Walk down any dull suburban street in any boring town in the world, and pass by all the closed curtains, and you just know every home has its universe of stories behind those blinds. There are crime and romance and horror and dramas in every house, on every street, in everyday life.
Bedford Street is the latest graphic novel by NZ artist Ross Murray and it's bloody brilliant, looking inside those homes and finding all sorts of stories. Some of them are grim, some of them are funny as fuck, and some of them are genuinely moving.
They're all human. There is no magical realism here - these are stories about the mundane life, where having an extra twenty bucks at the end of the week is a great victory; where failing to realise how much you've got more in common with your obnoxious neighbour is going to lead to all sorts of trouble; where taking care of your brain-damaged brother is a full time job, and hard every day, and still not enough to overcome the guilt.
The prologue, featuring a car and two birds in various states of mortality, serves as a broad metaphor for all the rest of the stories in the book. But Murray's dark stories also come with the breeziest of art, clear and wide and open, with an unflinching eye. The use of the kind of static posing seen in David Aja comics makes it so readable, and all the more shocking when explodes into tiny bursts of painful violence (largely directed at a barbecue) that are reminiscent of Michael Kupperman's wonderfully nonsenscial comics.
But Murray's comics are a world away from Kupperman's absurdity. There's more sad masturbating here, and a grinding despair at the inability to just sit down and watch Love Atoll on TV.
Bedford Street is about the lack of connection in modern society, an ability to say what we really mean, to admit how we really feel about the homeless guy trying to find shelter in an abandoned house. It's set in a tiny corner of Aotearoa, but there are stories like this everywhere, and they're all heartbreaking.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment