'F Premise awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find that her innocence had gone missing." The first thing you notice about Roman Muradov's gorgeous graphic novel (In A Sense) Lost & Found is the rightness of the art.
The way it skips lightly between cartoony simplicity and complex visual imagery. The way it creates its own surreal world to play out the narrative of the fable it's telling. But that's not all that's going on here. The San Franciscan cartoonist is not only playing with visual form; he's having fun with words and language too.
This is a lovely - and long overdue - development in graphic novels: the idea that the words matter too. (In A Sense) Lost & Found is in some ways a very simple fable about F Premise mislaying her "innocence" and her subsequent search for it, but it's the cleverness and the sophistication of the telling that sticks.
It also raises a question that has been bothering me for some time now about graphic novels. How cartoony do comic books have to be? Because there is a choice. You can do what Nina Bunjevac does in Fatherland with her almost pointillist recreation of the past in black-and-white photographic images. Bunjavec's cross-hatched recreation of her childhood is a powerful piece of both biography and history as it traces the darkest shadows of Yugoslavian nationalism as played out in her own family story.
In 1975 her mother fled Canada to return to Yugoslavia to live with her parents and escape her husband, a fanatical Serbian nationalist.
Bunjavec's art is a form of subtle caricature that aspires to realism, one that serves the story - which is fiercely told and deeply felt - well. And yet it falls short of the obvious comparisons, Maus and Persepolis. That's a high bar and there's nothing wrong with falling slightly short, but I keep wondering if my own slightly reserved response is because of its artistic aspirations to realism, a sense that this is a beautifully rendered reproduction of photographic imagery which at some deep level feels a substitute for the real thing.
Is that fair? I'm not sure, and anyone who wants to get a human handle on Balkan history should start here. But - and this is just a matter of taste - I respond more to the clean-lined Herge-in-hell cartooniness of Charles Burns. The storytelling in Sugar Skull, the third and final part of a trilogy, fizzes and pops like a faulty neon sign. It's about punk bands and performance art and the messiness of young lives played out in counterpoint to a nightmare alternative world of tunnels and giant eggs. The result is a cartoon vision of reproduction and pregnancy that is full of male fear (but not, I think, male disgust).
The cartooniness of the art gives us the freedom to engage with the unreality of the approach. And I wonder if this isn't one of the key pleasures of comic strips. If something looks unreal we can accept its unreality more easily, and revel in it.
Take Stephen Collins's laugh-out-loud funny comic strips in Some Comics, which start with a ridiculous premise - a canine dentist, talking plastic bags - and then tap the humour in them, or Jamie Cole's Art Schooled, a joyous, lewd, penis-obsessed comic take on life at art school that Channel 4 should even now be commissioning as a follow-up to Fresh Meat.
Or best of all Emily Carroll's Through The Woods, her gloriously creepy graphic short stories that play with the language of fairy tales but present them as grimmer than Grimm.
If you don't find The Nesting Place's nightmare vision of wormy faces creepy as hell, maybe you're already dead.
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