For the past year, I have been writing reviews and articles for the Magazine PanelXPanel. Here's a one that wasn't accepted.
Done in the style of Edward Gorey's The Ghastlycrumb Tines, The Ghastlygun Tinies is a bitter punch to the gut on the epidemic of shootings in schools. The art perfectly invokes the style of the original Gorey work from its bleak humor to the use of shading. Unlike the original however, each page has a single panel that bleeds two separate letters into the same scene. These scenes show one typical event in school (be it acting in the school play or answering a question) while the other highlights the horror of what's going on. My favorite of these is "D is for DANA who had a hall pass" for the sheer subtlety of it all. That isn't to say the panels of normality don't have an air of foreboding ness. Each one is haunted by the school shooting that is occurring be it posters for "Farewell to Arms" in the background, piles of books being abandoned on the floor, or the sheer emptiness of the room. It goes on and on until the subtext can't help but explode into the text. (I should note, much to the comic's credit, that there's never a panel where we see a child's corpse.) This is the molotov cocktail that answers Where We Live's question of how we move forward with sheer anger and teeth. Highly recommended!
No comments:
Post a Comment