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| Posted on Wednesday, July 24 @ 00:00:17 PDT |
Before he became internationally famous, Italian graphic novelist Manuele Fior was already working on the stylistic language that he would develop with increasing assuredness. Red Ultramarine, from 2006, pairs a straight-forward re-telling of the legend of Daedalus and Icarus with a somewhat more oblique Faustian tale, in what the story aptly terms “a strange correspondence.” Finding echoes between plotlines is Fior’s favorite narrative tactic, but here the reader will have to put in some work to tie Greek myth with its modern-day counterpart. Fausto might be Icarus, but in his behavior he’s Daedalus, and his girlfriend Silvia has a red birthmark on her face, and it’s not quite clear what Minotaur, red in tooth, nail, and horn, has determined their fate. The expressiveness of red, with black and white for demarkation, is what’s attractive visually: Fior never lets it get boring over 150 or so pages. Complaint: a couple of illegible panels whose abstractness gets too close to opaqueness.
16-year-old Lucia has just moved into an Italian seaside town with her overbearing mother in Manuele Fior’s groundbreaking graphic novel 5,000 KM per Second. The move is observed by two friends: shy Piero and outgoing Nicola.
The three will see their lives connected- and slightly disconnected. Because this is a truthful tale of distances and time.
Later, Lucia is a college student doing a thesis on Ibsen in Norway.
Later, Piero is an archaeology student in Egypt.
Later, Nicola runs a store in Italy.
Later and Later and Later.
Love triangles are no tropes when they are this well-drawn, this well-observed.
This is a novel of seasons, of changes, of colors. Of green-yellow Italian Vespa estates and primaveras; of blue-grey Norwegian vinters and vars; and yellow-brown Egyptian el-seefs and el-khareefs.
Fior’s watercolors capture the passing of seasons- and the passing of passions- with painterly charm. The panels are also vaguely reminiscent of Picasso, and Gauguin, and even occasionally Degas’ bathing nudes- something one rarely gets to say of a graphic novel, but explains why 5,000 KM per Second was a winner of the Angouleme Grand Prize in 2010.
The Interview, set in 2048 Italy, goes black-and-white-and-gray. Raniero, a sensible, rational psychologist, gets into a car accident and witnesses a strange UFO phenomenon: triangular lights in the sky. That Raniero shouldn’t be driving a car (or, later, a Vespa) in 2048 is obvious: cars should drive by themselves so accidents don’t happen.
In the eyes of his colleagues, Raniero might as well be invested in horse-riding.
In any case, the psychologist has a titular interview with Dora, an alleged hallucinating psychotic who has been put in the hospital by her parents. It’s not only because she belongs to a new polyamorous “Convention.” She believes that extraterrestrials are communicating with her- through triangular signals in the sky.
(The triangular signs might just be light projected from the ground through a triangular shape, as rational Raniero realizes.)
While I missed his use of color, seeing Fior be expressive with charcoal palette was equally inspiring.He was going after Antonioni’s L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse. I don’t think sci-fi is his forte, though. He knows emotions. Technology, not so much. This is the least sci-fi “sci-fi” story I have ever read. One panel features a genuine coffee-maker of the old-fashioned type that a Cuban grandmother might use out of nostalgia for the 1950s. The excuse is that Raniero is old-fashioned, but there IS a limit. I’m old-fashioned but don’t listen to music on my Victrola.
Maybe Fior sees the future as necessarily more drab than the past of 5,000 KM per Second.
Evolving from that work, though, means that I can’t see the Picasso, or the Gauguin, or the Degas- I see the Fior.
Graphic artists are BEYOND their recognition: when did Gauguin, Picasso, or Degas tell any continuing story that was as powerful as this book?
Fior’s early short works are collected in Blackbird Days, most of them wrestling with Italy’s role within the European Union.
“Help! Hilfe!” deals with an Italian father whose son gets lost in a Berlin airport- which leads to grim ideas that maybe the Germans had some point with all their cruel WWII discipline and austerity. “This wouldn’t happen to a Kraut!” Turns out the kid is fine.
“Class Trip.” A class trip to Paris leads two Italian teachers to deal with the glamour and disillusion that city offers to visitors. There’s such a thing as “Japanese Syndrome,” where Japanese tourists are shocked by a Parisian reality that has little to do with Moulin Rouge or Degas or Monet or Godard. But as one of the teachers in the trip states: “Without France’s duality, Victor Hugo couldn’t have written Les Miserables.” One of the teachers takes a final defiant stance against a class full of teenage assholes, which I think most teachers will find cathartic.
“Postcard from Oslo”: Here, Fior’s style matures and gets closer to 5000 KM Per Second, and uses the same premise of a school exchange stay in Norway following a break-up. The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” gets referenced. A house of Norwegian wood burns; so does the past. This bird has flown.
“Postcard from Salento”: The musical reference here is the great Italian song-writer Paolo Conte. Fior wrestles with his own ‘ethnicity’- which region of Italy defines him? The answer is unclear, and it gets worse: “After ten years traveling between Germany, Egypt, Norway, and France, maybe I’m not Italian anymore.” An idyllic road trip with a French girlfriend is ruined by the radio’s constant stream of horrible news: car crashes, missing tourists. Beauty strangled by the media.
“The Story of Gabriel C.” A soldier seems to be driven by suicidal, self-mutilating instincts.
“The Painter”. Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin’s stay at a sanatorium (is there any place creepier and less conducive to healing?) inspires his painting “Island of the Dead.”
“Grandma and Grandson”: About Asian immigrants, and the need to keep heritage alive: the grandson is 100% French, as much as any other French person: but also something richer and deeper.
“Blackbird Days”: (The coldest time of the (Italian) year! The idea is mother birds will hide in a soot-filled chimney) A prequel to The Interview.
“How We’re Doing.” An indictment of how France treats its foreigners. “But we’re doing fine.”
“Gare De L’Est”: A conclusion that ties back to “Blackbird Days” and showcases a Tokusatsu/ Kaiju fight in Paris.
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If you need further proof that thought (“rational” thought, anyway) is bound by language, just look at how we perceive time. To us, time is an arrow; tomorrow lies ahead; we look “forward” to see what will happen; we march toward the future.
Nothing would have seemed dumber to the Ancient Egyptians.
It’s the past that lies before us, which is why we can see it (or believe we can see it) so clearly. The future is always behind us, therefore we are blind to it. We are sort of dragged backward into time.
That’s one of the things Teresa Guerrero realizes in Manuele Fior’s latest, Hypericum. Teresa is obsessed with Egyptology, and in particular the famous 1922 expedition in which Howard Carter uncovered the tomb of Child King Tutankhamen, (who was King by age 8, got married by 9, reshaped Egyptian religion by 12, conquered Nubia by 15, and been declared a God by his loving followers by 16, before his death at 18.
Just in case you needed to feel unaccomplished).
Teresa is an Italian in Berlin, having been chosen to help with an exhibit on King Tut- and while tormented by her insomnia she reads Carter’s work: half of Hypericum transports us to Carter’s expedition, a dual-story device Fior has used before. Teresa’s adventures in Berlin involve hooking up with Ruben, a rich artist kid slumming among the “Common People”- that is, fully supported by Daddy Warbucks.
The two fall in love, and if this was a novel or a movie, Hypericum might fall too easily into the genre of “people discussing love, life, the universe, and everything while walking around.” (It’s a genre I’m fond of, but I can understand its limited appeal.) However, Fior’s work has also to be considered purely as a series of evocative paintings, and it would succeed as such even if we discarded narrative.
But the narrative is an issue. As was the case with Red Ultramarine, I don’t know if all of Fior’s ideas coalesce: what does the insomnia-curing St. John’s Wort (the Hypericum in the title) have to do with September 11 (the book’s culminating news event, which disrupts Teresa’s life even in Berlin?) What does September 11 have to do with King Tut? If Fior was American, I could more easily assume he is mourning an Empire’s decline, but it’s a real stretch even them.
At least, it invites thought and reflection, as all of Manuel Fior’s work does. Start with 5,000 KM Per Second.
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