Wrinkles by Paco Roca
Never let them tell you life begins at 40, or ends when you enter a retirement home. Ernest has just entered an old folk's establishment, and life is ever-changing. There's the time he meets a person hounded by the idea at least of alien abduction, the moment he forgets the word for 'ball' when holding one while doing armchair exercises, and the galling day he finds out he shares a medication routine with the most helpless and locked-in of inmates. No, for Ernest, especially in the hands of his new room-mate Emile who will do anything to earn a fast buck, life is full of some kind of variety.
| Wrinkles by Paco Roca | |
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| Category: Graphic Novels | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A clean and humane look at what might some feel a dirty subject, but the approach to a subject so alien to many graphic novel readers is only to be lauded in this remarkable book. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 104 | Date: January 2015 |
| Publisher: Knockabout | |
| ISBN: 9780861662371 | |
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This is the kind of book to slap the comic-denigrator around the head with, for their ideas of them being just for children. Yes, it has a very simplistic and timeless visual style – plain, unpatterned fields and bold black outlines, a la Tintin – but it certainly is a mature work. Lauded in its original Spanish when first presented in 2007, the piece comes to us from one of Britain's more out-there, risqué and challenging publishing houses – although clearly the only risk here is in their hoping for a commercial market for something as galling as senility and life in a home.
But there certainly should be a market for it, for this example is brilliant. The delusion of the suffering is presented perfectly well – the character holds the same pose and position in the panel, but immediately removes from her status of resident aged 80 and becomes, say, a dashing young traveller on the Orient Express in her swinging 20s. When people do suffer they suffer in dignity, perhaps stumbling over a word or forgetting a term, but never doing so unpleasantly. Perhaps that makes this book too anodyne, too unrealistic – where's that indelible stench of urine, or the old man dribbling in the corner? – but for me this gives the subject a respect, a measured and mature look and most importantly an entertainment value that does not condescend or patronise, or completely shirk reality. There's enough that's miserable about this world, the book says, whether the slow drip-drip away of one's faculties, or the pain of facing the irredeemable turning point of one's life that entry to such a home entails, without facing the agony of what here is confined to the upper storey of the facility.
So, then, this is a book that for me laid just enough truth on the table, presented it with great characters in a humane and respectful way, and with more than enough in the way of both clever presentation and honest-to-goodness story. It must be one of the more unlikely comic books you've read this or any year, but it's one of the best.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Further grist to the mill of those championing graphic novels to cover all bases is the mighty Dragonslippers: This is What an Abusive Relationship Looks Like by Rosalind Penfold.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Wrinkles by Paco Roca at Amazon.com.
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