The plot of the comic revolves around a man remembering events from his childhood. The story is pretty simple, but the way it’s told is interesting. Details of the story emerge as the narrator remembers them, and he changes them as he goes. The most obvious example is the face of the osteopath. The narrator can’t remember if his face looked one way or another, so combines the two images to create a new (admittedly fabricated) appearance of the man, and changes his mind again later in the story. As for the writing, it’s pretty good, but it’s always apparent in Gaiman’s comics that he has a background in literature, and that isn’t always good. He tends to rely on narration and delivering exposition through text rather than art, and that emphasis is very heavy in Violent Cases.
Luckily, the artwork more than makes up for that, putting the details of the story together into disparate images that are just as shaky as the narrator’s memories. The artwork is rough like a sketch, with images scattered through different panels. The original 1987 printing of the story was in black and white, but each reissue since then been in color. Still, there’s very little color in it. It’s only there as punctuation, to draw your eye to a detail. It’s an unusual choice, but it’s effective. This story only needs so much color; anything more seems unnecessary. Besides, I’m sure the narrator doesn’t remember what color everything was. The lack of color, if anything, helps tie together the artwork and the text.
Besides the heavy narration, I’ve only got one complaint about this book, and that’s the lettering. I know it’s supposed to look handwritten and perhaps it’s intentionally hard to read, but it’s an obstacle between the reader and the text. Maybe the printed version looks better than the digital one I’m looking at, but I don’t know. Other than that, Violent Cases is a solid book, and it holds up just as well in 2013 as it did in 1987.
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| taken from http://www.darkhorse.com |
Alan Moore‘s introduction from 1987 talks about comics “growing up” as an art form, but that process doesn’t seem to have gone very far since then. A book like Violent Cases is still unusual in comics, as is anything else that attempts this kind of story, without action and superheroes. However, I think there’s still room for both paradigms in comics, superhero comics and cartoons as well as more serious storytelling. They both do something that the other can’t provide, but it’s true that comics still aren’t always taken seriously as an art form. Books like Violent Cases can change that perception somewhat, but it’s a very slow process and might require a change in the way we think about (and buy) comics. I won’t speculate about that any more than I have; that’s not the purpose of this review, and it’s very likely that I’m talking nonsense at this point.
Which is probably a good sign that I should wrap up this review. If you haven’t run into Violent Cases before now, go ahead and pick it up. The cover price of $24.99 is pretty standard for a hardcover book like this. The story is pretty short, but it’s worth it just for the artwork. If you’ve ever read Sandman before, you’ll know what to expect broadly in terms of the writing and style, but this is still a very different comic from most others you’ll read.
Danilo Culibrk, aka Augustus, is a staff writer for the Red Shirt Crew. He doesn’t think a violent case is a good place to store a violin, or a typewriter for that matter. You can follow his ramblings through his own memories on Twitter at @Augustusing.
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