Robot Nightmares

Robot Dreams, author-illustrator Sara Varon, was a nominee for a 2007 Cybils Award as a Graphic Novel for Elementary/Middle Grade Readers. Its publisher has said that it “definitely appears very young at first glance, but then many of the reviews caught on that it has strange, unexpected depth to it.” Indeed, I think Robot Dreams is deep water indeed.

As this New York Magazine excerpt shows, Varon draws simple, uncluttered pictures using a thick, curvy line (cartoony!). She draws anthropomorphized animals and robots with big round eyes (cute!). She uses very few words (though Robot Dreams isn't truly a "wordless" book, as I discussed back here). And she tells her story in comics form (comics!). Therefore, this is a book for younger readers, right?

Wrong. Robot Dreams is the story of a dysfunctional, asymmetric relationship between Dog, who makes impossible demands on all his friends, and Robot, who suffers horribly because of Dog's thoughtlessness yet can't stop yearning to please him.

The story starts with Dog building Robot from a kit and taking Robot to a dog beach. Dog doesn't realize that playing in the water is not good for Robot. Robot lies on the sand, paralyzed with rust. Night falls. Dog doesn't know what to do, and so goes home. When Dog returns the next day, the beach is closed for the season.

Dog tries to make other friends. Duck is useful for getting a kite out of a tree, but then flies south for the winter. The Anteaters are fun for sledding, but they, well, eat ants. The Snowman whom Dog builds is pleasant, and even brings Dog into acquaintance with Penguin, but come spring Snowman melts, and Dog feels nothing in common with Penguin anymore. Not one of Dog's friends is perfect!

Meanwhile, Robot is lying on the beach, fantasizing about being rescued by Dog, then about being rescued by anybody. These are the "robot dreams" of the title. In reality, Rabbits break off one of Robot's legs, Robins build a nest in Robot's chest, and Monkey gathers up Robot's pieces and sells them to a scrapyard.

In June, a month after Monkey has been over the beach, Dog returns and can't find Robot. Dog ends up buying and building Second Robot to be a perfect friend.

Meanwhile, Raccoon has bought the scraps of original Robot and built them into Robot Radio. Raccoon and Robot Radio dance together in comradeship and joy. Yet when Robot Radio sees Dog walking on the street with Second Robot, Robot can't help but play music for its old friend. Dog hears the music, not turning to notice the source, and whistles a happy tune.

I'm not saying that Dog doesn't feel horrible about what happened to original Robot. Dog really does feel guilty. And Dog is careful to stop Second Robot from going into the water and rusting. But I don't think Dog ever learns that being a good friend means compromising sometimes.

Publishers Weekly called Robot Dreams an "elegiac and lovely graphic novel about friendship," and said in particular that "Robot is an avatar for all children who wonder why they aren't receiving the love they think they deserve."

To those children I'd say: Give up on Dog. You deserve much better.

A Few Words on Wordlessness

In The Art of the Comic Book (University Press of Mississippi, 1996), R. C. Harvey states: "A cartoonist is one who creates in the visual-verbal mode of the comics--someone who is a writer-artist. And in the creative processes of the cartoonist, neither words nor pictures take precedence over the other: they blend."

Harvey is expert in cartooning, comics history, and literary analysis, and this is a very good book on the form. However, his attempt to locate the essence of the comics art form in a half-and-half blend of words and pictures is untenable. (Dylan Horrocks has complained that Harvey's adherence to this theory leads him into "some rather asinine critical judgements." I wouldn't go that far, not when I can simply link to Horrocks's essay.)

The most obvious problem with Harvey's hypothesis is that it offers no space for wordless comics. He acknowledges that some exist, offering an example from a daily strip, but treats them as exceptional. Most comics creators and readers would probably say that comics without words and comics with them share more qualities than not. Both are sets of sequential pictures, they usually adopt the same visual vocabularies and techniques, and we interpret them through similar processes.

Shaun Tan's wordless The Arrival was one of the 2007 Cybils finalists in the graphic novels category (older readers division). I think its wordlessness is crucial to how it works, as I plan to discuss tomorrow. Tan even includes an episode about communicating through pictures instead of words:



The label "wordless" seems to mean something different when applied to children's picture books. As Scholastic published Sara Varon's Chicken and Cat in 2006, the catalogue copy labeled it a "wordless picture book." Booklist and The Horn Book echoed that label. School Library Journal called it a "wordless story." But the book contains words, as this detail from one spread shows.

In fact, out of sixteen page spreads in Chicken and Cat, ten contain words. Some are labels on shops, products, or structures that appear in the scenes (e.g., on the seed packets in the picture above). Others are sound effects and motion labels (e.g., "pat pat pat"), as I described back here.

Chicken and Cat got labeled as "wordless" because it doesn't have words where most picture books do. There's no narration explaining the scenes and the transitions between them. As with truly wordless picture books, an adult can't read it aloud to a child. And of course adults need some sort of warning.

Varon's Robot Dreams was another Cybils graphic novel finalist this year. It, too, was described by its publisher as "without words," but again it has a few. Unlike The Arrival, however, that seems simply to reflect Varon's storytelling style; it's not thematically linked to the book's story.

WAVE, TOSS: Another Way to Show Movement

During this month's COMICS WEEK, I commented on how producing digital images had given artists a new way to show movement: by drawing as crisply as usual, then blurring the result with Photoshop or a similar program to replicate the effect we see in photographs.

That posting listed some pre-digital methods to convey motion. But since then I've noticed quite a few examples of yet another method that I'd left out: simply labeling the action.

The top example here comes from from Paul Gilligan's daily comic strip, Pooch Cafe, for 21 Jan 2008. The words "WAVE WAVE" are obviously not sound effects, not spoken words, not words that would actually appear in the scene. They simply tell us what the lady across the street is doing. Probably if newspaper comic strips didn't have to be so small Gilligan could have conveyed the same information with motion lines around her hand. [ADDENDUM: Or maybe not. Today's strip uses the same technique despite having more space available.]

The previous day, I'd seen another example in Jim Pascoe and Jake Myler's "manga-style" Undertown, running in Sunday newspapers. It showed a boy clutching his teddy bear, with the word "CLUTCH" drawn beside him.

The example on the right is from Sara Varon's graphic novel Robot Dreams (a Cybils nominee). In addition to the parenthetical "toss," she shows the movement with the dashed arrow.

I suppose I should count this technique among other ways that comics artists show the invisible in their drawings, along with speech and thought balloons, sound effects, established symbols for collisions and emotions, and the like. But it seems more like telling, not showing.