nine panels, no waste

the nine-panel grid is a constraint and nearly everything good comes out of refusing to break it. chapter five is symmetrical panel for panel around its centre and you can miss that completely on a first read, which is the right way to hide a formal trick.

the back matter is why it stays on my shelf. memoir excerpts, a bird-watching journal, ships' logs, an interview transcript, a psychiatric report. the prose sections carry information the panels don't, so the book is running two documents at once and expects you to hold both open at the same time.

the pirate comic interleaving worked on me the second time and not the first. dr manhattan's chapter, the watch, the mars sequence, that's the one i'd hand to anyone who tells me comics can't do interiority.

against it: the mechanics of the ending are silly in a way the rest of the book isn't, and the squid does not survive thirty seconds of scrutiny. also every reader who comes out of this thinking rorschach is the hero has misread a book that is not remotely subtle about him.

1. gibbons never gets enough credit for the colour work either.