Every week on “Sunday Page” an author has to choose a single page from a comic book. It could be for sentimental reasons o for a particular technical achievement. The conversation could lose itself in the open water of the comic book world but it will always start with the questione: «If you had to choose a page from a comic book you love, what would you choose and why?».
This Sunday I’m out with Sarah Horrocks, critic for Hooded Utilitarian and ComicsAlliance, but also author of The Leopard and Hecate Snake Diaries. She drew a well-known cover of Adventure Time, and collaborated with Brandon Graham on Multiple Warheads and Prophet.
Children of the Sea is one of those books that I fall into whenever I pick it up. And though I also like other Igarashi work, Children of the Sea is fascinating because the small miracles he builds in his short stories he has to elongate here and it’s fascinating to watch him create those rhythms. It’s hard to pick any singular page of Igarashi’s work and be able to convince people of his merits because his style is a weird magic, that builds upon itself. It’s suggestive with its forms and lines, and that engages your imagination as a reader, and pulls you closer to the art and the story, and so things become bigger than they are when you are really reading the book. He’s the closest thing comics has to a Tarkovksy like figure who can create his own magical sublime truths.
But in this page there is no sea! How did you end up choosing it?
I picked this page for a couple of reasons. The first is simply that Anglade is my favorite character in the book, he’s completely beautiful, and a really fascinating man, and I like the design on his lover here with the short black hair. The second reason though is that this section from which this page is a part is very unlike the rest of the book. Where the rest of the book is kind of this metanatural adventure about existential miracles in the world around us–this one is more mundane. It’s Anglade with a character we haven’t met before, intimate in a way we don’t know him, right before he is to be attacked by these assassins and burned alive. This is the only pocket in the book with this kind of danger in it, and it gives this scene a coda like appeal, particularly for Anglade. We see Anglade again later, but this is kind of his last big involvement in the book. The page itself is beautiful along a few different lines. The composition itself is really cool because there’s this triangle of eyes going from Anglade’s eye to anglade embracing his lover, to the eyes of the cat hissing–that cat hiss is cool because it completely shifts the space–we go from in bed with these two lovers, to Anglade alone looking out in this darkened room–he’s gone from someone who knows things, to someone who can’t perceive the danger that is about to fall on his head. And of course the page is balanced between the lovers and the beautiful violent fire that engulfs Anglade’s beautiful house.
As Valerio Stivé once wrote, when you think about Children of the Sea you think about very different situations.
True. Even though the comic is chock full of wonderful phantasmagorical sea adventures, and some real sublime moments–when I think of the book as a whole, this is always the moment I think of first. Book 4 as a whole is for me one of the best comic books there is. It has this section, and it also has that part with Anglade in Antarctica which is my second favorite part of the book. I think Anglade is the most interesting character in the books, because he is so uncompromising in his quest for understanding–and there’s a strange despair behind that, where you don’t sense that Anglade really values anything else that is around his life–he’s oblivious in a lot of ways, and this page captures these complexities. His mystical curiosity and quest for illumination, at the cost of this awareness to the dangers around him. It’s like he’s given up one way of seeing for another–which I think this page speaks to. To me, that’s what’s behind Anglade’s eye as he says “There’s a Universe”. The sort of sad bored way that Igarashi draws that eye, it looks like it’s looking into a world we can’t see. The way it lines up with the cat’s eyes in the middle panel as well, I always thought it was almost like Anglade was seeing through the cats eyes too. I also like that Anglade ostensibly sees his lover in the same way he sees the cat–as part of this wonderful mystery–but not as someone who is there at that moment with him in the way that two people are together. He’s a weird lover! I don’t think Igarashi even names Anglade’s lover. And the thing is, I think large sections of this part of the story are actually through her eyes. She stands in for us at places, we look at Anglade through her.