|
June 2008 |
By
James Moore
The term
graphic novel is a broad one, embracing a wide variety of
formats from purely visual narratives to more prose filled
work. Freelance illustrator, musician, and teacher Leah
Hayes’s second graphic novel, Funeral
of the Heart, lays on
the outer edge of what would normally be considered a
graphic novel. More accurately, it is a collection of short
stories with illustrations interspersed throughout.
These stories all have a magical realist bent, sometimes
veering into macabre fables. The shorts are slight, and
forgettable. Funeral
of the Heart’s five
tales concern quirky, low-key, and slightly grotesque
characters caught up in moments of heartbreak and
disillusionment. Hayes occasionally grasps at a sense of
disquieting melancholy, and these tend to be some of the
more affecting moments. Those moments, however, pass
quickly, and the book fails to either worm its way under
the skin or into the heart. Mostly. Funeral
is dour
with some saccharine/maudlin elements laced beneath the
gloomy surface.
While Hayes may not be the strongest writer, her artwork is
indeed interesting. The illustrations for
Funeral
of the Heart were
created using scratchboard, using a sharp instrument and
etching away a surface layer of ink or paint to create the
image. Hayes’ images have strong compositions making
excellent use of negative space and the high contrast
intrinsic to the scratchboard. That the drawings is
literally scratched away gives the book a rough, dreamlike
feel. Her figures are misshapen and pathetic in a slightly
whimsical way. The illustrations complement and enhance the
stories, often more than the stories deserve.
Where the book succeeds most is as a design object. It is a
carefully packaged book, where even the text pages
demonstrate an elegance and care of design. Hayes varies
the amount of text and its placement on the page as a way
of controlling the pacing and mood, giving the stories more
impact that than they would have if they had been just
printed traditionally. Her hand-scratched lettering makes
the book seem more intimate. Hayes’s title pages, including
the book’s cover does a good job setting the stage for
vignettes. While the stories themselves are neither
especially good or all that bad, Hayes’ choices in
presentation are ultimately what saves the book. Overall,
there is a certain unity to Funeral
of the Heart that
makes it work where a less carefully wrought book of
similar style and tone might have simply been a pretentious
disaster.
Funeral
of the Heart in many
ways pulls off the creative goals it sets for itself. That
is, one senses it is precisely what it wants to be. Whether
what it wants to be is of interest is another matter. It
reads like a worked-over art school assignment involving an
unlikely medium and a dream journal. Aesthetically, it is
attractive and polished, but there just isn’t much for the
reader to latch onto. It is not that there are any
particularly damning flaws, just a lack of anything to
really recommend other than as a curious art object. Hayes,
who also works as a musician under the name Scary Mansion,
actually captures more effectively and hauntingly in her
music the subdued spooky atmosphere that
Funeral of the Heart fails to
achieve.
