Two of my biggest reading successes of the year so far - amidst a happy band of very good books - have been The Ones With Pictures. It was one of my reading resolutions to try out comics and graphic novels, and I've made a good start towards it. I'm only a beginner, a definite novice at getting the most out of the form, but now have a long long list of recommendations to keep me busy and build up my graphic novel - comic reading muscles. If you have any other recs, let me know!
Saga: Volume One by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples
Image Comics, 2012
160pp, hard copy
*Borrowed from the library
This is the first comic I've ever tried. Before I started I had to do some research about how to read it, which was slightly embarrassing. I only had the vaguest sense of how it worked; how the story was balanced between the art and the words. I'm not a particularly visual person anyway - I'll always chose words over images; I remember in prose - so it was counter intuitive at first to read both at the same time. I was chasing the words across the page spread, and then having to go back to look at the visuals. I think it'll take me a while to get used to synthesizing the two.
Of all the places I could have started I picked Saga for no better reason than name recognition and that the first volume was on the shelves at work. I didn't really know what it was about, just that I'd seen lots of my favourite people raving about it. Each volume release seemed to garner more and more praise. It wasn't at all what I was expecting. This first installment in the story of star-crossed lovers Alana and Marko is graphic, scatological, violent and visually boggling. Also: romantic, heart-warming, earnest and quite lovely. I first flipped it open on the train home from work to a full page featuring a naked multi-breasted giant spider assassin woman wielding machine guns. The person sitting next to me visibly flinched; I slapped it closed pretty quick. (Funnily enough when Esther flicked through it later it fell open at exactly the same page. 'What the hell are you reading now!?' she said. I guess it was a popular opening with some borrowers. Which is more than slightly ick.)
It starts with a birth. Alana and Marko are newly weds, expecting their first child. They're apprehensive, excited, fractious with one another and deeply in love. They're also soldiers from opposite sides of a space war that has been raging for so long that the fighting has been outsourced to other planets. As Alana goes into labour they're fugitives, hunted as traitors by both sides and destined for a life in hiding. Their daughter Hazel witnesses her first firefight within minutes of entering the world. It's a powerful proposition.
The narrative is layered between first person narration from a future Hazel - a voice over in retrospect - which is beautifully measured, and the painful, dirty business of surviving in a war zone with a tiny baby. Even as you're in the thick of a sweary fight sequence you're also floating above it, appreciating the nostalgic pathos of the moment from a distant point of view. Marko and Alana aren't sugar-coated in the slightest - he's a pacifist prone to alternating fits of idealism and rage; she's spiky, uncompromising and quick to anger - but their love for one another, and Hazel's love for them, is a corrective that deepens their story from the start.
Coming to write about it now I realise quite how much was crammed into what felt like an incredibly short read; and also how vividly it has stuck with me. From TV-headed Princes to lie detecting cats, sex planets to space ship forests, ghost children to romance novelists to breast feeding on the battle field, there is so much going on here. It took me a while to adjust to the abrupt choppy way the story flies about; and the breezy casual familiarity of some of the dialogue initially struck me as awkward. But eventually I liked almost everything about it. I absolutely can't wait for volume 2. I have all the released volumes on request at the library and volume 3-5 have already come in. Volume 2 is, typically, missing in action with some tardy reader. Gah! Hurry up! And in other news the first volume of Rat Queens has just come into stock for me too.
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Becoming Unbecoming by Una
Myriad Editions, 2015
208pp, hard copy
*Purchased December 2015
Becoming Unbecoming was suddenly everywhere at the end of last year; on Twitter, on blogs, on best-of lists. As soon as I heard what this non-fiction graphic autobiography was about, I knew I had to read it and soon. It's set in my home county of West Yorkshire in the 1970s and 80s, against a backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper case and in the context of misogyny that I recognise all too well. Una - who was 12 when the Ripper emerged into full view in 1977 - interweaves the story of her own sexual abuse by older men and the horrific 'slut-shaming' that followed by her family and peers with that of Sutcliffe's thirteen (known) victims. Exposing herself completely and openly, she uses her experiences to talk about the systematic ways in which women are silenced, judged and violated in modern British culture. She particularly highlights how women's sexuality was (and continues to be) either controlled or reviled by the media and the justice system. Some of the statistics she quotes - about levels of rape convictions, about gendered violence - were shocking and terrifying, even though I sort of knew them already.
The art here couldn't be more different to Saga. Whereas that is a riot of colour and movement, Una draws mostly in a palette of grey, restrained and quiet on the page. The layout of each page neat, even when it's busy with content, and the words flow intuitively through and around the pictures saying 'read this way, then that'. There is a children's story book feel to it, especially the build-your-own-character cut out pages, which is at once disconcerting and perfect. Rage at the injustices described are often contained by infographics - the number of violent male offenders versus the number of violent female offenders in 2012 represented by little figures, like in a government report. There is a serious determination to be clear. It works well in partnership with dreamy surreal wordless pages that perfectly convey the mixed emotions of Una's childhood, rape and recovery.
I was deeply deeply moved by it, start to finish, in part I guess because it touched on the personal for me. I'm sure it will for many women of our generation. I was born in 1983, two years after Peter Sutcliffe was finally caught, but he loomed large in my imagination as a child. My dad was a police officer then - he joined the force in 1975 - and was tangentially involved in the investigation as a young constable. Some of his stories now about the West Yorkshire police in those years are shocking and yet (sadly) not shocking; the brutality, sexism, racism and casual violence have become all too familiar. When I was growing up I was painfully aware of the lessons that he taught me: that there are bad people who do very bad things and girls especially have to be very very careful because they are vulnerable and fragile and prone to damage of all kinds. Good girls stay safe; bad girls get hurt.
It's extraordinarily courageous to write a book like this, and to speak so openly about the experience of abuse. Not only that but to recognise that abuse is a point on a spectrum of acts against women that range from beating them to death with a hammer to making fun of their bodies. The ending was so powerful, so painful, that I cried hard for longer than a little while.
~~Victoria~~