Bookblog #43: Picture Books



Tohby Riddle, Nobody Owns the Moon (Penguin Australia 2008)
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (DC 1986)

Putting these two books in the same blog entry probably counts as a violent yoking together of heterogenous (sic) objects. But when I'd typed that sentence, I googled Doctor Johnson, whose famous phrase about the metaphysical poets I was mucking around with, and discovered that he went on to say that in Cowper's poetry 'nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises'. He could easily have been describing both these wildly different books, except it would be hard to see Tohby Riddle's book as doing anything remotely as unpleasant as ransacking. The first couple of pages of text in Nobody Owns the Moon could be from a nature article in a children's magazine: 'The fox is one of the only wild creatures in the world that can successfully make a life for itself in cities. This is because it is quick-witted and able to eat a variety of foods …' and so on. But in the accompanying images, the fox wears cords, exercises his wit on a crossword and wields chopsticks with practised dexterity. Nature and art indeed! Subtilty is a word that could have been invented for Tohby's cool palette and understated, elusive/allusive humour. The fox, whose name turns out to be Clive Prendergast, has a much less successfully adapted friend, a donkey named Humphrey, and with these characters we are taken into a city world as dreamily enticing as Woody Allen's Manhattan, where friendship and art and kindness flourish as gracefully as orchids in a New York brownstone.

On the other hand, 'ransacking' strikes exactly the right tone for Alan Moore's work: here he pillages history (in Watchmen – which unlike Nobody Owns the Moon is not a children's book – the US won the war against Vietnam and Nixon was still President in the mid 1980s) and the superhero tradition (my own childhood exposure to superheroes didn't go much beyond Superman and Batman, but I gather that the superannuated mask-wearers here are transparently based on existing characters, with names changed to avoid copyright infringement). There's constant contrapuntal play between multiple story lines, most strikingly between the events unfolding in the 'real' world and the plot of a series of comics being read by a minor character. I'm actually much more at ease with the likes of Maus or Pedro and Me than with superhero comics, and I probably admire Watchmen for its virtuosity rather than being engaged by its story. On the other hand, given that the superhero characters are deeply flawed -- one might almost say they are all psychopaths on one kind or another -- perhaps a certain Brechtian alienation is intended. I doubt if anyone actually likes the ending, which is fraught with moral and political murk, but it does make one think.

I re-read Watchmen for my Book Group, and the timing is excellent because the movie is now looming on the horizon – the trailer bodes well for capturing the feel of the book, though I agree with commenters on tor.com that the characters look a bit too young and slick:


Posted: Sat - November 15, 2008 at 06:59 PM           |

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