Review: Black Pillars by Andrew White
– Lovely fluid inky line. There’s an economy of drawing, esp. in the female main character’s face.
– It’s a confusing story – the people are confused and we are confused. We feel what they feel.
– I say confusing, but it is still deliberate and mysterious. There’s a there there, it seems.
– Great formal tricks. The best, my favorite and one I want to steal so so bad, is his use of circles for breathing. He teaches us by matching up text “Breathe in, breathe out” with a black and white circle. After a few times we know what it means. So you reading it are breathing too. Very great and crazy closing of the book/reader gap. I hate you Andrew.
– Clever panel structure. He uses different panel pages for different sections – the sections feel different but linked:
– 3 panels for landscapes in the beginning
– 8 panels for a first person encounter with a pillar
– 9 panels for a third person section about kids talking, crashing cars
– 6 panels for weird reports and confused testimony– The 3-panel landscapes are particularly odd. Some of the pages are like a person looking – the top panel is the sky, the middle is center of a landscape, the bottom panel is the bottom. Another way of putting us there. It also adds time to the landscape. It adds time to a panorama.
– There’s a night scene with just the right mix of black and grey – too low a contrast and it would be mud, too high and it would be too easy to see. Feels like NIGHT.
– There’s weird circles around a dude in a crowd. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but White convinces me that there’s reasons for things. That’s what good solid formal foundations can do – give you leeway with other things – you can convince by just doing it in a badass way.
– Like his Retrofit book, he uses layers images in a section. Instead of juxtaposing next to things he slaps them on each other. Comics on a Z axis.
– He uses ink wash when people are giving the reports/ testimony. Remembering things, not so crisp as black and white. Hazier.
– I honestly don’t know where this thing is going story-wise but he has convinced me he has something in mind. I’m easy though – I like to read wandering, but I don’t think he’s doing that. He has somewhere here.
Some kind and perceptive thoughts on Black Pillars 1 from Warren Craghead.