When I was a kid I was a voracious reader, devouring one book after the other, losing myself in worlds created by other-worldly-beings otherwise known as authors. Weirdly, the only author I remember meeting/hearing read when I was a kid was Farley Mowat whose memoir of growing up on the prairies (The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be) may also have been the first memoir I ever read. Mowat spoke at the Banff School of Fine Arts, as it was then known, and because Dad taught there, we attended a lot of events, including Mowat’s.
It’s been a while since I read with such a sense of delight and discovery, but diving into the world of graphic novels and comics has pulled me back into the pages of books in a way that reminds me of my childhood reading days.
Not that the subject matter is necessarily light. Au contraire. Each of the four books above is weighty in its own way. This mix of seriousness and levity (the comic strip presentation lends itself to lightness) bodes well for the story I’m trying to tell. Yes, I’m about to state the obvious, but life is like that - a mix of hideous (the trenches in The Red Diary), baffling (Guy Delisle does a fabulous job of capturing the fish-out-of-water experience of the traveler abroad, in this case, in China), unfair (Poppies of Iraq), and very funny (the scene in Chester Brown’s memoir when his mother explains her padded bra may have elicited a guffaw).
The wide range of illustrative techniques has been both encouraging and instructive. Every panel does not need to be crafted in exactly the same manner - the way Delisle goes back and forth between simple cartoony conversations and more detailed renderings of street scenes interspersed with zooming in on details (like the teeth above) makes me very aware of a) just how much DRAWING goes into a graphic novel and b) how many different ways there are to capture the everyday moments of a life. I mean, I knew this from a purely theoretical perspective, but reading these books and studying how the authors/illustrators navigate their way through sometimes complicated territory has been both inspiring and daunting. And, encouraging - I need to draw more and more and more!
The memoir Poppies of Iraq includes family photographs (filed that away for future reference… we have a LOT of photos in the family archives), but is also interesting for a couple of other reasons. First, the format. There’s more expository prose than I was expecting when I first picked it up off the shelf at the library. And, it’s a collaborative effort with Findakly writing the story and inking the illustrations but her husband, Lewis Trondheim responsible for the drawings. Hm. That type of collaboration hadn’t really occurred to me, not that my colouring is any better than my drawing, but in general, I had not realized what a collaborative process creating graphic novels and comics can be.
Another example of including very simple to more complex drawing all in the same book is this spread from I Never Liked You. This memoir is also a terrific example of building up the sense of a period in a person’s life by providing snippets, using repetition, and exploring dark moments by providing that all-important “crack where the light comes in.”
The Re[a]d Diary is just cool - a nifty piece of conceptual art/literature that pushes the boundaries of collaboration. I’ll write another piece about this book all on its own as it’s a bit complicated and worthy of a deeper dive, but I’m out of time for today! I’m heading out and about to be late but remain dedicated and determined to continue this day-by-day chronicle of the genesis of my own graphic novel memoir.
Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to share! And, I’m still collecting suggestions for further reading - drop your favourite graphic novels in the comments and let me know why you are such a fan!