I recently bought (impulsively, and at Wal-Mart no less, while shopping for groceries when J was visiting and unfortunately ill) and read The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. It is a fantastic piece of (young-adult (whatever that means)) literature and an even more fantastic mixing of standard narrative prose and sequential art (which is a fancy way of saying “comics”).
It is supposed to be the story of a young boy named Hugo Cabret, but it is really about Georges Méliès, who was a magician, maker of automata, and early filmmaker. He is credited with discovering that if you stop the camera and remove something from the shot before starting the camera again, you can make that something disappear. Here is a link to his Wikipedia page. In 1902, he directed one of the first sci-fi/fantasy films: A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune), which contains the iconic bullet-in-the-eye-of-the-man-in-the-moon image, and which you should watch right now (I’m embedding part one of this two-part version, despite its strange electronica soundtrack, because the all-in-one version has annoying, French-accented narration):
The film is incredible for its use of special effects, its playing with perspective, and its design (set, costume, otherwise). The book is incredible because it operates on many of the same platforms–I mean, mixing text and image is not a new concept, but I can’t think of many novels, young adult or otherwise, that begin with sequential art, interrupt that art with text, and then periodically interrupt that text with more art that advances the narrative. And I suppose one could refer to that as both “special effects” and “playing with perspective.” The book as object is well-designed: The black-framed pages, whether they be text or art, are reminiscent of silent films (in fact, many of the text pages only have a small amount of text, making them very much like intertitles). The book as narrative is also well-designed: Much of the story has to do with clockworks and automata, and I, as reader, was pleased to watch different parts of the narrative come, fit, and work together.
There is a certain amount of cheesiness in how well everything is tied up at the end, but considering the book’s two main conceits, clockwork and movies, are both well-known for their neat completeness, and also considering this is a work of (so-called) young adult fiction, I can forgive the perhaps too-easy happy ending.
At the very least, this book has renewed my interest in learning how to pick locks.
