Never miss a post! 
Review: Delphine #1
Delphine #1
Written and Drawn by Richard Sala
Published by Fantagraphics Books. $7.95 USD
Fantagraphics' Ignatz line rolls on, bless it, with longtime Fantagraphics-published cartoonist Sala beginning what looks to be a hefty tale of suspense and horror. I'm by no means a Sala expert, having only read his work of the last couple years, but this is a great introduction to it, a culmination of whatever Sala has learned from several years making spooky comics and many more years of watching horror films. In this story, a young college student says goodbye to a girl for the summer, just as they had made that connection where they would soon be boyfriend and girlfriend. She has to take care of her ailing father, and can't promise she'll return, so he's naturally upset about this turn of events. We meet him as he's taken the trip to visit her in some quaint, or is that bizarre and not-right? village. Sala makes great use of the larger pages of the Igort format to let the panels breathe. Rather than cramming in more detail, he uses more space, larger areas of black or dark gray tones, and lets these areas draw even more attention to the spare but important little items he does decide to place in the frame.
The young man almost immediately finds misadventure when he enters town, accepting a ride from a strange man and his silent, withered mother--people who've lived in the town so long they don't realize they're odd, or that their manners are poor and customs beyond the norm. Everyone is like that, either oblivious or downright hostile and devious and twisted, and it's hard for our poor hero to find his footing. Sala sets up incidents so skillfully every page is really a pleasure to read. When the local guy is driving our hero he assures his silent, almost catatonic mother not to worry, they won't be driving through Harrow Tree Woods, well, it's not a surprise when the young man later gets another ride and, of course, has to go through Harrow Tree Woods. Not a surprise, but a pleasure, reminding one of that old Chekhov maxim that if a writer shows a gun in the beginning of a scene, that gun had better be fired by the time the scene is over. Each page pays off the other page, but in carefully measured ways, assuring the reader that the story will only continue to build in intensity from here. Excellent.
*Thanks to Marc Mason for correcting me. Lack of sleep led to me calling it the "Igort" rather than Ignatz line. Igort is a famous European cartoonist and he edits the line, as well as producing Baobab for it.
Written and Drawn by Richard Sala
Published by Fantagraphics Books. $7.95 USD
Fantagraphics' Ignatz line rolls on, bless it, with longtime Fantagraphics-published cartoonist Sala beginning what looks to be a hefty tale of suspense and horror. I'm by no means a Sala expert, having only read his work of the last couple years, but this is a great introduction to it, a culmination of whatever Sala has learned from several years making spooky comics and many more years of watching horror films. In this story, a young college student says goodbye to a girl for the summer, just as they had made that connection where they would soon be boyfriend and girlfriend. She has to take care of her ailing father, and can't promise she'll return, so he's naturally upset about this turn of events. We meet him as he's taken the trip to visit her in some quaint, or is that bizarre and not-right? village. Sala makes great use of the larger pages of the Igort format to let the panels breathe. Rather than cramming in more detail, he uses more space, larger areas of black or dark gray tones, and lets these areas draw even more attention to the spare but important little items he does decide to place in the frame.
The young man almost immediately finds misadventure when he enters town, accepting a ride from a strange man and his silent, withered mother--people who've lived in the town so long they don't realize they're odd, or that their manners are poor and customs beyond the norm. Everyone is like that, either oblivious or downright hostile and devious and twisted, and it's hard for our poor hero to find his footing. Sala sets up incidents so skillfully every page is really a pleasure to read. When the local guy is driving our hero he assures his silent, almost catatonic mother not to worry, they won't be driving through Harrow Tree Woods, well, it's not a surprise when the young man later gets another ride and, of course, has to go through Harrow Tree Woods. Not a surprise, but a pleasure, reminding one of that old Chekhov maxim that if a writer shows a gun in the beginning of a scene, that gun had better be fired by the time the scene is over. Each page pays off the other page, but in carefully measured ways, assuring the reader that the story will only continue to build in intensity from here. Excellent.
*Thanks to Marc Mason for correcting me. Lack of sleep led to me calling it the "Igort" rather than Ignatz line. Igort is a famous European cartoonist and he edits the line, as well as producing Baobab for it.
Posted by ChristopherAllen at 10:56 PM [Link to this post]
1 Comments:
Mi amigo- that would be the "Ignatz" line. Igort is one of the creators they're publishing in it, though. :-)
Mason
Post a Comment
<< Home