I don’t know if it’s because I’ve gotten older, or more sensitive, or the world has gotten scarier, or what, but ooooof, this was a tougher read than I remembered, mostly because the depictions of a society falling apart under the threat of nuclear war felt distressingly resonant, albeit highly caricaturish and stylized.
Actually, in a more detached vein, this was what I noticed even more — how allegorical the book is, despite its apparent interest in gritty realism, and how cleverly it combines the two. This is most obvious in the depiction of sexual assault-as-occasion-for-epiphany, where the effort to claim psychological nuance rather than symbolic utility feels especially strained, but its also sort of emergent in the interplay between word and image. Like, when Dan is shown with blue skin, it’s blatantly inviting you to connect his sexual impotency to his feeling of inferiority via Jon (and to compare the two of them), but it can also be explained by him…being in a dark room where a tv is on. It’s neatly done.
And it is a pretty dazzling example of the kinds of narrative complexity that graphic novels can accomplish far more readily than novel or even film — the rapid flashbacks and jumps between the perspectives of various characters from one pane to the next would be totally dizzying in another medium.
My students didn’t seem to find it nearly as depressing as I did (though quite a few didn’t like it, many because it felt so stereotypically male), thankfully, and many of them absolutely loved it, which was fun. Overall, it remains a pretty excellent book to kick off a graphic novels class.
Kasia Reads 