‘ROSEWATER’, THE NEXT THING IN GRAPHIC NOVELS – A REVIEW

January 25, 2008 by PT Rothschild.

ANGELS, POKER, AND THE APOCALYPSE, WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE?


Though the womanizing boarder where I live at the ‘hotel underground’ who I’ve nicknamed, ‘Mr. Bee’, since he’s always buzzing around the honeys, decries MySpace as distasteful, I, on the other hand, have the opposite opinion. As one of the first bits of scene blowback, I’ve watched MySpace grow and am constantly surprised by the caliber of people wanting to become a friend of mine. My latest friend, 3 friends ago, is an artist named Alexei Gural who came to my site /ptrothschild to request friendship. When I linked back to his page, as I always do whenever anyone says let’s be friends, I was astonished to see the type of artist he is. Not the usual music artist, Alexei is a writer like me, and also a graphic artist, meaning that he tells a story in words and pictures. And it was the pictures that hooked me into reading the premise of his graphic novel titled, ROSEWATER.

Looking at the cover of this novel, the first thing that grabs you is the starkness of it done in black and white, and the solarized photo showing four faces in a close-up pose. While everyone is either shouting about or dissing the film Cloverfield as the next big thing or a remix of The Blair Witch Project done with Godzilla, ROSEWATER is real avant gard. Writing a script like that for a movie, Alexei assembled a group of young ‘actors’ to portray the emotions his story called for, and then photographed them in the various scenes. Transposing the photo story into a series of B&W (comic book) panels, he then turned them into a nihilistic palette on which he tells the tale of a world turning to sand. This ‘disintegration’ commenced at a concert when a band, made up of earthly angels, started playing their music. However, when the story opens we find just one angel band member who has rescued possibly the last human left, a human with amnesia and no memory at all as to what has happened to the world.

The back story and how all this comes full circle is told through 317 pages of stunning graphic photography that reveals what may be in store for the next generation of comic book novels that cross themselves with a movie maker. And yes, these ‘earth’ angels play poker and drink beer, like the rest of us regular sons of Man. This novel is available from www.lulu.com.

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