Giovanna Fabi uses her artwork to evoke so many feelings out of the reader.
Perfect Love (mini kuš! #133) by Giovanna Fabi (kuš!)
In her comic Perfect Love, Giovanna Fabi poses a fascinating challenge to her readers right away— look beyond the image. Her artwork is built over grids— not the usual grids (i.e., panel layouts) that we usually talk about in comic circles but grids like the graph paper you used in school to chart out mathematical equations. She draws her panels in the grids, layered beneath (or maybe over) her already geometrically-influenced figures. In a lot of her images, the grids provide a foundation for her drawings; she’s not a slave to the grids but you can see how lines and shapes roughly snap to them. The grids are structural but they are also narrative, creating a distancing between the story and the reader that mirrors the character’s own relation to what’s happening to her.
On one level, Fabi uses the grids to create patterns for her backgrounds that infuse a buzz, an energy, to her image. Having these 1x1 squares juxtaposed over every image is kind of exciting because there’s this repetition that’s happening on every page, a rhythm to each panel and page that pulls you in. And like the best rhythms, her artwork becomes even more special when she pulls away from the grids, almost defying the order that the grid is trying to impose on her. For large parts of this mini comic, she’s working in concert with the grid— she creates patterns and boundaries in the story with the grids but her characters, two lovers, are ever so slightly out of synch with the grid work. Their edges don’t quite match with the grid work— it’s close but they’re still organic and don’t fall completely within the confines of the grid.
The story is about this woman and her lover, enjoying a physical connection with each other. The sensuality of the book becomes this thing that pulls these two together even as forces in the story try to keep them apart. It’s a surreal story about love, dreams, and touch. These are all the ways that these two interact and when they’re apart, you feel the absence of the other. Fabi moves around the spaces of these connections and the void produced when one of them goes away. Her artwork is very simple and open; it’s easy to put yourself into the position of both the woman and the man, experiencing this story through the masks of Fabi’s drawings.
Those are the things that the grid amplifies. When the characters are together, the lines of the grid connect and bind these two together, creating this gravitational force that exists just for these two. The repetition of the grids laid over the lovers suggests this shared air that they’re breathing. It’s part of the intimacy of the art. And then when it’s only one of them in the image, the grid just highlights the isolation that they’re feeling. It becomes so noticeable that one of them is missing as the grids become so much more dominant.
Functioning on many levels, the grid also suggests that there’s something else happening here, that this story isn’t quite what it seems to be. It creates a veil over the narrative that dares you to look beyond it. The grid never gets in the way of the storytelling but it suggests depth to the artwork— is the grid in front of or behind the characters? It’s there somewhere in relationship to the reader, the characters, and the setting but it’s never quite too clear where in space it is.
Fabi’s use of the grid could be a gimmick, something that’s just there in an inert way but that’s not how she’s working. It’s never there just to be there. It’s suggestive in so many different ways that make this an exciting comic. Perfect Love s a small, simple comic— deceptively simple as Fabi uses her artwork to evoke so many feelings out of the reader. It’s a short comic that feels different each time because the grid seems to do something different with every reading. It’s effective, evocative, and emotional.
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