2008-04-13 OUTSTANDING GRAPHIC NOVEL

I am rarely moved to write a review, but this book deserves far more recognition. Modan draws superbly with a familiar Herge clear line style, but the simplicity it deceptive - she manages animate her characters with astonishing skill, right down to the slightest gesture, glance or stance. Her story is subtle, complex, wonderfully paced. It is highly personal yet fair and and insightful. Modan has managed something rare in this medium- to write with passion without falling back into introspective (and self indulgent) auto-biography.

So this book would work as either art or as text, but the synthesis as a comic achieves something only possible with comics- a fully realised, deeply experienced world in which the characters exist and live on beyond the book. The entry of gifted women like Modan into this male dominated world is opening up entirely new vistas and is bringing Graphic Novels into full maturity as a literary medium. Very exciting. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough to the enthusiast of mature graphic novels or the novice who is put off my the rows of comics of butch men in tights.