Avec Dimanche, McNaught nous entraîne dans une étonnante balade en apesanteur, dans un de ces quartiers résidentiels de banlieue aux maisons identiquement répétées et aux pelouses uniformément manucurées.
Jon McNaught is a genius, a magician: he can make you travel in time, and space. Birchfield Close, during a calm, relaxing sunset, is certainly a destination I will strongly recommend. A little, sweet town, I wouldn't mind to visit over and over again...
I'm so glad to have discovered Jon McNaught's work! His art style is simple yet elegant -absolutely love the color pallet and paneling and his storytelling both in Birchfield Close and Dockwood is a little melancholic and sweet at the same time. It reminded me of one of those dull and utterly ordinary days, where you find yourself bored and somehow absentminded, doing nothing. Then for no reason, you start noticing all these small -everyday life- details in the background and this feeling you get is a little overwhelming -how important they suddenly seem and of such extraordinary beauty. A feeling that usually leaves you very calm and content. Birchfield Close is not so about telling a story -there is no specific story anyway- rather, more about getting this sort of feelings through. A very short but sweet read, perfect while drinking a nice cup of tea/chocolate!:)
This a beautiful little book. I was immediately drawn to it in a sea of graphic novels at the bookstore. It shows a day passing in an anonymous suburb, done in muted blue and peach, and without speech. Birds chirp, video games bloop, doors slam, a hot hair balloon whooshes, and someone coughs. No one speaks except for tv and radio voices. Tiny silhouetted figures of the suburb move through their day, mowing lawns and sunbathing. The figures are drawn as if the author is studying them from far away through a telescope. There isn't a plot--just a day passing, represented entirely by images and sounds. If you find beauty in the mundane, or in the things we take for granted, I think you will like this book.
I liked Dockwood much better, felt like it came together far better, but this is sweet, thoughtful, contemplative in similar ways... maybe I like the more narrative structure of Dockwood, and this feels even more than that book did (because all his work feels like it, really) like lyric poetry, which may be a matter of taste more than anything else. I love the small book format. Almost wordless, but there are sounds throughout he asks us to pay attention to, in addition to (obviously), all the little things he wants us to see, all the fragile but constant beauty.
Birchfield Close by Jon McNaught is another wonderful offering from Nobrow Press. It is a quiet work filled with noises, a Mona Lisa on a postage stamp, an epic in sonnet form, and a study in time captured in minutes and seconds. All these contradictions should make it clear how difficult it is to write about a book that’s only about twenty-five pages long, covers a brief period of time at the end of a day, and has no dialogue between characters.
Physically, the book is about the size of a typical paperback, and many of these fairly small pages have such tiny panels that a single page can have as many as twenty-six panels, though the number of pane... Read More: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...
Jon McNaught is so good at the quiet passage of time! The muted colors, the repeating patterns, the pocket-size, and how he structures the frames and pages all make for a charming and very atmospheric story. I really loved the four wildlife guides at the end. Best. Loveliest.
I think the pacing suffers from the small format (unless a darting kind of reading was the intended effect), but other than that, it's peaceful and beautiful.
A lovely little graphic story. Two characters take in the sights and sounds of their English suburb from the elevated viewpoint of a rooftop. Gorgeously designed and rendered.