CR Review: Watching Days Become Years #4



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I have a total art crush on Jeff LeVine's series Watching Days Become Years right now, and I'm not sure I can articulate exactly why it hits me the way it does. I'd like to try. This is a comic book series from a very small publisher, Sparkplug Comics Books. Despite its familiar dimension the book itself is printed on slightly heavier stock than one might expect, giving it definite heft. The cover is half-photo and half-text block, with no indication of comics content inside. It's a solid object, not quite a book but absent of the ephemeral qualities we ascribe to classic funnybooks.

LeVine is probably best known for the 1990s series No Hope, and if you flip through an issue of the new series really quickly, the structure resembles that effort. There are several short stories, from one-pagers to multiple-page efforts, and LeVine lingers on almost of all the pages either placed directly within the action as a character or as the eyes through whom the reader watches the story unfold. What seems different about this work is that many of the stories LeVine chooses to tell are much more reserved, much less forced than some of the early work, both in terms of mood and the quality of the narrative. There are greater contrasts between moments where he seems to be gently reflecting on a moment and those in which he acts as a participant.

When this sense of distance and maybe even withdrawal rubs up against more humorous and direct anecdotes, it does feel a lot like the array of modes through which we view the world as we get older, the way memory collapses into moments -- a snatch of dialog, and an anecdote or two. Also, LeVine is a better artist now, which allows the sensibility with he depicts a street scene or a collection of object act as its own commentary, to suggest a moment of pleasure from seeing something arranged a certain way, or to evoke in non-literal fashion how a viewpoint felt beyond what was simply seen. LeVine's comics capture moments the way we seize on memories, those that come idly to us, those that reflect a certain mood of type of quiet engagement. I don't know of too many cartoonists that have been able to engage modern this delicately, and his confident use of some of comics' most appealing formal strengths adding resonance. I'm not sure it's for everyone; the effect I describe might not hit different people the same way and anyone divorced from that measured effect would no doubt have an extremely different view of the comic's content moment to moment. It's a very good comic for me right now, though, and I'm grateful for that.


 
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