Broken Frontier

Italian superstar Francesca Ghermandi brings her latest work to American shores, and it comes bearing gifts that no other comic book currently offers.

Grenuord is a stark, bleak story, overflowing with Kafka-inspired paranoia and Lovecraftian isolation. It’s terrible yet whimsical, mirroring the dystopian hijinks of Brazil with the black cartoon humor of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The plot is deceptively simple: George Henderson (a beaten, exhausted individual with a skull-shaped head and sunken eyes), absconds from his old life of over-dominating women, purposeless jobs, and narcissistic psycho-analysts, to travel to a new city – Grenuord – and begin anew. Once there, however, he is immediately targeted as an outcast, and is watched by his neighbors, distrusted by his employers, and soon receives a visit from a man come to "check the meter" who then finds an illicit substance within George’s home. George suspects this mysterious meter man may be an agent of DOXA, the despotic agency that controls all within Grenuord, and the notion quickly leads George down the path of mistrust and obsession. He can’t seem to garner acclaim at work; he can’t act properly around his neighbors; and worst of all he continues to gain the attention of the worst sorts: DOXA agents and street-kid gadabouts, all whose very presence in George’s life allows for him to be further pinpointed by those wishing to believe him despicable. All George wants is to live harmoniously with others; what’s a maltreated, misunderstood man to do?

The story unfolds with a dexterous straightforwardness – all the characters and situations are clearly laid out with no intent or resolution left unclear. Still, while every scene is simplified, the overarching outline of events is intensely experimental, especially within the second issue. While issue #1 kept a streamlined narrative, #2 departs from this and delves haphazardly into an ongoing crossover with a side comic-strip story called Fred and Co. Fred maintains its own, vastly varying art style, and characters that traverse from one story to the other (between Grenuord and Fred), maintain their own stylistic appearances, though objects do not (Fred always appears as a scratchily scrawled comic-strip stick figure, even in Grenuord, though the "illicit substance" found in George’s home by the DOXA agent changes to mimic the look of the strip or the comic depending on which it is appearing in). It isn’t made clear – at least not yet – how these tales tie together, but the inference that they do or should seems to be inherent. On one level, this enhances the storytelling, but on another, it detracts enormously from the reading experience (I’ll elaborate in a moment).

The primary art in Grenuord is equally arresting and accurately complements the grotesque, gothic storytelling. Heavy, thick pencil lines coupled with a density of shading is pooled with a sparseness of detail that brings an evocative aesthetic to the work – redolent of Peter Bagge and Basil Wolverton, or classic black-and-white strips such as Popeye and Krazy Kat. The Fred and Co. strip brandishes a coarser style, and sports even sparser backgrounds and therefore an intense use of blank whiteness – an antithesis to the heavy lines and shading of Grenuord – all of which appositely represents Fred and his mean-spirited, directionless street friends as compared to the intent-driven world of poor, underachieving George Henderson.

With such a breadth of story and art packed within the pages of Grenuord, I have little doubt that this story will, all together, be a remarkable achievement; but there’s the hitch – it’s not together at all. Fantagraphics has chosen to release Grenuord as a six-issue, quarterly series, meaning six 32-page installments once every three months over the course of eighteen months. For a story that’s main draw – its original qualities – depend upon its structure as a complete work, this is a baffling decision. Especially when considered with the individual issue pricing (#1 was $5.95, #2 was $4.95); this makes a prospective reader pay over $30 for what will inevitably be collected in graphic novel format for no more than $20-25, and it will make a far superior reading experience as a completed novel rather than a serial. Even more quizzical: the work is long finished, and only needs to undergo the translation procedure to hit American shelves, so why the long, drawn out wait for a work that can only suffer from lack of reader engrossment?

Francesca Ghermandi has created quite a stunning piece with Grenuord, and the covers alone, displaying a mere single frame of art each, were enough to draw me like a moth who suddenly notices the sun is – hey, right over there! (And with its crazy high cover price, that metaphor is terribly apt.) It’s haunting and whimsical without trying to be pithy (which current gothic-whimsy trends tend to apply with the skill of an eight year old girl wielding lipstick). It even has some very intriguing, fresh experimental techniques that appear to gel with the overall concept; a rare find, indeed. Still, it’s hard for me to recommend a thing I know to be flawed, and Grenuord as a six-issue, quarterly miniseries will be a difficult beast to burden, both monetarily and (if one gets that far) in graspable coherency. Wait for the trade, I say, unless, like me, you just want to support the work – though even then I’d think twice about supporting the publication method.