First Second Fall, part 2

Posting this early, since it’s written. Let me also remind everyone that a new strip of Things Change is up today (Wednesday) as it is every Sunday and Wednesday. Today’s strip ends the first story.

See my first post on the fall line-up from First Second.

Emmanuel Guibert and Joann Sfar’s Sardine in Outer Space was one of the books in spring line-up that I didn’t read. It’s definitely a kid’s book, and I never liked kid’s books even when I was a kid. The second volume is out with the fall. I am in no way qualified to discuss this book as comic for children. I read one of the stories (it’s a collection of short comics with the same characters) and gave up in boredom. Sfar’s art is much more controlled than one sees in his more recent work.

I originally read Sfar’s Klezmer (Volume 1) in the original French. The book is beautiful and chaotic. Somehow, out of the disconnected squiggled lines and blotches of watercolor, Sfar creates these amazingly expressive drawings. The colors convey much emotion and set the mood of scenes. You don’t see many comics using color this way, nor with such a loose, liquid style. Whole pages will be done in two colors while others shift from panel to panel. The music scenes are particularly alive and vibrant. This is the comics equivalent of expressionism (even fauvist).

The story follows a few outcasts in Eastern Europe during the earlier part of the twentieth century (post WWI, pre WWII, I believe) who come together by the end to form a klezmer band. Like Sfar’s Rabbi’s Cat, this book draws on his Jewish heritage, but this time from Eastern Europe rather than the Algeria. It is a tragic-comedy, a comedic-tragedy, dark and funny. I enjoyed it more than The Rabbi’s Cat and look forward to reading volume 2 (out already in France).

Since I already had Klezmer, the book in the line-up that I would’ve been most tempted to pick up is Lat’s Kampung Boy. Lat is hailed as “one of the most beloved cartoonists in Southeast Asia,” and Kampung Boy was originally published in 1979. Once again this book seems aimed at the children’s book market, and it straddles the illustrated book/comic divide, falling, in my opinion, more into the illustrated book box. Almost every page is a single image with accompanying text and the only a very rare use of word balloons. Very little use is made of close sequentiality between the images, and only rarely do the images add more than scenic trappings to the text. One excellent sequence is a number of single page drawings that show Lat running after his new friends as they throw off their clothes, climb up a large tree, and jump into a pond to swim. It’s a dynamic scene, which makes one ever more conscious of the paucity of the broad narrative timing of the rest of the book.

The book tells pieces of Lat’s life growing up in a Malaysian village. Like in Journey into Mohawk Country, the unfamiliar setting left me wanting more information. For an American reader, the exotic local, the chance to learn of other cultural ways, is probably the selling point here, and I don’t feel that I got enough of that (which isn’t to say I fault Lat for that, as I assume he made the book for people in his culture not mine). Lat’s drawing has caricatured people but realistic backgrounds, similar to Hergé but with a looser style that is reminiscent of American comic strips.

All in all, I must conclude that either First Second is publishing a lot of mediocre comics or they are publishing comics for which I am clearly not the target audience. With these six books, I’d say it’s a little bit of each, which doesn’t really put them on a different level than most publishers. The only one I’d really recommend is Klezmer, which is a really beautiful book (though the French edition is on a nice off-white paper with a bit of texture that really works great with the watercolors in the art–this English edition is on glossy white paper, less warm). Maybe if you are buying for a child Sardines in Outer Space would be a good choice (who am I to say).

Klezmer and Kampung Boy are $16.95. Sardine is $12.95. You can view some Klezmer pages (in no way done justice at such a small size) here.

Tags: Bande Dessinee, coloring, expressionism, sfar

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