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January 30, 2005
Serious Comics
I too (like eleutheria, who read it in coincidental tandem with Plath's The Bell Jar) thought Return to Persepolis was a brilliant work, a very rare example of a comic worth reading (ie not full of middle-aged-adolescent's psychoanalytic-gothic tedium). Much better than Joe Sacco ('Palestine') because whereas he is obviously a bit of an archetypal naive liberal (and fully realises it, so that it is the source of much of the humour in his books) Satrapi manages to make use of her own at times agonising experience both to resonate with a universal 'outsider' theme and to inform the reader about a politically and historically specific situation.
Rumbled!
'Serious' comics (or if you prefer, the much-vaunted 'graphic novel', always supposedly on the verge of being 'accepted into the mainstream') always seem to work best with simple graphics ('Maus' being the example for all to follow) - following the minimalist style of the newspaper comic-strip rather than the all-action format of 'comics' ('serious' comics of the latter type always seem to me to _spoil_ the dynamism of the format). Here is a wonderful example of someone making use of the format to achieve an effect that text or image on their own couldn't. Light and humorous, dark confused and profound, personal and political all at once.
Posted by undercurrent at January 30, 2005 12:43 PM