I'd first come across Aaron Renier's book at Comic-Con this year, and the clever packaging caught my eye. You can't judge a book by its cover, they say, but when it comes to comics it's a little more reasonable. For serial comics, where the cover art is often a much more detailed and interesting drawing than the interiors, I'm often disappointed once I actually open it up, but for book-form comics and graphic novels, what you see on the cover is usually a good indication of what's inside. Spiral-Bound is designed to look like an old spiral-bound notebook, with a pencil tucked in the spirals, the ruled lines on the edge, and a scribbly pen drawing on the cover.
The drawings inside are done with a brush pen, and have a similar tone to Craig Thompson's artwork (think Goodbye, Chunky Rice more than Blankets), but with perhaps a more light-hearted tone. The world of Spiral-Bound is populated with anthropomorphized animals (the little bubble-vehicles that aquatic animals drive around are particularly ingenious). There are meddling kids, secret passages, an underground newspaper, angry mobs, and a mysterious lake monster which may or may not exist.
It's a wonderful romp of a book, one that's kid-friendly without being dumbed down. I'm glad to have it in my collection, and I'll definitely be reading it again.
Fed to jonathan's brain | November 04, 2005
| Comments (0)
