Flower and Fade Book

This is an earlier, less mature work by the author of Joe & Azat, which I LOVED.

In some ways, this is a more poetic piece. There are some really fantastical sequences from a party, there are some dream depictions which make good use of visual metaphor.

For me, I think the main weakness here is panel size uniformity. Almost all the pages (except for title pages for chapters) have six panels, in roughly the same proportions. There are some moments and sequences when I really wanted to rest my eyes, but the pacing here kept me flipping pages. Also, Comics Lit published this in a relatively small size and some of the pages feel like they'd be more impactful in larger scale.

The story itself is pretty par for the course for a reader who partakes in a lot of semi-autobiographical graphic novels. Bitter-sweet, wistful, two-freaks-stuck-in-a-doomed-cliche. I feel like the characters could have been fleshed out a bit more - the work and goal drama is a little out of the blue. But maybe everypeople are what Lonergan's going for here.

I find his drawing style more aesthetically pleasing here than in Joe & Azat, and though the storytelling is a bit more experimental, it also feels less mature than in that other work.