Recently, I came to a realization about our weekly feature “Small Press Spotlight” and about what my true intentions were about it. The intent wasn’t necessarily to spotlight books that with Small Press origins as much as wanting to guide superhero centric readers towards books that are a little bit different.
With that in mind, I’ve now renamed the column “Off The Cape” going forward, and will continue to focus on books that exemplify high quality comic booking that work well for both the more indie minded as well as the superhero set. My choices will continue to be sprawling and never really set in the present, which is why my first column will look at a 2006 title from Oni Press – 12 Reasons Why I Love Her from Jamie S. Rich and Joëlle Jones.
Check it out after the jump.
I’ve previously featured Rich and Jones in Small Press Spotlight, as I looked at their noir offering You Have Killed Me earlier this year. I’d meant to look into more of their work recently, and I finally got the opportunity when I picked up their first full length collaboration 12 Reasons Why I Love Her.
This book made it impossible to not pick up when I had been perusing the art blog of Jones. She had been commissioned by someone to create a piece for someone whose favorite books were Craig Thompson’s Blankets and this very book, and the result was the stupendous page of art you see to the left. Not only that, but any association with Blankets, no matter how limited, is enough reason for me to pick up a book.
I’m very glad that I did, as this book stands out as one of the most emotionally resonant and true pieces of art about relationships that I’ve read in quite some time, and it features some remarkably great work from Jones in her first full length offering.
The story is told in 12 vignettes that are in no order in particular, each telling little tales about the ups and downs of a relationship between a young couple named Gwen and Evan. While in another creators hands, the abandonment of chronological storytelling could be messy in execution and painfully trite when read. Rich has proven himself as a creator who has a wonderful grasp on storytelling, no matter how traditional (or non-traditional) it may be. Telling the story out of order immerses us in Gwen and Evan’s relationship from the get go, giving us the bad to go with the good to give the story the sense of reality necessary to make it a successful venture.
The individual stories themselves range, telling tales as disparate as how they met, their first date, their one-year anniversary, and in a particularly charming sequence, the truth about Gwen’s dreaming habits. There is a lot more in there, but no chapter felt more intimate and alive than Evan recounting when he first found about Gwen’s dreams, or the lack there of. The language blended with the visual representation from Jones is impeccable, especially one page in particular featuring a simple but powerful image of a striking leg departing a car. I spoke about this in my review for You Have Killed Me, but I think this is an important point to note about this book: Rich and Jones work in tandem as well as any writer/artist combo out there. The images Jones creates from Rich’s scripts only bolster the power of them, and vice versa, just the way all successful pairings should be.
For an artist who was new on the scene at the time, Jones put on a show here. As David Mack noted in the pull quotes on the back, “I loved Joëlle Jones art from the first time I saw it…,” and if this was her entry into large scale comics, it’s shocking to me that she isn’t a huge name (that I ran out of money before acquiring a sketch from her at Emerald City Comic Con is all the more upsetting now too).
Jones performs admirably throughout, but there is one two page spread that is so damn jaw dropping in execution and concept that I have to speak about it. In the Eleventh chapter (the fateful fight chapter), Evan and Gwen carry out much of their conversation as they leap from rock to rock on a lake. Jones takes us along with this conversation, carrying us through the entirety visually with new Evan’s and Gwen’s presenting the new dialogue at different places and different times. It’s a wonderfully simplistic storytelling device that I just never see, and Jones is to be commended on doing so much with such a well honed idea.
I know it seems a bit odd to not have mentioned Evan and Gwen yet, but I wanted to save them for last. They are the crux of the story. They are the story. If they fail as characters, the story itself would crumble around them.
But they do not. They are flawed people, people who get mad about ridiculous things, feel jealousy, get upset about poorly timed jokes, have unreal visions of the future, and all that jazz. In that regard, they are real people. Rich doesn’t hide these characters behind a rose colored veil – he leaves them out in the open for all of their peccadilloes to be exposed to us. This makes their relationship and all of their interactions all the more charming and tense, alternately. Gwen is the woman that every man could see themselves loving…Evan is the man we all sadly are…they are both remarkable creations from Rich and Jones.
All in all, this book was a delight to read. Sure, it was frustrating at times because of the relationship troubles the duo got into, but to me that simply means Rich succeeded in creating a connection between the material and myself as a reader. I think my only wish for the book is that Rich had made a playlist in some location on the web for readers to listen to the song associated with each chapter (hint hint, Mr. Rich). 12 Reasons Why I Love Her for those with mainstream comics on their brains but love in their hearts, and is a superb choice for the first subject of this new column.
