Tiny Giants - Softcover

Nate Powell, best known for his Walkie Talkie series, has been self-publishing his comics for years, selling over 20,000 copies of his comics to date without the benefit of formal distribution.

A cartoonist's cartoonist, Powell employs stunning technique in some of the most complex, elusive stories in the comics medium, approaching the level of narrative abstraction of psychedelic '60s cartoonist Rick Griffin's weird pages full of pop-culturally referential figures speaking only made-up palindromes and exclamation marks. But Powell still draws real people in realistic settings. He pretty much dispenses with plots, though, preferring to interleave incidents to conjure an existential feeling, most often youthful angst engendered by the travails of romantic love and realizations of mortality. Occasionally, he tells a unitary story, as in the volume opener, "Nineteen," in which a black soldier delivers a message to another, presumably dead, soldier's family in a lily-white town. If his young-and-soulful stuff frequently becomes mawkish, his artistic skills make every frame worthwhile. Frame by frame, his work is more varied in every way than that of most other comics artists, yet he unfailingly maintains narrative momentum by carrying over details from one panel to the next, no matter how altered the angle of vision. Brilliant. Ray Olson
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