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Original Italian Version.
September 2, 2003
Flood! it is one of the surprise of the year, one of the best volumes to comic strips of 2003, than of sure not lascerà indifferent the readers to the search of mature and deep works. The Lexy has proposed it in a volume of good invoice, from the optimal paper for the yield of the most personal feature of the author Eric Drooker, to a price that rispecchia the quality of the work and the confection.
Flood! it collects three storys for images of Eric Drooker , author and illustratore for several reviews (between which The New Yorker ); three testimonies of the city, indeed of New York, its city, seen from a distorting disc of a valve, but above all three works that evidence the graphical ability of the author. Its is a made style of black ink, filled up spaces and empties to you, modern tribali, distressing, melancholic and poetici graffiti . A dirty, nevertheless expressive and strong feature, where the construction of the table is free from every constriction or cage, and in which the words or the onomatopee would not add other to how much already communicate the sign. In fact the vignette, often to all page, they only speak with the designs, without sonorous, wrapping the white men and the black ones of the tables in Hush dense and a terrible one, that it seems as well as not to hide or to darken the noises, how much to stuff with wadding them, soffocarli hardly, leaving but in the tribali, clamori far ears a noise like of tamburi, voices, grida, stridii, scroscii. Hush it is the noise of the truth , broken only from a comic strip (within the same comic strip), in which the words they are scratched and schizzate on the page from the cartoonist.
The $R-bianco.e.nero of Drooker is full, nearly a "black & white man", in which the often black china it becomes the background on which, for removal, delineates the figures, enriched in the last history of a humid blue that amalgam to perfection to the rest of the design. Drooker constructs tables from the perspective forced, folded until the end, where the long perrons framed before from the bottom and then from the high express vertigo, the body knot of a woman, stiff in the pleasure, has the sapore of the pleasure and the sweat, and where the high palaces are incumbent on the roads that make space between the concrete. Tables with a force and a expressive impact like not if they see some often, where the equilibrium of the spaces and the sense of geometry give to the figures, only rough sketch and made of little features often stilizzati, the ability to exceed the limit of the page and to communicate for symbols and allegorie. A style that Kuper recalls , Crumb , Ott , Spiegelmann , but personal and originate them, able to tell "aliena "the New York in all its beauty and all its extraneity, in bizzarra a declaration of love and terror for its immensity, a largeness that incredibly turns out claustrofobica. A city where it is easy to get lost and to mistake road, or to find it crossed, in order not to return more . A city emblematically designed, in the illustration that opens the volume, on the back of a gigantic turtle to the drift in the immense ocean, dark shadow under waters increspate of waves.
Eric Drooker lives to New York from three generations. The city for he is one brulicante entity, a sauro dormiente that it dreams, and that in its to dream it drags the own inhabitants. The city exists gives before the man, has in himself deep roots, history of antichi people and atavistic feelings.
Going to analyze single storys, House is the first one of the collection: the beginning is a dream, a memory of infancy, interrupted gracchiare of the television, only companion of room of the protagonist. These will discover how much are easy to be are swallowed from the city: without more job, without moneies, a objective in the own life, will be found again to walk between the symbols of the degradation of a sure far America from the places setting some of the reviews and from films of Hollywood, between smells to it, the grida, the misery, indifference, but above all the solitudine of the road. The tone of the story seems to emphasize how much is large the risk to remain single, single between the crowd, single also when we think to have found one similar, for which is in truth one small pause from the own staff solitudine: a disease that ends for being an pleasant and friendly torture from which is more and more difficult to get rid. The progressive desperation of this man without name and history comes expressed through vignette more and more small and dark, very far from those large and solid, nearly imposing ones, that they characterize in kind the story and the entire volume; vignette that hand by hand yields more and more poor and outlined space all at once, suffocated from black, the more and more narrow, more and more small ones, until only remaining one extended of black small riquadri, like many small pools without light.
The second history, entitled simply L , is a story much short one, than beginning from one come down in metropolitan (L is line "14 Street- Canarsie Local", than from Manhattan it leads to Brooklin), us door within a dream of one city more ancient basement, made than covered coves of graffiti, disowned tribes and antichi cults made up of dances and sexuality. A dream of freedom and disinibizione, interrupted abruptly from the truth that seems to lead the protagonist, once again, towards the own solitudine. Beautifulst the tables of opening and closing, with the scales of the meter that come down before and go up to the end, solo one of the many shining graphical solutions about which we spoke to the beginning; between these it still remains to emphasize busto the knot of woman, seen from the eyes of the man with which it is being coupled in an archaic and inebriante ritual.
Finally, the story that it gives tito it to the collection, Flood exactly, that it seems to continue directly from the previous L, with the escape of the protagonist from the metropolitan.
The first two tables, but, are evocative a panoramic one of the city give over the clouds that, like in a homage to the illustrations of Escher , assume the shape of fish. The protagonist, once again completely anonymous, walks under the rain. Its solitudine (newly silent comprimaria) is rendered still more obvious from the graphical choice of the author, than it designs some, white man on black, the ribs and the heart, like if riuscissimo to see of one x-ray of the feelings, distinguishing it from the other figures around to he. Between the thunders, a short one, appreciate humanity parenthesis come encounter to the man from a pedlar of umbrellas, than gliene it donates one in order to repair itself from the water. When it reaches house, a very small monopremises, to wait for finds it just the cat and the table from design where, with a blue ink, it begins to paint of history to comic strips. In before these history we find the only passage where the words, simple signs find it hard you to the inside of "vignette in the vignette", break off Hush, under shape of a song intonata from the rough voice of a eschimese, while it navigates to the drift on one ice slab.
While the protagonist designs, the thunderstorm imperversa on the city; piove even from the old ceiling, a lot that the water knows them until arriving to the ankles. Although this, he continues to design, to cost to make it under the umbrella, like possessed from the history that it wants to narrate: one situation and one be of mind that fatichiamo not to connect to the same Drooker, here more than ever close to just the personage. The second history that it begins designs seems to begin like one fable: transported from the wind, the fumettitsta it flies over the city, until to far away a Luna Park; here it assists to a corteo of clown and soldiers, monstrous and pathetic masks of the comic strips and invalids, beings, and the fable is transformed clearly in qualcos' other. Hidden in the tatuaggi of a phenomenon from large shed, it will live again the history of the United States: not that one made of courage, freedom and adventurers, but that NATO from the violence, the slavery, made of ingiustizia, violence and died. Ended the circus, removed the trick and the smile, the clown are sad , as the clown they only know it, poor and it are starved. They are not risate to us, only disappointment for the dream smashed American. The same violence of the past returns in the present, the protagonist of Flood designs it for the roads of its story that continues: the violence of the police when it forgets its protecting role about in order appealling the manganelli, the violence that door blood, and the blood that seems to carry the storm, a new deluge in order to cancel the too many sins of the man.
The same deluge that, outside from the "comic strip in the comic strip", is flooding the city, forcing the designer to end its work sott' water. Then, to edge of the adapted umbrella to raft $R-di.fortuna, it takes the wide one outside from the window together just to the cat, until that a wave does not turn upside down the umbrella, making drowning it. On its corpse the feline, remained finds salvation single hour: a particular one emphasized, once again, from the design of the heart that it strikes in its chest, like if last inheritance from the master to the cat were one. The solitudine of the animal will be cancelled from the arrival of one new Arches of Noé, than, pointed out from the boat, it has the fattezze of the vendor of umbrellas. The last table is for this new hope for the humanity, this full ship of braces of animals that is annoying on popolate waters of squali, between the tops of the palaces where once the humanity existed.
The art of Eric Drooker possesses one great visual, able force to communicate directly with our anguish, with the feelings of the reader, playing with the metaphors of storys. The solitudine, topic prince of the collection, nearly becomes concrete, leaving I lean cold sweats and melancholy; also for this sensibility, the absence of the "sonorous one" appears guessed: where there is Hush, the solitudine has a noise still more fort.
There is salvation? In Blood Song, volume perhaps following to this and in which, to how much one says in quarter of cover, Drooker catches up the apex of its acts, we could have found the answers that we try to this question; we, therefore like the personages with which we have shared this doubt during the reading. Unfortunately the closing of the Lexy Editions, than already had announced the work, places great doubts on the possibility to see in Italy other jobs of Drooker. Perhaps it is worth the pain trying them in English language, in order not to lose contact with a great up to now guilty ignored author in Italy.