Writer/Artist: K. Thor Jensen
Publisher: Alternative Comics
Plot: Thor travels 10,000 miles in 60 days, all in those horrible Greyhound buses.
Comments: I can bore you to tears with my story about my trip throughout the USA, but I’m in an excellent mood today so I will spare you the details.
Let’s just take this one step at the time and begin at the beginning.
The Cover: The cover displays Thor on a burning couch, pulled by a Greyhound bus. It seems like a simple cover, but it has several elements that can be interpreted as metaphors of what lays ahead in this story.
Book Design: Alternative Comics is a small independent publisher, but kudos to them for their whole package of the book. It’s done with love. They used good printing paper, and the quality of the cover is nice. They opted for the Manga format, which works really well with the six panel per page placement, but they were smart enough to use superior paper quality than most Mangas.
Story: I’m a bum for not knowing any work by K. Thor Jensen. Red Eye, Black Eye is my first glance at his pencilling.
And what a glance!
When I got this book, I waited till it was bedtime to start reading. My intention was to read a few pages and then off to dreamland.
So much for my plan!
I began reading and didn’t finish the book until it was why too late for me. Yes, I read all 304 pages in one go! The next morning feeling broke, I took it with me, and let’s say I read more when I worked.
My initial reaction was to compare it with Blankets (TopShelf), but that isn’t doing justice to Red Eye, Black Eye, because this book can hold its own.
Jensen made sure that this story actually reads like a novel. A graphic novel that is, which he divided into 19 chapters. Each chapter pinpoints a town/city where Thor is travelling to. By doing this, and making New York the beginning and the end, it gives you a realistic feeling of what 10,000 miles feels like.
This voyage Thor is undertaking can be seen as a pilgrimage, a soul searching of what life is about. While reading this tale, I kept thinking of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, who also chose New York as a beginning.
Thor is looking for inspiration to get his own life back on track, besides doing this by traveling, he meets a lot of interesting characters. These characters supply him with strange and wonderful anecdotes, which can be read like realistic fairy-tales. The people that Thor meets are almost stranger to him. Most of them he's only met through the internet. This shows braveness on Thor's part: to put his life in the hands of strangers, even though it’s for a brief moment.
It’s there in Brantleyville that Thor is towed by a truck on a burning coach.
Characters: The characterisation is a strong point of Red Eye, Back Eye. This doesn’t feel like fiction; these people are actually living somewhere.
The book contains more then twenty individuals who Thor meets throughout his voyage, but by using a clear format of the different chapters, it isn’t hard to put yourself in Thor’s shoes. These people are like you or me, searching for their (small) place in the universe.
Thor has a gift for extracting highly personal anecdotes for his own sanity. They are a slice of life. Sometimes they have meaning, a beginning and an end, but Jensen is also brave enough to keep stories dangling without any resolution. Almost like real life.
Art: Although the art style of Jensen is limited, it’s highly effective. Throughout the book he only needs a few ink lines to draw the right expression for his main character, Thor.
The six panels per page is a strong format. It delivers a steady rhythm like a tight drumbeat in a song.
The panels are genuine without showing off. It keeps this narrative realistic and humble, without losing the grand scope of Red Eye, Black Eye. By looking at the drawings I can smell that distinct odour of a Greyhound bus again.
Final Word: Red Eye, Black Eye should be regarded as highly as Tricked or Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson or Blankets by Craig Thompson.
What did you think of this book?
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