Comics & Graphic Novels Literary
Off the Cuff
- Publisher
- Porcupine's Quill
- Initial publish date
- Feb 2024
- Category
- Literary, African American, General, Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780889844766
- Publish Date
- Feb 2024
- List Price
- $10.00
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Aqueous by Nathanael Jones is a collection of prose poems that address the ways in which post-colonial realities in the black diaspora continue to fracture concepts of identity, history and memory, place, and community. Through the use of extended metaphors relating to the transatlantic slave trade, contemporary art, marine biology, and the commercial construction industry, both personal and collective experiences of being Afro-Caribbean Canadian in North America/Turtle Island are described and enacted as indefinitely liminal. Organized into three main poem sequences, the collection first uses a fictional sound art piece as a way of diagramming the kinds of fractured subjectivities engendered by colonialism and its after effects. In the second sequence, a beleaguered speaker navigates realities of manual labour and how they are used to shape racialized and gendered identities, and the pressures these forces exert upon interpersonal relationships. Lastly, the third sequence delves further into oceanographic themes in order to compose a portrait of Montreal's black anglophone communities as both invisible and yet forever in the peripherals of mainstream cultures in Canada.
About the author
Mark Huebner is a Canadian advertising copywriter and commercial illustrator. After studying film directing and screenwriting at New York University, Oral Roberts University, and University of Winnipeg, Mark started his career in film production before discovering that copywriting provided a broader channel for his compelling narratives. He is the author of Sports Bloopers: All-Star Flubs and Fumbles (Firefly Books, 2003), a YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, as well as Let Go, his first published wordless novel (Porcupine's Quill, 2021). He lives in Toronto.
Excerpt: Off the Cuff (by (author) Mark Huebner)
Preface by Warren Clements
This is a story without words. But is it? There are words throughoutin the frantic conversations as our hero prepares for his interview, in the clatter of discussions that must surely be going on as he walks toward his moment of reckoning, and, of course, in the climactic encounter.
But you have to imagine the words, and it is Mark Huebner's skill not only as a draughtsman/engraver but as a storyboard artist and storyteller that lets the reader fill in the missing bits. Whereas his wordless novel Let Go was a dramatic evocation of a fellow losing his job and recalling how he got to that point, here Mark is exercising his comic muscles. You can sense the hero's panic as one thing after another goes wrongsmall missteps, but anyone who has splashed coffee on their shirt before an important meeting or torn something vital at precisely the wrong time will wince, sympathize and, since it is happening to our hero and not to them, laugh.
The ultimate laugh comes with the payoff at the end, which of course I would not dream of revealing here. But when you get to the interview, note the inventive way in which words that are truly important are conveyed with a speech balloon that substitutes a drawing for the missing sentence(s). And then note the way in which that drawing morphs into a different one a page or two later. (Obscure enough for you? It won't be.)
Mark has to juggle several balls in the airthe forward motion of the story, the need to make sure the reader grasps what is going on, and the inclusion of minor details that flesh out the panel or increase the reader's amusement. And did I mention he doesn't use words? Talk about a tightrope walk.
The reader has to play a part in this: to pay attention, to adapt to this form of storytelling. It is a wonderful art, practiced over the past century by such masters of the form as Lynd Ward, Frans Masereel, Milt Gross (now there was a comic artist), Laurence Hyde and George A. Walker (those last two, like Mark, working in Canada), but it makes its demands. Books of this type are not to be skimmed through; every picture tells you one important thing and possibly many other things. Happily, if you miss a connection you can go back and revisit the drawing that leads into it. Books are handy that way. And since Mark is a nifty artist, the journey is a pleasure.
[Continued in Off the Cuff]