David Small has made his name illustrating children’s picture books.* You know that; I didn’t, until Melissa told me about Small and passed me Stitches, Small’s first graphic novel, a medium about which I do know something.  In the graphic novel market, I am not this book’s target audience, in that I find most graphic memoirs self-absorbed and overdetermined.  I like Harvey Pekar in small doses, admire Mary Fleener from a distance, and consider the canonical cornerstone Maus excellent but overrated.  Persepolis is the only recent graphic memoir to pull me in, in part because Marjane Satrapi had a truly big story to tell.

The story of David Small’s childhood and adolescence isn’t big, but it’s mightily weird, and he has both a sharp narrative angle and technique to burn.  His story encompasses a cold mother with a tragic secret, a doctor father who personifies the blithe arrogance of the 1950s professional class, and deranged grandparents out of Sherwood Anderson by way of Cormac McCarthy. Small the character travels from confusion through rage and finally withdrawal, while Small the author never lets his (apparently) well-adjusted present divert the reader’s attention from his deeply troubled past.  The narrative emerges from young Small’s hermetic point of view, but not because mature Small shares too many graphic memoirists’ narcissism.  Instead, he demonstrates that self-absorption is both the affliction and the compass of youth, like a hormonal peyote trip from which we all get to learn and need to advance.

I don’t know Small’s work as an illustrator, but I assume he primarily does single images, which makes his flair for sequential storytelling especially impressive.  Although he doesn’t come close to Will Eisner’s talent as a cartoonist, he has obviously studied Eisner’s narrative techniques, and few artists in contemporary comics have his facility for combining deliberately mundane sequences with arresting, even startling effects.  Stitches accomplishes the rare feat of vividly depicting an ugly world to whose rich emotional landscape readers will want to return.

*from Melissa: my favorites are WHEN EVERYTHING CAME WITH DINOSAURS; THE LIBRARY; and IMOGENE’S ANTLERS, which Small also wrote. However, picking which David Small art is the best is like picking which chocolate cupcake is best. They’re all good. I loved and was incredibly moved and horrified by STITCHES, but as it’s not a kids’ book and Greg is the graphic novel afficionado in the family, I decided to have him review it instead. Oh, and psst – Mr. Small – St. Louis is so close to some of your other tour stops…

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