Customer Reviews

Things Undone

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We are a visual society, more apt to look at something in pictures or in motion than simply printed words on a page, a society of instant gratification that prefers to 'get it' in one quick setting rather than pondering through pages and hours of work. Enter the Graphic Novel. As long as there are artists of the caliber of Shane White creating new books on the order of THINGS UNDONE the new direction of marrying illustration art to the written word will make a strong case for this genre.

As both a writer and an artist Shane White proves to be a true professional. His story in this particular venture is not the expected fantasy novel populated with beasts and other comic book heroes: THINGS UNDONE is a seemingly semi-autobiographical story (that is just how real he make the novel read!) of a graphic designer/video game artist Rick Watt confronted with all of the mundane emergencies of living - housing, job loss, frustrated failures, rocky relationships - becomes a zombie and is driven to the point of self annihilation. Sound grim? Well, in White's clever hands the story contains just the right admixture of dark comedy with reality and transforms that into flashbacks and flash forwards to make the story applicable to 'everyman'. Told in comic book style (the color range of orange white and black of the drawings keeps it focused if a bit visually dreary) complete with created words for sounds ('krak', 'slam', 'chuc', 'chaka', `blam', `spew' etc), the life of Rick Watt is at once visually entertaining while it is made more visceral in impact of the story line. It is a wild ride, easily read in one sitting, and places Shane White in the arena of creative graphic novelists in fine fettle. A new form to watch - life as told in the form of a comic book! Grady Harp, October 09

Rick Watt is a mopey twentysomething who moves jobs from Philadelphia to Seattle -- and, in flashbacks, moves from one girlfriend to a prettier model -- without budging his massive mopey depressiveness. White shows the mopiness and depression by having Watt slowly turn into a zombie, complete with body parts falling off -- and that's a great visual metaphor...except that it doesn't make up for the fact that Watt has no real reason to be mopey and annoying. His new job isn't going as well as he'd like it to, but he's also just being a jerk, particularly to his girlfriend, Natalie.

White is going for existential ennui, or maybe a quarterlife crisis, but, really, it's just that Rick is a passive-aggressive jerk who can't communicate effectively with either his girlfriend or his co-workers. He gets a happy ending of sorts by learning to have "backbone," which is precisely the wrong lesson -- Rick needed to be able to talk, not to fight.

The zombie motif is artistically interesting, but the moments of greater zombification aren't consistently related to Rick being more beaten down and dehumanized; more often, they're a product of his own anger or lack of attention. There's nothing wrong with Rick that a bit of slowing down and paying attention wouldn't cure; he's not a zombie, just a self-absorbed guy who thinks he deserves to get better than he gives.