Translation: Poison River and the vertiginous ellipsis

Derik Badman takes apart translates an article originally written in French in which David Turgeon takes apart Gilbert Hernandez’s Poison River and sees what makes it tick for French site du9.org.

The density of narration, the abundance of situations in a limited space, and the compressed representation of time all participate together to give the story a schematic impression. In other words, Hernandez tells his stories in broad strokes, showing details only when necessary. Among other things, this allows him to age his characters significantly in only a few pages or to show the type of large-scale social or political evolutions that would be difficult to notice were the story told “step by step.” On the other hand, these characteristics seems to prevent a certain degree of fluidity in the story.

Grandpapier

Derik Badman writes a brief post on Grandpapier, a project started by Belgian publisher L’Employé de Moi. The site features work in French and English as well as a number of wordless strips.

Recent Comics Bureau postee Darryl Cunningham comments on Derik’s post;

I was recently asked if I wanted to contribute to GrandPapier, and have now been doing so for a number of weeks. I find the style of the comics on the site to be so much more playful than US or UK comics. There’s a real freshness about the approach there which made me realise how staid English language comix have become.

Looking at the quality of the work, this is a hard opinion to disagree with.

Lewis Trondheim

Following a recommendation by Aiden Smith, here is a good review of Lewis Trondheim and Olivier Appollodorus’ Bourbon Island 1730 over at Madinkbeard, which discusses POV and narration.

A ten page preview is available at First Second Books.

If you haven’t heard of Lewis Trondheim before, have a look at his website, read up on L’Association, read his interview on The Comics Journal and buy all his books.