From Plath to Panel : The Nao of Brown

I've found what must be the third of a great trilogy of graphic novels in The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon. (The other two are of course Logicomix and Nelson). However this was a truly random find - where the previous two had been bought after reading reviews, I found this after a good twenty minutes of perusing the comics shelf at Waterstones (no apostrophe required now). It was a no-contest - a few seconds of page flipping and it was decided on - the graphics are exquisite watercolours. But the story does not let you down either. A quirky-yet-gentle tale - without real anger despite the compulsions of Nao Brown which lead her to imagine herself committing acts of violence on the closest and most loved of her friends. I've not yet reached the end - maybe these obsessions will be made real - I hope not - but even then this will have been a beautiful thing. My daughter was also immediately taken by the artwork and I hope she reads it because it is as literary as any of the classic books she loves and hip enough to keep her in with the cool kids too.
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It makes me want to draw - like reading The Waste Land made me want to write poetry. It is unfortunate that I draw far less well than I write poetry and I do that far less well than any of the poets I admire. However looking back my poetry has improved so maybe given time (in more ways than one) I could draw as well. I move from obsession to obsession without focus. As I said before, I am having to turn off the wifi to avoid being distracted while reading. And it works.

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!