Derik Badman's Journal

2021-09-25 10:29

The swallows were out yesterday morning, so I guess they didn't migrate for the season.

Read Dash Shaw's new comic Discipline the other day, and was pretty underwhelmed. The narrative follows two siblings who are Quakers. The brother goes off to fight in the civil war, defying the Quakers' pacifism, while the sister stays home. The text is all letters between the two. There is an aspect of how the text of the letters isn't telling the whole story we see in the images, but that's kind of always the case in comics when letters are involved, so I don't feel like it was super effective. Like it wasn't clear we were seeing all the letters or even all of each letter. It all felt a little underdeveloped to me. The art is very light, loose hatching, no panel borders, no real use of black, it all sits lightly on the page. I'll probably read it again to see if I glean more from it a second time through.