Karen Haber Reviews Creature: Paintings, Drawings, and Reflections by Shaun Tan and Chivalry by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran
Creature: Paintings, Drawings, and Reflections, Shaun Tan (Levine Querido 978-1-64614-200-2, $35.00, 223pp, hc) November 2022. Cover by Shaun Tan.
Artists can make profound emotional statements through visual magic and show you things you’ve never seen before. Shaun Tan excels at this and has spent a career making unique emotional and artistic connections using various media. Creature, a handsome, full-color, self-curated survey of his work in picture books, comics, paintings, and films over 25 years, will remind readers of why he is world-renowned and acclaimed.
His work’s combination of deep emotional content, beguiling visual whimsy, and meticulous technical skill combines to highlight the poignant strangeness in everyday life and in alternative realities. Whether it’s a giant strawberry being taken home by a proud steampunk gecko or a lost thing that kinda sorta looks like a boiler sitting on a beach being ignored, Tan’s award-winning artwork connects us to the oddities of existence, and their deep emotional undercurrents. In books like The Arrival (2006), The Red Tree (2001), The Lost Thing (2000) and Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008) he expresses familiar human emotions – alienation, depression, loneliness, weirdness – in a visual language that often features anthropomorphic and zoomorphic beings.
Much of this is conveyed in Creature. From the casual doodles – the DNA of everything Tan depicts – in the endpages to the dreamy large paintings featured in two-page spreads, Tan reveals his observations and obsessions. We see that Tan is a supreme noticer of details about the physical world, from the translucence of a cat’s ear to the seeds on a strawberry, and he imbues his observations with humor, poignance, nostalgia, occasional anger, and references to the Australian landscape in which he grew up. His generous commentary discusses his inspiration and process. An index of the work is especially welcome, as is his bibliography.
This big, beautiful book volume isn’t a complete retrospective, but it is a very personal statement that dips into the artist’s journey over several decades package. Anyone interested in Shaun Tan’s work will want to get their hands on Creature.
Chivalry, Neil Gaiman & Colleen Doran (Dark Horse 978-1-50671-911-5, $19.99, 72pp, hc) April 2022. Cover by Colleen Doran.
The award-winning hardcover graphic novel Chivalry, from the team that brought us the similarly acclaimed Snow, Glass, Apples (2019) takes a different visual approach from its dramatic, high-contrast predecessor. This warmhearted tale of a visit by a magical knight of the Round Table to a widow in 1980s England receives a delightful romantic treatment by award-winning artist Colleen Doran.
Her choice of watercolor for the book’s illustrations provides a soft dimension of color and light. Aiming for an illustrated manuscript effect, she takes readers into a private world in which everyday reality and homely details collide with magic and fantastic imagery. The widow, Mrs. Whitaker, finds the Holy Grail in a charity thrift shop – as one does – and takes it home where it goes very nicely on her mantel next to her late husband’s photo. When a knight of the Round Table knocks at the door and requests the Grail, well, that’s when the fun begins.
Doran has evoked a very specific, endearing vision of a very British setting, making the most of Gaiman’s deadpan humor in the process. The artist’s notes are well worth reading to give insight into the long gestation of the project, and her creative process. Extra bonus features – character portraits, sketches, commentary by the artist – complete this appealing package. Best of all, unlike most of the other books reviewed in this month’s column, this one will fit easily onto any bookshelf.
Chivalry won the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium, and a Locus Award in 2023. If this increases your hunger for Doran’s wonderful, heartfelt work, the good news is that she’s been tapped to create the graphic novel of Good Omens.
Karen Haber is the author of nine novels including Star Trek Voyager: Bless the Beasts, and co-author of Science of the X-Men.
She is a Hugo Award nominee, nominated for Meditations on Middle Earth, an essay collection celebrating J.R.R. Tolkien that she edited and to which she contributed an essay. Her recent work includes Crossing Infinity, a YA science fiction novel of gender identity and confusions.
This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.
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