| Title | : | Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 197880847X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781978808478 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 215 |
| Publication | : | First published June 12, 2020 |
Rebuilding Story Worlds offers the first full-length study of this seminal series, exploring both the artistic traditions from which it emerges and the innovative ways it plays with genre, gender, and urban space. Comics scholar Jan Baetens examines how Schuiten’s work as an architectural designer informs the series’ concerns with the preservation of historic buildings. He also includes an original interview with Peeters, which reveals how poststructuralist critical theory influenced their construction of a rhizomatic fictional world, one which has made space for fan contributions through the Alta Plana website.
Synthesizing cutting-edge approaches from both literary and visual studies, Rebuilding Story Worlds will give readers a new appreciation for both the aesthetic ingenuity of The Obscure Cities and its nuanced conception of politics.
Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters Reviews
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I'm a big fan of the Belgian graphic novel series The Obscure Cities (De Duistere Steden in Dutch), and have been collecting the albums from the late 90s.
This book is quite a dry analytical work on The Obscure Cities, tackling such subjects as the role the cities play in the narrative, how our Earth and the series' Counter-Earth are as real as eachother, or at least play with that notion. Most interesting to me is the idea that Counter-Earth is a constantly changing and shifting place, where each new story can fundamentally add and/or substract to the world.
Reading the book has reminded me how much I enjoyed the series, and how I should reread the books, including the last couple of volumes which I've missed.
(Thanks to Rutgers University Press for providing me with a review copy through Edelweiss) -
Fascinating; Almost Overwhelming
This book is part of the "Critical Graphics" series. The stated purpose of that series is to "...bring scholarly insight to single authors and their creator-owned graphic fiction and nonfiction works. Books in the series provide context and critical insight into a given creator's work, with an especial interest in social and political issues." Unlike most blurbs, manifestos, or prefaces, this introductory statement of purpose is a clear, precise, and complete statement of exactly what you will find in this book.
Amazingly, this book is both reader friendly and scholarly, and offers both an engaging entry point for a lay reader and a substantial academic treatment for specialists. That is quite an accomplishment. I am most definitely a lay reader, and am not particularly tolerant of academic obfuscation, and yet I found the writing insightful, engaging, and both rigorous and congenial, which is quite a feat.
The book comprises ten chapters, which are presented as distinct but interrelated essays. It should be noted that the essays are text heavy; there are illustrations, a few photos, and some excerpts of pages from different volumes of "The Obscure Cities", but this book is not generally heavy on graphics. This surprised and disappointed me a bit, since more examples and illustrations to support the points being made in the essays would have been helpful and welcome, (and a bit of a treat). That said, this is still an essential and eye opening piece of scholarship, and a nice find for devoted fans and also for more casual readers.
So, if you are interested in the work of Schuiten and Peeters, or the particular phenomenon of "The Obscure Cities", or even mostly just the social and popular context within which these men work and publish, this is a surprisingly accessible and remarkably engaging choice.
(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)
