The Ticking - Hardcover

French, Renee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891830708 ISBN 13: 9781891830709

Publisher: Top Shelf Productions, 2006

Synopsis

The Ticking is the story of Edison Steelhead, a boy who at birth takes his mother's life and his father's deformed face. Secreted away by his father to be raised in a remote island lighthouse, Edison relates to his surroundings in the only way he knows how--by capturing them in his sketchbook. Able to find beauty in even the most grotesque of things, Edison embraces his own unsettling appearance and sets out to confront the rest of the world.
Waiting for him on its alien shores are the sights and experiences that will give shape to both his future and his past. Written and illustrated by acclaimed artist Renée French, The Ticking is a compelling work of graphic literature, a reminder that before we can appreciate the beauty around us, we must first find it within ourselves. A gorgeous 216-page hardcover graphic novel, designed by Jordan Crane.

About this title

Reviews

Starred Review. French's work always splits the difference between cuteness and revulsion, and her new graphic novel is both the sweetest and the most stomach-churning thing she's ever drawn. Budding artist Edison Steelhead is a grotesquely deformed boy—his eyes are on opposite sides of his head—whose mother died in childbirth. His father wants Edison to get radical plastic surgery. After Edison refuses, his father brings home a "new sister" for him, Patrice, who's a bug-eating chimpanzee in a baby-doll dress. Then things get really weird. Edison heads off to seek his fortune in the city, his father continues to try to get him to hide or change his face, and the book's point becomes less and less its plot and more French's astonishing artwork—just a small, wobbly-bordered panel or two on each page, rendered in feather-soft pencil textures. Edison's bildungsroman involves a bunch of exquisitely rendered symbolic motifs: flies, fishing lures, tweezers, dismal hotel wallpaper and some gruesomely sexual-looking geoducks. Miraculously, French keeps The Ticking's tone deadpan and charming, with laconic captions and long silent sequences—even the grossest moments are played for nervous giggles. She's an inimitable and masterful stylist, a kind of Edward Gorey who draws out the whimsical side of body-horror. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

When Edison Steelhead is born, his mother dies, and his father, seeing that Edison resembles him, flees with the newborn to a lighthouse on an islet. An occasional visitor boats over, and then his father has Edison draw a mask over his wall-eyed, earless, bald head. Once the boy goes with his father to a doctor, who proposes surgery that he says is better done sooner than later. But Edison rejects the procedure. Just after returning home, father presents Edison with "your new sister"--a chimp named Patrice. All along, Edison draws found objects: insects, cigarette butts, twists of tissue, the scars on father's head. When he grows up and leaves the islet, he illustrates a fly-fishing catalog. Exploiting the texture of the drawing paper, French defines shapes with shading more than line, and she makes Edison's drawings stylistically distinct from the narrative continuum. Proceeding, quite often without words, one or two frames per page rather than in most comics' nine-panel grids, she fashions a gem that means more with every reading. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1891830708
• ISBN 13: 9781891830709
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Staros Chris