The Comics Bureau

From the splen­did folk over at Tabella Pub­lish­ing come a couple of books by Øivind Hov­land, a Scand­inavian artist whose approach to illus­trat­ive storytelling is simple and precise;

Even if you only have one small image at your dis­posal, a story can still be told. And that, in a nut­shell is my aim, to tell a story using whatever means I have.

Trail and Error, pub­lished in 2008 is the story of Jean Bab­tiste de Bomber­aque, an adven­tur­ous chap from the early days of avi­ation. Essen­tially a book about determ­in­a­tion and ambi­tion, it depicts the tit­u­lar tri­als and errors of the young aviator’s career. For­bid­den Planet write up an inter­est­ing review;

Trial and Error is incred­ibly short for a graphic novel, it’s just 32 pages long, but since each double page is actu­ally a very clev­erly designed single flow­ing image, the action start­ing on the left and flow­ing, without panel bor­ders, over to the right in a single sweep­ing move­ment – it’s effect­ively  just a 16 page story, with no dia­logue and even very few cap­tions. But that doesn’t mat­ter since Øivind Hovland’s art does all the storytelling we need, all lush, thick blacks to begin with, and later, as the dreams of flight really begin to take off, more and more dom­in­ated by white as the sky begins to fill the pages, free­ing us to fly with Jean Bab­tiste de Bomberaque.

A Day in the Life of Alfred, pub­lished in 2009, is the story of routine and isol­a­tion. Using a very lim­ited palette, Hov­land depicts the story some­what non-traditionally, using maps, sym­bols, col­our and char­ac­ter. The book is not just a story, it is an exer­cise in the inter­change­ab­il­ity of text and image. This can feel like you have ‘missed’ some part of the story some­how, but it does bear up to repeat read­ings. Again, here is a For­bid­den Planet review;

And that’s it, book over, reader left ques­tion­ing. Did I miss things? Was there more there than I’d seen? I can’t work out whether that feel­ing means it hasn’t quite worked or it def­in­itely has – is it bad to feel like I’ve missed some­thing, is it good that get­ting to the end made me go back and study the book’s pages with a more ques­tion­ing eye?

I’m com­ing down on the side of good. When I went back I was look­ing for the pat­terns, look­ing for the details I’d missed, look­ing at the art to spot the con­nec­tions, the trig­gers to Alfred’s troubles. And as I read it again, and again, and again (it’s only 50 pages and maybe 500 ish words after all) it got bet­ter each time.

Much of Hovland’s work is sparsely nar­rated but lav­ishly illus­trated. In format, both books are sim­ilar to children’s books. Don’t let this ana­logy fool you though, the storytelling shows a deft­ness and sub­tlety of visual nar­rat­ive that bears up to repeat read­ings. You don’t so much ‘read’ Hovland’s work as take in each ele­ment of the type, image, com­pos­i­tion and nar­rat­ive. Great stuff. Go and buy it all immediately.