Rereading this for class, slower, more carefully. I still don’t particularly care for it, but that doesn’t matter because there are some good things here to be found.
The first segment, Belmont Harbor, has a basic story of John waking up, going to school, seeing his friends, making plans to go places, and a turning point when his friends buy liquor and John finds pills in his friend Tina’s room. John chooses not to partake, and naturally there’s the feeling of being uncool of which teens are so deathly afraid.
There’s the need to be one of the crowd and the loneliness that is exaggerated in John’s mind. There’s the boredom and frustration that can best be described by ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ –though that doesn’t really change with age, those words sometimes being the best descriptor of a situation–but the indiscriminate use is half reasonable and half just rebellion and effect. The problems of young people are always the same, so the story is not exciting except perhaps in its appeal for that very reason: everybody’s been there.
The comic strip is as intricate in its use of panels and graphic expression as hypertext is with its paths and text boxes. I feel Porcellino’s artwork is not as great as many I’ve seen, yet it does have a simplicity that is perhaps more likely to invite a feeling of commonality or empathy. While certain series of panels seem to go on a bit longer than I would see as necessary–particularly the last section where there are about 16 panels indicating John’s separateness from his friends and his resulting depression. I also didn’t quite follow the symbolism in the revelation he seems to find which comprises the last 5 panels.
There’s a particularly interesting effect when John is in Tina’s house looking around at her things, as if learning about her by examining her environment. When he finds and asks her about a small vial and she answers, "poppers," there’s a change in the mood. Porcellino shows this nicely: An empty ‘thought balloon,’ is John’s response. In the next panel, Tina is talking, but her text balloon just shows some tiny dots–John evidently is not listening. More importantly, Tina does not have a body, just her head. She has lost something of her identity to John. This is one of the great things about comic strips and graphic novels that is different from the techniques used in text.
It will be interesting to get more insight on this from the other students.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology