The Three Paradoxes by Paul Hornschemeier


The Three Paradoxes
Title : The Three Paradoxes
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1560976535
ISBN-10 : 9781560976530
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 80
Publication : First published September 15, 2006

The Three Paradoxes is an intricate and complex autobiographical comic by one of the most talented and innovative young cartoonists today. The story begins with a story inside the story: the cartoon character Paul Hornschemeier is trying to finish a story called "Paul and the Magic Pencil." Paul has been granted a magical implement, a pencil, and is trying to figure out what exactly it can do. He isn't coming up with much, but then we zoom out of this story to the creator, Paul, whose father is about to go on a walk to turn off the lights in his law office in the center of the small town. Abandoning the comic strip temporarily, Paul leaves with his camera, in order to fulfill a promise to his girlfriend that he would take pictures of the places that affected him as a child. Each "chapter" of the story is drawn in a completely different style, with strikingly unique production and color themes, and yet, somehow, despite (or perhaps because of) this non-linear progression, it all comes together as one story: a story questioning change, progress, and worth within the author's life.


The Three Paradoxes Reviews


  • Sam Quixote

    The book tells the simple story of a hometown visit for the artist of the book to his parents, along the way reminiscing about his childhood and incorporating daydreams and tangents that crop up during a conversation with his father. The drawing styles change with each story from the polished and clean look of the main story to the draft style of a story involving the artist, a monster, and the wise man in the sky, to a four colour style for flashbacks to his youth, to cutesy Manga-esque art for a story on the Greek philosopher Zeno.

    The book would be dull without the changing styles as it's not really a story, but then I think the book is more of an artistic experiment rather than a fully formed book. With the title and the inclusion of Zeno explaining his paradoxes theory (a failed idea where he posits that essentially nothing changes because nothing can change), Hornschemeier seems to be saying that despite the three stories (one about wanting to change, one about someone who was changed, and one about immediate change), he is still feels unchanged, still the same person. I think that's what he's trying to say with the stories and I'll give him credit for taking an original and interesting approach to the book.

    Overall though it feels slight, as if its less than the sum of its parts. I like Paul Hornschemeier, I think he's clearly a talented artist, but as a storyteller he needs more development. "The Three Paradoxes" is an interesting novella (comivella?) but the art overwhelms the story, leaving pretty pictures in place of anything more substantial. Hornschemeier looks like he'll produce something brilliant one day but "Paradoxes" is not that.

  • Jamie

    An interesting rumination on the concept of change and how it relates to the act of creation. Hornschemeier, on a walk with his father, mixes his observations of his old neighborhood with his struggles to finish a comic strip about youth, all the while indulging in memory and whimsy. Encounters with other people, stray bits of conversation, everything inspires some kind of mental tangent, what could be new fictional ideas, false memories, or something truly remembered. In one panel, Paul's young self passes on the street behind his current self, suggesting we are here now and we are here then, and we are always the same, like the three Zeno paradoxes of the title pulled through Vonnegut. (In another sequence of panels, do we break point of view and go into the head of Paul's father? If we do, for shame--but it could also be more mental meandering by Paul.) All the while, The Three Paradoxes is expertly drawn, shifting from a precise Tomine-esque style to parodies of old comic books for the backstory, as well as sublime little glimpses at the blue-pencilled pages Paul is working on. Still, by the end, even with all the heaviness of design, the book is a tad slight. Again, maybe by intention? Because it certainly does linger, like one of its narrator's memories, playing on the brain even as the book is reshelved.

  • Kirk

    This book fluctuates between a father and son (presumably our author) and the cartoons he draws, and some of his childhood memories.

    It isn’t all wrapped up in a neat little package, but life rarely is, and it resonated with me for this reason. We have a guy who likes his life and his art, but still has regrets and thinks a lot about uncertainties.

    At the same time, it provides a bit of an escape from my life. Everyone is pretty comfortably situated, and the problems in the book are superficial. They walk through the suburbs or a smaller town, and everything seems sort of polished and charming.

    I’d also read this again some day.

  • furious

    One of those slow, melancholy, autobiographical comics. Like a Clowes, or a Tomine, or even Essex County-style Lemire. There's humor, but it's not a laugher, there's a kind of sadness, but it's definitely not a crier. It's just kind of moody and uncertain and slightly hollow. I appreciate it, but I don't love it.

  • Josephus FromPlacitas

    I'm not going to comment about this very closely, it was sufficiently understated that I didn't come away with much of an impression, even after reading it twice. It had nice-looking art, very clever use of image, background surface, and comics-making techniques to differentiate the imaginary and the "realistic". For example, he's working on a new story in rough blue pencil outline as he tries to work out his artistic demons on paper. His real life is darkly colored and relatively realistic, while his vision of philosophical dilemmas is rendered as a yellowed children's comic with despondent Greek thinkers who look like Playskool characters. (It looks better than it sounds.)

    My dislike for Ambiguous Realist Fiction (see my whiny review of
    Rutu Modan's
    Exit Wounds) is starting to get in the way of my ability to decide whether a book was any good or not. "Oo, an ambiguous ending about a boring middle class person's life, how captivating!" I guess the really clever and well-done comics crafting can't stand up all that well to the thin story: a guy takes a walk with his dad and wonders what it will be like when he meets the girl he's been writing to on the Internet. The screenplay just writes itself!

    Or maybe there's a sort of cold, Midwestern understatement that goes over my head, a sort of middle American haiku form. Ex-northern European immigrants who don't like loud expressiveness leave most things to the imagination. It is up to the monk-like reader to try to grasp the hidden meaning of the silent, morose gazes of the characters. Maybe, but I'm just conjecturing here.

    It feels more like a short story than a book. Which is a terrible thing to say, because it's clear that a book's worth of comics-making went into the project, but only a few overlapping vignettes drive the story.

    Funny how the color scheme of the realistic portions reminds me of
    Chris Ware's stuff. I guess the landscapes of Ohio and other parts of the Midwest are likely to look similar.

  • Abby

    A beautiful book to behold, but lacking a story that left any real impression on me. I like how Hornschemeier depicted the four separate story strands in completely different styles and color schemes, but I found the connections between them tenuous and not very interesting. Also, I am sick of reading semi-autobiographical comics about nerdy, socially awkward young white dudes who were bullied as kids and have difficulty relating to women.

  • Ademption

    2.5 stars rounded up to 3. Minor Hornschemeier. There are multiple narratives with clever transitions, using different drawing styles to move between the present, the past, and creative imaginings. But for all the neat pomo transitions, there isn't much happening on each plane. Paul the Author worries about finishing a comic and being a writer while hanging out with his father, and also remembering a moment from childhood. This book is technically well done, but narratively thin.

  • Jeff


    Mother, Come Home sounded so good that as i waited for it to be delivered to my lieberry, i plucked this one from the shelves because it sounded good. Alas, i merely enjoyed it as a visual experience. The ideas conveyed via The Word never cohered for me.

  • Jeffrey

    This is the book where Paul Hornschemeier finally pulls together all his experimenting in style and form and wraps it into one seemless narrative. Like most good comics or graphic novels, the 80 pages seem like a lot more, and warrant repeated readings. Funny and thoughtful.

  • Emilia P

    By far Horschen-whatevers best book that I've read.
    Sad, sweet walks around town with his dad, reminisces on childhood in a different drawing style, and Zeno's paradox.

    Woot.

  • Vel Veeter

    This is a short graphic novel with a twisting series of art styles and narrative that circulate around an emotional entangling with Zeno’s three paradoxes. Our storylines involves a man in his late twenties having a night time stroll with his father discussing his past and their memories of being younger and this is drawn in a realistic contemporary graphic novel style, a childhood set of memories about “bullying” but more so about the complicated nature of rival bullying drawn in a kind of comic strip style of the 1940s or 50s, and then a kind of How-To or explainer narrative about Zeno and the paradoxes drawn in the style of a “Introducing: _____” education graphic novel.

    It spends some time thinking about the ethical, emotional, and moral praxis of the paradoxes in real world situations, but in entirely subtle and abstract ways, so it’s not a primer. And instead, like the paradoxes themselves, we find out that there are no easy answers actually. The book almost acts as a kind of koan then, but then, that might a different book altogether.

  • Vittorio Rainone

    Molto bello. Ma forse un po' troppo corto per il prezzo di copertina. Di Hornschmeier mi aveva già colpito "Mamma torna a casa", edito Tunuè. Ne "I tre paradossi" si ritrova, nella storia portante, lo stesso tratto netto, pulito, schematico ma intenso, con colori a campo unito, che tanto mi ricorda il capolavoro di Chris Ware ("Jimmy Corrigan, the smartest kid on heart"). A movimentare il racconto, si intrecciano altre due linee narrative: la "fantastica", che percorre la parte creativa di Paul, con disegni a matita blu, che dà l'idea di storia in via di creazione, su campo bianco; la "flashback", molto fumettistica con colori acidi e retini, introdotta da scatti della macchinetta fotografica di Paul. La storia è piccola, ma sa percorrere in maniera esauriente lo spettro emozionale del protagonista, senza mai strafare, senza voler essere didattica o didascalica. E' uno spaccato di vita che sa essere episodio e autoconsistente al contempo.

  • Nate Gruz

    Meh. The illustrations and their various styles are impressive, but the story is slight and the message, if there is one, was totally lost on me. I couldn’t fathom paying list price for this book, as it took less than half an hour to read (and that’s with lingering to admire the artwork!).

    I’m fairly certain I can toss this on the massive heap of “boring, sad people are fascinating, right?” graphic novels.

  • Kelly

    This autobiographical graphic novel left me with a feeling of emptiness. Not because the story was filled with angst, but because the whole thing felt unfinished. Loved the cartoons and graphics, but the story was dry.

  • priscilia

    2.5-3

  • Daniel Watkins

    Interesting and nice artistic style. I felt like it was a chapter in a longer book - I feel like the themes of the book could have been developed more.

  • Ellen Kozisek

    Enjoyable in the reading, but it didn't come together into anything meaningful. Left me thinking "huh?" when I got to the end.

  • Jackson

    Ho hum at best

  • C Pure

    I am always a fan of Paul Hornschemeier’s stories they really make you think... I may not understand it fully but I always learn something new. I also just love the mix of styles in this one.

  • Cyborg

    Short comic about visiting home. As someone who often gets lost in the nostalgia trap, I really dug this book.

  • Grace Kelly

    Really loved the artwork in this, and the story is decent, but felt like it could have gone on a bit longer/was cut a bit short.

  • Stuart Page

    Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of those searching, reflective, uneasy kinds of graphic shorts, like by tomine etc. Short, but sharp.

  • Jess

    2.5

  • Robert Beveridge

    Paul Hornschemeier, The Three Paradoxes (Fantagraphics, 2007)

    So, the underlying question of Hornschemeier's graphic novel asks us: was Zeno, in fact, right? Even when we reach our destination, have we really reached our destination? We are here given five linked (some more firmly than others) stories: the main story details a visit from our protagonist (Paul, natch) to his parents. The one most firmly linked is a memory Paul has while walking through town with his father of a childhood memory; a second involves a comic the adult Paul is trying to draw that focuses on what we must surmise is an idealized form of his childhood self- radically different from the child we get to see; a third involves a car accident, which may or may not have happened to Paul (I couldn't tell, and no other review of the book I've read trying to figure it out touches on this); the fourth is a comic-book retelling of Zeno presenting his paradoxes (and being rebuffed by Socrates).

    I didn't have nearly as much of a problem with the caesura motif as a lot of reviewers seem to have; it picks up on the paradox of the arrow in flight, and the traversing of each half-distance, never reaching the target. Every time Paul wants to say something, it has to travel half the distance from brain to mouth, then half that distance, then etc., which usually ends up with him blurting out something that bears little, if any, resemblance to what he's actually thinking. I can buy that. But then, on the same level, the thing I did have the most problem with here works in exactly the same way, and it still bugged me (the conclusion to the main storyline is absent-- because, of course, if Zeno was right, we can never reach our destination, see?). A paradox in itself, I guess. What we do get, on the other hand, is very well done, and deeply felt; I just wanted more of it. That, however, would have derailed the entire novel. What's the answer? There isn't one. Another paradox! ***

  • kubby

    well, this was my friend's library book. it's a quick read. it had a different feel from mother, come home, but it still left me wanting more. mostly there are flashbacks of sorts from the character paul visiting his hometown. there are different drawing styles employed throughout and i do like when stories weave together. it seems like this could be a chapter of a longer work.
    i wouldn't recommend this to everyone. it may have a draw for cartoonists for the frustration portrayed in the comics-making process and the mentality of a cartoonist. kinda like an inside joke (but who is laughing?) and i thought having the story within looking like the non-photo blue was clever, even though i wasn't particularly fond of that portion.
    the snippets i liked best were the guy at the convenience store and the zeno parts. the scenes of him as a kid were a little hard for me in both style and content

  • Shrey

    Interesting graphic novel. It was fun to go back and forth across various timelines and perspectives, with the artwork shifting along with you.

    But you were still stuck with a bit of a meh story. I think I've finally reached the point where the insecurities of a 20-something post-collegiate urbanite fail to make for a compelling narrative.

    This was too much about process (including the process of insecurity). Which could be interesting if that process uncovers deeper truths or goes somewhere or actually makes you feel for the characters involved in some way.

    Oh well - At least the process was pretty.