In this year’s damaged Frontier Awards, British creator Gareth Brookes had the very best original graphic book classification sewed up with The Black Project, his frank, funny as well as painstaking look at male teen sexuality.
Gareth Brookes has been a prolific existence on the UK little press scene for years, from the stick-figure humour of guy Man as well as good friends (and lady Woman) to the laugh-out-loud nature poetry pastiche of The odor of the Wild (which has a hard-won area in my loo-side library, wedged in between Baudelaire as well as Leonard Cohen).
However, 2013 was the year in which he stepped as much as comics’ top table. His stunning book The Black job (the champion of the very first graphic book competition run by its eventual publisher, Myriad Editions*) has surfed a wave of acclaim since its publication earlier in the year, as well as now it has chosen up the ultimate accolade – the damaged Frontier award for finest original graphic Novel.
Like all the very best comics, The Black job blends its compound as well as type to tell a story in a method that other mediums can’t approach.
However, one of the things that make this work remarkable is the mash-up of methods that Brookes utilizes to tell his story – a medley of linocuts as well as embroidery that took its creator four years to complete.
The Black job is a sometimes disquieting however commonly extremely funny look into the murky nascent sexuality of a young teen boy, Richard, set against the backdrop of middle-class, middle England suburbia in the early 90s.
However, Richard’s wish for intimacy pushes the objectification of women as far as it can go. utilizing admirable levels of invention, he develops a series of ‘girlfriends’ from home items, while going to extraordinary lengths to prevent his creations being discovered.
Richard’s affectless, unblinking as well as uninhibited narration of his exploits is commonly startling, however is provided with such sincerity that in spite of its strangeness, it never alienates the reader. There’s likewise a weirdly touching irony between the grotesque nature of his creations as well as the affection as well as protectiveness he feels for them.
Brookes utilizes the unique medium of his work to produce some neat narrative tricks. On a few events he shows us the back of his embroidery workings, reinforcing the book’s subtext that there’s something a bit more untidy going on behind the orderly facade of suburbia than we may suspect at very first glance.
In the year that we lost Iain Banks, it’s fitting that a new piece of work has shown up with a familiar blend of darkness, humour as well as imagination. With its convincing as well as unsettling depiction of the mental tickings of a strange young man, it’s not overstating the situation to state that The Black job resembles nothing so much as a extremely benign house Counties version of The Wasp Factory. Congratulations to Gareth Brookes as well as Myriad Editions.
(*The Black job is likewise offered digitally from Sequential.)