Joff Winterhart's debut comic, Days of the Bagnold Summer, has become, along with Mary and Bryan Talbot's biography/memoir Dotter of her Father's Eyes, the first graphic novel to be nominated for a Costa Book Award. The news was undoubtedly a significant moment for the medium, and raised a number of questions about the role of comics in relation to prose [...]- which will clearly be argued over for some time to come.
The book covers six weeks of the summer holidays of schoolboy Daniel Bagnold, 15, and his librarian mother Sue, 52. It is as neat a slice-of-life as you will find; Winterhart captures teenage angst perfectly, as Daniel mopes around the house, daydreaming about being in a metal band ("Skullslayer"), and occasionally leaving to sit with his one friend in the park, dressed head-to-toe in black in the hot summer sun.
The book is structured as though it's a collection of never-before-published newspaper strips. Each page stands alone as a vignette in the Bagnold's lives, and many small events are never picked up on again. Daniel, unable to sleep, drinks a two-litre bottle of coke at 2am; Sue mistakes a page of copied-out Metallica lyrics for a heartfelt poem by her son; the pair of them discuss their memories of Sue's American father, who left the country when she was young. But these moments build up to an impressively full portrait of the two leads.
The economy of the book extends to its art. The comic-strip-style layout leads to a deliberately formulaic page -– six panels, with a one-word title -– while the panels often contain nothing but scratchy headshots of the characters. Backgrounds are rare, filled in only when they are necessary for the point of the scene. The style lends an air of theatre to the whole book, as though there are stage-hands running on with the props for the next scene between each page.
Me: The above was the review I read that tells it best. The characters are outlined in a very telling way, the body language conveying so much, but sometimes the faces are fudgy, as though the characters were expressing their own blurry responses, the way they are feeling not quite complete, in Daniel's case because he is half way through growing up and in Sue's case because she hasn't got enough in her life. They are so lovable, and at times funny, but they lack positivity. Some people will find their story depressing, and others will find it too small and too subtle. There are no momentous events here, but there is a tiny bit of development which would appeal particularly, I think, to mums, who know how every day there is a little change in our offspring, and it goes on, and it's hard to pin down any particular time.. This book attempts to do that.
This book made me look at my daughter to see if she was well-defined, as though her positivity would reflect back well on my own, and my word, she looks so clear and vital to me, even when she wears a hoodie and baggy jeans, but that might be just my view of her. So you see, the little book set me thinking and I liked it very much. It's nice to open it up anywhere and read a section. (I like putting nice in sentences because you are not meant to.. I mean it's a pleasure.)
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