"Rickety Stitch And The Gelatinous Goo: The Battle Of The Bards"

"Listen," the living skeleton says to encourage the lovely Canta in a new graphic novel, "You don't need a big audience to sing. You don't need adoring fans or chests of gold. And you don't need approval from anyone. You just need the music. ... We sing because we love to. The melodies, the stories ... they inspire us."

The skeleton, along with his sidekick, a talking hunk of gelatin, and a group of oddball friends, have journeyed far to the city of Harp's Edge, there to join in a great music competition that will, in an unexpected way, bring down the house. 

"Rickety Stitch And The Gelatinous Goo: The Battle Of The Bards" ($16.99 in paperback from Knopf Books for Young Readers; also for Amazon Kindle), illustrated by Ben Costa, and created and written by Costa and James Parks, is the third outing for Rickety and company.

Book 1 of "Rickety Stitch And The Gelatinous Goo" set our heroes on "The Road To Epoli"; Book 2 saw them on "The Middle-Route Run." For Costa and Parks, both from the Bay Area, Rickety's stories are part of a larger universe, the Land of Eem. Readers coming first to Book 3 will miss the backstory, but there's plenty of action--and poignant betrayal--to keep teens and adults mesmerized.

Rickety desperately wants to find out who he is, and his purpose. He comes from an earlier time, never co-opted by the again-resurgent Gloom King; as one character puts it, he's "the undying ember of a golden age that has been all but forgotten." 

Throughout the story, there are flashes of that reality, and oh, the song: "What Once Has Been, Again Shall Be," written by Costa and Parks, and sung by former Chicoan, and now Oaklander, Evin Wolverton, who co-wrote the lyrics (listen at RicketyStitch.com). Wolverton performed in several E-R Sessions, back before the Plague.

Outcasts and outsiders find courage together. As the song says, "For every sorry heart, we'll lift each other/ For every crashing wave, we'll brave the sea." Though a deep sorrow has come upon the world, Rickety's antics will keep readers in stitches.

“Unflattening”

At the headwaters of Western philosophy, Plato warned us not to be taken in by mere perception. The images we perceive are but copies of copies, he said; only the intellect could “see” true Goodness or Beauty. The image is not the reality.

But would it be possible to intertwine words and images so those images push us to understand more deeply the reality that the words alone cannot adequately describe? That’s the goal of an extraordinary “graphic novel” called “Unflattening” ($22.95 in paperback from Harvard University Press) by Nick Sousanis.

Sousanis has joined the full-time faculty of San Francisco State University to teach “comics as a way of thinking.” Though it may sound like a prime example of misspent education, Sousanis’ book is a serious challenge to the status quo which, he claims, serves to narrow our vision and undermine our potential.

He draws on a nineteenth-century satiric novel called “Flatland,” by Edwin Abbott, in which “A. Square” tells of life in a two-dimensional world. He can’t imagine a world of three dimensions: A sphere passing through Flatland would only appear as an expanding and contracting circle. Similarly, we have trouble breaking through our “reliance on a solitary vantage point … a single line of thought … where we see only what we’re looking for.”

Instead, comic art can be used for crucial ends in bringing to our attention multiple perspectives in which “distinctive viewpoints still remain” but they are “now no longer isolated … (but) viewed as integral to the whole.” Sousanis uses the thought of scientists, philosophers, literary critics and artists to connect, as in a web, a phantasmagoria of images.

The bottom line? “Perception is not dispensable. It's not mere decoration or afterthought, but integral to thought, a fundamental partner in making meaning. In reuniting thinking and seeing.” Sousanis’ black-and-white drawings are choreographed with the text in minute detail and are never mere illustrations of the words.

In comics, when the eye travels from panel to panel as a conversation unfolds, time turns into space (the physical space of each drawing). If time is the fourth dimension, then comics can help us grasp a reality that A. Square could never even dream.