Finger Prints

This is an absolutely fascinating, compelling and disturbing graphic novel. It’s in a wide and low format more usual for comic strip reprints, and he breaks it into a grid of two tiers by five panels, dialogue generally taking one of the ten spaces rather than being in a balloon within a panel. I’m not sure he always uses the distinctive timing that this encourages or even forces flawlessly – sometimes a sequence should flow, but doesn’t. Nonetheless, the formal qualities do create an original feel and rhythm.

The story is remarkably complex for a comparatively short work (it’s under a hundred pages). Dr Fingers is a top plastic surgeon, most notably working on a famous movie actress. She is engaged in a sham relationship with a co-star in a big hit film. The doctor’s wife is reluctant to have more work done on her aging face; his assistant is ready to strike out on her own with a fantastic new kind of treatment, about which the doctor is sceptical (and which turns out to be terrifying at a Charles Burns level, if not at all in his style).

But the sophistication is in the thinking behind the story: this is a rich examination of ideas of beauty and the pressures to maintain it, and especially those on women and how that reflects on their position in the world. “Culturally, a woman IS what she appears to be to others,” as Dr Fingers says when preparing to cut up another female face. He’s not even happy with the huge movie star, wanting to make one more change, and you can only believe that there will always be one more thing.

He makes the art work with this – frankly no one looks that attractive to me, but he differentiates people enough to make it work, despite the hook-nose line-mouth manga reductiveness. Actually the boldness of his line rather seemed like modern woodcuts, and he makes the simply cartooned faces very expressive, even of subtle and fleeting feelings changing across short sequences of dialogue-free panels.

It’s a shame that a work as strong and deep as this will never get very much attention – it doesn’t have the big-subject, big-statement hook for those outside comics, and for comic fans, well, we are bludgeoned with material that simply regurgitates and reinforces the most adolescent, blatant and simple-minded notions of beauty, especially when applied to women. Still, in its quiet way this is one of the finest graphic novels I’ve read in years.