Heroes Never Rust #48: War at Home

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Heroes Never Rust, Violence

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Alan Moore, Saving Private Ryan, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Violence

Heroes Never Rust #48 by Sean Ironman

War at Home

This morning, I watched the opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan. My internet was down and I decided to check out what DVDs I had while I ate breakfast. I don’t know why I chose Saving Private Ryan. It’s been years since I’ve seen the film. I only watched the first twenty minutes or so. I left off a couple of minutes after Tom Hanks and his crew make it off the beach and start obliterating Nazis in retreat. I was fourteen when the movie was released and I thought the battle scenes were the best part. Explosions. Limbs blown off. A Nazi throwing his hands up and surrendering just to be gunned down. It was good action and that’s what I was looking for. But I’m old now and tired. Today when I watched the film, it was horrific. Not just because people were dying. Not because I understand that real people had to go through this. Before I turned it off and went to start my work for the day, a few Nazis began to run away. About three of them were in their trenches, not firing, just running. Running to safety. Running home. Running from death. And then, about two dozen U.S. soldiers, who are above the retreaters on solid ground, gun them down. As a kid, I probably cheered when that happened. Take that Nazis! But watching it now, there was something so animalistic about it. I understand these same Nazis were killing American soldiers just a few minutes earlier. But I felt the scene showed what war does to a person, how it changes a person, how it destroys everything.

In the conclusion to volume one of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, war has come. Professor Moriarty’s airship bombs Limehouse, which is engulfed in flames by page two. In the opening, Moriarty says in regards to the cavorite, “This wonderful, celestial material…It’s given me the sky, this element that I was surely born for. Ah, Sergeant, does your soul thrill as mine does to these seas of cloud, to this God-like perspective? To this God-like power?” Moriarty is an evil son-of-a-bitch. He even comments on the “countless tiny lives” below before commencing the bombing. He must kill thousands this issue. And for what? So he can defeat a rival crime lord? As the neighborhood is burning to the ground, I no longer see Kevin O’Neill’s beautiful artwork. Even though it’s fiction, I think about all those people who were sitting down to dinner, who were getting ready for bed after a long day working construction. They have no stake in what’s happening. And now, they’re dead.

When the Chinese crime lord, The Doctor, sees the destruction, he orders his troops to attack. They fly at Moriarty’s airship with their own personal flying devices. I feel bad for them. What do they get out of this? They fly to their death, and from what we see later, it is a gruesome death. Nemo and Mr. Hyde lay out what looks to be hundreds of men. In the end, when the league wins, and of course they win, men fall to their deaths. And, again, for what? Because two crime lords can’t get along? What’s a crime lord any way, other than an asshole? What’s he a lord of? We’re smart people. How does someone lord over us? Why would anyone follow these mad men? They can’t pay well. The hours must suck. Who’s dream in life is it to work for a crime lord? To kill for someone else? I say if The Doctor and Moriarty can’t get along, then let them fight, but leave everyone else out of it. They can kill each other all they want, but London would be safe. The battle is made worse because people follow the villains. The villains themselves can do barely any damage. It’s the numbers of men, the numbers of bombs. Moriarty didn’t make those bombs, or his airship. He didn’t load those guns, sharpen those swords. He told someone else to do it, and someone else did as they were told. Why?

In the television show Game of Thrones, Varys poses a riddle to Tyrion. I couldn’t find the quote for the show, but riddle in the books is: “In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me – who lives and who dies?” The sellsword has the power over the three men. He can kill them all or just walk away. Yet, people go on and pretend the other men have the power, and most people do what others tell them.

At the end of volume one, the league triumphs. Moriarty is beaten. London is saved. But it all seems so anticlimactic. It was all for nothing. And I don’t mean that as a criticism of Moore’s script. That’s just he way things are. A couple of crazy, power-hungry men cause destruction, and then we’re left to clean things up.

Maybe I’m thinking too hard about things. Maybe I should just look at the pretty pictures and be in awe of how the league fights their way through the masses of soldiers to win the battle. I can say that it’s pretty cool, and I enjoy the comic greatly. But maybe I’m just tired. Tired of seeing new mass shootings on the news. Tired of soldiers killing people. Even tired of people who do work they don’t love just because they’re following what other people tell them to do. No one can tell us what to do. I think from time to time about superheroes in our own world. If they would be helpful or not. But we wouldn’t really need them if we just did what we know is right. The league of extraordinary gentlemen would have no purpose. Maybe if the league didn’t have to fight these mindless battles, Mina could fight for equal rights of women. Nemo can fight against England’s treatment of India. But I guess the important things will have to wait. A little orb that makes things float seems to be much more important.

___________

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

Versify #7: A New Kind of Comic Verse

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Graphic Novels, Poetry, Versify

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Adam Scott Mazer, Bianca Stone, Eric Drooker, Hybrid form, J. Bradley, Julian Peters, Pamela Burger, Poetry, Versify

Versify #7 by Pamela Burger

A New Kind of Comic Verse

As is probably now clear, I am a great lover of the hybrid form. Prose poetry is perhaps my favorite hybrid genre, because it brings out the poetic elements so often missing from narrative prose but often feels more natural than verse. The new release from YesYes books, The Bones of Us is part of an interesting new development in hybrid poetry. Described as “graphic poetry,” with words by J. Bradley and art by Adam Scott Mazer, the collection looks like a comic book and reads like experimental poetry.

For those who have never heard of “graphic poetry,” the collection might also be described as “poetry comics,” a blending of hand-drawn art and lyrical text that is difficult in many ways to differentiate from abstract or avant-garde comics.

Whatever one calls it, the subgenre that combines the traditions of graphic literature/comics and poetry seems to be thriving. Late last year, Julian Peters received a bit of attention for his in-process adaptation of TS Eliot’s “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock“Peters has also adapted other French and English-language poetry into comic form, like Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” which appeared in the Graphic Canon series. Visual adaptations of classics (or recent-classics), like 2010’s Howl: A Graphic novel are becoming easier to locate.

Also of interest is a trend towards collaborations between artists and poets like those featured in Cordite Poetry Review‘s October, 2013 issue in which ten graphic novelists adapt contemporary poetry. One of the more intriguing projects featured there is Pat Grant’s visual adaptation of Fiona Wright’s “Vibrations.” Grant fed the lines into google image search and then drew what came up. He explains that he “was thinking about it as a durational, situated drawing performance.”

Many poetry comics come with these types of cryptic explanations of what the work should be. The basic premise of the form, however, is fairly simple: by juxtaposing two media, the reader/viewer has more sensory input to take in and more semiotic decoding to process, and therefore has a richer art-experience. Or, at least, a different experience. In the instances mentioned above, where an artist works off of a pre-existing poem, I often find myself giving the words priority; however, in the case of artists like Bianca Stone, who creates the words and art together, the experience proves quite different from other interactions with poetry because the visual and verbal elements receive equal weight. It feels less like illustration and more like graphic literature.

Bianca Stone

Although The Bones of Us was written first and then illustrated, my reading experience was closer to when I look at Stone’s work than Peters’s. The images are striking and often horrifying, but do not detract from the power of the words. Rather, they meet the intensity of the poems they accompany, and the entire work coheres not as a blending of two different things, but as a completely original form.

That is, a “graphic poem” or “poetry comic” often feels like an illustrated poem rather than a truly hybrid form. On the other hand, such a work might veer towards the other end of the spectrum poetic and come off as a very abstract comic that is “poetic” but not poetry per se. So it is remarkable that The Bones of Us does not seem to lean towards one genre or the other, but instead appears as the third term: the graphic poem.

Indeed it is always remarkable when collaborations give this feeling of coming together as a single work, and in the case of such a new form–new, at least, in comparison to, say, the haiku or sonnet–it is perhaps more noteworthy that the combination is so seamless. YesYes Books seems interested in producing all kinds of such collaborations, which makes them a publication house worth looking to in the future.

___________

Pamela Burger has a very short attention span, which is why she loves poetry. Her poems have appeared in several small magazines you might never have read. She lives in Brooklyn, teaches writing and literature, and is an instructional technologist for the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College.

Heroes Never Rust #29: Filling in the Gaps

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Heroes Never Rust

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Gwen Stacy, Heroes Never Rust, Jeph Loeb, sean ironman, Spider-Man, Spider-Man Blue, Tim Sale

Heroes Never Rust #29 by Sean Ironman

Filling in the Gaps

One of the more frustrating aspects of comics in the 1960s is how fast-paced they seem. Each issue has a villain rise, fight the hero, and then get defeated. At times, at least by today’s standards, there’s no room for the story to breathe. Within a few issues, characters like Spider-man seem to have a handle on being a superhero. Weeks and months pass between issues. Relationships go from being good to bad and back again in no time. But, what that approach has given us in modern comics is the ability to fill in the gaps. Comics today can go back and tell previously untold tales in a character’s early years to connect events and relationships, and even add a new dimension to the comics.

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale have worked on the Color Series (although I don’t think that’s an official name) for Marvel Comics. The series focuses on relationships in a character’s early years. There have been three mini-series so far—Daredevil: Yellow, Hulk: Grey, and Spider-Man: Blue. (A fourth, Captain America: White, was announced but never released.) Spider-Man Blue, I believe, is the greatest of the series. I’ve used it on many people to show them what superhero comics are capable of. The series is memoir-like in that Peter Parker from the current day reflects back on his relationship with Gwen Stacy, his first love who was killed while Spider-Man battled with the Green Goblin.

The comic begins with the present-day Parker testing a recorder device. It’s Valentine’s Day. He’s speaking to someone, but we don’t know whom, not yet. “I remember the first time. How you sent me a Valentine that wasn’t signed. You just drew in one of those happy faces.” Spider-Man, in a blue tint, swings toward the George Washington Bridge. He places a rose—the red color sticking out from the blue tint background—on the bridge. When he swings off, the rose falls into the water. “Hello, Gwen. My funny valentine.”

Then the comic jumps back. Spider-Man in the ‘60s has been captured by the Green Goblin. This isn’t when Gwen died, though. Spider-Man breaks free and defeats the Green Goblin. “At first, I thought he was dead. And I’m ashamed to say, Gwen, in that moment, I was relieved. It could have ended right there…all my worries…gone. And Maybe you would still be…” The Green Goblin lived. Spider-Man helped him out of a burning building. Norman Osborn was the Green Goblin and the father of Peter Parker’s best friend. Trying to help his friend cost Peter Parker his first love in the end.

Throughout the six issues, we get a balance of Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy. For a while in the comics, Peter Parker had his choice of beautiful women. Gwen Stacy was the nice girl type. Mary Jane was the wild one. By showing the balance between the two loves of his life, there’s sadness in the story. In the final interactions Peter has with Gwen, there’s another woman—another woman taking him away. Many of Spider-Man’s enemies show up—Rhino, the Lizard, the Vulture, Kraven the Hunter. Aunt May, of course, is used wonderfully. In a breakfast scene halfway through the story, Peter looks at Aunt May, and in the captions from the present day, Peter says, “I never, ever, though I would be burying you before her. It’s just no the way life is supposed to work.” No matter where the comic goes, Gwen stays the focal point.

The greatest strength of the comic, though, is that it never shows Gwen’s death. The story doesn’t exist to capitalize on a past story—to repeat what has already been done. While reading, I expect to see Gwen die in the end—to have Spider-Man fail. The Green Goblin doesn’t return, though. Kraven is the final villain of the piece. It turns out the Green Goblin had previously hired Kraven to kill Spider-Man. Even in defeat, the Goblin still had reach. “I look back on my life as Spider-Man, and God help me, there are days when all I can think of is how much time it’s taken away from my family…and from everyone I’ve loved.” In the end, the cost of being Spider-Man comes back to Parker—a theme that reoccurs throughout the early years of the comic.

The final shot we get of Gwen is of her kissing Peter. “That’s when you had me, Gwen Stacy. All of me.” It’s a full-page shot, usually reserved for big battles. The last few pages catch up on the present. Peter’s in the attic of the home he shares with Mary Jane, his wife. He talks into a recorder about trying to find something he could call good that came from Gwen’s death. “But something happened that night. I think now your death was MJ’s wake-up call—that we weren’t all going to live forever and the party was going to end.” The comic, which is still about Gwen, becomes also about Mary Jane, and even Peter growing up. The comic doesn’t just repeat Spider-Man’s past, or even just show previously untold parts. It helps characterize the current timeline. It’s important to the characters in the present. In class, I’ve heard professors go on about how flashbacks can be bad for a story because they end up stopping the present-day story from moving forward just to explain things the reader never needed explained. But in Spider-Man: Blue, we get an understanding of Peter, Gwen, and Mary Jane that goes beyond the traditional love triangle into a story about how there’s always something good, something hopeful, even in death.

___________

Sean Ironman is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

Gutter Space #15: When Worlds Collide: Bone, by Jeff Smith

13 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Graphic Novels, Gutter Space

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art styles, Bone, Graphic Novel, gutter space, Jeff Smith, leslie salas, Sequential art, Worldbuilding

Gutter Space #15 by Leslie Salas

When Worlds Collide: Bone, by Jeff Smith

To springboard off my post last week about how differences in art styles can affect the reader’s ability to perceive differences between characters, I’d like to take some time to discuss the differences between the way characters are drawn based on where they are from. One of the best examples of this is Jeff Smith’s Bone.

Bone follows the protagonist, Fone Bone, as he gets lost in a new uncharted land and has the adventure of a lifetime. As he searches through miles and miles of desert (with only a few supplies—a map, a canteen, a bedroll, and a copy of his favorite book, Moby Dick), Fone finally encounters a lush valley.

Taking a moment to look at Fone, we can see that he looks rather cartoony. He’s all white, doesn’t really have any clothes, and his features are simplified. His feet don’t have toes. He doesn’t have hair or nostrils, but he does have expressive eyebrows and a bulbous nose. His four-fingered hands are typical of old-school comics and cartoons—much quicker to only draw four fingers than all five.

However, when we see the valley, it is rich with detail. There are clearly different types of trees and fascination topographical variety. This world that Fone has come to the cusp of, is unlike the boring and vast nothingness of the desert. So it only makes sense that it’s people should look differently also.

Enter Thorn, the beautiful young woman that finds Fone Bone and helps him (and his cousins, who have also come to the valley) out. Fone helplessly falls in love with her, and for good reason. Look at her! Look at those lovely lashes, those muscled thighs, those five-fingered hands. She’s drawn in rich detail, and clearly comes from a world much different than his own.

Unlike some of the other characters that live in the valley, Thorn does not discriminate against Fone and his cousins based on their appearance. Almost every new character makes some sort of comment about how strange they look, but once the weirdness is addressed, the people of the village grow used to the Bones and accept them as guests and visitors.

It is in this manner that Jeff Smith visually addresses the weirdness of people who come from different places. The vastly different drawing styles, combined with the characters’ recognition of the difference, helps the reader navigate the cultural, economic, and societal differences between these two types of people. Overcoming these differences is a recurrent theme throughout the graphic novel Bone, and adds an element the realism of prejudice in this fantastic setting.

___________

Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Gutter Space #9: Flashbacks in Will Eisner’s A Family Matter

02 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Gutter Space

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graphic novels, gutter space, leslie salas, Will Eisner

Gutter Space #9 by Leslie Salas

Flashbacks in Will Eisner’s A Family Matter

We’re going a little bit old school this week by taking a look a cartooning legend Will Eisner’s A Family Matter.

Before we jump in, I’m going to take a moment to be honest. As you can see by my previous Gutter Space posts, I mostly focus on contemporary (and rather mainstream) American independent comics and webcomics (that aren’t superhero comics—that’s Sean Ironman’s domain). But besides reading the classic American funnies in the newspaper, I wasn’t really exposed to American comics until more recently. I got interested in sequential art by reading Japanese manga. (We can get more into whether or not my obsession with manga may or may not have started with my obsession with Sailor Moon at a later time. See Mark Pursell’s post for a similar sentiment.)

I bring this up because A Family Matter is the first Eisner graphic novel I’ve ever read. And because of the heavy contemporary manga influence in my background, my approach to understanding his sequential art comes from more of an outsider’s perspective.

Over the span of 72 pages, Eisner covers a 24-hour period in what seems like a normal family’s life. We readers get to know each of the family members in the present as they make their way to their father’s 90^th birthday party. But we also get snippets of each of the family members’ troubled past with their father and each other through flashbacks. The placement and braiding of these scenes further informs the particular nuances of this family’s dysfunction.

These flashbacks often are presented side-by-side with present action, offering contrast and introspection to the interactions between the family members. The flashbacks are drawn with what seems like a wispy hand, less detailed than the present, with fuzzy shading around them, functioning similarly to thought bubbles. The result is a punchy, immersive storyline that fully engages the reader in the conflict of past and present influencing the future.

A Family Matter is a quick read that exhibits technical mastery in many areas. Boldly inked with soft grey watercolor shading, the art itself is typical of American cartooning in the late 90s. There’s some great work going on here, especially with narrative braiding, but I’m still not sure how I feel about the story as a whole.

Yes, the story is rich with details and provides a thought-provoking ending. There are no captions at all in the comic (except for an epigraph at the very beginning), so the story is driven entirely by drawings and dialogue. The work undoubtedly showcases Eisner as a master of the form, but I still feel like something’s missing—or maybe that it’s trying too hard.

The story itself lacks the complex sophistication of many contemporary graphic novels. It really just feels like a collection of dysfunctional-family clichés. A daughter catches her father with a strumpet and becomes the favorite after she promises to keep his secret. The oldest son becomes an outcast because he refuses to follow in his father’s footsteps. A woman sleeps with her sister’s husband. Everyone has daddy issues, and sucks up to Dad in the hopes that they’ll get a cut of his substantial inheritance. And so on. We’ve heard these stories before.

I’m not sure it is fair to draw this kind of parallel given that Eisner was on the forefront of establishing comics as a long-form medium for storytelling. He practically invented the graphic novel, so of course the medium itself will undergo substantial changes in just a few decades. Were these themes as prevalent in literature in 1998? Probably. But what about in comics? Maybe. But maybe not presented in this manner. And maybe it’s just my MFA talking, being snooty about storytelling quality and what may or may not be considered fresh and literary.

Either way, there are definitely great things to learn from A Family Matter, and I’d certainly suggest it as a good short read. Check it out and let me know what you think?

___________

Gutter Space #4: Worldbuilding in Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Gutter Space

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Artichoke Tales, coming-of-age, Fiction, Graphic Novel, gutter space, leslie salas, Megan Kelso, nudity, vulnerability, Worldbuilding

Gutter Space #4 by Leslie Salas

Worldbuilding in Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales

Worldbuilding—whether in graphic novels or prose novels—is the long and arduous task of creating and enriching social, cultural, and economic setting of a narrative. Worldbuilding is done best when it is invisible to the reader. When an author establishes a foreign setting through the storytelling itself (and not in awkward, stilted dialogue or blatant, uncrafted listing), a reader’s growing understanding of how the world functions becomes a natural element of the reading experience.

Graphic novels are uniquely suited to establishing a great deal of this kind of detail in the span of a few panels thanks to the power of visual literacy. One of the best examples of worldbuilding done well in the medium of sequential art is Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales.

This graphic novel, which took Kelso six years to complete, follows the coming-of-age story of Brigitte Quicksand, an apothecary girl from the South who has fallen in love with a soldier boy from the North. Because she and the boy are from opposite ends of the continent and have very different backgrounds and cultures, they are forced to part ways and say goodbye.

Frustrated by her lack of understanding about why people from the North and South—both of whom have artichoke-looking hair—don’t get along, Brigitte asks her grandmother to tell her about the history of the continent.

Brigitte’s quest for understanding and her desire to reconnect with the boy from the North serves as the vehicle that propels a comprehensive account of this history of the Artichoke people and the consequences of a civil war.

Although the reader goes into Artichoke Tales knowing nothing about the world the Artichoke people live in, by the end of this epic tale, one has a comprehensive understanding of their world—and how it mimics our own.

As a side note, one of my favorite things about Megan Kelso as a cartoonist is that she is unafraid to draw provocative or embarrassing scenes.

Throughout Artichoke Tales, there are illustrations of urination, birth, plenty of sexual encounters, and even of a certain member of royalty experiencing gastric distress.

This inclusion of characters in nude and/or vulnerable positions adds to the realistic effect of good worldbuilding (and good fiction in general). We see these characters in their natural environments, at their best, and at their worst. We get to know them, we recognize ourselves in them, and this is what touches us as readers of good writing.

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Gutter Space #2: Thompson’s Narrative Braiding in Habibi

15 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Art, Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Gutter Space

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Tags

Craig Thompson, graphic novels, gutter space, Habibi

Gutter Space #2 by Leslie Salas

Thompson’s Narrative Braiding in Habibi

In the graphic novel Habibi, Craig Thompson uses the theme of willing- versus forced-sacrifice to effectively braid narratives from the Bible and the Qur’an with the coming of age stories of orphans Dodola and Zam. This juxtaposition of stories and images emphasizes influences the novel’s pacing and tone. To focus more readily on Thompson’s style in Habibi, this discussion is limited to a close reading analysis of pages 46 through 49.

Thompson’s braided narrative structure is perhaps the most obvious in this selection—there are clearly two separate conflicts: 1) Dodola and Zam’s quest to “provide for [them]selves,” and 2) the dilemma of “which son was it?”—Ishmael or Isaac—that Abraham sacrificed when God asked him to sacrifice a son (Thompson 46, 48). While the selection begins and ends with Dodola and Zam, Thompson’s introduction of the sons dilemma as a bedtime story innocuously implants the idea of sacrifice as a potential solution for Dodola and Zam’s plight. The main component of the story of Abraham and his sons is bookended with Dodola’s refrain asking how she and Zam would “provide for ourselves” (Thompson 46, 48). In addition to the story being framed by her question, a single panel amidst Dodola’s journey to meet the caravan and acquire food implies sacrifice with the image of Abraham’s arm raised, knife in hand, over the crouching body of one of his sons. The reader may not yet know that Dodola has chosen to prostitute herself for food and supplies, but Thompson heightens the tension with the simple reminder of Abraham’s plight through the juxtaposition of images.

As Habibi is a graphic novel, notions of images are quite literal and focus on line of sight and effective use of light and dark shading. Thompson makes great use of his images, choosing to invoke patters in the borders of panels to help distinguish between Zam and Dodola’s narrative and Dodola’s Biblical bedtime tale. The panels surrounding the stories from either holy book, the Qur’an or the Bible, are rich and vibrant with intricate detail, all in line with the aesthetic of art as illumination. In terms of panel real estate, almost half of the selection is devoted to the story of Abraham and his sons, and the other half belongs to Dodola and Zam. Thompson’s choice to equally distribute the space on the page to both narratives emphasizes his stylistic preference to the braided narrative and the power of suggestion.

Another strong aspect of the selection is Thompson’s use of repeated images. These images, when repeated with slight changes, can affect perceptions of time or character development. For instance, the camels in caravan progressively become more indistinct and shady (Thompson 48-49). This development creates a sense of mystery and heightens tension at the unknown. In terms of the Zam watching Dodola through the porthole, and interesting transformation occurs in the span of two panels—Zam grows a from screaming infant into concerned adolescent with the repetition of a single panel (Thompson 49). Not only does the reader jump through time with Zam, but his posture and demeanor in a single panel also characterize their situation—Zam and Dodola have survived, and Dodola continues to sacrifice her body so that they both may live.

Speaking again of sacrifice, the repeated images of Ishmael and Issac are particularly effective. While some of these images are repeated throughout the novel, in particular the image of Abraham pressing both of his sons to the altar (Thompson 48), the repetition of the two sons in this section is unique. Although the boys differ in age by thirteen years, they are drawn as equivalents—same age, same height (Thompson 46). Their clothing is similar—although Isaacs may seem a bit finer, and the biggest difference is Ishmael’s thin, dark features as opposed to Isaac’s rounded, fairer ones (Thompson 46). These physical characteristics, as well as their emotional dispositions, are also projected on each of the boys’ respective mothers, further emphasizing their differences. When Ishmael and Isaac appear in the same panel together, it is always Ishmael on the left, and Isaac on the right. While Isaac may be Abraham’s legitimate son and thereby his right hand man, Ishmael is the compliant son. The contrast between these two sons and their character tie into the central theme of sacrifice—voluntary or not.

The juxtaposition and braided narrative not only applies to the religious texts and the lives of Zam and Dodola, but within the texts themselves. The teachings of the Qur’an and the Bible are often presented side by side in what appears to be Thompson’s objective perspective on the nuances of story. This is most evident in the full-page panel depicting the sons of Abraham carrying bundles of firewood to “to the site of the slaughter” (Thompson 47). On the left side of the panel, Ishmael is a “willing participant,” on the left Isaac “was tricked” (Thompson 47). The actual quotes of both Ishmael and Isaac are also provided, along with their location in the Qur’an and Bible, respectively, giving not only Dodola authority as an expert storyteller to Zam, but gives Thompson credibility as the author making a conscious choice to cite the passages themselves.

The study of the differences between the Qur’an and the Bible are culturally pertinent to the current state of affairs between the Western world and the Middle East. While this segment of Habibi does not expand on the radical juxtaposition of first- and third-world living conditions, the excerpt does touch on the power of storytelling, as an oral and written medium, and its influence in society. Dodola begins with a bedtime story about Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac, but this story grows into a metaphor for their situation, a willing or unwilling sacrifice to “provide for ourselves” (Thompson 46, 48). Thompson’s deliberate use of a braided narrative structure paired with clever use of juxtaposition in images creates compelling pacing and a resonant tone to speak to his theme of sacrifice.

___________

Episode 28: J.T. Waldman

16 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Episode, Graphic Novels, The Bible

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comic books, Elizabeth Sauchelli, graphic novels, harvey pekar, Jewish Literature, JT Waldman, Literature, Megillat Esther, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, Stargirl, The Bible, The Book of Esther, Writing Podcast

Episode 28 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download

On this week’s show, I interview the comic book writer and artist J. T. Waldman,

and Elizabeth Sauchelli discusses Star Girl.

Elizabeth Sauchelli

Texts Discussed

Darin Strauss’s Reasons to Rejoyce.

Notes

Pages 106-107 of Megillat Esther.

Pages 146-147 of Megillat Esther.

Page 35 of Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me.

Page 148 of Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me.

Episode 28 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.