I really like this book, but it took my awhile to come around to that. My first time through it (must have been awhile ago now) I didn’t really think much of it. Not that I thought it was bad, but I just didn’t… think about it. I pulled it out of a pile for this reviewing project, and ending up reading it a few times in the past couple days.

The Hot Breath of War is divided in six parts. I’m not sure what to call the thing as a whole. It’s not a novel-like continuous narrative, nor is it just a collection of disparate short stories. There is one character that appears in half the sections. It’s not exactly variations on a theme, though I feel the presence of an underlying connection without being able to articulate it. War is a common thread through most of the stories, as is the theme of people attempting to make personal connections with each other.

Perhaps it is appropriate that I find it hard to articulate a description of this book. In the first part, we find two soldiers in some kind of war (Afghanistan? Iraq?). Their tank is blown up. One of them says: “Everything is exploded, words are divorced from their meaning.” They then meet two native men who joke around with the soldiers and the language barrier. This section is drawn in the most caricatured style of the book. The one solider bears a resemblance to Beetle Bailey, and the story even ends on a plop take. It’s a satiric story, where the one soldier calls in an air strike that rebuilds the native chief’s home (“asymmetric warfare” he claims).

This jokey atmosphere is belied by the last story in the book where we see what seems to be the same two soldiers. The one is tending bar for the other, who is shown in a wheelchair, bandaged up and missing half a leg. The single most emotional picture in the book is a silent panel of the bartender hugging the man in the wheelchair. It’s one of the last images in the book and it hits the emotional core amongst the war and people trying to connect.

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The bartending soldier also appears in part five, which reads like some kind of play. The soldier, on his way back from the war, and a young girl, pulling a wagon that bears her dead mother, meet on a road. They talk in a mannered way (clearly a purposeful stylistic shift from the rest of the book). The girl notes that as neither a baby to be saved and adopted nor a woman to be physically loved, she can be nothing to the soldier but a victim. It’s a strange yet moving scene.

Two of the stories are less war and more love. The second part finds a young man named Mason going out on a date and later trapped on a public telephone as the ocean waters rise and flood the city. He is left on a phone but, having lost the phone numbers of his two girl friends, unable to communicate with anyone. What starts as a rather banal man-seeks-sex story becomes a natural disaster of some kind. No war here, yet Mason, as he heads out into the night, notes the “hot wind” blowing through the city, perhaps another form of the “hot breath.” His world is also not without its violence. A party he attends has an ongoing fist fight in the background, while the sex he has with his date is drawn like a cartoon fist fight: a cloud with body parts sticking out and little stars surrounding it.

The other part finds another young man looking for sex, this time unsuccessfully, leading him into anger. Meanwhile the girl he fails to sleep with wanders off with a laid back anthropomorphic cat, who’s dressed like a hobo.

One of the parts, unlike the others, seems grounded in a historical moment. It takes place during the Spanish Civil War (one can infer such). It is the only part that uses conventional rectangular panels and a less caricatured style. It is also the most direct story. For all these reasons it provides an incongruous bump in the book. By virtue of its difference, it must have some special significance, right?

Alixopulos has a dynamic cartooning style, very loose and caricatural. He packs a lot of energy into his images and makes plenty of use of cartoon iconography throughout. He eschews panel borders and averages two to three panels a page, giving the pages an airy appearance. Often his images have scribbles and hatches and curves that serve in place of borders to hold in some of the images. He’s also surprising good with his prose. The narration in different parts of the story are not only well written but take on slight variations in style. It’s nice to find a cartoonist with an ear for prose.

This review is pretty scattered. I don’t really know what to say about The Hot Breath of War. I’m not sure what Alixopulos is aiming at, and I’m not sure if he hit it, but I enjoyed the ride. I’ll keep an eye out for his next book.

[This is part 17 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

Two things that jumped out at me as I read:

1) Prose in comics. There’s clear sense that Hart is not only thinking about images and narrative but also the actual prose he writes. I get the feeling most people don’t pay attention to this in reading comics. I know I tend to give it little thought. Perhaps this is due to a general lack of quality in the prose itself. Something to consider in the future.

2) Images in context. Take a look at this panel/image:

Out of context like this it’s pretty abstract. Hart has a simplified iconic style, and here we can get the idea of some kind of motion and clouds or dust or explosion or something… but what is it?

Now, take a look at that same panel with the panel that precedes it:

Now it becomes a little clearer with the context of the streetlights and the silhouetted heads in the foreground.

The simplified imagery works because of the accretion of context from one panel to the next. That’s a key part of many comics, particularly those with less detailed art styles.

I’m like a broken record when it comes to John Porcellino’s work: I love its beautiful minimalism and quiet, thoughtful narratives. A new long work by him is cause for celebration, and this volume does not disappoint. Thoreau at Walden is the latest volume in the Center for Cartoon Studies series of sort-of biographical comics. While previous volumes have seemed just slightly off narratively and a little too juvenile for my tastes, this volume is right on target. While previous author/subject pairings seemed like winners (Lutes on Houdini, following up his Jar of Fools on another magician; Sturm on Paige, following his baseball comics), John Porcellino writing on/with Henry David Thoreau is a perfect match for a comic that is meaningful for adults but also readable for a younger crowd. If you’re familiar with Porcellino’s work, his focus on quiet meditative experience and the natural world, is an obvious fit with Thoreau.

Thoreau at Walden focuses, as its title would indicate, on Thoreau’s experience living in a small shack on Walden pond, as described in Walden. Porcellino uses only text from Thoreau’s writing (admitting to minor editing and reorganization) to narrate the book, mostly from Walden itself but also from “Civil Disobedience” and his journals. By using only Thoreau’s words, Porcellino allows the reader to directly engage with his protagonist’s thoughts and writings, making the comic a kind of teaser work for Thoreau’s prose (it has got me wanting to reread Walden).

The narrative is divided into four parts (winter, spring, summer, fall) covering a year of Thoreau living in his shack outside of Concord, MA. Thoreau discusses his thoughts on conformity, his experiment in living simply both separate and still connected to civilization, his daily life at the pond, nature, and philosophy. Interspersed with these meditations are small vignettes from his life and the relatively longer story of his night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax (famously described in “Civil Disobedience”). Porcellino effectively captures small moments of life, adding a visual warmth that is missing from the text. What emerges is the surprising relevance of Thoreau’s work to contemporary society and individuals, in regards not just to the environmentalism for which he is generally regarded a forefather but also to issues of simplicity, (non)conformity, and the individuals relation to society. Reading these ideas now (many many years after I read Walden late in my teen years) I can see how much his thoughts are forebears to so many movements and lifestyles in the twentieth century like the seemingly opposed hippies and punks.

The use of Thoreau’s actual words makes for an interesting reading experience. His syntax is so different than what one sees in comics or even most contemporary prose. The writing, in its structure, is rather dense even in the fragmented state found here, and the density of the writing contrasts with the minimalist style of Porcellino’s images. It forced me to give the text a closer attention than in most comics, occasionally finding the need to reread a page or sequence of pages more than once, so as to not lose the flow and meaning of the sentences in between panels. I wonder if this speaks to Thoreau’s 19th century prose or to some larger issue of prose style in comics.

Porcellino’s drawing style is as minimal as ever, the obvious difference from other recent works being the use of a warm tan as a second color. I’m not aware of any previous use of color (other than printing the linework in different colors in A Perfect Example) in Porcellino’s work, so it is interesting to see what he does with it. The color serves a few purposes throughout the book. The color often serves to create a greater sense of depth. Porcellino does not use linear perspective (or does only very rarely) nor does he vary line weight, so often his drawings appear flattened (see below), relying on placement and size to create the illusion of depth. With the addition of a color, different fields of a panel can be pushed back or pulled forward by applying the monochrome.

The color allows Porcellino to present light in certain situations, such as a nighttime scene or an image Thoreau sitting in front of his fireplace. The color is also used to create a focal point in the panel, sometimes in a very specific way (everything is tan except the white focal area, see above) elsewhere in a more general compositional sense. The color is a welcome and simple addition to Porcellino’s work. Less successful is the multicolored cover which move towards a more realistic (representational) color scheme and ends up being detrimental to the simple linework.

As always numerous simple and beautiful compositions are to be found both in individual panels and in pages or multipanel sequences. The image below is almost unbelievably simple, yet the placement of the lines and the white shapes are just perfect compositionally.

Similarly, the color in the sequence below shifts from day to night with a simple mirrored flip of the field.

If you are fan of Porcellino’s work, this post was unnecessary, you’ve probably already bought this book or have it on your list. If you haven’t read Porcellino before this is probably the best place to start and should be the easiest of his works to find.

Bonus link: Porcellino on the genesis of the book.

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