Pinwheel by Mike Bertino
Pinwheel
By Mike Bertino
Tender Loving Empire
There’s not much you can learn about Pinwheel from its cover. Yes, there’s a boy and a girl, but she’s not an ice queen and he never shoots lasers from his eyes. It’s not even about a polar bear (which you’ll find only on the back cover). Pinwheel is about two very different lives with one unexpected thing in common: the script.
Whether this device works or not hinges on the reader’s liberal understanding of the word “family.” A family could define a couple with children or maybe it could mean a bunch of gangsters. At least, that’s the way Mike Bertino plays on the word in his recently released and beautifully illustrated comic Pinwheel.
Bertino is a gifted artist but the concept he’s worked through in this book tends somewhat to distract the reader from his art. By the time you get to the second story, you’re trying to piece together the copy from the story before to see if it fits just right, see if it’s really all the same in writing. (It does, almost exactly.) It’s exciting to look over both of the stories to see how a sentence could be put into the mouth of someone new or broken up in a new way to create a fresh scenario. But more so than looking at the detail and well-mastered lines in the panels, you tend to look at the words. Unfortunately, outside of the concept, the words are pretty boring and the characters seem absolutely lifeless and without, well, character.
In the first comic, a girl realizes that she can’t conceive. Why this is a problem for a young unmarried couple with a hip, close group of friends, I don’t totally understand. In that one, the characters felt flat. By the first page of the second comic, the concept became clear, but the characters in the second story were also drab and puppet-like. In the second story, two brothers think they’ll finally get to start a criminal gang of their own. One of them apparently changes his mind.
This isn’t the witty prose that will pass revered through the ages, but Bertino has executed an original idea using all of his sequential talents to make something that is really unique: a string of words with two remarkably different lives. If you can overlook what’s written and examine what’s underneath, this is a splendid comic. It’ll make you excited to witness the rest of Bertino’s cartoonist career.
The book measures 6.5×8.5” and it’s 28-pages long. The cover is 3-color silk screened on a mustard/brown-colored cardstock with matching end papers. The drawings are black and white with a single well-spotted gray tone fleshing out some perspective. It’s $9.99 and available through Tender Loving Empire.
-Sarah Morean
No Comments
Other Links to this Post
-
Journalista - the news weblog of The Comics Journal » Blog Archive » Jan. 25, 2008: Residential Solid Waste — January 25, 2008 @ 3:57 am
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
