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Excerpt:
"...The Next Day (which has also been turned into an interactive animated online documentary) is co-written by Paul Peterson, Jason Gilmore and cartoonist John Porcellino, acclaimed for his self-published King Cat series. Like Girard, the book uses cartooning to tackle profound subject matter: It’s based on interviews with four real-life survivors of suicide attempts.
In both dark subject and spare style, the book reminds one of Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles, which concerned Alzheimer’s and was the first-ever graphic novel nominated for a Writers’ Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize, in 2010. The visuals in The Next Day are even more distilled, however, in Porcellino’s trademark “doodle” style.
Yet Porcellino understands the power that resides in the simple graphic, and gets forceful ideas across in a direct, sometimes brutal fashion. And the effect perhaps mitigates or offsets the sadness of the narratives, without either undercutting or diminishing them.
The most powerful instance of this is when one character tells of being molested, as a child, by an uncle – with the relative represented as an amorphous yet threatening blob. Text and image also meld powerfully in a sequence where a character relates how she threw herself down stairs, with words and pictures functioning as counterpoint.
The Next Day is a worthwhile, distinctive follow-up to KENK...."
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