Forget Sorrow

For a comic book, I found Forget Sorrow very dependent on the words of the narrator.  The narrator, weather it’s the daughter or her father, does a lot of the work of explaining what’s happening, the images often lean on these descriptions like a crutch.  When the narrator says she left China, an image will show her with a suitcase.  The narrator and images seemed to have a call and response relationship, instead of a trade off between narration/dialogue and images that I see in many other comics.  I like comic books that let the images speak for themselves, let the reader explore the cells for more information about the story.  Here, I often felt the images were more like illustrations that accompanied the narration and didn’t always have a lot to say on their own. 

            What I really liked about the images was when the author used more abstract drawings to show concepts or feelings.  On page 79 there is a memorable drawing of the body-less heads of children gnawing on a skeleton.  I thought this showed the character’s fears in a creative way.  The author also uses this to bring her poetic lines to life.  When the grandfather is wandering and begging, we see his limbs sticking out of a river he can’t swim free of.    

            The author used this same technique to portray bad deeds.  Her stalker ex, Rotten Egg, is portrayed as very large, inhumanly tall, and he reminded me of some kind of evil spirit.  I really loved the full-page illustration of him on page 11 that showed him as big as the house the narrator’s family is hiding within.  Characters doing bad things are often shown as larger than life or with demonic qualities.  When the narrator’s father yells at her, he sprouts devil horns, page 70.  When the narrator’s father returns home to China to visit, his relatives have giant heads as they badger him for things, page 196.  I also really liked, on page 200, when the family feels they are being spied on.  We get large eyes at the top, and the pigs for slaughter right above them.  This could be considered too literal for some, but I really like the bold imagery in this cell and it really stuck with me.  Also, when the narrator dreams that her mother in stuck in a pagoda, the drawing was so beautiful that I found myself wishing it was a whole page.  These images took on a life of their own in my head, and added depth that the written text hinted at.

            I think the most consistent theme that kept coming up for me was nature.  The narrator’s father grows up with a garden, and the narrator is constantly taking walks outside.  I found the animals in the text would mirror the human characters.  Cats killing mice when family plots were unfolding, the family of rabbits while the narrator is walking with her family, and the lone fox when the grandfather is on his own. 

Weather often helps show the character’s emotions.  The character’s faces are not always brimming with emotion, and so the background of thunderclouds or shadow helps reinforce the feelings they are having at the moment.  When the narrator is mad at her father, on page 38, there are heavy clouds behind her.  When there is family strife over the decision to let Third Uncle take over the countryside land, the characters are shown with lightning and rain in their backgrounds.

The dialogue could be a little too on the nose sometimes, the narrators did a lot of the work while the dialogue, especially in flashbacks, didn’t always pack a punch.  I did really like the thoughts of the narrator’s father as a young man.  In these he was honest and funny.  I felt like knew him best from these moments, not necessarily what he said during his recounting.         

-Iris