On Sunday, I made an amazing discovery (I’m not sure how I’ve missed it so long)–poetry comics exist.
I know how this sounds–Batman quoting sonnets while fighting evil in Gotham city–but I promise you, the comics of Bianca Stone are deeply moving words and pictures working together. And no super heroes make an appearance. (not yet, anyway)
Bianca Stone’s blog is packed with images in various stages of completeness, including an inside look at the drawings behind Anne Carson and Bianca Stone’s book, Antigonick–a retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone. (Anne Carson translated, Bianca Stone illustrated). Antigonick is beautiful–Bianca’s drawings are printed on semi-transparent paper, bound intermittenly. The verse is arranged like a free-form poem and spreads across the page. The book follows the story of Antigone pretty closely, though it does vere off course every once and awhile (I doubt Kreon discussed Hegel in the original), but the modernization of the text only adds to the depth of the story.
In other news:
Today, we got a box. Inside the box are small bound books in all sizes. Each of the small books tells the story of one of the 
inhabitants in a Chicago townhouse (one book is the story of a bumble-bee who lives in the hive on the building).
I had been anxiously awaiting Chris Ware’s new graphic novel, Building Stories, but I had no idea it was going to be like this. This is not the comic book hero graphic novel you bought every week when you were a kid. This the grown-up version. The characters (all women, except for the bee) seem to be trapped mid-existential crisis.
The sheer size of this book/box (it’s about the size of your Monopoly box) is enough to scare even the most adventurous reader, but really, its just a collection of short stories. Plus, its all pictures!
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