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Dancing lessons for your eyes...
a look at Graphic Novels
Sometimes adults forget that reading is a physical act. It’s not just something that happens in your brain—it’s something that happens between the page and your eyeballs. Watch children learning to read and you’ll know what I’m talking about: their fingers, eyes, and lips all move in time to their reading. Simply tracking a line of text across the page is difficult at first, like counting a row of telephone poles that disappears into the distance.
Now try reading a graphic novel. If typical reading is like making your eyeballs march across a page, then reading a graphic novel is like making your eyeballs dance. When I first started reading graphic novels, I didn’t know where to look first—text bubbles, facial expressions, motion lines? But I soon realized that a good artist will call your attention to what’s most important in ways subtle and surprising. And besides, it doesn’t really matter. The whole spread tells the story, and regardless of the order in which you take in the elements on the page, your brain will quickly piece them together like a puzzle.
That said, there are certain graphic novels that I enjoy reading more than others because of the way the artist leads me across the page. This year, I read about 200 graphic novels, and one image that’s still burnt into my retina is from the second book in the Locke and Key series, written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez. The main plot device in the series is a collection of keys, hidden in a spooky old New England house, that do strange things to people’s bodies and minds. In the second book, Locke and Key: Head Games, a little boy finds a key that pops your head open like a plastic Easter egg, letting others look inside and even take things in and out. The image that stays with me is the glimpse into the little boy’s mind: it’s like a bowl full of brightly colored toys, tiny people, and nightmarish monsters that takes up the entire 
page. Makes you wonder what the inside of your head looks like.
Then there was the dreamy world of Bayou, vol. 1, written by Jeremy Love and illustrated by Patrick Morgan. Set in the Reconstruction Era American South, the story grips you first with the terrible injustice of a little girl’s father blamed for the death of her white playmate. Then it sucks you in further with images of an eerie other world lurking under the waters of the bayou. I can’t remember when I first noticed that the images of crooked houses, well-dressed animals, and tyrannical adults had as much in common with Alice and Wonderland as they did with American history, but when I flipped through the book again, I saw what should have been my first clue on the first few pages: a group of knowing-looking little white rabbits popping out against a murky greenish palate.
In contrast to these two full-color graphic novels, Pluto vol. 001 by Naoki Urasawa and Osama Tezuka, is a toned-down black and white tale. Of course, some people will be thrown off by the fact that it reads from right to left, like all Japanese manga, or comics. (I hate to translate manga as “comics,” since in Japanese culture, any kind of literature—mystery, drama, even how-to books—can take a graphic form without attracting any stigma.) But the layout in this one is fairly straightforward, because the authors are trying to tell noir-ish, minimal story. The manga borrows a character from one of Osama Tezuka’s masterpieces, an android who investigates the murder of other robots, and this volume introduces you to two of the robot victims. The trick here is getting your to care about characters who are manufactured and programmed to do specific tasks. The artist really got me was when he drew a 9-foot tall robot, wearing a black cape to hide the weapons implants that embarrass him, clumsily trying to play a melody on the piano.
Another black and white graphic novel that really moved me was I Kill Giants, written by Joe Kelly and illustrated by J. M. Ken Nimura. The protagonist of this story looks like a maladjusted school girl (she wears rabbit ears on a headband and carries around a homemade heart-shaped purse), but she claims to be a giant killer. It’s unclear whether she’s delusional, perfectly sane, or just playing an endless role playing game. I don’t want to say why the story almost made me cry, because it gives away too much, but I will tell you the image that stays with me: a titan rearing his ugly head out of the stormy ocean with a tiny girl on the tip of his nose, wielding a hammer on a stick much too thin to bear its weight.
Those are just a few of my most valuable reading experiences of 2009. I’ll try to spare you any murmurs about a thousand words and simply encourage you to flip through the graphic novels available at PCL. Though small, the graphic novel collections are growing fast. There may even be enough books on the shelves that you will want to ask me for a recommendation. Despite what I just hinted at, I love putting my appreciation for images into words.
Emily Brown, Children's Librarian at Mt. Pleasant Library