Art

Pinocchio Review

Alan Hindle | Wednesday 13 April, 2011 16:14

The first of many beautiful but shocking scenes in Winshluss’s Pinocchio comes when Svetlana Geppetto, the dissolute, beehive bombshell who probably married the greasy little inventor to get out of Soviet Russia, discovers her husband’s new electric toy can have uses of her own. That nose, it’s just the right shape and size… Unfortunately for the bored wife, unlike the original Pinocchio, whose nose grew when he told a lie, this one, as Geppetto enthusiastically pitches to his military clients, is actually a flamethrower. The mechanical boy leaves his smoke-filled home to head out on the road of adventure, where he meets tyrants, perverts, sea monsters and doomed children. Most of whom, as in all the best kids books, come to horrific ends. Some might argue this isn’t a kids book, but those people have never read the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales and were probably never children themselves. They just popped up in a pumpkin patch somewhere, already wagging their fingers and looking for stuff to scold.

An epic graphic novel following very, very loosely the original story of Carlo Collodi’s little wooden boy, Winshluss’s pen hacks and chops inky images out of the paper as though his deadline was Doomsday, and that right soon. At first glance the sloppy dynamism seems a little crude, but painstaking attention to detail and a flawless sense of composition gives his scrawls a scruffy elegance that builds to a richer finish than clean perfection ever could. Every panel is drenched in dark, forbidding atmosphere- assisted by colourist Cizo’s moody palette of mostly blues and greens. Winshluss expands the Pinocchio myth, shovelling other fairy tales and cultural myths into the fire, everything from Snow White to Superman and Christianity, Easter Island and Mussolini.

Reading a bit about the artist Winshluss, I found several references online to his supposed lack of morals. But this is a very moral tale. This Pinocchio may be a devastating war machine, but he’s an innocent. His only dark side is that he exists. He was built to be ultimate killing machine, but it is the schemes and deceits, the abuses and corruptions of those who use him that are evil. Pinocchio is content just to be around folks and observe. In fact, the only thoughts in his head belong to Jiminy Cockroach, the lazy drunken bug that lives rent-free in his steel head.

The use of vignettes, short little interludes employing a variety of styles, mostly to tell mini-tales of Jiminy, start to proliferate about two-thirds of the way through. To the point that they threaten to derail the previous, solid storytelling. It sort of suggests the artist was losing steam and needed ways to keep his own interest going. However, as said before, this is an epic work, and whatever it took to complete the story is justified to me. Since these these breaks are all beautifully done and hilarious, tackling various themes, interlacing storylines, introducing characters, it seems a rather petty observation. Even if it was my own.

A gorgeous and inventive piece of storytelling genius, Pinocchio takes on a life of its own and becomes considerably more than the sum of the fairy tales Winshluss pilfers and scribbles. Easily one of the best graphic novels I’ve read in fifteen years.

Originally from French publishers Les Requins Marteaux, Pinocchio is published in English (not that there’s much translation needed, the book is almost entirely wordless) by Knockabout Comics on 25 April, but advance copies may be found at several comic stores in London, including Forbidden Planet and Gosh!

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