I like Laika

I thought that Nick Abadzis did an amazing job of rendering the story of Laika into a beautiful, fascinating, and thought-provoking graphic novel. The book was really a joy to read, and I found it particularly impressive because it seemed that much of the story was actually Abadzis’s own creation, rather than being fully historically accurate. Certainly he did a lot of research before creating Laika, but I doubt that the conversations were recorded in such detail, and considering that he invented the character of Yelena, he really had a lot of work to do in terms of putting the story together.

And now for an analysis of Laika via Understanding Comics. Well, to start off, I found that Abadzis used far more moment-to-moment transitions than I’d seen previously. He certainly employed a lot of action-to-action transitions as well, and many subject-to-subject ones, but compared to other authors that we’ve been reading for this class, he seemed to have far more moment-to-moment panels than is typical in modern (Western) comics. Oddly, though, I didn’t find that these moment-to-moment transitions slowed the book down, which is what McCloud had suggested would be the effect of such transitions. Instead, they seemed to increase my anticipation as I was reading, because they gradually showed me what a more typical book might show instantly. In other words, Abadzis often used six panels to depict a scene progression that many comics artists would have condensed to two panels. Thus, the effect (at least on me) was one of building tension and excitement, since my final reward of reading was prolonged. Furthermore, I’ve noticed that moment-to-moment transitions generally involve fewer words and less dialogue than action-to-action transitions. In my experience, this makes the moment-to-moment transitions move faster, because rather than having to read a lot of speech bubbles, I can simply absorb the information presented by the images and then move on to the next panel. This effect also allows for a gradual accumulation of images in my mind, which prepare me for a later change of scene. However, I can certainly see how in many other comics, the same use of moment-to-moment transitions would make the book read slower rather than quicker by prolonging a scene and extending it into more panels than it ultimately needs. It just seemed that in Laika, the transitions worked to speed up the novel’s pace by both increasing the reader’s anticipation and allowing for a quicker, smoother way of processing information.

One thing that really struck me about Laika and about Abadzis’s illustrating style were the faces in the novel. I really did not like them. On the one hand, I felt that they were too sketchy and that they looked more like preparatory drawings for a fine art painting than cartoon faces. The eyes were always very small, and the cheeks had these odd expressive lines on them that seemed unnecessary. They certainly don’t resemble any other faces that I’ve come across in graphic novels. In that way, I started to think that perhaps I didn’t like them because they weren’t cartoony enough and because I couldn’t relate to the characters as a result of their too-individual faces. But then I realized that the faces weren’t even that individual! I sometimes got the male characters confused because their faces looked too similar and I had a hard time telling them apart if their context wasn’t made clear. So then I understood that the faces were indeed fairly general and should have fit McCloud’s requirements for universality, allowing me to better identify with the characters because they might possibly resemble me. But I still didn’t relate to most of the characters; I only got inside the mindset of Yelena and, of course, Kudryavka. Ultimately, though, I understand Abadzis’s struggle to both represent real people who once existed and turn them into cartoon figures that he could easily draw over and over again. I think that he struck a nice balance between showing distinctive, specific characters and making them suitably simple for the purposes of a graphic novel. And I don’t think that the reader is expected to identify with all of the characters that we meet in Laika; certainly, people like Korolev and Yazdovsky are more authoritarian than they are friendly. But still, the faces in the novel struck me as atypically not cartoonish.