I love comics. I started reading them as a child, and though they have fallen out of favor with me for more grown-up things like the clothes I wear or what color my hair is or how many different gauges of rings can I fit in my ears before they start sagging just to see you know because I'm curious about the elasticity of my ear-skin, I will always hold comics close to my heart as one of the truly exceptional and avant-garde literary genres. Totally underrated, too.
Craig Thompson does a fantastic job of dispelling any immaturity that critics may find or try to assign to comics or graphic novels. Each panel is a snapshot from his heart, from what he holds dear, the experiences that helped shape him into the man with the ability and audacity to not only write about his life, but to illustrate it, too. This so obviously goes infinitely beyond the good vs evil super hero mega powered balls to the wall kamehameha stereotypes people have for comics. Dont get me wrong, I still read and have massive amounts of respect for anything Marvel related, pre-Disney-buy-out-bullshit and before their heads got so inflated with Hollywood helium they're so far beyond even Uatu's knowledge, but Thompson's work doesn't fall into that category. No where close, really. This is visual literature. He is still a story that is so inundated with information he simply could not find the words to describe it all. Maybe the words he needed didn't exist yet, who knows.
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