So this past Christmas I bought him the first three volumes of the Dark Horse hardcovers. He became a little obsessed with Beanworld, and wanted to get more of the story. I had owned an earlier, less complete collection for many years, which my 9-year-old son found and read last year. On the other, like the synergistic combination of film scores and movies, engaging two different ways of obtaining and processing stimuli can create a completely different (emergent) experience that is more than the sum of its constituent information streams. On the one hand, if you don't enjoy one aspect, it all falls apart. Just a different way of engaging with the media.
On the one hand, it limits how much imagination you need to apply, but on the other, it requires you to "explore" the page more than text to find details that you might have otherwise overlooked if you just skimmed it. Graphic novels are intriguing in the different ways authors can present information: in dialogue, in text, and in artwork. This is my first graphic novel after Watchmen, and while that one didn't really do it for me, I think this book helped me understand why. I'm very excited to go back to Beanworld in Volume 2. It reminds me a bit of DaisyWorld, a kind of literary modelling: an ostensibly simple abstraction that helps one understand the intricate mechanisms underlying various phenomena. Marder created a world with its own ecological processes, organisms, and physical environment onto which he projects any number of tropes from literature and mythology (the hero's journey etc). This is all the more impressive in light of its wholesomeness, which can so easily become trite. This is one of the most creative things I've read in a while.
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