I've been waiting for this book, since I am a big fan of Thomas Ott's work, some of the finest being done in graphic novels, and I was convinced this one would be special. The underlying story is deepening in his work, and now this book has resolved one of the critical conceptual problems in the graphic novel in a beautiful way. The best graphic novelists understand that the balloon is the death of creativity, unless used ironically, knowingly, and instead find other, more deeply felt ways to insinuate the textual element into the graphic narration. Shaun Tan's recent publication, The Arrival, is another fantastic realization of this issue and has its own brilliant solution. Ott here uses a long hyphenated number, a deliberately cross lingual cypher, printed on a small strip of paper, to show a hopscotch-like narrative, involving a talismanic relation between this paper "master" number carried by two different men, and their "sinthomic" relationship with fragments of this number, as they wander through the labyrinth of their mathematically foreclosed fate.
Very poignant and beautiful parable, perfect for the medium. There are no pyrotechnics with the format; it is a laconic distribution of plates, four at the most per page, its sobriety a reiteration of the story's bleak progress. But all of the drawings clearly reveal a labor of love, a superbly crafted scratchboard subtractive drawing technique that has become Ott's trade mark.
Three observations always seem to emerge from books of this quality that argue for them in favor of film. The speed with which the story can be "skimmed" its essence extracted, is amazing, far faster than filmic media, and under the control of the viewer, who can himself decide on the story's rhythm, on which drawings to linger. Also, the graphic novelist has considerably more freedom in format, instead of fairly restricted industry aspect ratios in filmic media (I'm reminded very much here of Sergei Eisenstein's essay "the Dynamic Square"). Finally, the comprehensive mise-en-scene of graphic novels is equally impressive to film (admittedly without the soundtrack), but it can be realized by one person and can represent an undiluted, uncompromised, excellent work of imaginative, innovative, narrative art, striving to capitalize its A. Very Highly Recommended. And thought provoking far beyond the work itself.
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