Review - Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

Feynman is a biography. I'm not usually much a fan of biographies, but in this case it's a biography of the titular Mr. Richard Feynman- a very famous scientist who is sadly no longer with us, so I thought I'd give it a crack. There's only really two reasons why anyone reads a biography; the first is that you're already interested in the person it's about so want to know how they came to be the way they are, the second is you want to see if you too can extract some life-lessons from their experiences. So, the question is- are you and can you?

                Truth be told, Jim Ottaviani, the author of this bio, pens himself into an awkward position before even the first panel, saying in his dedication that

'If the laws of physics allowed, I'd go back to thank whoever it was that first showed me "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!" Then I would read it again.'

Which brings up a very damning point- This is not the first Biography written about Feynman, and if he enjoyed it so much, why should we bother to read this one? What's more, the other biographies were autobiographies penned by Richard Feynman himself. So in what sense is Feynman needed?

                Well, for one, it condenses things. The narrative touches on a lot of events throughout his life but you get the distinct impression that Ottaviani has cherry-picked and rearranged details in order to provide a smoother, more interesting narrative- if a point in the future is relevant to something being discussed at the moment, he has no problems throwing linearity out of the window. At first this is a little jarring, but as soon as you start expecting it and disengage from convention, it does a much better job tying themes and moments together than would otherwise be feasible in a straight A-to-B story...and somehow works to reflect the meandering thoughts of the titular character as he strolls through life. The tone is consistently light-hearted and semi-detached, more interested in the little things in life and only occasionally stopping to clarify his opinions on larger philosophical points, offering maybe a glib comment to paste over the cracks until they can be more appropriately addressed later on.

They're talking about the Atomic Bomb, just so you know.

                Sometimes it makes the moments of grief seem spurious or like they didn't affect him much, how it just glides from them into other things. No tragedy defined him. But then how often does tragedy actually change someone? How often does tragedy strike? So I'm inclined to put this down as a strength of the piece rather than a weakness...there is a feeling, though, that not every scene that's included is strictly necessary, a little editing and shaving down of some of the asides would have gone a long way to making this a more coherent piece.

                Despite this, though the writing can get dense in places it's never overwhelming, (though it might be fair to say that some parts might be daunting if you've forgotten your high-school physics classes), and most importantly Ottaviani knows when to drop the text entirely for some panels in order to change the momentum to suit the mood. He knows what he wants on the page, and it's good to see from a writer.

                ...Which is just as well, as it's really the art that you're here for- the one thing that Feynman's own autobiographies didn't have and by far the most important thematic aspect of this book. Feynman himself was quite the fan of art and artistic expression- indeed, his most famous creation was a diagram- and Leland Myrick does an excellent job in using his own illustrations to explain and expand upon the text Ottaviani puts down to make even the more complex ideas accessible

Give it a minute.

-All while infusing the book with eccentric character; the spindly-yet-accurate linework bringing to mind sketching with a technical pen (an apt choice for a physicist) with the bold unshaded colouring providing clear contrast between the forms those lines are trying to depict. It's the kind of clear obviousness you'd see in a calculation, but with more vibrancy- a flattering portrayal of the kind of character Feynman was

                Which isn't to say it's entirely without its faults. The women tend to look very similar to each other, and the colour-coding as you slide through the timelines doesn't seem to have any meaning or cause behind it other than to note that you've passed into some other era, which can add to the jarring effect that the sudden timeline jumps create.

                So. To go back to our first points...are you interested in Richard Feynman and can you learn from his life? I'd say he's certainly niche...but comics are niche anyway, so I'm sure that if you've even bothered to read this far you will likely get something out of this biography- Feynman has some good lessons to give beyond just physics.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself. You are the easiest person to fool.

With everything done in a style that can get you to rethink things in your own life; a strange perspective that Feynman himself was famous for and which Ottaviani has managed to capture brilliantly.

I suppose the experience of reading this was very familiar to how I felt about the man when I first heard of him, back in college. Back when I was studying physics I saw a lot of Feynman diagrams. Useful as they were, I never thought it vital to know the life of the man who made them. Reading Feynman, that opinion hasn't changed...but to quote the man himself, though the book isn't vital, it *is* very 'in-ter-est-ing'.

Review - It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

Art Spiegelman has sabotaged this review. I’m looking over the outside of my lovely new purchase and, to my delight, there’s a little blurb on the back by him recommending this graphic novel; rare praise indeed from the man who wrote Maus.

However, it’s also irritatingly accurate praise. He doesn’t just stick to calling ‘astounding’ or anything so simple, he makes the kind of comments that you know anyone who gives a damn about comics can pick up on and understand…which as I say, sabotages the actual need for a review, as his is as good a one as any. However, for the benefit of you who haven’t seen the back-cover or wonder if what he said there was truthful, I decided to be redundant and do one anyway. So, cold and tired and feverish, I sat down in the perfect mood to read Jacques Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches.

To begin with, the first thing that struck me about this little slice of World War I was the narration of the piece. I was not expecting such a candid ‘Tell don’t show’ style of narration in a comic so highly lauded and I found it somewhat removed me from the passion of the story...at least, this is what I first thought. My mistake really, because it was that sense of detachment that the narrative was trying to foster; there is no use in getting attached to men who are going to die on the next page, or just the next panel- oftentimes without warning. The grim reality of the images usually has no time for fancy allegory or flair, the inked blacks, whites and greys feeling quite at home in a comic where everything would just be variations of brown anyway… The mood is captured within the first few panels, straight to the point, and can be summed up as so: ‘Shells fall, people die.’

                And there’s such a bitterness about that summation which just keeps on coming back, over and over again. Every story in this collection slaps you in the face with how everyone doesn’t want to be there but gets on with the job anyway, panels of people saying they don’t want to do something even as they’re doing it- a strange but totally understandable consequence of war because as Tardi writes; ‘…where war is concerned it always comes down to stupidity’.

So the machine grinds on and every misery you expect is put out there…but unlike in something like Maus, Tardi’s work almost laughs at the carnage. Cold, black humour suffuses the pages, executed simply through an acknowledgement over how impossible that horror is to quantify; throwing up propaganda slogans during hopeless charges, referencing French Revolution ideals of Libetere, Equalite and Fraternitie regarding mass conscription, and, in a late example, throwing hard numbers of misery at you (accompanied by a soldier clutching his head, screaming).

‘And the cost? Cannons, shells, etc.? 2,500 billion Francs! For that price, every inhabitant of Europe – not to mention the Russians – could’ve been given a small four-room house…But, y’know, numbers!...’

‘But, y’know, numbers!’ about sums it up; a mocking exclamation (as a lot of the exclamation marks are in here) that if it’s too big to grasp it’s silly to try. And it is. The only thing left to do is shrug, in that very French way.

That is, perhaps, an accurate summation of the reading experience as well. The first story you sense he’s just trying to get into the swing of things, the panel layout is a little more creative, some curiously shaped shell-like curves, establishing the mood of the piece and a curious mix of detached 3^rd and 1^st person, getting a little Heart of Darkness in people within the story telling it…then it takes a break into an actual short story…and then after that brief respite it’s as if you’re hammered from there to the end of the book. The pace is absolutely relentless- not like any other comic I’ve read- with three panels a page you just keep marching on, shells dropping all around, people dying every other page, with no distinction over when one story ends and another begins beyond your own common sense telling you if it has or not (and sometimes the date changing). Often in this text do soldiers not even know which way they are facing or whose trench they’re in, and so it feels when you’re reading it; the dates provided that tell you the ‘when’ quickly fade from memory, the imagery is obscured and muddy and what you can see is, usually, what you’ve seen before; dead bodies, barbed wire, and artillery shells going off. 

                At the end of it, I found myself taken through it at such a speed (all in one sitting) that I could barely remember specifics. The narratives, on reflection, were not as important as the mood they created. Same with the places. Same with the charges. Even the characters only stick because nearly always their names were capitalized, as if Jaques wanted you to see them out above the mire of corpses he was depicting…Bidet, Bouvreuil, Huet, Mazure….I may as well be listing ingredients for a sandwich for all they mean to me.

                However…a work is to be judged on if it succeeds in getting its point across, so don’t think I’m being down on It was the War of the Trenches simply because I was mildly depressed and still cold when finishing it. It didn’t have the surprise and the shock of other more sensational war comics, and in the end it was better served without them; the dour, humourless humour and bleak prospects that saturated the book did a much better job of conveying the scale of feeling than any amount of viewpoints or BBC Documentaries about the Somme ever did. As well it should considering the size of the film and bibliography noted at the end of the work, something which offers an explanation over how accurately and completely it managed to capture the mood, even if a lot of the events were fiction (it's never made clear what is fact or not).

                In the end, you’ve been bombarded so thoroughly by the three-panel shelling that like the soldiers within, you just can’t shrug it off apathetically anymore. It’s just miserable…but satisfyingly so, and because of this Jaques Tardi has done a wonderful job of extending a sliver of empathy and understanding toward a war that everyone overlooks and nearly everyone alive no longer remembers. I’m glad its taken so long to be translated if only for that kind of timing, because though you might not take much from It Was the War of the Trenches or be able to have long discussions about it, you won’t forget it either; and this matter isn’t one we should be forgetting about at all.

Review - Pyonyang: A Journey in North Korea

 It is fortunate that Guy Delisle didn’t bring a camera into North Korea. For one thing, if he did photograph or film the limited amount of things he’d be allowed to, then he likely would not have bothered to make a comic out of his experiences, sated solely by his pretty pictures. To go a little further, if North Korea was the kind of country where he *could* have taken pictures of whatever he liked, then he wouldn’t have even needed to make a comic about it.

                As it stands though, the country’s own strict mandates compelled Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea to be made, and made in the artistic medium most suited to describe it- that of the drawing.

                You see, North Korea is held together by its image. If it didn’t scrape foreign labels off of bottles of water or refused to hire natives for its decadent capitalist casinos, how else could they convince their people that they lived in a land of plenty and that their brand of communism works? Without image, its workers paradise would be revealed as the labourer’s hell the world knows it to be, the people would rebel and the society would collapse. In short North Korea – the North Korea the people there believe themselves to live in, is a fiction created by their ruling party. And you cannot photograph fiction.

                You can draw it though. And it’s through Guy Delisle’s drawings that you finally get a sense of how North Korea truly is; a flaking, rusting nation held together by a silent and ever-present threat; not from the outside as they tell themselves, but from within.

                It’s fair to say he nails this impression on their society before you even open the book. The sublime cover-art manages to encapsulate the tone from the offset; the talent and the apparent happiness showing us what The Glorious Leader wants us to view the nation as...but the set-piece nature of it telling us the rest, the smiles too large and distorted to be real, the lines the children are sat in making them look regimented and identical as if coming off a production line, and the muddy, rough shading hinting at just how murky and sinister the whole enterprise really is.

                It’s a truth that a photograph could not capture nearly as well, and it’s one that Guy Delisle’s art excels in revealing. The pictures are simple and solid without being abstract, giving the events described a presence without tailing off into confusion through multiple meanings or interpretations – clarity is the objective here, something important when covering a nation which likes to cover things up.

                This philosophy of clear-thinking also seems to extend to the writing, as it has a very wry but exact way of conveying itself that leaves you in no doubt of Delisle’s real opinion of what he sees and experiences regardless of tone (When sombre, factual; when humorous, understated).

                For its part, the art never moves in contrast to this ideal. There are no appreciable instances where Delisle says one thing and shows another, rather the images work to expand on what he’s saying in order to make his point clearer or, more commonly, to colour his writing with the emotion it otherwise seems to lack. An example would be when in a conversation with his translator, Guy draws him wearing a military uniform to subversively make fun of his talking about army manoeuvres- something that wouldn’t have been picked up on in a drab conversation alone, and much more honest to Guy’s personal feelings for it. Indeed it could well be said that he expresses himself through images better than he does through writing – a fact hinted at through his background as an animation director, a background without which he would never have had cause to enter the country or have as much travelling freedom within it; just another reason why the medium of images most fits this subject- he literally couldn’t have done it without them.

                As it’s basically a documentary on his time in Korea as said animation director, one notes that a sizable chunk of the book is just about the daily grind and the way he tries to liven it up. Small, oftentimes daft events of no particular note crop up often, while ‘the big questions’ about North Korea are dealt with sparsely at irregular intervals, as if avoided. Both of these quirks  seem a product of Guy’s experience there, and manage to nod toward what kind of a country it is without needing to say too much about it directly- basically, to live there one has to take their mind off of the madness of the system, otherwise they would be driven mad too. The humour present throughout, from the visual gags to the little ‘spot the dissident’ games seem to be there to help Delisle cope as much as they are there to entertain, with the small highlights of brainless hijinkery present showing some of the few ways he could rebel against the oppression he felt around him...and to say that he *could* rebel, as it seemed no-one else there dared to. I received the impression that were it me or most other people there in Pyonyang, bubbled up in our foreign hotels and foreign quarters, we would be much the same; acting out because we could while others couldn’t, frustrated at being watched all the time when not on our little alien ‘island’, with everyone on it merely transient or moving onto somewhere else, all just killing time until it was their turn to go.

                It all makes it seem like Pyongyang, with its unresponsive citizenry and deserted highways and lack of electricity, is a ghost city. And in this city, the ghosts are real. The fear of them hovering over the heads of every citizen there, unspoken but ever-present, and perfectly represented by Delisle’s great use of that city’s own darkness via shading, specifically in relation to the ‘sheets’ covering this ghost city- the buildings and architecture.

                During the more ominous moments of the book Delisle tends to pull back on the writing and suffuses his imagery with a murk which seems unnatural for a city that’s reportedly ‘too clean’, a stylistic choice not used to give his image more depth of detail but more depth in meaning. Brilliantly, he tends to pair this effect with rare, page-wide drawings of the threat’s presence in Pyonyang, the party’s giant buildings – their show of power. These pages come as a drastic change to the normally cramped and constrictive panel layout of the rest of the comic, creating a feeling of over-arching dominance, the effect the North Koreans were aiming for when building them...however, like in the opening cover, Delisle’s artistic depiction of them reveals the true state of things: The buildings seem worn and drab, uniform in purpose...but above all, lonely in their darkness. Cold. A sign of solidarity when what they need is openness.

                There’s much more to be said about Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea; about the interesting insights into how animation works, the use of the 1984 novel Guy takes with him on the trip, but in the end they all sum up to a point – not one where you despise their regime, but one where you pity the people under it. By keeping it grounded and the party more of a deadly phantom, Guy Delisle manages to draw a much tighter focus onto something that *is* real in that fabricated world; the people he works with and alongside...and how ill-informed and naive they seem compared to the rest of us, but still not without their amusing, human quirks. By the end you realise his last gesture in the book symbolises not just a simple game conceived in boredom, but a hope he extends to all those within the country.

                And, to follow on that optimistic note, I also hope you pick this graphic novel up, even if these kind of things normally aren’t your cup of tea. Much like NK opening its borders for goods, it’s well worth coming opening up your horizons for too.