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January 28, 2005
Subway Reading: Pigtale
It has been a while since I last saw a fellow comic book reader on the subway. The dry spell finally ended a few days ago, when I saw a tall, bearded, young white guy reading a weathered copy of The Watchmen. It's nice to see people enjoying the classics! Then yesterday I saw an older Asian gentleman reading some kind of... well, I guess I would call it manga, though I could be way off base. It was a small digest-size paperback, black and white, with 8 panels per page and some kind of prose running vertically down the right-hand 1/3 of each page. The art was simple and stylized, with smooth, nearly featureless figures. There were word balloons in the panels, which lead me to believe that it was a narrative and not, for example, some kind of instruction manual. Unfortunately the guy got off the train at the next stop so I couldn't snoop any further.
I like to imagine that one day I will mention one of these sightings, the comic fan in question will read the blog, and leave a comment like, "Hey! That was me! Awesome!" And then... well, I suppose that's the entirety of that lame little fantasy. So if you were the middle-aged Asian guy on the downtown F train last night around 6PM, please let me know what you were reading. Thank you. Now on to today's review...
Pigtale #1 - This quirky black & white comic book from Image is written and drawn by Ovi Nedelcu. Nedelcu comes to comics from animation, and that experience is a clear influence on the scripting and the visuals in his comic book debut.
The story has its fair share of stock elements. Protagonist Boston Booth wants to follow in the footsteps of his late father by becoming a private eye. Unfortunately he can't find a job and the bills are mounting. Meanwhile, he pines for a beautiful waitress/singer but finds himself too afraid to ask her out. All fairly pedestrian stuff... but then there is the last-page reveal. Without giving too much away, it indicates that the story is about to veer sharply into the world of the wacky. On one hand, the tone of the story was a little too shifty for me to get comfortable. But that could also be an indication of the book's originality and idiosyncratic charm. It's not unheard of for a new story to take a few issues for the writer to settle into a more comfortable flow and for the readers to get used to a unique tone. That could well be the case for Pigtale.
Visually, Nedelcu does some very interesting work in this book. His drawing style clearly owes a lot to animation, with its smoothed-out contours, minimal rendering, and exaggerated forms. The artist's background includes a lot of character design work, and his ability in this field shines through. The gang of bullies was a great example. The tiny size of the little guy who yells "Get him!" made me laugh out loud. The pacing of the script was very tight, matching the impeccable visual pacing of the panel-to-panel transitions. My criticisms have to do with the finished artwork and some of the page layout decisions. I found some of the 2/3 page and full-page splash panels kind of distracting. I understand the desire to give more weight to certain moments in the story, or to establish time and place. But the timing in the smaller panel sequences was so crisp that the larger panels seemed like wasted opportunities. As for the look, the halftones were a little too overused at times. Gray tones can be deceptively tricky in comics. In this case, the error was on the side of using it too often. The small variations in value got swallowed up and the page too often turned into a grayed-out blur without enough visual hierarchy. While I am usually a champion of black and white, I kind of wish this book had been in color instead. I also thought that Nedelcu's actual lines were a little too jaggy and sketchy for his otherwise clean, shape-based style. Overall, though, he did a lot more things right than wrong, and I am sure that he will be able to take the lessons from seeing the final printed version and apply them to future issues.
For more of Nedelcu's work, check out his web site at www.ovinedelcu.com. His weekly sketches page, which includes work that ranges from loose sketches to finished color pieces, shows off his considerable character design skills and visual ingenuity. This comic had a lot going for it, mostly in the form of the creator's obvious skill and imagination. It has a lot of potential and I hope it gets a chance to develop. 3.5 stars.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at January 28, 2005 04:50 PM