Body Music by Julie Maroh

This is an amazing book. It's a series of vignettes about love, mostly romantic and sexual love, told in 'graphic novel' format. Most of the vignettes are unrelated, most of the characters are (relatively) young, and all of the vignettes take place in Montreal. There are vignettes showing post-first date anxiety, the revelation of true love, one night stands, spicing up a long term relationship, first meetings, post-fights.

What makes the book extraordinary are the drawings. They are so evocative. Faces twist with emotion, darkness lowers over wintry Montreal, anger rages silently across pages of panels, ghostly figures reconstruct memories.

"In the heat of the club. Saint Catherine Street East" is largely wordless. We see flashes of heated bodies as they dance. A single dancer in the crowd catches the undivided attention of a man at the bar. Perspective shifts: we watch the dancer circle close to the watcher on the dance floor. The dancer's face, torso, back, lips rivet the watcher's attention -- in sequence? We see the dancer as dynamic fragments surrounding the still watcher. Words finally appear as the two begin to interact, but it is through the drawings that their relationship has been created and evolves.

This book is not a comic. It's storytelling in pictures and words, with so much more said by the drawings than by the words.

"Are you my mother?" by Alison Bechdel is more typical of the graphic novels I've read in the past. In Bechdel's books the drawings emphasize and illustrate the words. It's relatively easy to re-imagine them as conventional written memoirs or as conventional narrative movies.

In Body Music drawings create character, atmosphere, and emotion. Words simply explain, clarify, or contradict.

Maroh's work is a more elusive, allusive beast.