The White Elephant - Damon Hurd & Christopher Steininger
I checked out a big stack of comics at the library including this one, a "thinly veiled autobiography." It's a very strangely executed book about Gene, a young man who is estranged from his family and has trouble talking about it: the old family secret is the elephant in the room, which everyone sees but nobody talks about. But the way the book is written, it's a stage play, with Gene talking to a stereotypical shrink on one end of the stage, while characters from his memories enter and exit. Gene interacts with them, and then returns to the doctor's part of the stage. My biggest complaint is that it's often confusing which panels to read first, simply because of the way the dialogue is printed, so it often led to repeated readings to make sense of a particular page. Other than that, it's a peculiar but effective way of telling the story, in a way that provides distance from the topic yet still gets at the emotional core.
Fed to jonathan's brain | December 15, 2005
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