Customer Reviews

Sounds of Your Name

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Nate Powell creates some of the most incredible comics I've ever encountered. The visual style shifts almost as quickly as the teenaged characters' moods, but never becomes random or incoherent. Some lines flow like Jules Feiffer's scrawl, others jolt down the page in angular tracks that remind me of Sam Keith. Some pages feel light and breezy; other times, broad, dense blacks make even night air feel as dense as a tombstone.

A comic really stands on its writing, though, no matter how good the art is. Powell presents some of the finest comic writing around. The scripts bring to life the trials and occasional small triumphs of life as a teen or an adult just starting out. That time of life often rides on emotion rather than reason. He renders that whirl and confusion accurately, something that linear plotting and familiar visual angles just can't do. If graphic novels correspond to literary prose, then Powell's work comes closer to poetry in many ways.

Written reviews have no way to capture the look of this book, and its feel simlpy has to be experienced first-hand. Powell became one of my favorite comic artists the moment I first saw his work. This volume cements his reputation as one of the finest creators working today.

-- wiredweird

PS: This volume includes "It Disappears," which has been published as separately.

Sounds of your Name is a graphic novel anthology of black-and-white zine and comic stories by punk band player Nate Powell. Featuring dark, gritty artwork, dialogue that turns on a dime from casual to deadly serious, and sequences that are likewise drift from day-in-the-life to tense to shockingly explosive, the stories in Sounds of Your Name captivate with underground fervor. From the hard life of an alley cat who longs for the comforts of domesticity, to the simultaneously grim and spiritual insights of a war veteran, to the rites of passage from childhood to adulthood, Sounds of Your Name is undeniably a "thinking man's comic" from cover to cover. An avant-garde collection especially recommended for anyone interested in taking the pulse of the underground comix scene.

I don't know how or if Nate Powell matures as a writer in his later work, because I have only read this collection, which contains his early stuff. I loved the black and white art and think he's a very talented illustrator; I thought the writing was mediocre. Here's a sample:

The rays' eyes were just like the fishers'--all sunken in and sad, like slippery little basset hounds panicking in the August sun. They soon died and simply enough, I watched their little skins bake and harden. The men need those fish for nothing more than rent and a little food. More spokes in the wheel.

The best pieces are the shorter, enigmatic ones that contain very little writing.