The seemingly casual way in which Boulet is able to just sit down and draw a three page story from scratch – no sketches, no mistakes, all done on paper in a single take, is both awe inspiring and slightly sickening.
Sugar, Sugar — Serge Baeken
One of the best comics published last year was Serge Baeken’s Sugar, a slice of life comic about the life of a cat and the family he’s adopted into. Cat comics are always problematic because they so easily dive into sentimentality; it’s so easy just to lose yourself in cute anecdotes. Baeken’s work on the other hand has a bite to it. Partially because he recognises the essential truth of having cats, that you have to get used to their death, you share your life with them for, if you’re lucky, ten-fifteen years and then have to get used to their absence.
But more than that, it’s the art that keeps it from being sentimental, in its formalism. Baeken keeps the same six by four panel grid throughout the book, but within these panels experiments with layout in a way you don’t see a lot in other comics, certainly not so consistently. So in the early page shown above, you basically have a big overview picture of the street and block of flats the family lives in, intercut in panels, with the narrative set on top of it. It’s hard to know how to read it at first, your eye drawn down the page following the line of the building first, then back up to the first text balloon. Or perhaps down the road in the middle of the picture?
Baeken uses a lot of, if I understand McCloud’s Understanding Comics correctly, “aspect to aspect” transitions between panels, where different aspects of one idea are shown, rather than the passage of time. Here used like a training montage in a movie to show Sugar learning how to “talk” with his humans. I like the way in which the people are drawn slightly more “realistic”, with more lines to their faces than the cats, sleek and stylised.
The consistent six by four grid is also great at showing action, with Sugar breaking through the panel borders, background orientation shifting with his own. There’s a touch of Toth, of Hugo Pratt in Baeken’s use of black and white, of shadow. These are pictures you can keep looking at for hours.
As Wim Lockefeer laments at the Forbidden Planet blog, Sugar hasn’t been translated into English yet, but it wouldn’t need much translation. If you’re even slightly comfortable with French or Dutch, pick this up at your favourite comic store.
The Black Cat teaches judo (3)
All her Children Fought
Proof you can tell a science fiction story with only three actors and one, not entirely convincing special effect. Based on the story by Tobias Buckell, who has the story of how it came to be up on his blog. It’s an excellent example of how much you can convey with just a bit of subtle incluing, by working within genre expectations. I can’t be the only one to watch this and be reminded of Ender’s Game, can I?
Some comments: I wonder if the choice of accents for the three actors was deliberate or just a coincidence, but it works in contrasting the boy and his minder with the main character. I’m not sure the premisse of the movie is valid, the reason why it’s young boys/children being sent up there rather than adults, but it makes emotional sense.
A week of short short stories reviews
So I made the decision to read through this list of 98 well received short SF stories from last year, as originally posted to MetaFilter, reading roughly three stories a day. The first week of posts is now up:
- Introduction and list of stories
- Day One: stories by Charlie Jane Anders, Eleanor Arnason and Dale Bailey
- Day Two: Jessica Barber and two by Elizabeth Bear.
- Day Three and Four: Helena Bell, Holly Black, Aliette de Bodard, Richard Butner, Richard Bowes & Chaz Brenchley.
- Day Five: Siobhan Carroll, Dario Ciriello and C. S. E. Cooney.
- Day Six: Julio Cortázar, Tom Crosshill and Amanda C. Davis
- Day Seven: Amal El-Mohtar, Ruthanna Emrys and K. M. Ferebee.
It’s been interesting reading these stories this way, usually done on my tablet lying on the couch with a cat on my lap. Even if a given story isn’t too my liking, it’s easy enough to push through to a better one. I don’t read enough short stories normally and this is a good challenge to get me to read more.