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ESSENTIAL // 1.23.03 SPARKS:
AN URBAN FAIRYTALE SPARKS:
AN URBAN FAIRYTALE SPARKS will break your heart so many times over the course of its 400-some pages that you'll want to stop reading. Why keep going back to something like that? Because you won't miss out on one of the best collected reads released this past year. It's not like SPARKS is all doom and gloom. Far from it. It runs the gamut of emotions-from joy to fear to anger to grief to embarrassment to love. It's the story of a girl named Jo, a 20-year-old loner, the type who never fits in because she's an individual-only she can't see the good in that. She longs for companionship, so at her job as an auto mechanic, she builds her ideal man out of spare parts. The fairytale element of the story is that her knight made of shining armor actually comes to life. A bucketheaded, gangly robot with a car grill for a chest, Galahad, as he is dubbed, comes off like pretty much every other strange creature new to this world that you see in movies like E.T. or The Iron Giant-curious, naïve, cute. But whereas most stories like that tend to at least focus equally, if not more, on the strange creature and its human friend, SPARKS focuses its gaze squarely on Jo. In his forward, Paul Dini justly calls Jo "one of the great comic art heroines." Eisner nominee Lawrence Marvit has created a female lead that is complicated and unique, something lacking from many comics today. Jo is the type of girl you were friends with in high school, but you didn't figure out how special she was until years later. And it takes her even longer to realize it. Jo lives with her abusive father and a depressed mother, but instead of them keeping her down, they give her something to aspire to be different from, something to leave behind. She can't help but want to be normal, though. This book is about discovering who you are, and we follow Jo along over the course of the book as she explores as best she can who she is-which includes going out on numerous lousy dates, wearing nice clothes she would never really want to wear, hanging out with girls who she considers normal and well-off but are just the opposite, and finding her prince charming. That's right, the princess gets her prince charming, just like in traditional fairytales. But staying true to the book's nature of not doing what is expected of it, she doesn't get to keep him. And unlike nearly every other guy in the book, this one's pretty decent, even when he's dumping her, showing that SPARKS is a book where they don't follow through with the clichés. The book isn't all about Jo meeting guys. The relationship Jo and Galahad build is both touching and believable, so much so that the culmination of their friendship at the book's action-filled climax feels natural and very moving. And through Galahad's continual search for knowledge, Marvit slips in bits about telescopes, constellations, comets, Arthurian legend and Greek mythology, letting the reader learn along with Jo and Galahad. The book's final act shifts things into high gear, perhaps a little too much so, but the conclusion does give Jo's story the ending it needs. It's actually amazing how true Sparks is. It's unflinching. It doesn't let its characters off easy; it doesn't provide simple solutions to problems. This story is a tragedy from which hope rises. And as wonderful a story as Marvit crafts, his skill as an artist is equally impressive. The animation-style art works perfectly for this story, where the illustration is very simple, but every line counts nonetheless. Often the faces of characters consist of just a few squiggly lines, but Marvit is able to cram in every emotion there is into an arch of the eyebrows. His sense of panel layout keeps things moving as quickly and as fluid as Galahad's ever-grasping arms. And even though this book would have looked very nice in color I'm sure, Marvit uses black and white to great effect-illustrating that even in light there can be danger, and that not all times of darkness have to be bad. Some critics have noted that SPARKS' animation-style art (creator Lawrence Marvit has worked at nearly every animation studio in the biz) and its billing as a fairytale might be a bit misleading in light of the story's dark tones. But really, SPARKS stays true to fairytales in that there's certainly an element of fantasy in it, but there are also several key life lessons, harrowing as they may be. As much as SPARKS is billed as a fairytale, the book is as real as what's outside your window. The only fantasy element is the robot-and while that does play a big part in the development of Jo and certainly the conclusion of the book, SPARKS is really about getting through everyday life. Finding out who you are and what you want to be-not what you present to the world, or what you dress up as to get places, but an identity that you know to be true. SPARKS is a thick, nice book that I'm proud to have on my bookshelf. This is a tome that can be read and passed around to numerous others who can likewise associate with the all-too-human struggle of Jo and Galahad as they try to figure out their place in the world. It's about following through with what you want to do, not what's expected of you. Jo and Galahad literally follow through on what Oscar Wilde said-"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
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