"A graphic novel on steroids" is the way one enthusiastic young woman described it.
Nonhuman Communications marries a comic book’s visual storytelling
and visceral excitement with a prose novel’s nuance and depth, in an
illustrated “scrapbook” format. Lively pages, like hot MySpace pages and cool fan sites.
Each Nonhuman Communications graphic novel is presented as a scrapbook compiled by the novel's protagonist. The Concrete Jungle Book,
for example, is presented to readers as a scrapbook put together by
Little Mo, the novel's main character, who grows from age 9 to 18 over
the course of the novel.
The prose narrative tells the story from the point of view of the
human protagonist and other human characters. Since humans use verbal
language to communicate, words seem the logical choice to tell human
stories. For example, the opening paragraphs of the prose narrative in The Concrete Jungle Book:
Shift finished at 3:00 PM, Big Mo swapped patrol car for SUV and drove to the South Dallas Cultural Center where he waited for his wife, Myra, and their nine-year-old son, Morris Armstrong, Jr., a.k.a. Little Mo. The veteran peace officer enjoyed the glorious late November weather, daydreaming about the Thanksgiving feast his family would devour with gratitude this coming Thursday. Good thing he bought a twenty pounder, with big-eating Baldo being there and all, he chuckled to himself.Life ain’t so bad, all in all, he decided.
He glanced up at a picture on the visor of Myra, his Hispanic honey. Eleven years they’d been together, one year less than Mo’s time in service. Damn, ain’t that something, he thought. Just a brother from the hood, all big and black and hard and tough and all, and her so soft and gentle and loving enough to make this cold heart melt like butter on a hot plate. Thank you, Jesus!
Not that it’s been easy, he reminded himself, his face clouding momentarily. Ain’t hard getting out of the ghetto, brother. Just hard getting out alive.
The comics pages move through the same story space as the prose narrative,
but from the nonhuman point of view, often that of an animal character,
but sometimes a force of nature, or inhabitants of the spirit world.
Below is the final comics page of Chapter 1, The Concrete Jungle Book. The color scheme mimics the
realities of wolf vision, which engages a limited spectrum compared to
the human eye.
Scrapbook sections throughout open multiple portals into the lives of the characters, human and non.
Dolphin Energy Map by Morris "Little Mo" Armstrong, Jr., Age 10
(from Little Mo's scrapbook in The Concrete Jungle Book, Chapter 3; oil pastels on paper)
We observe that screenagers enthusiastically respond to the prose+comics scrapbook novel design, because, as one young woman explained,”Reading these pages feels like interacting with multiple narrative streams at a web site.”
(from Little Mo's scrapbook in The Concrete Jungle Book)
Often we integrate prose, scrapbook, and comics elements in a 2-page spread, as in this example from The Concrete Jungle Book. In the spread below, the wolves, Akela and Raksha, observe the murder of Big Mo and Myra, parents of Little Mo
We’ve developed a media mix that lets us creatively depict the reality
of animal consciousness and behavior, without anthropomorphizing. It’s
fun, too. At least we’re having fun with it. And, readers of
traditional novels and comics don’t seem to have any trouble navigating
our books. We tested, it works. They enjoy reading them, too.
To identify with beings who sense this world in ways so different from
humans, yet who share an Earthly existence and thus can’t properly be
considered “alien” – this seems to us the literary equivalent of an
amusement park thrill ride. More
than one reader paging through a Nonhuman Communications prose+comics
scrapbook novel, moving from one media type to another, has reported
feelings of intense strangeness, mystery, plus sudden epiphanies of
recognition and familiarity.
