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Tuesday, February 14, 2012. New Comics TOMORROW!

 

"I Hunt Giants. I Find Giants. I Kill Giants."

By Kristy Valenti

Tuesday February 9, 2010 05:30:00 am

It is not often you find a graphic novel with back-cover blurbs from both NPR and Ain't It Cool News. Though I Kill Giants needs no love from me — it's already made its way onto 2009 Best-of lists, including the ALA's Top Ten Graphic Novels for Teens — I contend that the acclaim for the book is essentially warranted. Joe Kelly, the writer, and JM Ken Niimura, the artist, have managed to present a simple plot — a freakishly intense elementary school girl deals with family issues — with narrative and aesthetic sophistication.

Kelly's writing isn't impeccable — the protagonist, fifth-grader Barbara Thorson,[1] speaks in an elevated diction by most standards (Peanuts-like, she sounds as if she were an adult in a child's body: "Welcome to the Chorus of the Damned. I hope you left your soul in your locker, Sophia."), and, in and of itself, the story, and many of its elements, are not new.

What Kelly does, and does well, is: thrust the reader directly into protagonist Barbara's world view; give the reader enough time to absorb that and the characters she interacts with; make every reference count (in keeping with the spirit of the Dungeons & Dragons game that Barbara plays, he combines Greek, Norse, and baseball mythology, as well as British folklore, I think); parcel out information sparingly, only as needed, over seven issues;[2] and then, wisely, give the rest over to Niimura's bravura art.

Niimura, a native of Madrid, is a relative newcomer to the U.S. comics scene. In the graphic novel's back matter, he explains that he came out of self-publishing: a look at his website, http://www.niimuraweb.com, shows past projects with varying degrees of manga influence, European polish and indy scratchiness.

In I Kill Giants, Niimura harmonizes these styles to great visual effect (he also remarks, in I Kill Giants' end notes, that he usually works in color: however, working only with blacks, whites and grays seems to have been to his advantage) and does so with a wide range of line weights and textures — though his panel borders are thick and freestyle, he has a fine pen line, sometimes loose, sometimes precise, that he pairs with brushwork and ink washes.

Given the manga influence, it's impressive that Niimura's art manages to convey motion, especially that of clouds and water, without necessarily invoking animation. Both he and Kelly strive to keep the reader defamiliarized, so in Niimura's case, a reader might dwell on a page or an object for quite some time, trying to decipher just what they're looking at.

In terms of his figure work, he breaks down his characters' facial features into mercurial components to be reconfigured as needed: this gives them a great expressiveness. (He will also deploy panel composition to drive home a mood: for example, on page 6, the top panel's vanishing point draws the reader's eyes directly to the teacher's frown, even though she is in the background.) He is equally adept at body language, employing silhouettes from time to time. His pages are masterfully laid out: I Kill Giants is a controlled read. Though it's detailed enough for readers to linger over the art, it's not over-rendered or fussy: Niimura is not afraid to add in panels to just breathe.

With I Kill Giants, Kelly and Niimura spin established tropes and styles into a fresh, affecting work, admirably eschewing cheap melodrama or sentimentality. It's rare for collaborations, in comics or otherwise, to work out as well as Kelly's and Niimura's: I hope they work on another project together in the future, as it was simply a pleasure to read a graphic novel so adroit.

Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010

 

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