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Special Feature
SPX Spotlight 2: The Lagoon
By Adam McGovern
Published: 2008-10-28
Being a sporadic accounting of self-made masterworks I picked up at the premier indie-comics event, the Small Press Expo.
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Writer: Lilli Carré
Artist: Lilli Carré
Publisher: Fantagraphics
5 out of 5 stars
No one orchestrates moments and metaphors to give a magic,
fluoroscopic view of people’s longings, regrets, secrets and
sustenance like Lilli Carré.
In her new graphic novel The Lagoon, a family lives close to
nature in one of Carré’s trademark psychological forests
primeval near the title body of water and one of its strange,
siren-like denizens, whose mysterious song forms the center of
everyone’s days and nights in ways unknowable to each other. A
dotty but visionary old man, his impatient, creative granddaughter,
and several wistful and impulsive relatives and townsfolk experience
the price of love, loss, life and mortality with the strange serenity
that’s held by every animal except us in real life but is shared
by all in Carré’s dreamscapes.
The Lagoon is as dreamlike as ever, but never before has
Carré’s work felt so immersive in palpable reality rather
than hypnotic reverie. The clinging air of a swampy summer is
tangibly present, and Carré’s mastery of the
medium’s materiality twists the story around you – her
control of pace, command of detail, and imagination with design embed
you in woodsy textures, enchant with tentacled spirals of solid
melody, and move you through the shadows like a slow-motion flip-book.
Tiny panels mark measured moments and domestic confinement while
sprawling spreads convey organic abundance and vast mysteries.
“Writer/artist” scarcely does Carré justice; few
creators are able to write with art the way this mental movie
achieves.
The back-cover copy rightly compliments the intricate use of sound
(through onomatopoeias both graphically classic and compositionally
unintrusive) with which Carré maps the characters’
existence and emotions, from the cries of a night woods to the tapping
of a fidgety grandpa. But the metaphor floods its banks and engulfs
the book’s whole worldview – The Lagoon is a
symphony of the eccentricities and personal mantras of behavior and
belief that make us singular and human. None more so than its
accomplished and insightful creator.
—CCdC— Read all of ComicCritique.Com’s columns, old and new,
at our columns archive!
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