Reviews
ATTENTION SEEKING
The Nao of Brown Glyn Dillon Self Made Hero RRP £16.99/$24.95 • No digital edition Reviewed by John Innes Glyn Dillon’s art first reached an audience in the archetypal 1990s comicsand-music magazine Deadline, where he drew a strip called Planet Swerve. Awash with spaceships in the shape of classical Greek sculpture, doped-up aliens and copious genitals, like much of the magazine’s content, what it lacked in
linear storytelling it more than made up for with sheer enthusiasm. While fellow Deadline alumni Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl, Gorillaz) and Phil Bond (Wired World, Deadpool) continued to work in mainstream comics, Dillon established a career as a storyboard artist. Seventeen years on, The Nao of Brown is Dillon’s first self-written piece, a stunningly beautiful graphic novel which combines the realistic storytelling of European comics with a cinematic sensibility obviously influenced by the artist’s second career. The Nao of Brown tells the story of a young Japanese woman, Nao, living in London, and her friends, loves and obsessions. The book follows her as she lives her life coping with OCD, which leaves her battered with violent, morbid thoughts. In a taxi ride she imagines reaching forward to break the driver’s neck, cycling through the city she mentally ploughs through children playing in the street, working in a toy shop she pictures a scenario in which she stabs a pregnant woman’s swollen belly with a pencil. It’s a testament to Dillon’s writing and expressive art that none of these scenes are anything other than deeply moving. The reader experiences the fear that Nao has of CONTINUES ➤
INFINITY #3 • February 2013 • 8 of 57