Equinoxes

God, I love Pedrosa so much. He's just so brilliant. It's hard to explain what Equinoxes is about. It's the fleeting moment in between everything perhaps? The comic is divided into four seasons and we have different people in different stages of life trying to find meaning and mostly, themselves. The comic is philosophical leaving you room to interpret it the way you want. At the same time it's solemn and beautiful in its quietness, which makes the heart to feel at ease. Pedrosa is a master at doing this - making us understand so much more than there seems to be. My favorite was the man living on his own after divorce, his daughter visiting him from time to time. In a way I felt like we were alike on some level and stuck in the same kind of nothingness that's hard to define and thus fix.

The art is magnificent. The colors are vibrant and the line art is so beautiful. The seasons define the colors mostly and colors make sense by not making sense. I could frame all the panels and hang them on my walls. Pedrosa's style is perfect, really. It's subtle and simple, but at the same time meaningful, sad and detailed. The controversy in his art is very interesting and more or so there's so much more hidden in everything he does. The cover isn't really the best possible though. It's not because it's not good, but it fails to depict the book and most of its content. It also makes this seems dark and grim, when it's not. The other editions have way much better covers, so I do hope the publisher will think this through. The font in the speech bubbles was wonderful, but the text pieces in between looked hideous with Times New Roman. The poetic aspect was thus lost and the bulk text looks unappealing. Don't do this to Master Pedrosa, please. He deserves more.

This is the best graphic novel I have read since Essex County. I really cannot say enough praise, but here is an attempt:

Describing Equinoxes is just as difficult as describing why any great piece of art is beautiful and or important to someone whom has never encountered it...

The art style is magnificent. Setting a dynamic mood with its range of vivid, sometimes moody schemes. I felt the urge to cut out some of the stark imagery for framing.

The characters are as real as some of the elder New Englanders I love and hate. And the story holds its scales somewhere between deep sentimentality and existential crisis.

Cyril Pedrosa will soon share my shelf-space with Jeff Lemire.