Significance of Font in Sexile

One thing I found myself really drawn to throughout the graphic was the way that font played a role with the voice/tone of a character. Font choice is a central point of a graphic novel, and can oftentimes set up tensions; for example, the classic comic book font and the font that the same comic book will use for an interjection like POW! Are different styles. And in graphic novels such as Saga, font is used to separate different characters dialects and accents. When I started reading Sexile I found the font interesting because it looks more messy, almost like handwriting to me. This made the reading special because I really got Adela Vazquez’s voice. It hit me in a way that EB Garamond never could. The font made the story feel more intimate to me. This in turn made me take notice when the font changed throughout the graphic novel.

The first scene we get a font change for is when Adela is recounting a story of her childhood, how she tried to pimp a goat for sex with a boy she knew. The scene shifts from her telling the memory, to the memory being played out in the page for the reader. Instead of Adela’s voice, we hear the voice of Pepe, the boy she was trying to seduce, and Adela as a child. This shift in voice felt really jarring to me as a reader, I wasn’t expecting to experience the loss of the narrator’s voice in such a drastic way and it surprised me. What was so cool to me about the narrative voice is how different it would be if this story were set up as a traditional novel. The dialogue would mostly have tags of things like “he said,” which would be enough to imply the narrative voice. But what in this specific scene implies a narrative voice? Once the flashback is done the illustrator zooms out and lets the reader see Adela in the “present,” meaning we see Adela as she was when she was recounting the story.

The voice of the narrator, in this case it’s Adela, is something that the reader uses as a portal to the story. Everything is shown to us through what the narrator has seen. Changing the fonts throughout the graphic novel in order to set apart what voice is the narrator’s and what voices exist in the story the narrator is telling is really effective. In Forget Sorrow there was no changing of fonts, but the illustrator/author relied on setting the narrator’s voice apart in other ways. The most notable way that I remember was the use of text boxes instead of speech bubbles. Both Belle Yang and Jaime Cortez chose to utilize box shapes to contain the voice of the narrator, or the voice of the narrator was unaccompanied by a speech bubble, showing that it was the voice controlling the narrative. Incorporating different styles of font further highlights the voice of the narrator in the novel; and it works in a way that doesn’t divert attention from the story, but made me feel more secure in my relationship to the narrator as a reader.