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Heartbreakers Meet Boilerplate
Review posted: 07 Oct 2005
Writer: Anina Bennett, Paul Guinan
Artist: Paul Guinan
Publisher: IDW
4.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam White
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Heartbreakers Meet Boilerplate is an unusual, experimental
graphic novel that mixes science fiction, Victorian-era robots,
and political commentary to a unique effect. The book follows the
adventures of a group of cloned women who serve as celebrity
bodyguards to the leader of a Clone Rights movement and who uncover a
robot possessing artificial intelligence originally built in 1893.
That may sound far-fetched, but it actually fits together into
a highly original graphic novel that mixes art, photography,
painting, and prose, and looks unlike anything I’ve seen
before.
Guinan’s style keeps the
atmosphere of the book fun, and he blends the three different mediums
(pencil/paint/photo) so well that it’s impossible to know where one
ends and the other begins.
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Anina Bennett’s writing is light and funny, yet
laced with human themes and political discourse. Despite being
clones, the main characters have distinct personalities, and
her robots are perhaps the most human characters in the story. The
villainous Wexlers are a pair of clones as well, yet they could
not have more disparate personalities, and that leads to much
humorous dialogue. The book is also interspersed with prose sections
accompanied by “photographs,” which detail the history
of Boilerplate from his creation through his disappearance during
World War I. These text sections weave together history and fiction
flawlessly and make Boilerplate seem perfectly plausible as a real
creation.
Paul Guinan outdoes himself on the art, which
he calls “paintography” — a combination of art,
painting and photographs that produces a clean, realistic tone
that adds immensely to the plausibility of the story. Most of the
book is in gray/sepia tones, but occasionally he throws in a
full color page that makes me really wish the whole thing were done in
color. Guinan’s style also keeps the atmosphere of the book
fun, and he blends the three different mediums
(pencil/paint/photo) so well that it’s impossible to know
where one ends and the other begins. Guinan’s doctored historical
photos (like Boilerplate with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders)
look so real you’d swear it was all historical fact instead of
fiction. It looks like Guinan had a lot of fun with this book,
and that rubs off on the reader and makes it a highly entertaining
reading experience.
I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for something new
and different, because I’ve seen nothing similar anywhere
else. The Boilerplate mythos itself is half the fun, and Guinan
even has an extensive website devoted to the redoubtable robot
(http://www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate/) — if you check that out
first you can’t help but be interested. I hope to see more from
Guinan and Bennett in the future, and I really hope they get a
solo Boilerplate project off the ground at some point.
Heartbreakers Meet Boilerplate also makes me wish history was
as interesting as they make it out to be.
—CCdC— Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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