![]() ![]() Two recent début graphic novels by Lee Lai and Tommi Parrish (friends and ex-Melburnians now living in Montreal) give us a chance to examine this relationship of cover to content, and to broach the vast discussion of a comic book maker’s style, their approach to art and design, their visual voice. Basically, you can judge a comic book by its cover. A comic book begins before you even open it. With a comic book, the sort of thing you see on the cover is the sort of thing you get inside. For the browser, that’s like trying to decide whether to attend a concert on the strength of a billposter. The cover of a text-only book is communicating a sense of what the book is like through the totally different language of images. In the case of comics, however, the cover image is made by the same hand that creates the images that proliferate within the book. For the latter, the cover image is usually produced by a designer whom the author does not know and may never meet. The covers of comic books/graphic novels/sequential narratives, call them what you will, have a fundamentally different relationship to the contents of their books than the covers of ‘ordinary’, text-only works. ![]()
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