The art is gorgeous. Gorgeous! Here's a page:
See what I mean?
Problem is, the story never hits the ground for me. It's about Sun Green, a girl in a long line of the Green family where the women all seem to have some sort of nature-magic quirk about them, and then disappear.Reading it, all I could think was that I bet the album would have blown me away... particularly if I were hearing it during the middle of the Bush era. But either way, songs seem able to imply more than the lyrics might say -- we're invited to fill in the blanks with our own experience and details, where Greendale the comic fills those blanks in for us.
Now, I'm a big ol' lib, but the politics in this book just seemed simplistic to me, and never entirely... Idon't know, solid. Bush bad, war bad, drilling bad. More sloganeering and cheerleading than policy. They don't have much depth, and I guess I was hoping for a little more. Or maybe a little less politics altogether. The environmentalism is really at the heart of this book. It never really comes together for me, but taking it out would have gutted the book. But it feels too airy, somehow.
Aargh. At least the book is coherent, which is more than I can say for this post.
Anyway, when I was searching for the art I posted, I found this french website that posted material that an earlier artist, Sean Gordon Murphy, completed before Cliff Chiang replaced him (I don't know why). And I have to say, as much as I love (love!) Cliff's art, I think Murphy might have been a better choice. The people look a little cartoonier, a little less glossy. And with Murphy on art, I likely wouldn't have been interested enough to buy it (Chiang was the draw for me). But I think I would have managed to touch me a little more -- wrap me up in the story more than making me stop and look at every gorgeous page.
Any thoughts? About anything? 'Cause I'm all over the map.
Replies
yeah, what the hell are you talking about?
I think I'll have a richer experience with the GN once I listen to the album, which has gotten a lot of praise. But buying the album also kinda feels like doubling down.
What bothers me is the overt eco-theme that comes out every bit as strong as the story itself. That bothers me. Like Rob, I'm a liberal kind of guy and I agree with 98% of their viewpoints here, but things like this tend to preach to the choir and they never sway anyone's point of view.
The artwork is beautiful.
But the story feels like it's just a little bit of a story, and we never really get in depth with anyone. We kind of get into Sun's character, but it feels like we're looking at her from just out of reach. It felt like the character of Sun Green was servicing the environmental message instead of it being a part of who she was as a more complex character. Does that make sense?
The art is fantastic, but the story is lackluster. It feels like it should be about three times as long and with the environment left in the background instead of at the fore of the last several pages.
Greendale tells the saga of the Green family and the fictional California seaside town they founded. It began as a ten-song rock opera, which was then made into a feature film. In the course of relating the history of the Green family, Young examines the nature of environmental, political, and personal responsibility. The main focus of the graphic novel is teenager Sun Green, a young woman finding her voice and using it to oppose injustice in the world. She has a strange connection with the natural world, and power over it. Lately she's been having dreams, and it turns out that all of the Green women have been similar. They have a history of mysterious disappearances at age eighteen, the age Sun is when the story begins. So in many ways it's the story of the entire family, but the focus is on Sun, who spends most of the story unsure of herself and her place in the world. She loves her family, but feels distant from her parents, and is unable to prevent her cousin from getting into serious trouble. Then when a mysterious Satanic stranger appears things take a serious mystical turn. Most of the family history is told in the form of flashbacks as Sun tries to learn about relatives she has never met. Her personal turning point comes when she visits her great-grandmother Mahalia and undergoes a Native American style initiation rite. She emerges a fiery environmental activist, her personal connection with nature transformed into a social one. It's a lot of story to squeeze into a single thin graphic novel, and I didn't think it completely succeeded, despite the gorgeous art. First there's the problem of all that family history being scattered through the narrative, which could be used to good narrative effect, but instead comes off as disorganized. Then there's the shifting focus between the family members: I never felt I really got to know any of them, which creates a distance from their story. This is especially true of Sun. Her transformation from confused teen to committed environmental activist seems sudden, and the mystical elements feel tacked on. The conclusion should be inspiring, but felt abrupt.
I agree with Jeffs comments earlier: But the story feels like it's just a little bit of a story, and we never really get in depth with anyone. We kind of get into Sun's character, but it feels like we're looking at her from just out of reach. It felt like the character of Sun Green was servicing the environmental message instead of it being a part of who she was as a more complex character. Does that make sense?
The art is fantastic, but the story is lackluster. It feels like it should be about three times as long and with the environment left in the background instead of at the fore of the last several pages.
Big agree on what you said about Sun. The reader should really get to know her, so her big moment at the end would mean something. But we don't, so it doesn't. The ending just comes off as didactic, the character in service to the message rather than the other way around. I could see the story working better with more space: the length of the book is clearly insufficient for a saga covering several generations.
The one thing that I don't entirely agree with is the question of the politics. Yes, they're heavy-handed and simplistic, as I said, but I'm not completely convinced they're the story's politics rather than Sun's politics — that is, the approach to them is very much the way 18-year-olds tend to approach these things: in simplistic, "why can't everyone see what I see" ways. It's hinted when she gripes about some of her family (paraphrasing): "His views are pretty much the same as mine; why aren't we on the same page on this?" Because, as most teenagers don't realize, our politics don't (generally) define us, and the world isn't as easy to change as they think it is (a message reinforced by the ending not really changing anything).
On the other hand, I think this is also very much Young looking at the world today and wondering where the outspoken youth activists he remembers from his youth are. Reading this book, and again thinking about it now, I keep getting the song "Ohio" in my head. There's no one-to-one correlation between the two (other than being written by Young, obvs), but it feels like this resonates with the whole "Gotta get down to it ... Should have been done long ago" of that song.
(Or I'm giving Neil Young entirely too much credit, and it really is as simplistic as it seems at first glance...I'm not at all convinced that's not the case.)
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next