Category: Reviews

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Graylight by Naomi Nowak

Naomi Nowak published three graphic novels in the Aughts – I missed the first one, Unholy Kinship, but covered the second one, House of Clay, for ComicMix at the time. And now I’ve finally found my way to the third book, 2009’s Graylight .

At the time, I referred to her as “a cartoonist resident in Sweden, of Hungarian-Polish ancestry” and noted that she seemed to work in English. She might not be making comics, but she seems to still be in Sweden, and still making art – paintings and jewelry, these days. I don’t want to say art is art – I like to see narrative work, and have a bias in that direction – but it’s great to see artists having what looks like a reasonably sustainable career, making the things they want to.

Graylight is an allusive, imagistic book, colored out to the edge of the pages in tones that look just a bit desaturated to my eye – a unique, particular palette surrounding and supporting Nowak’s complex lines and complicated page structures. Lines defining people sometimes fade out or end unexpectedly, while objects – especially thematically important ones, seem to be closer to the surface of the page and shown in more detail.

The underlying story isn’t as complex as the way Nowak tells it: there’s a young woman, Sasha, in this unnamed village that we assume is somewhere in Sweden. She’s a bit flighty and self-centered: we see her with her friends and meeting a reporter, Erik, in town to interview a famous reclusive author, Aurora, who lives in the woods nearby.

Sasha impulsively – we think she does everything impulsively; she’s that kind of young person – goes along with Erik as his “photographer,” though we don’t see her holding a camera at any point. Aurora and her grown son Edmund are not happy there’s someone else with Erik for the interview, so Sasha flounces off, but not before (impulsively) stealing a book from Aurora’s house.

Sasha, over the next few days, starts a no-strings relationship with Erik – this somewhat frustrates him, since he wants more. 

There’s also something of a curse that starts to hit her, in ways Nowak presents almost entirely imagistically. Aurora knows she has stolen the book, and believes Sasha has the same kind of power she does – she’s a witch, more or less, and calls on two others like her to make the traditional trinity to call down her curse on Sasha.

There’s also what the book description calls a love triangle – Edmund hangs around, watching Sasha during the days before the curse comes on – but it’s not entirely clear if he’s in love with her, fascinated with her as an example of the outside world he’s unfamiliar with, or just keeping an eye on her for his mother. In any case, he eventually comes to see her, as the curse starts affecting her more strongly, and retrieves the book and breaks the curse (these may be the same action).

Again, Nowak tells this story through gesture – drawn in an idiosyncratic way – and allusive dialogue and imagistic pictures, rather than by explaining in any detail. It’s a visually fascinating book, full of striking images, with a story that I suspect different readers will take in somewhat different ways.

So many comics are easily pigeon-holed; it’s refreshing to find one as specific and different, in both style and substance, as this one.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Dear Beloved Stranger by Dino Pai

Everyone has one book in them, they say. Usually the “how I got here” story – whatever was unique or special or striking about childhood or life in general. I don’t think that’s dismissive; I like to think of it as celebratory: everyone can make at least one work of art, if they put in the time and effort and have the drive.

And when I come across a book that is “how I got here,” I wonder if this was the one book, or the springboard to a continuing career.

Dino Pai’s first major work was the 2013 graphic novel Dear Beloved Stranger . It’s somewhat autobiographical: Pai was a new graduate from art school, and his central character here is a new art school graduate named Dino. I never want to assume with semi-autobiographical stories, though: “semi” is a huge territory, and just using your own name doesn’t mean any particular moment or thought is taken from life.

Stranger is largely about the desire to create: Dino is out of school, looking for a job without much luck so far, and feeling stuck. So he starts making a story, after running into former classmate Cathy. That story is the story we’re reading, more or less, framed by letters to an unnamed “Dear Beloved Stranger.” I thought there was going to be some romantic tension with Cathy, or that she was the one Dino was writing to – I’m not sure if that was my misreading, Pai making that a possibility deliberately, or an unfortunate choice in the work.

But Cathy is really just the catalyst here, so making her an attractive classmate, of the gender Dino is attracted to, feels like a distraction – she could have been a male classmate, or a teacher, or some other mentor, and that would have made that role more distinct from the “Dear Beloved Stranger.” (Of course, maybe the answer is Pai wanted that ambiguity, or simply that “Cathy” was the real person in Pai’s actual life, and that bit is less “semi” and more fully autobiographical.)

The book is in multiple sections, in somewhat different art styles: the story of the young artist Dino, the work he’s creating, and how they merge together in the end. Pai moves from mostly greyish tones for the “real” scenes and soft colors for the fantasy sequences, both with an attractively detailed, just-this-side-of-fussy style.

We do learn who the stranger is in the end; I won’t spoil that here. It’s personal and important for Dino, and probably equally so for the real Pai, but I did wish it had been weaved in earlier in the book, and that Cathy wasn’t there as such an obvious red herring. But the story is satisfying; we feel for Dino and think that Pai did well in this first major work.

And if we then search to see what he’s done since – which I did – we find that he’s mostly been working in animation since then, making stories, but that he seems to have done some comics as well. I’m always happy to see that: I want creators to keep creating, for the people who make “here’s how I broke through and actually started making art” stories to keep doing that, in whatever ways they can and want to. So Dear Beloved Stranger was the beginning, but there’s more after it: this launched Dino Pai, and he’s been going since then.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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The Disappearance of Charley Butters by Zach Worton

Charley Butters is probably dead. He was a painter in his mid-life during the later 1950s, so by the time of this 2015 graphic novel – set, as far as I can tell, basically contemporaneously – he would have been at least in his eighties. But there are two more books in this series, so I suppose he may show up as a centenarian eventually.

This is not really the story of Charley Butters, though. He’s in the title, and his model and mystery is important, yes. But it’s the story of Travis, a young man who works in a record store and sings in a black metal band.

Travis and his two bandmates are going off into the woods with filmmaker Stuart, to gesticulate and grimace in extreme makeup – they’re making a video. The four guys are bickering, complaining about each other, nagging, picking on each other – they’re grumpy and combative, in a bad mood.

That’s probably good for death metal, though. You don’t want to be too happy when you’re invoking the devil.

After a couple of hours of mugging in one clearing, they head over to their next filming location – but stop when they see an old shack. Maybe there’s something cool there they can put into the video?

They “break” into the shack – the door was jammed shut but not locked, and the place is decades old, untouched for who knows how long. Inside, they find a lot of notebooks, some old canned goods, and what looks like a couple of dozen versions of the same painting.

This was Charley Butter’s cabin: he built it, after running away from the art scene in whatever the local city is. (This is set somewhere in Canada, probably around one of the smaller cities in Ontario – creator Zach Worton is from Mississauga, so that can be Guess #1.) The guys poke through his stuff, realize he was a “schizo,” and head off to finish up the video.

But Travis comes back later, to collect all the notebooks, to read Butters’ diaries. He’s becoming fascinated with what I suppose I should call The Disappearance of Charley Butters .

Travis is unhappy – he started this band on a lark, but it’s not his kind of music, and central figure Mike is an alcoholic asshole with very particular, demanding notions of what’s appropriate for black metal. So he quits the band, cuts his hair, starts dating a girl named Kat, and spends a lot of time reading the Charley Butters notebooks.

Parallel to Travis’s story, we get flashbacks to Butters – he has a successful gallery show, but starts having auditory hallucinations, which leads him out to that wooded cabin. He becomes entirely reclusive, avoiding all people.

Travis is becoming fascinated with Butters’ story – and, coincidentally, so is Stuart, the filmmaker who made their video. The two decide to make a documentary about Butters, with Travis as the on-camera interviewer and Stuart directing. Their first interview is with Butter’s wife (ex-wife? widow?) Eleanor, which doesn’t go well – Travis keeps interrupting her, and asking the wrong questions first – and gets cut off early.

But they still want to make the documentary. That’s where this book ends: they know that Butters existed, that he lived in the woods for a while and then wandered off somewhere else, and they intend to keep investigating.

Worton has a fine storytelling eye here; he’s mostly working in a four-panel grid, and has a crisp style that’s particularly good in silent panels and contemplative moments. The story is obviously not done, but what’s here is satisfying enough while clearly being the first part of a longer piece. (Worton did make two more graphic novels to complete the trilogy between 2016 and 2018; I haven’t seen them yet.)

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal and Kim Consigny

Most lives don’t have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn’t form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements – there’s at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras – but that only means better raw materials for a biographer.

So if I say that George Sand: True Genius, True Woman  tells an “and then this happened” version of the famous 19th century novelist’s life, I’m mostly just saying that George Sand had a normal kind of life. Things happened, she did her work, she was involved in causes and had love affairs, and then she died. That’s the story writer Séverine Vidal and artist Kim Consigny tell here: one woman’s life, from fairly early childhood to the moment of her death, in some detail. Vidal focuses somewhat on Sand’s writing, but more so on her relationships – with her mother and grandmother in youth, with other family members and the men she was involved with later in life.

And I appreciate that. Some biographies, especially in graphic-novel form, find a story in their subject’s lives by focusing on a moment or a period on the person’s life. That’s certainly valid, but, especially in a case where I don’t know the person’s life all that well – as here – I’d really prefer to get the full sweep of the story. And George Sand does just that.

She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, daughter of what seems to be a minor noble in the very early 19th century, and the Napoleonic Wars somewhat impinged on that childhood – spent primarily at the family estate in Nohant in central France – but the drama of her early life was more centered on the conflict between her aristocratic paternal grandmother and her Parisian mother after the death of Aurore’s father at a young age.

Vidal and Consigny show young Aurore as strong-willed, rebellious, prone to visions, and often unhappy with her role as a young aristocratic woman. (As seen later in life, she was against both the roles of “woman” and “aristocrat” as they existed in France at the time.)

She grew up, she started to write, she had affairs – but, before most of that, she did what women in her time had to do: she got married, at the age of eighteen. It was not a success, and maybe that lack of success led to some of the rest.

This is a fairly long graphic novel, over three hundred pages, and it’s packed with details from all of Sand’s life – again, more skewed to her personal life than to details of the themes and reactions to her works, though we do see her talk about and work on her major books here.

There’s a lot of text, particularly dialogue. I assume a lot of it is taken from Sand’s own extensive memoirs, or third-party accounts – I don’t know if we can entirely trust any detailed account of a conversation before sound recording, but Sand’s life was well-documented. Consigny brings a lose, breezy, amiable, energetic line to the proceedings, giving a lot of life to a story of people mostly in rooms talking to each other.

I’ve never read Sand, and knew very little about her life or work before this book. So I’ll say it’s a fine introduction, and a strong portrait of an interesting, influential figure who lived through tumultuous times and was close to a lot of other cultural figures of her day.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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REVIEW: Megalopolis

Megalopolis
By Francis Ford Coppola, Chris Ryall, & Jacob Phillips
160 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$25.99

While curious, I did not go to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. I had read about the trouble shoot, the confused critics, and the box office doldrums, and never got around to it on streaming. Thankfully, Abrams ComicArts has provided us with a graphic novel adaptation, which apparently isn’t slavish to the screenplay. Billed as an “alternate” version, it apparently is to be considered a sibling to the feature.

Coppola succumbs to the fascination with ancient Rome, which has become the cliché starting point for alternate futures such as The Hunger Games, Red Rising, and even Foundation. Somehow, the empire never fell, and futuristic wonders can be found in New Rome, which is our New York City.

It’s a story about family and competing visions of that future: one utopian in its aspirations, the other set in a regressive status quo.

That’s about all that makes sense. Chris Ryall, an accomplished writer and editor in his own right, fails to turn Coppola’s ideas into a coherent narrative with clearly defined characters. The worldbuilding raises more questions than it answers, and none of it is appealing. We root for none of the characters or, frankly, care about them long before the story ends. He’s billed as both writer and editor, and here, a seasoned editorial hand was required.

I gather the film’s narrative is its philosophical sweep, which isn’t evident here.

Similarly, cartoon Jacob Phillips is fine with the people, but New Rome needs to be a personality in its own right; we’re giving more of an impression of the city than something comprehensible.

I admire the experimentation evident in the project, but the execution does not deliver an enjoyable reading experience.

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REVIEW: The Essential Peanuts

The Essential Peanuts
By Mark Evanier
336 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$75

I was growing up during Peanuts’ peak period, the 1960s-70s, and you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing images of the gang. Yes, I bought some of the Fawcett paperback collections from the Bookmobile and was thrilled that Apollo 10’s command capsule and lunar module were named Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

I was also overwhelmed by the ubiquitousness of Snoopy, who easily eclipsed the humans and was on t-shirts, a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, lunch boxes, and so, so much more. I didn’t fully grasp the genius of Charles M. Shulz’s work until much later. It wasn’t my favorite strip, yet I read it every day, and I still do in the Classic Peanuts strip.

As a result, I was delighted to see this 75th anniversary overview of the strip and its global influence, along with the simplicity of Shulz’s linework. I learned about him from the recent Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Shulz and learned even more in this handsome collection.

The mammoth hardcover traces Peanuts in two ways: a 75 Essential strips, with commentary and supplemental strips; and a chronological exploration of the strip’s evolution, broken down by decade. As a result, you get some 700 daily and Sunday strips out of the 17,000+ he wrote and drew. One of the things that set Schulz apart from his peers was that he never, ever used assistants; he wrote, drew, and lettered each and every installment. That alone is worthy of celebration.

In Evanier’s clear-eyed prose, we see which new concepts or characters were introduced, which ones freshened, and which ones faded with time. Among the first casualties, for example, are Shermy and Patty, who were there on day one but were reduced to occasional background players within a year or two. We can see the rise of Snoopy’s sentience and then his playfulness as he turns his doghouse into a Sopwith Camel airplane, and how good ol’ Charlie Brown doesn’t quite know what to do with the newly arrived Peppermint Patty’s interest in him.

To me, the strip hit a crescendo in the late 1970s and then began a gradual decline, one that took the next 20 years to wind down. In the final years, health problems caused the steady line to wobble, the characters getting somewhat cruder, while the heart never left.

Accompanying Evanier are celebrity quotes drawn from Fantagraphics’ complete collection of the strip, as well as new sidebars written by translators and editors, who round out our understanding of the strip and its creator.

There is a second volume in this slipcase, filled with facsimiles of fun memorabilia that may bring back a memory, as it did for me, or just a smile. That’s all Shulz wanted from his readers, and he delivered daily for some 50 years, a totally remarkable accomplishment from the most unassuming of people.

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ArkhaManiacs by Art Baltazar & Franco

Art Baltazar and Franco have been making a very particular kind of comics for twenty years or so – kid-friendly versions of popular superhero and superhero-adjacent properties, bright and happy and light-hearted, colorful and zippy, full of rubber-hose cartooning and vibrant colors, with usually a cluster of short related stories with minimal plots but a lot of (mostly goofy) character work.

It’s been a durable model, and it’s worked quite well, from what I’ve seen. I think they started with Tiny Titans, which ran for a long time and seemed to be a major success from my chair. The only comic of theirs I’ve covered on this blog was Itty Bitty Hellboy  a decade ago; I got their books for my kids when my kids were young, but my kids are in their mid-twenties now. So I haven’t read a Baltazar/Franco [1] book in quite some time, but I had a lot of fond memories.

ArkhaManiacs  is exactly the same kind of thing they do so well: it collects a short series from 2020 about a kid Bruce Wayne in a somewhat sunnier, happier Gotham City and his encounters with the inhabitants of the Arkham Apartments.

And…it just struck me as a bit odd, subtly off in ways that made me uneasy. Centrally, the problem is that it’s reminiscent of, or seems to reference, the classic creepy Grant Morrison/Dave McKean Arkham Asylum . In both cases, Bruce comes to this mysterious place, is led around by the Joker, meets a whole bunch of weird people, and is told repeatedly he needs to lighten up.

I don’t think Baltazar and Franco meant to make this rhyme with Arkham Asylum. But it does. So the subtext is that a whole bunch of colorful characters – whom we, the adult reader, knows as insane murderers – are urging a kid Bruce, pre-trauma, that he needs to become more like them by using his imagination.

In a kid context, we can just take it all as straightforward, as it’s presented: these colorful characters are harmless. They’re not inhabitants of an asylum, just goofy people living in an apartment building, and they have a lot of fun, and do clearly have great imaginations. And Bruce is a bit of a serious, quiet kid, who could use some loosening up – which is what happens here. In the book itself, it’s all sunny and kid-friendly, Killer Croc and Bane and Harley Quinn and the Penguin all just having fun and playing pretend around a pool.

But…that inevitably makes me think of this Morrison moment, which I don’t want to be reminded of during a book for kids set before Bruce’s parents are murdered:

You may be able to read ArkhaManiacs and not think about Arkham Asylum. Your kids, if you have any, will almost certainly be able to, and that’s probably even more important. But if you know Arkham Asylum, this book will hit more uncomfortably than you expect.

[1] Franco’s last name is Aureliani, which isn’t hidden, but he uses the single name professionally, like Ms. Sarkisian 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 2

The first volume collecting the Miller/Janson run on Daredevil included fifteen issues of the title series, plus two “try-out” issues of a Spider-Man comic Miller drew before that. Daredevil was published bi-monthly in those days, so that was a longer swath of time than comics readers these days realize: issues dated from February 1979 through July 1981.

This second volume, with the meat-and-potatoes title Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 2 , is slightly shorter, collecting issues 173-184 of Daredevil, exactly a year’s worth of issues from August 1981 through July 1982. But Miller, writing and laying these comics out, was still changing and transforming his work; there’s almost as much difference between the first and last stories here as in the first volume.

The captions, and the overwriting tendencies of 1970s comics in general, is ebbing – only slightly in the first couple of issues, but noticeably towards the end of this stretch. There’s at least one very good multi-page action sequence that takes place entirely wordlessly. Oh, everyone still talks too much, and says the same things too much, and the captions are dull and obvious fairly regularly – but you can start to see daylight through them, like a massive overcast that’s starting to break up. We know, eventually, there will be entire stories written with a lighter hand and an ear for how people actually talk.

(And then that would all go away again, if we’re talking about Miller specifically. He is a fascinating example of a creator who started off in a standard, deeply artificial mode, managed to become close to naturalistic for a while, and then dove deeply into an even more clotted, personal, tediously artificial mode later on.)

The art looks a bit blander and stiffer to my eye in the first couple of issues, with an off-model egg-headed Kingpin and an Elektra just slightly off as well. I don’t know if it was Miller switching up how he worked – looser, tighter, different tools – on the way to his mature blocky style, or if the difference is mostly from Janson’s finishes. (I’m never sure how to take their “art” and “finishes” credits here – did Miller pencil these stories, mostly, or did he just lay them out? Did he do the initial work on the boards, or send Janson thumbnails? And did that working mode change over the course of the years they worked together?) 

This is also the soap-opera era of Marvel, so each issue has a vaguely separate story, but they run into each other – Elektra comes back to do some international-assassin-ing in New York, the Gladiator is tried and reformed, Kingpin schemes and hires Elektra as his new fixer, Bullseye comes back again like a bad penny. There’s a political campaign, in which Kingpin’s hand-picked mayoral candidate is likely to beat a glimpsed and unnamed Ed Koch unless Daredevil’s reporter buddy Ben Urich can dig up more useful dirt without getting himself murdered.

There’s a bit of vague Orientalism, but the ninja are mostly just mooks in funny suits at this point – they’re called ninjas, and we can assume they’re Japanese in origin, but that’s about it. Miller would appropriate much more, later on.

Like most monthly comics, this isn’t a single thing: it’s a thing in the middle of transformation, eternally. One story bleeds into the next, ideas work their ways through and conclude, art shifts and changes over time even when the team remains the same. It’s still getting better here, which is exciting and invigorating: captions getting shorter and more precise, art getting more dynamic and layouts more visual. It’s still assembly-line adventure comics for young readers, don’t get me wrong, but Miller and Janson had ambition and ideas, and they were aiming for the top of their particular genre – and that’s something to be celebrated, no matter what the genre is.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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REVIEW: Making Nonfiction Comics

Making Nonfiction Comics
By Eleri JHarris & Shay Mirk
272 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$29.99

There are numerous books available on how to write comics (I co-wrote one and am editing another), as well as on how to draw, letter, and color comics. However, no one really focuses on content like this excellent volume, which concentrates entirely on the growing field of nonfiction graphic narratives.

Graphic nonfiction has been around almost as long as graphic novels, with the general public first exposed to it through Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and gained notice for works such as Joe Sacco’s Palestine or even Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo. My first exposure was in 1982 with Jack Jackson’s Los Tejanos graphic novel, published by Fantagraphics. Today, many publishers produce series of biographies or explore stories from history. I have used Abrams’Economix to help understand financial concepts.

The authors and artists are experienced from the Nib, a graphic journalism website, and they break down the process step by step. Along the way, they educate us on some interesting topics as a way of demonstrating the lesson. There are chapters on research, interviewing, graphic reportage, personal narratives, and data usage, which walk you through each process.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the book is the diverse range of people interviewed about their process. Several interviews are featured in each chapter, demonstrating the vast scope of graphic journalism. I knew of it from some newspapers, but here we have 42 different creators, each doing interesting work in the less obvious corners of the World Wide Web.

The authors also ensure that we understand basic terminology, along with chapters that focus on writing in this style, and the value of having a firm editorial hand to prevent creators from getting lost in the weeds with too much research or obscuring details.

The final two chapters are universal for creators, focusing on how to share and publish your work, as well as how to build a community. They then conclude by spelling out how they created the book, providing examples of a comics script, contract basics, and deep citations for further reading.

My Maryland Institute College of Art students have rarely explored nonfiction, but I intend to highlight this aspect, as many have fascinating personal stories worthy of sharing with the world.

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Betty Blues by Renaud Dillies

I have two ways I could start with today’s book, neither of which has much to do with the book itself. I could mention I read another graphic novel by Renaud Dillies a decade ago, Bubbles & Gondola , and only vaguely remembered it when I saw a thumbnail image of the B&G cover at the back of this book. Or I could point out that the title is not the same as a certain smutty French movie from the 1980s, and reminisce that I saw that movie at college, and that the first line of the movie provoked one of the best, rippling, unexpected crowd laughs I’ve ever experienced. [1]

None of that gets us much closer to Renaud Dillies’ bande dessinée Betty Blues – copyright 2003 in France, published in this edition in the US in 2013, translated by Joe Johnson and colored by Anne-Claire Jouvray. I could mention that Bubbles was the story of a novelist and Betty is the story of a jazz musician, so I can assume that Dillies has at least a small tropism towards telling stories of the creative life.

Betty Blues, I learn from Lambiek, was Dillies’s first book, and won him the best debut award at Angoulême that year. And that does somewhat explain the ways that Betty is a bit too earnest, a bit too constructed, with some lines that read like Johnson is trying to take a very specific French idiom, probably a bit too high-toned for the immediate scene, and put it into the closest approximation to idiomatic English he can. Betty at times feels like a book stretching, reaching for something – meaning, purpose, universality – and getting very close but not quite selling it all in the end.

Little Rice Duck is the main character; he’s a jazz trumpeter in a band, playing at night, slightly drunk, in some bar as the book opens. We think he’s been doing this for a long time; we think he’s very good at it. We also know there’s very little money or prestige in it. But we think he was happy.

Was. He had a girlfriend, Betty, sitting at the bar, as we guess she did most nights. This night, a rich guy, James Patton, sits down next to her, plies her with champagne, and whisks her away. Rice is broken when he finds out, and goes on a drunken bender, throwing away his trumpet and declaring he’s going to give up music forever and move far away. The possibility that Betty could possibly come back, or that there might be any other woman in the world he might someday be happy with, is clearly not on the table.

The rest of the book follows two major threads and one minor one. The minor one is a married couple, Peter and Susan – he was injured by Rice’s falling trumpet and they get through some surgery and deciding to sell the trumpet. The two major threads are, of course, Rice and Betty. He travels as far away as he can get, takes a job at a sawmill, and gets caught up in industrial action. Betty, on the other hand, is basically kidnapped by James, who doesn’t let her get away or do anything, but pampers her for a while until she finally gets fed up with his obsessive rich-guy nature and walks away when he has her as arm candy at a public event.

Both Rice and Betty are pretty passive, Betty even more so than Rice. They’re mostly dragged into situations and don’t do very much to change their lives – their lives are changed for them by others.

We think this will probably be some sort of circular story, that Rice and Betty will reunite, or at least meet, after all they’ve been through. They might not get back together, but it’s the kind of story that looks like it should end that way.

It does not: Betty Blues is much more French than that. I won’t spoil the ending, but it does have a quintessentially Gallic shrug at the end.

Dillies’ art is glorious, though – great smoky-jazz-club ambiance, with lots of organic, scratchy, quick-looking lines in his square six-panel grids. The art looks great, and sells the emotions of its anthropomorphic characters, even if the dialogue is sometimes a bit stilted and oddly-phrased.

I tend to be a grump about stories of artists and about people who do things for insufficient reasons, so I may not be the best judge of Betty Blue. I did see a lot of strength and life to it, particularly remembering it was Dillies’ first book-length project.

[1] The movie is Betty Blue. The scene is, as I recall, a tracking shot that comes in from outside a house to show the two main characters very energetically fucking…on a kitchen table, maybe? And the line is “I had known Betty for a week.”

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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