boyish and weird for everyone" (2). But aren't they all kind of goofy and boyish and weird looking, too? Great way to show the stochasticity of meanness and alienation.
The narrative sets out to describe a supernatural experience and ends up telling a story about a girl gone missing, never found, and leaves on the page, a great aching for her. The ambiguity of the characterization and of the tale allow the reader to ruminate about loss- especially the kind concerning folks who have drifted out of our lives for one reason or another, or those, perhaps, that we took for granted.
The story is organized in soft bubbles delineated by background shading rather than lines. The story begins with a dialogue between several characters in word bubbles but is then narrated in solid blocks of text that are the same size as the frames themselves. This gives the feeling of a very close first person voice. The rounded frames are punctuated here and there with objects: a picture frame, computer screen photos, and a newspaper clipping. The objects stand out in sharp contrast next to the marshmallowed images.
The characters in the pictures are all fairly nondescript sweatshirt-wearing, long-haired teenagers. The only character who really stands out is the lost mother. She is wearing a very low cut blouse with ric-rac trimming and has on bracelets and rings. Her face is animated, and her hair falls loosely across her chest. The narrator is a long-haired girl whose gender doesn't really become absolutely clear until the second page, where she is seen younger, in a school uniform skirt get-up. Interestingly, though they are all so seemingly similar, clearly the friend in question was the odd man out. She was made fun of, picked on, teased. She is "too boyish and weird for everyone" (2). But aren't they all kind of goofy and boyish and weird looking, too? Great way to show the stochasticity of meanness and alienation.
The narrative sets out to describe a supernatural experience and ends up telling a story about a girl gone missing, never found, and leaves on the page, a great aching for her. The ambiguity of the characterization and of the tale allow the reader to ruminate about loss- especially the kind concerning folks who have drifted out of our lives for one reason or another, or those, perhaps, that we took for granted.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
The Tragic House of Doilies
Allison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home A Family Tragicomic, is compact and full to the brim. The story of her child hood is laid out in episodic groups of panels while the text bounces from her adult reflections to her childhood inner dialogu, to passages of canonical literature that she find revealing. The literary inserts both illustrate her dense, itellectual public relationship with her father and her fantasy of him.
The inclusion of actual letters and diary entries provides traction to her tale. It lends credibility and allows the reader to breathe in the world she is showing without suffocating under her perception of. Hearing the mother and father's authentic voices made the retelling of this very private family story into a public document, a statement, rather than singular personal experience. The author maintains her balance just on the other side of neutrality. Her own childhood diary with it's scrawling carrots and mini "I thinks" crammed between sentences serve to illustrate her character and reveal her then-state of mind as compared to the ongoing review from her older self.
Interesting how she littered the book with those Sunbeam Ranch bags... She rubs it in how small and closed their entire world theirs was. Her fathers death didn't come from some far off outsider truck, rather from a company who's very products had fed his mortal self for years and years. It was a great way of showing how enmeshed the family was with their surrounding and their community. It is that very enmeshment that compelled her father to hide his identity from himself all those years. She manages to clearly convey that small town mentality.
I was very described to hear the author describe her father as a "sissy" (90). I was almost... insulted for him? I really liked and identified with the father character and this word somehow seemed like a great betrayal of their trust. Though she laughs at his death and never really admits to their utter propinquity, I found them a very loving father daughter unit. They spent a lot of time together sharing work and play. Their ongoing book swap during college and his continuing, earnest letters seem a testament to that. It seemed that their misunderstandings had more to do with his religious small town midcentury upbringing than it did with a personality clash or an abuse. Indeed, she admits that "we were inversions of one another" (98), declaring that they were one and the same, reflections of one another.
The art in this book is incredibly enjoyable. The characters have strong, recognizable featuresand wonderfully emotive faces. The father is studiously rendered, he has the same smile and jaw lines throughourt. Bechdel employs a delicate blue wash to shade, highlight, and light her images. What in Lucky were hard, dark spaces between objects are in Fun Home these prismatic subtleties. For instance, the sunset she watches with her father on page 150 is very convincingly lovely. the wide open picture with the figures in sillouette and the sky a fluctuating blue wash, is for comic art, really evocative. The last panel on page 86 is another great example. Here she has silloutte, line shading, blue wash, and white space to show the lights, which highlights the toner of the text by placing the characters so firmly in distinctly separate spaces and adds visual nuance. She uses a different style of art for the chapter-headings, inserting scratchy black and white drawings of photographs that are more realistic than the panel art. They add depth to both the visual texture of the book over all and to the characters themselves; the audience gets to see the family members outside of Bechdel's impersonations of them. The anatomy drawings (44) are thrilling: realistic, horrifying, and frank. She includes genitalia, body hair, wounds and the like without exaggerating it.
Allison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home A Family Tragicomic, is compact and full to the brim. The story of her child hood is laid out in episodic groups of panels while the text bounces from her adult reflections to her childhood inner dialogu, to passages of canonical literature that she find revealing. The literary inserts both illustrate her dense, itellectual public relationship with her father and her fantasy of him.
The inclusion of actual letters and diary entries provides traction to her tale. It lends credibility and allows the reader to breathe in the world she is showing without suffocating under her perception of. Hearing the mother and father's authentic voices made the retelling of this very private family story into a public document, a statement, rather than singular personal experience. The author maintains her balance just on the other side of neutrality. Her own childhood diary with it's scrawling carrots and mini "I thinks" crammed between sentences serve to illustrate her character and reveal her then-state of mind as compared to the ongoing review from her older self.
Interesting how she littered the book with those Sunbeam Ranch bags... She rubs it in how small and closed their entire world theirs was. Her fathers death didn't come from some far off outsider truck, rather from a company who's very products had fed his mortal self for years and years. It was a great way of showing how enmeshed the family was with their surrounding and their community. It is that very enmeshment that compelled her father to hide his identity from himself all those years. She manages to clearly convey that small town mentality.
I was very described to hear the author describe her father as a "sissy" (90). I was almost... insulted for him? I really liked and identified with the father character and this word somehow seemed like a great betrayal of their trust. Though she laughs at his death and never really admits to their utter propinquity, I found them a very loving father daughter unit. They spent a lot of time together sharing work and play. Their ongoing book swap during college and his continuing, earnest letters seem a testament to that. It seemed that their misunderstandings had more to do with his religious small town midcentury upbringing than it did with a personality clash or an abuse. Indeed, she admits that "we were inversions of one another" (98), declaring that they were one and the same, reflections of one another.
The art in this book is incredibly enjoyable. The characters have strong, recognizable featuresand wonderfully emotive faces. The father is studiously rendered, he has the same smile and jaw lines throughourt. Bechdel employs a delicate blue wash to shade, highlight, and light her images. What in Lucky were hard, dark spaces between objects are in Fun Home these prismatic subtleties. For instance, the sunset she watches with her father on page 150 is very convincingly lovely. the wide open picture with the figures in sillouette and the sky a fluctuating blue wash, is for comic art, really evocative. The last panel on page 86 is another great example. Here she has silloutte, line shading, blue wash, and white space to show the lights, which highlights the toner of the text by placing the characters so firmly in distinctly separate spaces and adds visual nuance. She uses a different style of art for the chapter-headings, inserting scratchy black and white drawings of photographs that are more realistic than the panel art. They add depth to both the visual texture of the book over all and to the characters themselves; the audience gets to see the family members outside of Bechdel's impersonations of them. The anatomy drawings (44) are thrilling: realistic, horrifying, and frank. She includes genitalia, body hair, wounds and the like without exaggerating it.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Lucky is an irreverent collection of minute narratives, snapshots of a little life in New York. These stories and sketches, originally published in three separate parts, really develop as the book goes on. Like her friends said they would, it looks like her work only got better after being lost and redrawn. The third section was much more captivating; I, as a reader, was so much more engaged and the narratives themselves were flayed out much more delicately. Recounting such 'quiet' and subtle stories takes a careful hand; it is easy to lose the point of the story.
Lucky #1 struck me as a bit redundant. The title, obviously, is sarcastic. The narrator is drawn in short, straight lines. Her face is very plain and open and her eyes are mere dots. The first thing we discover about her is that she is inhibited, shy, painfully self conscious. We are introduced to her boyfriend, Tom, who seems to have no personality. The entire book deals with the difficulty finding a room in New York City. The subject matter is a known factor of city life for most readers, presumably. What, then, is Bell illuminating that wasn't already known? She seems to withhold details that would focus in on her characters and make this story 'too personal' which keeps the reader at arm's length, unable to connect to them. In these first stories, the narrative felt more like a journal entry than a plot.
Lucky #2 begins with noticeably different line quality to the artwork. The frames on the first page (45) are large and the narrator is depicted in each one with dark, steady lines. She seems to have grown in her technique since the publication of the first book. The characters started to gain some flesh during the "farm upstate" scenes. The narrator reveals her interdependence on them, which we hadn't really seen in the first book. Without the context of her social life, with its own lexicon, references, and style, the story is hard to draw meaning from. Meeting the gang helped solidify her point of view as a narrator and I got the hang of her jokes and perspective. The scene with the walkie talkies displayed their lives in action as opposed to in retrospect as in some of the other bits.
I was particularly intrigued by her attempt to meditate on page 54- "I thought, if I sit still enough, I will gain some kind of deeper understanding. Reality will break open, I'll become a fuller person, and see things closer to how they really are." She sits, she waits, and "nothing special" happens. This little bit indicated the larger question of the rest of the book. She's looking. She's looking for her self to settle into itself and for life to start being great! or meaningful or worthy, but the days just seem to peel back like so much pith revealing... another day gone, and nothing more... lucky. Page 54 is also the last page of the first half of the book which seems to have no solid black filling in the panels. The rest of the book is riddled with half-dark frames full of shadows and sunglasses. Life is getting heavy! Or at least more full of contrast. There is also a lot more use of quiet panels without dialogue or narration.
She presents another scene in which the esoteric Buddhist connection is sought after. The scene after her yoga class with friend, Andy, seemed to reflect back to the earlier passage at the farm. In it, Andy talks enthusiastically about reincarnation and how comforting it is to believe in, "I don't know how anyone can be creative and believe that this is all there is" (65). He invites her to come to class saying she will love his yoga teacher. The yoga teacher also talks a lot about reincarnation and uses Gabrielle as an example in his lecture. He congratulates her for accomplishing in one class what he had spent his life trying to learn. As a voyeur, this scene plays differently. Gabrielle's face in the drawings is tortured, her body is quaking, and she seems to fall and crash out of every position. He tells us she must have been a yogi in her past life. As she leaves the class, there are five pointed frames of her waiting at a bus stop. Alongside her, curled up on a bench, is a person sleeping. Presumably, he is smelly, and homeless. She leaves on the bus, and the last frame focuses in on only him, with big wavy lines rising off of his body. Perhaps she is wondering who he was in a past life, and what he had done to deserve his current position. These scenes lend the work a larger, more interesting question than, "where can I get a good room in New York?"
As her interest in her work deepened, so did mine. The last third had me surprised, laughing, and dog-earring pages. I loved the French kids!! I loved the dad of the French kids. I loved the whole Francophile bit. The kissing lesson was great. The wit and humor quotient goes up, but continues to gnaw at the same question. On page 95, at her new, great jewelry job, she says, "...the tedium is excruciating. It builds up as a profound blankness that stretches out across the day, five days across the week, weeks piling up on to years, boredom layered up on loneliness, a gaping emptiness, directly contradicting the rich life I had intended to live". The narrator never seems to make any break-throughs on this question, this emptiness swallowing her life. She just plods on. The book ends with her and Tom literally being swallowed up into the banal little hole in the New York apartment wall. Like The Nothing of The Neverending Story, it goes on forever, destroying everything in its path, unless one has the courage to dream oneself out of it.
Lucky #1 struck me as a bit redundant. The title, obviously, is sarcastic. The narrator is drawn in short, straight lines. Her face is very plain and open and her eyes are mere dots. The first thing we discover about her is that she is inhibited, shy, painfully self conscious. We are introduced to her boyfriend, Tom, who seems to have no personality. The entire book deals with the difficulty finding a room in New York City. The subject matter is a known factor of city life for most readers, presumably. What, then, is Bell illuminating that wasn't already known? She seems to withhold details that would focus in on her characters and make this story 'too personal' which keeps the reader at arm's length, unable to connect to them. In these first stories, the narrative felt more like a journal entry than a plot.
Lucky #2 begins with noticeably different line quality to the artwork. The frames on the first page (45) are large and the narrator is depicted in each one with dark, steady lines. She seems to have grown in her technique since the publication of the first book. The characters started to gain some flesh during the "farm upstate" scenes. The narrator reveals her interdependence on them, which we hadn't really seen in the first book. Without the context of her social life, with its own lexicon, references, and style, the story is hard to draw meaning from. Meeting the gang helped solidify her point of view as a narrator and I got the hang of her jokes and perspective. The scene with the walkie talkies displayed their lives in action as opposed to in retrospect as in some of the other bits.
I was particularly intrigued by her attempt to meditate on page 54- "I thought, if I sit still enough, I will gain some kind of deeper understanding. Reality will break open, I'll become a fuller person, and see things closer to how they really are." She sits, she waits, and "nothing special" happens. This little bit indicated the larger question of the rest of the book. She's looking. She's looking for her self to settle into itself and for life to start being great! or meaningful or worthy, but the days just seem to peel back like so much pith revealing... another day gone, and nothing more... lucky. Page 54 is also the last page of the first half of the book which seems to have no solid black filling in the panels. The rest of the book is riddled with half-dark frames full of shadows and sunglasses. Life is getting heavy! Or at least more full of contrast. There is also a lot more use of quiet panels without dialogue or narration.
She presents another scene in which the esoteric Buddhist connection is sought after. The scene after her yoga class with friend, Andy, seemed to reflect back to the earlier passage at the farm. In it, Andy talks enthusiastically about reincarnation and how comforting it is to believe in, "I don't know how anyone can be creative and believe that this is all there is" (65). He invites her to come to class saying she will love his yoga teacher. The yoga teacher also talks a lot about reincarnation and uses Gabrielle as an example in his lecture. He congratulates her for accomplishing in one class what he had spent his life trying to learn. As a voyeur, this scene plays differently. Gabrielle's face in the drawings is tortured, her body is quaking, and she seems to fall and crash out of every position. He tells us she must have been a yogi in her past life. As she leaves the class, there are five pointed frames of her waiting at a bus stop. Alongside her, curled up on a bench, is a person sleeping. Presumably, he is smelly, and homeless. She leaves on the bus, and the last frame focuses in on only him, with big wavy lines rising off of his body. Perhaps she is wondering who he was in a past life, and what he had done to deserve his current position. These scenes lend the work a larger, more interesting question than, "where can I get a good room in New York?"
As her interest in her work deepened, so did mine. The last third had me surprised, laughing, and dog-earring pages. I loved the French kids!! I loved the dad of the French kids. I loved the whole Francophile bit. The kissing lesson was great. The wit and humor quotient goes up, but continues to gnaw at the same question. On page 95, at her new, great jewelry job, she says, "...the tedium is excruciating. It builds up as a profound blankness that stretches out across the day, five days across the week, weeks piling up on to years, boredom layered up on loneliness, a gaping emptiness, directly contradicting the rich life I had intended to live". The narrator never seems to make any break-throughs on this question, this emptiness swallowing her life. She just plods on. The book ends with her and Tom literally being swallowed up into the banal little hole in the New York apartment wall. Like The Nothing of The Neverending Story, it goes on forever, destroying everything in its path, unless one has the courage to dream oneself out of it.
Lucky is an irreverent collection of minute narratives, snapshots of a little life in New York. These stories and sketches, originally published in three separate parts, really develop as the book goes on. Like her friends said they would, it looks like her work only got better after being lost and redrawn. The third section was much more captivating; I, as a reader, was so much more engaged and the narratives themselves were flayed out much more delicately. Recounting such 'quiet' and subtle stories takes a careful hand; it is easy to lose the point of the story.
Lucky #1 struck me as a bit redundant. The title, obviously, is sarcastic. The narrator is drawn in short, straight lines. Her face is very plain and open and her eyes are mere dots. The first thing we discover about her is tthat she is inhibited, shy, painfully self conscious. We are introduced to her boyfriend, Tom, who seems to have no personality. The entire book deals with the difficulty finding a room in New York City. The subject matter is a known factor of city life for most readers, presumably. What, then, is Bell illuminating that wasn't already known? She seems to withhold details that would focus in on her characters and make this story 'too personal' which keeps the reader at arm's length, unable to connect to them. In these first stories, the narrative felt more like a journal entry than a plot.
Lucky #2 begins with noticeably different line quality to the artwork. The frames are large and the narrator is depicted in each one with dark, steady lines. She seems to have grown in her technique since the publication of the first book. The characters started to gain some flesh during the "farm upstate" scenes. The narrator reveals her interdependence on them, which we hadn't really seen in the first book. Without the context of her social life, with its own lexicon, references, and style, the story is hard to draw meaning from. Meeting the gang helped solidify her point of view as a narrator and I got the hang of her jokes and perspective. The scene with the walkie talkies displayed their lives in action as opposed to in retrospect as in some of the other bits.
I was particularly intrigued by her attempt to meditate on page 54- "I thought, if I sit still enough, I will gain some kind of deeper understanding. Reality will break open, I'll become a fuller person, and see things closer to how they really are." She sits, she waits, and "nothing special" happens. This little bit indicated the larger question of the rest of the book. She's looking. She's looking for her self to settle into itself and for life to start being great! or meaningful or worthy, but the days just seem to peel back like so much pith revealing... another day gone, and nothing more... lucky. Page 54 is also the last page of the first half of the book which seems to have no solid black filling in the panels. The rest of the book is riddled with half-dark frames full of shadows and sunglasses. Life is getting heavy! Or at least more full of contrast. There is also a lot more use of quiet panels without dialogue or narration.
She presents another scene in which the esoteric Bhuddist connection is sought after. The scene after her yoga class with friend, Andy, seemed to reflect back to the earlier passage at the farm. In it, Andy talks enthusiastically about reincarnation and how comforting it is to believe in, "I don't know how anyone can be creative and believe that this is all there is" (65). He invites her to come to class saying she will love his yoga teacher. The yoga teacher also talks a lot about reincarnation and uses Gabrielle as an example in his lecture. He congratulates her for accomplishing in one class what he had spent his life trying to learn. As a voyeur, this scene plays differently. Gabrielle's face in the drawings is tortured, her body is quaking, and she seems to fall and crash out of every position. He tells us she must have been a yogi in her past life. As she leaves the class, there are five pointed frames of her waiting at a bus stop. Alongside her, curled up on a bench, is a person sleeping. Assumedly, he is smelly, and homeless. She leaves on the bus, and the last frame focuses in on only him, with big wavy lines rising off of his body. Perhaps she is wondering who he was in a past life, and what he had done to deserve his current position. These scenes lend the work a larger, more interesting question than, "where can I get a good room in New York?"
As her interest in her work deepened, so did mine. The last third had me suprised, laughing, and dog-earing pages. I loved the French kids!! I loved the dad of the French kids. I loved the whole Francophile bit. The kissing lesson was great. The wit and humor quotient goes up, but continues to gnaw at the same question. On page 95, at her new, great jewelry job, she says, "...the tedium is excruciating. It builds up as a profound blankness that stretches out across the day, five days across the week, weeks piling up on to years, boredom layered up on loneliness, a gaping emptiness, directly contradicting the rich life I had intended to live". The narrator never seems to make any break-throughs on this question, this emptiness swallowing her life. She just plods on. The book ends with her and Tom literally being swallowed up into the banal little hole in the New York apartment wall. Like The Nothing of The Neverending Story, it goes on forever, destroying everything in its path, unless one has the courage to dream oneself out of it.
Lucky #1 struck me as a bit redundant. The title, obviously, is sarcastic. The narrator is drawn in short, straight lines. Her face is very plain and open and her eyes are mere dots. The first thing we discover about her is tthat she is inhibited, shy, painfully self conscious. We are introduced to her boyfriend, Tom, who seems to have no personality. The entire book deals with the difficulty finding a room in New York City. The subject matter is a known factor of city life for most readers, presumably. What, then, is Bell illuminating that wasn't already known? She seems to withhold details that would focus in on her characters and make this story 'too personal' which keeps the reader at arm's length, unable to connect to them. In these first stories, the narrative felt more like a journal entry than a plot.
Lucky #2 begins with noticeably different line quality to the artwork. The frames are large and the narrator is depicted in each one with dark, steady lines. She seems to have grown in her technique since the publication of the first book. The characters started to gain some flesh during the "farm upstate" scenes. The narrator reveals her interdependence on them, which we hadn't really seen in the first book. Without the context of her social life, with its own lexicon, references, and style, the story is hard to draw meaning from. Meeting the gang helped solidify her point of view as a narrator and I got the hang of her jokes and perspective. The scene with the walkie talkies displayed their lives in action as opposed to in retrospect as in some of the other bits.
I was particularly intrigued by her attempt to meditate on page 54- "I thought, if I sit still enough, I will gain some kind of deeper understanding. Reality will break open, I'll become a fuller person, and see things closer to how they really are." She sits, she waits, and "nothing special" happens. This little bit indicated the larger question of the rest of the book. She's looking. She's looking for her self to settle into itself and for life to start being great! or meaningful or worthy, but the days just seem to peel back like so much pith revealing... another day gone, and nothing more... lucky. Page 54 is also the last page of the first half of the book which seems to have no solid black filling in the panels. The rest of the book is riddled with half-dark frames full of shadows and sunglasses. Life is getting heavy! Or at least more full of contrast. There is also a lot more use of quiet panels without dialogue or narration.
She presents another scene in which the esoteric Bhuddist connection is sought after. The scene after her yoga class with friend, Andy, seemed to reflect back to the earlier passage at the farm. In it, Andy talks enthusiastically about reincarnation and how comforting it is to believe in, "I don't know how anyone can be creative and believe that this is all there is" (65). He invites her to come to class saying she will love his yoga teacher. The yoga teacher also talks a lot about reincarnation and uses Gabrielle as an example in his lecture. He congratulates her for accomplishing in one class what he had spent his life trying to learn. As a voyeur, this scene plays differently. Gabrielle's face in the drawings is tortured, her body is quaking, and she seems to fall and crash out of every position. He tells us she must have been a yogi in her past life. As she leaves the class, there are five pointed frames of her waiting at a bus stop. Alongside her, curled up on a bench, is a person sleeping. Assumedly, he is smelly, and homeless. She leaves on the bus, and the last frame focuses in on only him, with big wavy lines rising off of his body. Perhaps she is wondering who he was in a past life, and what he had done to deserve his current position. These scenes lend the work a larger, more interesting question than, "where can I get a good room in New York?"
As her interest in her work deepened, so did mine. The last third had me suprised, laughing, and dog-earing pages. I loved the French kids!! I loved the dad of the French kids. I loved the whole Francophile bit. The kissing lesson was great. The wit and humor quotient goes up, but continues to gnaw at the same question. On page 95, at her new, great jewelry job, she says, "...the tedium is excruciating. It builds up as a profound blankness that stretches out across the day, five days across the week, weeks piling up on to years, boredom layered up on loneliness, a gaping emptiness, directly contradicting the rich life I had intended to live". The narrator never seems to make any break-throughs on this question, this emptiness swallowing her life. She just plods on. The book ends with her and Tom literally being swallowed up into the banal little hole in the New York apartment wall. Like The Nothing of The Neverending Story, it goes on forever, destroying everything in its path, unless one has the courage to dream oneself out of it.
Monday, February 4, 2013
The Imposter's Daughter
'Graphic novel' is a brand new genre for me, as a reader. My housemate, a comic artist, has been encouraging me to get more into them. I recently read Black Hole by Charles Burns and the first 1/4 of V for Vendetta. First impressions went pretty well with both. My feet were damp as I embarked on Imposter's Daughter.
I like the episodic 'chapters' Some scenes seemed too rapidly sketched and I felt like I was missing some necessary bit of the story. Memoirists, having lived through their own stories must sometimes forget to highlight things in the necessary light for the reader to understand the type of gravity an incident had. It seems like this book sometimes skims dense scenes as if we already knew what was going on. For instance, on pages 31 and 32, I initially had a hard time following the author's leap into the entire-family-fight scene. I just didn't feel prepared, didn't see it coming. I wasn't sure where in the house the mother was, what they were fighting about, or how it had escalated. I was shocked to see the father throwing the Tab bottle at her head--- of course, as the story persists we see these interactions as habitual.
I had a fun time reading this book. The art is really great: comedic, tender, colorful, clear. I love how she used her real-life childhood drawings!!! They really clearly showed the real-life relationship between her and her father. The fact that, as a child, she teased her father about his arrogance, his sexy secretary, and clearly idolized him helped push the story out of it's comic-box and in to a more realistic narrative. Ahh! I loved how she drew little naked dolls on the floor with their clothes strewn about and their hair blowing. Also, the "No Smoking" posters... Really great.
The story itself, 'poor, estranged, well-to-do professional fights to reclaim true family identity', could have seemed cliche. Her real enthusiasm and honesty carried this book. The innocence and excitement with which the narrator comports herself through the pages is the most compelling part of the story. She really writes as if experiencing the sentiment for the first time again.
Without at all being 'edgy', she includes some nudity and an open account of her drug use. I liked that. She didn't blow the details out of proportion in order to puff up her identity. I thought her portrayal of herself was rather modest, and that was refreshing.
Martha
'Graphic novel' is a brand new genre for me, as a reader. My housemate, a comic artist, has been encouraging me to get more into them. I recently read Black Hole by Charles Burns and the first 1/4 of V for Vendetta. First impressions went pretty well with both. My feet were damp as I embarked on Imposter's Daughter.
I like the episodic 'chapters' Some scenes seemed too rapidly sketched and I felt like I was missing some necessary bit of the story. Memoirists, having lived through their own stories must sometimes forget to highlight things in the necessary light for the reader to understand the type of gravity an incident had. It seems like this book sometimes skims dense scenes as if we already knew what was going on. For instance, on pages 31 and 32, I initially had a hard time following the author's leap into the entire-family-fight scene. I just didn't feel prepared, didn't see it coming. I wasn't sure where in the house the mother was, what they were fighting about, or how it had escalated. I was shocked to see the father throwing the Tab bottle at her head--- of course, as the story persists we see these interactions as habitual.
I had a fun time reading this book. The art is really great: comedic, tender, colorful, clear. I love how she used her real-life childhood drawings!!! They really clearly showed the real-life relationship between her and her father. The fact that, as a child, she teased her father about his arrogance, his sexy secretary, and clearly idolized him helped push the story out of it's comic-box and in to a more realistic narrative. Ahh! I loved how she drew little naked dolls on the floor with their clothes strewn about and their hair blowing. Also, the "No Smoking" posters... Really great.
The story itself, 'poor, estranged, well-to-do professional fights to reclaim true family identity', could have seemed cliche. Her real enthusiasm and honesty carried this book. The innocence and excitement with which the narrator comports herself through the pages is the most compelling part of the story. She really writes as if experiencing the sentiment for the first time again.
Without at all being 'edgy', she includes some nudity and an open account of her drug use. I liked that. She didn't blow the details out of proportion in order to puff up her identity. I thought her portrayal of herself was rather modest, and that was refreshing.
Martha
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