Salmon Doubts
July 18th, 2004by Adam Sacks
ISBN: 1891867717
This is an entire graphic novel about, well, fish. As the title would suggest, anthropomorphized salmon who think.
We all know the basic deal with these fish: born in a river, they grow up, go to the ocean, return to the river they were born in to spawn and then die. Do we really need a book about this? They way Sacks tells it, yes.
This is also a story about the uncertainty of childhood friendships, the awkwardness of adolescence, conformity, and curiosity. All the characters happen to be fish and look more or less alike, true. Good thing Sacks can draw fish well.
Cover to cover, from the screen-printed first pages to the final panel, I enjoyed the art. Sacks employs thick, flowing lines, more cartoonish that realistic in style, but with veering into overly cutesy territory. A two-panel layout with few variations could get boring over a work of this length, but here it works. Shifts in perspective help with this, and to create a sense of motion — they are swimming fish, after all. He also uses three colors of ink (most of the time) and not black, but shifting blues and grays, helping to orient the reader throughout the journey.
Most of my favorite panels were from the open ocean scenes in the story. These were more visually compelling (swarms of starfish, dozens of manta rays, the soaring sense of open space) and mostly wordless. This brings me to the one thing I found myself disliking in the book: the lettering. I can see what sacks is trying to do — distinguish individuals and genders that as bodies look the same by employing different lettering styles — but I don’t like it. As an idea it isn’t a bad one (but do the girl salmon have to have more flowering looking script?) it is that the lettering isn’t as high in quality as the art. Couple this with the additional focus that switching lettering styles brings, and it becomes distracting.
This is a solid first graphic novel for Sacks, and another good bet on a different idea for Alternative Comics, the publisher. I look forward to what else Adams Sacks will do. Recommended.
