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December 07, 2005
I Just Bought...
...The Fountain by Darren (Pi, Requiem For A Dream) Aronofsky and Kent (Holy Shit He's An Awesome Artist) Williams. It is god damned gorgeous. If I hadn't bought that Little Nemo book last week, I'd say it's the most gorgeous book to come out this year. Yowza. It literally took my breath away when I opened it up and looked at it. I'll update this post later tonight or tomorrow morning with a good review.
EDIT: Okay, done reading it. Wow.
For those not familiar, 'The Fountain' was to be Aronofsky's third film. Towards the end of 2002, he was told that the film would not be made. Luckily, he had retained the graphic novel rights for the property, and sent the script to Karen Berger at DC/Vertigo. She hooked him up with Kent Williams, and the result is this book. As a nice outcome of the book's production, Aronofsky realized how to make the movie for about half the budget, and it should be coming out shortly.
So, the book.
Lately, I've been describing a lot of artists as 'deceptively simple'. Minimalism. Williams, however, is the first person that I've described as 'deceptively complex'. Maximalism. See, Mr. Williams gets the sequential artform. Sure, he puts a lot of work into each panel, but it's in the service of the story. It's stripped down sometimes, monochromatic in others, grayscale for a few pages, and full-blown multimedia other times. Why the changes, you may ask? Pacing. Servicing the story. Not pretentious, not art for art's sake, no showboating. It's that one thing that's missing from so many graphic novelists today: Storytelling. Conveying an idea through a sequence of images.
Today at work, a couple coworkers and I were gushing over the book, talking about what the art said to us (yeah, that whole art gallery thing I'm doing there has caused in-depth art criticism discussions), and we were pretty danged close to 'getting' what the story was about, just from the art.
And that story?
Wow. I don't really want to say anything about it, because it would honestly give it away. It's very textured, multi-layered, and I think it's one of those rare stories that five different people can read, and they'll give you five different descriptions of what it was about. It makes the reader an integral part of the process. Which, you know, is what comix are all about.
Here's a pull-quote from the book, that really sums it up. For me, at least. Talk to someone else, and they'll probably give you something different to ponder on:
"Remember Moses Morales?"
"Who?"
"The Mayan Shaman."
"From your trip?"
"The last night I was with him he told me about his father. His father who had died. But Moses wouldn't believe it."
"This is in the book?"
"Just listen."
"He said if they dug his father's body up it would be gone. They had planted a seed over his grave. The seed became a tree.
"Moses said, his father became part of that tree. He grew into the wood and into the bloom.
"Then, when a sparrow ate the tree's fruit, his father flew with the birds.
"He said, death was his father's road to awe. That's what he called it. The road to awe."
Posted by Schamberger at December 7, 2005 10:29 AM