Week 9: A wide world of comics

I read The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal. It was a really strange read. I don't know if I tried too hard to find something to like about the story, or whether I was just not in the mood to enjoy it as much as I expected too. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was the fact that I expected something really grand of a graphic novel that was in production for over 12 years. Overall I didn't feel that the story provided enough reality to the plot. It felt like the story just moved across orchestrated plot points that had to be hit. The pacing felt too even throughout. It felt like a train that I've ridden before. Similarly to King by Ho Che Anderson, this graphic novel shows stylistic shifts over the three chapters. The visual style remains very similar throughout The Nikopol Trilogy, but the story itself gets deeper and the artist uses more interesting ways of telling it as you progress. The first chapter introduces the basics. The second chapter explores showing a different reality via color, includes photography, and uses type outside of speech balloons as a narrative voice. The third chapter explores putting symbols and images into word balloons. It feels like many comic book artists are learning continuously as they're making them. Which gives me hope for future innovations within the medium. I liked how this artist included a large amount of absurd science fiction within this work. The giraffe print coats, green striped cats, and red haired officials make The Nikopol Trilogy a characteristically gaudy science fiction.

As far as the visuals are concerned, I thought Bilal's strength was in showing the dilapidated nature of his science fiction environments. It all felt very grimy and unkempt. The vehicles and other technologies showed a great degree of detail that made them believable. My least favorite aspect of his work was the faces of the human characters, especially those in the first chapter. I had difficulty differentiating them from one another and they didn't seem to talk, most all of them had their lips sealed even though they were supposed to be talking. The colors weren't too great either, in my opinion, they felt a bit too local. If something was supposed to be blue, it was overwhelmingly so.