After a brief break, the Friday Magazine returns.
I quite like this era of Heavy Metal in which we get a "complete" graphic novel in each issue. I put complete in quotation marks because, though length-wise it might qualify as a graphic novel, I feel like it's really the middle of a story. Perhaps it would be better to say a complete graphic album, rather than graphic novel.
This month's GN, "Yiu - My Promise to You," was stylish and dark, and presented a fascinating future based around a consolidation of power of six of the major religions (it doesn't ever quite say which). Part of the story is about a hitwoman who is trying to pay for a surgery for her brother, and part is about the birth of the Antichrist. I'm not entirely certain how the two mesh, and there's not really a lot of back story. This is why I think it's only a part of a series, rather than what we would traditionally think of as a graphic novel. To me, at any rate, a graphic novel tells a complete story. It might be part of a larger sequence, but within that sequence it itself is a complete narrative. I don't get that feeling from this graphic novel. But if we think of it as a graphic album, part of a numbered series, then we can read the piece in the context for which it's intended, as part of a story. Translation's a funny business, even when it's translation of formats.
Onward.
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