Winshluss: Pinocchio

The book is published in French but mostly without text, the story told in descriptive panels in that classic Bandes Dessinées style intermixed with with full page and half page panels that also form part of the narrative. The only parts of the book with words are a few sections in black and white drawn in a loose sketchy style that nicely juxtaposes with the colour artwork that makes up the main body of the book. These black and white passages involve Jimmy the Cricket who has taken up home in Pinocchio’s head, and with my bad french I managed to just about understand what was going on, although you could easily understand the story with little or no french (like me).

The majority of the book is colour and wordless. Winshluss draws and paints in several mediums and there are several full page panels that I was amazed by. The coloring has that desaturated nostalgic feel that perfectly matches his drawing style.

Winshluss: Pinocchio

Winshluss: Pinocchio

The lame fox and blind cat from the original Carlo Collodi Pinocchio adventures become a smack-head and blind beggar, Monstro the great whale becomes a polluted toxic mutant fish destroying a Titanic style liner complete with white bearded captain and string ensemble who not only carry on playing when the ship goes down, but as they are being dissolved by the acidic bile in the stomach of the toxic fish.

Winshluss also makes several nods to Disney; Snow White and the seven dwarfs make an appearance, the dwarfs are a gruesome set of perverts and their involvement in Geppetto’s comeuppance is particularly twisted. There is even a film noir element, a hard boiled cop with a head like an Easter island statue who tracks down Geppetto and the seven perverted dwarfs. The book is certainly dark, but full of humor.

Pinocchio himself is a mute robot-boy, created by Geppetto to be a war machine who he initially tries to sell to the military. Pinocchio goes wandering after short circuiting while Jimmy the Cricket enters his robot brain. Pinocchio tumbles through this story, staying resolutely mute while the tale unfolds around him.

Winshluss: Pinocchio

Winshluss: Pinocchio

Vincent Paronnaud is also credited as co-writer and co-director with Marjane Satrapi on the film adaptation of her comic series Persépolis. What a talented chap.

You can see more artwork at a larger size here at http://www.bdgest.com.

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Related posts:

1. Jason Lutes: Jar Of Fools
2. David Mazzucchelli: Asterios Polyp
3. Dan Drakeford: Writer, illustrator & cartoonist

So, I was in Dave’s Comics, Brighton, a Saturday afternoon, wanting a comic book fix. 2000 AD re-issues are just not doing it for me. I bought Asterios Polyp on the recommendation of the shopkeeper and on the brief flick through I gave it – and also, the nice hardback copy abated my ‘nice book’ addiction. It was only on getting home and giving it a proper inspection that I realised I was familiar with the author/artist. But I am crap with names. And facts.

Asterios Polyp, the protagonist, is a fifty-ish ‘paper’ architect – belligerent, arrogant, won lots of awards, recognised, but not one of his designs have ever been built. Already I liked Asterios, but saw the flaws, what I was supposed to think. His story is ‘a journey of discovery’, can’t put it in any other way – he is brought down, escapes, goes on a journey, discovers himself, meets interesting characters along the way and finds some sort of redemption. Sounds pretty average and run of the mill but this is anything but and so much more. Mazzucchelli manages to comment on relationships, compatibility, art theory, aesthetics all within his narrative and combines these themes with some very off the wall characters.

The artwork, so different to City of Glass, is itself subverted to become part of the narrative, different styles denoting mood, illustrating compatibility. The way he has combined his lettering, colour and page composition, all coming together in a way that communicates vast amounts on a single page, seems such a natural part of the evolution of comic books (sorry, Graphic Novels). Every character, however minor, had their own stylistically different lettering reminding me of Asterix books of my youth, the Goths with their blackletter style lettering, Egyptians talking in hieroglyphs. But Mazzucchelli uses this approach, spins and multiplies it to create a quite unique vision.

I bought a copy for my brother for his thirty eighth birthday. It was the last one in the shop. Must be good then.

Buy it here

Read an 2000 interview with David Mazzucchelli

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Related posts:

1. Jason Lutes: Jar Of Fools

Jar of Fools follows an alcohol addled, broken-hearted magician as he comes to terms with the end of a relationship and the unexpected suicide of his escape-artist brother. His journey is framed by the increasing senility of his mentor and the attempts of a low life con-artist to persuade the magician to educate his young daughter in the ways of magic.

A sense of detachment, of being out of time saturates this book; the magician’s acknowledgment that he is no longer relevant and the literal underworld the characters inhabit support this feeling. The magician’s own traditional take on his vocation removes him from the modern world – his kind of magic is the magic of smoky clubs, starched collars and sleight of hand, an antiquated form of showmanship made redundant by CGI, Vegas and television. In the magician’s aging mentor’s own words, how can you top Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear on peak-time TV?

Accordingy to Lutes’ Wikipedia page, a trip to France exposed him to ‘Bandes Dessinées‘ comic strips (Tintin and Asterix for example), which have greatly influenced his style (see his homage to Hergé on page 77 of Jar of Fools, and extra points if you spot the reference to Chris Ware). Having myself grown up with Asterix comics I can easily relate to these simply drawn characters and the rhythm of the uniform panels on the page. In some ways Lutes reminds me of Chester Brown, another European-influenced comic artist, insomuch as both keep a regular grid of panels on the page and use simply drawn characters, able to express a wide range of emotions through a few considered lines of ink.

Jar of Fools is neatly paced, and does not suffer from the transition from a series of issues in to a single volume. Lutes uses dream sequences and alcoholic hallucinations to show our protagonist’s state of mind, and successfully incorporates these sequences into his narrative, reinforcing the detachment from reality his characters all suffer from. With such doomed characters inhabiting Jar of Fools, a feel-good ending was never going to be on the cards, and although the characters all go through some sort of awakening the ending is downbeat but open-ended enough for the reader to form their own conclusions.

A graphic novel that I will revisit again, in Jar of Fools Lutes has created a work that is engaging and a joy to read, a refreshing change from the navel-gazing that constitutes much of contemporary American ‘grown up’ comics.

Many thanks to Faber & Faber for supplying a copy for review.

This review first appeared on bookgeeks.co.uk.

Buy a copy here.

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