Saturday, January 07, 2012

Nelson - The best Graphic Novel Ever - Probably


I came across this when looking up something about Posy Simmonds. There is slight similarity to One Day in that each "chapter" represents a day, slightly more than one-a-year, in the life of Nel Baker, spanning from her birth in the late sixties to the present day. However the real twist is that each section is drawn by a separate comic-artist, in a wide-range of styles covering child-like scrawls to ultra-realistic. I bought this this morning (didn't see Leonard, Sheldon or any of the rest of them at The Comic Book Store) and finished it this evening, which isn't enough to catch the subtleties of the drawings but I'll probably be reading it again straight away, especially after reading the afterword which says that there is a jigsaw hidden throughout the story, an interlocking set of clues. The real beauty of this is that the whole thing seems properly held together. Nel develops properly as a person in a way that is lacking in novels written by a single person. A real triumph. Buy it!

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