So in amongst changing job and so on I managed to find some time to get to read.
The Nightly News is as Roger said Hickman at his finest. The glossy, Monochrome infographical art style of Pax Romana while pretty didn't suit the story content.
Here it is the perfect fit thematically acting as a brilliant world building tool that raises the tension and engages the reader with the horrible media controlled world.
The character art is loose abstract and at odds with its surroundings as are the terrorists/agents of change portrayed within. All the media creeps are more tightly drawn and defined making them somehow more real and easier to resent.
I don't want to comment on the story too much in case people are going to read it but it was really engaging, I wanted to know more and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting.
During the week I was reading the follow on (auto)biography by Alison Bechdel called Are you my mother? While Fun Home was about her Father, his suicide and about her early days of coming out Are you my mother? takes on the more elusive and daunting task of writing a book about her mother.
Along the way we get a lot of insight into the authors frame of mind when writing the first book, her mothers reactions to it and the relatively more complex and undefinable character that is her mother who comes across as very funny but very distant. Her mother is still alive so the book spans the authors entire life to date and is both tragic and humorous in equal doses.
There's a lot of themes dealt with from the authors LGBT relationships, to her analysis and unique ways of looking at things to trying to define a character that is very hard to describe directly, like trying to describe a ship by the ripples it leaves in it's wake.
The art is great, it uses minimal colour and the line work is simple but the perspective and choice of what is shown is very cleverly thought out.
My only complaint is I felt like a voyeur reading it, it is a very personal book sharing a lot of things that must have been daunting to put out there to the public.
