Review: Breaking News
30 Comics in 30 Days - I’m reviewing a comic every day in November!
Day 4 - Breaking News by Daria Tessler
The pages of this experimental, zany little comic are crammed with life and texture. The central story — a dystopian yarn about sentient cars that turn against their creators — feels less important than the abundance of drawings decorating the border of each page: animals, human-shaped figures, faces, shapes, blobs, patterns, intricate designs.
At first, I tried to do the good English major thing (old habits are hard to break) and sought some deeper meaning in the marginal drawings. But I quickly realized this was a stupid approach. If there is some hidden significance in the geometric patterns and manic little figures, it’s beyond my power to discern.
And yet.
Despite their seeming lack of narrative or symbolic meaning, the margins can’t be ignored. For one thing, my eyes were constantly drawn away from the center, where the story actually takes places, toward these doodles. Also, they’re never safely confined to the border space: The story’s characters, objects, and speech balloons occasionally cross over into the margins, while the little drawings sometimes echo or talk back to the main narrative.
A page on which a murderous car drives its occupant into a toxic waste pit is glossed by a menagerie of little wacky automobiles. A page featuring “the notorious doomsday wheel” — a TV game show-esque device that promises apocalyptic events rather than money — is surrounded by skulls and faces weeping tears (of blood?). How does this tie into the story? No idea. But it’s fun to notice!
For me, this kind of playfulness is a real joy. Sure, extraneous doodles don’t belong in every book, but I love the way this comic cuts against typical storytelling advice: That you should kill your darlings, that you should cut “unnecessary” elements. Breaking New revels in the unnecessary and extraneous.
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