Apr. 02, 2008 - Issue #650: Privatization

These three novels offer a graphic depiction of their events

Skim, Three Shadows, Albert and the Others

 The spring book season brings a fresh crop of graphic novels, and this year, three new works offer wispily drawn, poetic looks at angst, loss and strange obsessions.

Skim is a co-production, from Torontonian Mariko Tamaki and her Alberta-born cousin Jillian (whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and The Walrus). Skim is Kimberly Keiko Cameron, wanna-be Wiccan and private-school student, her teenage diary self-expressions interspersed with scenes of her at school, or image-scraps: a streetlight pole at night, half-eaten food on a plate, a chainlink fence gilded with fallen snow. While faces, close-up, are not too distinctively drawn, landscapes and objects are rendered delicately. And the looser sketchiness of some pictures fits the milieu, a private school where girls act offhanded with each other, all flippancy and casualness on the surface.
 

Mariko’s writing is assured, expressing Skim’s reluctance to be too honest, too rawly emotional, even when a classmate’s boyfriend kills himself and Skim finds herself drawing close to her English and drama teacher. Skim and her friend Lisa always fall back on sarcasm, irony and mockery. Any sign of cliché or convention, even sincere emotion, and these girls distance themselves. Skim even scoffs confidentially at her friend: “Today Lisa said, ‘Everyone thinks they are unique.’ That is so not unique!” It’s clear, though, that Skim doesn’t really know who she is, what she wants, even what makes her happy. And one of the book’s sharpest insights is into conspicuous compassion, a holier-than-thou mixture of pity and help that a clique at school brews up when they form the “Girls Celebrate Life!” club.
 

People are only half in frames or a scene will spread across two pages, white space is expertly used, the masks or honest glimmers of Skim’s self-searching entries are wrenched off or lit up by the next image, and then there are the episodic jerks and pulls of a teen’s emotional meandering through high school. Though the book bears some resemblances to Show Me Love, Lukas Moodysson’s 1998 film, Skim comes into its own, building a teenage girl mood that’s shruggingly observant and shyly heartfelt by turns. 

 

Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows begins with an obvious debt to the author’s beginnings at Disney animation. The book’s sequences are quite cinematic: fadeouts, establishing shots, close-ups, zooms, careful framing. Scenes of Joachim growing up with his parents, Louis and Lise, in a bucolic vale in the European countryside, seem out of a storyboard of animation cells, with the family’s sweet little noses, the soft curves of shoulders and shoes, the hulkish father and the too-small, girlish mother.
 

But then the whorls of clouds and smoke darken and three horsemen appear on the hill. Grief is closing in (Pedrosa penned the book after witnessing the death of some close friends’ young child). Dialogue is isolated in circles. The wind whips around the farmhouse and the sky turns charcoal, the landscape shrouded. Swirls and smears of fear and anger whip out from Louis as he feels helpless in the face of the coming storm, and figures become splotches that fade into the fog.
 

As Louis takes Joachim on the run, they’re shaken by encounters with a slave-runner and a ticket-seller who can find anyone’s dearest price. Their drifting voyage is reminiscent of countless passages, the starving poor hoping to make it to the new world, the slaves being ferried across a Styx-like river to a new prison. Then murder runs bloody in the slashing rain as people’s black moral codes spill over, staining others.
 

The softer, cartoony debts to Disney still jar a little, but Pedrosa etches an increasingly impressionistic, atmospheric work. There are flashes of Goya, Doré, Cervantes and Poe. Certain images haunt like the pursuing shadows: father clutching son as they plunge into underwater blackness; in a manger-like shack, a gleaming self-sacrifice in the hope of salvation; a golem-like colossus marching the landscape. Inexorably, Three Shadows enfolds the reader in its dark, fateful, wondrous grip.

 

Albert and the Others, meanwhile, is a little slip of a Freudian flip-book—15 frames per page—from Guy Delisle, a Frenchman best known for his comix-tours of North Korea and China. An A-Z companion to Aline and the Others, Delisle’s foray into the female psyche, Albert and the Others is a mixed bag of 26 men’s preoccupations, neuroses and fetishes.
 

Men’s dismemberment of women into manageable pieces is nothing new (countless Western works, from Shakespeare to Hollywood, offer a dissecting male gaze), but some strips here betray a slightly leering, jeering relish of all-too-casual male violence and perversity. Albert doesn’t just pick out a woman from a closet like a piece of clothing but emphatically slams the door behind them when he takes her into the bedroom. Olivier’s sadomasochism is lingered on for pages. And the women here tend to be stiff caricatures rather than moving figures—clingy, grasping or uptight, like the bun-knotted, prim and proper She Who Is Annoyed by Mathieu’s fart from blocks away.
 

As indulgently crude and monotonous as some sections can be, others, particularly those that probe more deeply into a creepy, insecure male psyche, are intriguing. Is Etienne the therapist or patient? The therapist trims and polishes one part of his patient’s difficulties with women, then steals another to add to a Galatea-like feminine ideal he’s slowly bringing to life for himself. Fernand, a boxer, beats himself up to get his wife’s attention in a world where men’s cuts and bruises need to be obvious in order to be treated. In these sections, rather than thrilling to the backlashing current of men’s psychological short-circuits, Delisle starts to untangle the wires of narcissism, anxiety, and repression within the cubicle worker, the husband, the Everyman. V


SKIM

Written by Mariko Tamaki

Illustrated by Jillian Tamaki

Groundwood/House of Anansi

144 PP, $18.95

 

THREE SHADOWS

By Cyril Pedrosa

Translated by Edward Gauvin

First Second

272 pp, $18.95

 

ALBERT AND THE OTHERS

By Guy Delisle

Drawn & Quarterly

82 pp, $9.95

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