Jar of Fools

“Well, on the most basic level, clarity is of paramount importance. There may be certain instances where you want the reader to work more and piece something together, but in general he or she should be able to absorb the story easily and with little effort.”

-Jason Lutes on his work

I got through Jar of Fools quickly.  I wasn’t trying to rush through it, I was plowing through a book the way you do when you are always hungry for the next page.  I couldn’t stop turning the pages.  At the end, though, there unfortunately was a final page.  After letting the experience settle, turning over the emotion slowly coagulating in my brain, I started to consider why this particular graphic novel (or, here, picture story) was so readily digestible.  I attributed it at first to the gripping story.  I figured I just liked the narrative content a lot more than I liked other things we have read.  I was ready to leave it at that as I am often—to steal Alison Bechdel’s words—a “haphazard scholar.”

However, sitting down to write this post I decided to see what I could find about Lutes and Jar of Fools on the internet.  I came across an interview he gave to comicsbulletin.com in which he constantly stresses the importance of accessibility in creating narratives with pictures (comics, graphic novels, picture stories, whatever you want to call them).  To achieve accessibility Lutes does “things like never having more than a sentence or two in a word balloon, so it can be easily absorbed by the reader. In general, mainstream comics pack way too many words on the page, which hinders the comics reading process. The writers, for the most part, don’t understand how comics work and don’t trust the pictures to tell their part of the story. The end result is poor flow and less engagement on the part of the reader.”  He also “stage[s] most conversations from eye level, and pay careful attention to the body language and facial expressions of those involved. Mainstream artists tend to overuse dramatic or skewed “camera” angles, unconscious of the fact that how you frame a shot is an inflection in itself, and can undermine what’s being conveyed through the character interaction.”

Carrying these thoughts in my mind I skimmed back through Jar of Fools and was struck by how all of these incredibly simple panel add up to such a thick emotional response.  Each panel is straightforward, there are no curveballs here.  You get what you see.  However, the real power of the story does not rest on the page, it rests within the reader.  The panels, pages, and chapters add discrete portions of weight—and the reader cruises through the work with such ease (because the medium is so deftly controlled)—that recognition of personal involvement does not occur until late in the book.  That’s how it worked for me at least.  I didn’t think I particularly cared for anyone in the story until Ernie was considering mirroring this brother’s suicide.  From then on I had intense sympathy for all of the Untouchables the narrative contains.

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The interview I reference is here:

http://www.comicsbulletin.com/smallpress/98144619120449.htm