Graphic Novel Review
The Tipping Point Review
Continental Shift
♦ Humanoids have just put out a lavish hardcover, The Tipping Point, an anthology featuring some of the best European, Japanese and American creators currently working in comics. Tripwire gave its Senior Writer Andrew Colman the job of assessing it all…
The Tipping Point
Creators: Enki Bilal (cover), Taiyo Matsumoto, Emmanuel LePage, Atsushi Kaneko, John Cassaday, Eddie Campbell, Naoki Urasawa, Bob Fingerman, Boulet, Paul Pope, Bastien Vives, Keichi Koike, Frederik Peeters, Katsuya Terada
The Humanoids’ graphic album The Tipping Point is an interesting primer for the publisher’s classic output – a thematically diffuse collection of brief, mostly stream-of-consciousness vignettes that are often throwbacks to the Metal Hurlant era. There is little in the way of character development, as is usually the case with such collections – the dominant thread (if there is one) is protagonist as cipher, a small, distant creature tilting against the vast expanse of the universe, the elements or inner dialogue. Needless to say, where it excels is in its graphics, which are frequently outstanding – form over depth being paramount here. However some of the stories, however slight and capricious they might be (several are no more than dry little throwaways) still manage to beguile and exude atmosphere. There’s a woozily dated feel to the album which is most probably intended, but it doesn’t outstay its welcome. There’s the garish, the ersatz, the minimalist and the photorealistic on offer, yet it all, for the most part, yields the same oblique, occasionally humorous disconnection – taken as a variable series of high production sketches, it’s a worthwhile read.
Amid the noble misfires there are highlights – Emmanuel Lepage’s The Awakening’s soft-focus monochrome tale of rites of passage, set in an adolescent holiday camp, subtly hints at the harsh, unforgiving underbelly of the fledging years, yet shunts to a halt, constrained by the book’s format. John Cassaday’s beautifully rendered Huckleberry Friend, set in 19th century Mississippi, is barely a paragraph in what would make an excellent graphic novel. And then there are the science-fiction pieces, informed both by E.C. and Moebius – Naoki Urasawa’s Solo Mission successfully blending such influences with manga to delineate a dystopian tale of a henpecked space traveller’s fraught journey to “the death hell planet of evil” who ends up falling foul of that old canard, scale. Bastien Vives’s The Child, another space opera, is the bleakest entry of the bunch – a washed-out visceral interlude played in linear time, with no happy ending, let alone the expected punch line. It’s a case of less is more here, with the pared down sketchiness exuding real hopelessness. Perhaps my favourite effort from the book is Paul Pope’s Consort To The Destroyer, with tropes borrowed from Giraud, Barry Windsor-Smith and ligne claire. Basically detailing a warrior woman’s brief journey of survival against the odds from doomed sea vessel to remote mountain haven, it again leaves you wanting more.
There are two comedic pieces halfway through the book – firstly Boulet’s I Want To Believe, a satire on conspiracy theories and web-induced paranoia, is reminiscent of Gilbert Shelton’s Philbert Desanex’s 100,000th Dream, and has time for a wittily satisfying denouement. While Bob Fingerman’s The Unbeliever, which along with Boulet’s turn is the most cartoonish segment in the album, provides a necessarily light contrast with elsewhere’s gloom. Parodying timeworn horror yarns featuring unbelievers touring hell, it marries American sensibility with European-style art.
In the end, The Tipping Point’s format makes for a reasonably entertaining yet undemanding diversion, with echoes of more detailed, fully-formed projects from comics’ past – it may not be the sum of its parts, but it does show the breadth of the medium, rebounding between various genres and styles. Certainly worth a look.
ANDREW COLMAN
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