Released in 2008, I Kill Giants was a 7-issue mini-series about a young girl named Barbara who claims to kill giants. The other kids at school and the teachers aren't sure what to do with her, as she's generally prickly, impatient, and has no real time for them. Outside of tabletop RPGs, her main interest is in hunting and killing giants, to protect people.
For most of the issues, the book occupies that same sort of quasi-magical realism as Calvin and Hobbes, albeit substantially darker in tone. Instead of questions about whether Hobbes is a real tiger that looks like a stuffed toy or not, it's the question of whether Barbara is really talking with fairies and building traps for giants (and whether they exist), or if she's collecting roadkill as an escape from the troubles at home. Her father is nowhere to be seen, her older sister seems to be working to support Barbara and her brother (and breaking under the weight of it), and her mother. . .
Well, her mother is an off-limits topic, and there's something upstairs in her house that fills Barbara with terror. The first time its referenced, Nimura zooms the panel in on the huge round frames of Barbara's glasses and flips the colors, so they're dark voids. This sort of motif recurs through the book, and is actually amplified the further it goes. There's always light shining through the window on the landing halfway up, but Nimura tilts the angle to make it look steep and ominous. The same outlines of jagged-toothed faced Barbara sees in the clouds as portents start to appear in the shadows that border that band of light on the stairs.
Kelly writes Barbara as a child - intelligent, cynical, but still a child in a lot of ways - struggling to impose control on a situation where she feels she has none. She sets limits, makes rules only she knows for how people interact with her, and is blunt with those who cross them. Her tentative friendship with a new girl in class, Sophia, is almost torpedoed because Sophia thinks encouraging Barbara to share her interest in baseball with their gym teacher will smooth over troubles. Things spiral from there, and sooner or later, Barbara has to face the music.
The fights are all wild energy, panels tipping on their sides, limbs just a blur. When the storm arrives, its roar fills half the page from top to bottom, with the other half devoted to a series of panels showing Barbara and the other girls, or even houses, being nearly blown away by the magnitude of its voice.
2 comments:
Have you seen the film? I haven't yet, as I'm a bit wary of it missing what makes the comic so effective.
I haven't, so I can't help you there. I can't even remember when I learned there was a film, but I think I've "learned" it at least three times now, and I'm surprised each time.
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