Still Looking

Finished Death (in a manner of speaking) this morning, sitting outside the backdoor, under the fan, drinking a cup of hot Milo. Good way to start the day. Particularly enjoyed the pages devoted to a Gallery of our heroine, with a wide array of artists illustrating their versions of the very old young lady. A reminder of one of the great insights of Gaiman's Sandman series: having different visual versions of the characters ties in with the notion of varying perspectives on the same reality, and when you're dealing with sort of unrealities there's a lovely logic involved.

And having started strongly on the visual front, my on-going reading of Sonny Liew's brilliant The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye has kept things up nicely. (I was so impressed with this I bought a copy for Karen for her birthday.) When I read his Malinky Robot some time ago I thought then that Mr Liew might have things really worth saying in comics as well as being an obviously gifted illustrator. But I didn't expect anything on the scale and with the depth and ambition of Charlie Chan. It might be characterized as being, at least in part, a history of modern Singapore told through the medium of imaginary comics; and it's also a history of comics and their possibilities over the same period.

I can't think of anything else I've read about the island state that reaches this text's level of melancholy regret for the past that was swept away, combined with a steely-eyed sense of the necessary depredations of time and its passing. To combine this across the political and personal almost seamlessly strikes me as a quite remarkable achievement.

Isn't it strange that comics do melancholy so well?