How do you translate a cinematic experience to a graphic novel? “Widescreen” storytelling has become common enough, but what about the subtler things that movies can achieve? That’s one of the artistic ambitions behind Oni’s original graphic novel The Awakening, and the results are intriguing, if mixed.
The cinematic genre at hand is a school of Italian horror known as giallo. According to Awakening author Neal Shaffer, “the thing that distinguishes these Italian works is that they are more about a sustained mood and atmosphere than a quick edit and loud shriek.”
Shaffer and artist Luca Genovese have certainly achieved a sustained mood of helplessness in this piece. A circle of friends at a posh private school are being murdered one by one. Francesca, a newcomer to the clique, survived an attack, but it’s left her in an almost catatonic state. She has visions of the next killing but can do nothing to prevent them in her uncommunicative state.
Landis, the detective investigating the brutal killings, faces his own frustrations. The school’s administration is obstructively secretive, the only witness can’t share what she’s seen, and Landis has no other useful leads. A popular teacher is under suspicion and unable to help his students cope with their grief and terror. There’s an almost surreal inevitability to these events, a pervasive sense of doom.
The down side to the creative team’s commitment to giallo’s conventions – the primacy of atmosphere over a detailed narrative – is that it doesn’t hold together very well for me as a story. Shaffer and Genovese are less concerned with specifics of plot, and while the story is coherent enough, it’s beyond minimalist in terms of detail. The killer’s identity is ultimately irrelevant, as motives aren’t ever fully explained. It’s eerie, but it’s weightless.
And that may constitute a criticism of the genre more than of this specific work (provided I understand giallo’s conventions correctly). They’ve obviously translated the feel well from screen to page, but my tastes run more to the conventional mystery than a style-over-substance mood piece. (I like the drawing room scene at the end where all is revealed.)
That said Shaffer and Genovese have done a marvelous job of finding a cinematic style of visual storytelling. Establishing shots of the various settings, eerie moments where the “camera” seems to linger on an object as the action moves out of the frame, progressively tighter panels irising in on a subject… it’s all tremendously effective. Genovese is an extremely talented visual storyteller. His work reminds me of Sam Kieth’s on books like Four Women, combining the mundane and the surreal and the horrific.
Reading through Oni’s The Awakening the first time was actually a bit frustrating, as I had next to no knowledge of the giallo genre. On subsequent readings, after some web research, I was better able to appreciate the book for its ambitions in regards to its source material. But am I really that unusual for my lack of giallo literacy? I wonder how many casual readers will be a bit baffled by the book because they’re unaware of its inspirations.
Ultimately though, The Awakening is a laudable attempt to expand genre horizons in graphic novels, even if the genre in question is more interesting to me in concept than execution. It may be style over substance, but it’s certainly got style.