Weinstein, Jacob – Dirty Boxes

Dirty Boxes

I picked this book up a few weeks ago and just got around to reading it today. It was a blind buy, one of those things that I got off the pre-order page months ago because I had a little bit of extra cash and the description said “Xeric award winner”, which is usually worth at least a glance. When I brought it home I looked through it a couple of times, decided that I wasn’t in the mood to read something like that, and put it back down. Finally I was at the bottom of my pile of stuff to read (and Sassafrasquatch was asleep on my back so I didn’t want to disturb her by getting up) so I decided to read it. Then it came to me: there was a reason that I was never in the mood to read it. It’s because I usually don’t like comics like this. There are words and there are pictures, but they rarely go together. When they do they aren’t meant to be heading towards any kind of a story anyway. Parts of this book impressed me a lot. The bit of writing at the start, the sheer level of detail put into every page, the sheer artistry of some of the pages… but it’s just not for me.

I guess it’s another case of my knowing what I like when I see it, but I’m unable to defend that logically. If I would have seen this on the shelf I wouldn’t have picked it up because I would have known that the chances of my liking it were pretty slim. I don’t want to sell this book short though. If you’re a student of the art of comics and wonder what else can be done with panels, composition, placement and design, then get this. It’s fantastic for that, and I’m sure there are going to be plenty of people who absolutely love this book. It’s technically incredible, it just leaves me cold. Hard to put it any clearer than that. I don’t always need a linear story and it’s possible for something like this to win me over. Maybe some other time I’ll read this and think it’s fantastic. I haven’t seen a single review of this so I don’t know what the general reaction is, but I could have seen being blown away by this if I was in a different mood. I think, in the wake of all that’s happened, that I’m looking for escapism more than ever. Stories that I can get lost in, basically. This book is proud of not having a story and that’s fine for it. It’s just not what I’m in the mood for these days.