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A review by hypops
One Dirty Tree by Noah Van Sciver
4.0
One Dirty Tree bounces back and forth between Noah Van Sciver’s childhood home with his financially strapped Mormon family and the beginnings of his career as a cartoonist on the verge of his 30th birthday.
What is here is brilliant. The parallel storylines play off of one another perfectly without the need to explain or overburden the parallels. The use of splash-page sketch portraits also hits all of the best emotional notes.
My only gripe is that it ends too quickly. The final pages have an emotional resonance that far outstrips the slim story we’ve gotten up to that point. Another 100 pages or so spent getting to know and understand these characters and their relationships more would have given those final pages a truly sublime impact. Simply “sitting” with these characters longer would transform this book from very good to exceptional. This is one of the challenges of comics creation: the amount of time it takes to produce is much longer than the time it takes to read, which means that the pacing of longer works is very hard for cartoonists to judge.
On the plus side, after reading this, I’m persuaded that Van Sciver’s best work is still to come. And based on what he’s still producing in his Blammo anthology, he’s got much more memoir material to draw from. Perhaps this short book will end up being merely the beginning of a much longer, much more powerful book down the road.
What is here is brilliant. The parallel storylines play off of one another perfectly without the need to explain or overburden the parallels. The use of splash-page sketch portraits also hits all of the best emotional notes.
My only gripe is that it ends too quickly. The final pages have an emotional resonance that far outstrips the slim story we’ve gotten up to that point. Another 100 pages or so spent getting to know and understand these characters and their relationships more would have given those final pages a truly sublime impact. Simply “sitting” with these characters longer would transform this book from very good to exceptional. This is one of the challenges of comics creation: the amount of time it takes to produce is much longer than the time it takes to read, which means that the pacing of longer works is very hard for cartoonists to judge.
On the plus side, after reading this, I’m persuaded that Van Sciver’s best work is still to come. And based on what he’s still producing in his Blammo anthology, he’s got much more memoir material to draw from. Perhaps this short book will end up being merely the beginning of a much longer, much more powerful book down the road.