Word: novels
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Paul Hornschemeier writes psychologically adroit comics that are more concerned with superegos than superheroes. His next graphic novel, The Three Paradoxes, to be published in June by Fantagraphics Books, poses questions like: How do parents influence our lives? Can people change? Employing multiple narrative threads yet maintaining a clear story through varying color schemes and drawing styles, Hornschemeier's work demonstrates that comics can address complex ideas while also telling an emotional, entertaining tale. If other comics are easy chairs, his work offers the pleasure, and the pain, of reclining on a psychiatrist's couch...
...going to do for the day." He had never read comics that explored personal issues, so he gave up on the idea. Then, as he was completing a double major in philosophy and cognitive psychology at Ohio State, a girlfriend gave him a copy of Daniel Clowes' graphic novel Ghost World. It was a revelation. "It presented comics," he says, "as a vehicle for emotion and honesty...
After graduation, Hornschemeier began self- publishing a series of black- and-white experimental comics (recently compiled as The Collected Sequential). He soon began integrating color into his increasingly sophisticated works, and early last year he released his first graphic novel, Mother, Come Home, the story of a boy struggling to cope with his mother's death and his father's grief. The book, which features a bold visual design and a narrative that is by turns cerebral and heartfelt, set the tone for The Three Paradoxes. The artist says his main goal is "basically, just ask a lot of questions...
...very skilled first novel, a book full of deep feeling rendered with light, sure strokes. It's also one more variation, but a lovely one, on a very old story form, the sensitive heart trapped in a monster's body. Think of Beauty and the Beast or Boo Radley, the well-meaning neighborhood oddity in To Kill a Mockingbird...
Peter Carey?author of the novel Oscar and Lucinda, two-time winner of the Booker Prize, all-around intelligent bloke?has lots of thoughtful ideas about modern Japanese culture, almost all of which, he comes to discover, are wrong. He's wrong about the symbolism of his son's favorite anim? series, Mobile Suit Gundam. He's wrong about the artistic motivation behind Japanese sword-making. And he's wrong about the otaku, the ultra-obsessive Japanese fans of everything from manga to pop idols, who turn out to have more dimensions than Carey, an Australian living in New York...