Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car
Comics for Beautiful, Awful and Ordinary Days
Ratings2
Average rating2.8
Jordan Bolton's Blue Sky Through The Window of A Moving Car is a poignant collection of comics that explore universal experiences and emotions through art and poetry. Small yet powerful, and equal parts heart-breaking and heart-warming, these poetic comics are intensely relatable and go straight to the heart of what it means to be human. Most of life is made up of mundane moments on ordinary days. But every moment, every good day, bad day, and average day, had to happen exactly the way that it did for you to exist. Everything that made you, connects us all in small, invisible, and beautiful ways. This first comic collection from artist Jordan Bolton explores the fleeting details that unite us. Jordan brings together the visual language of comics with the heartfelt language of poetry, to express moments of love and heartbreak, embarrassment and shame, hope and disappointment, grief and happiness. Split into sections that reflect where we spend the majority of our time--In Public, In Transit, and At Home--Bolton shines spotlights on the lives and stories unfolding around us every day that we might otherwise ignore. With the addition of new and unseen comics, Blue Sky Through The Window of A Moving Car is a gentle reminder that everything is ordinary, everything is extraordinary, and everything is connected.
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Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.
This one is a short comic book that ilustrates the kind of everyday situations that most of us either have experienced or will experience in the future, either nice situations, sad situations, or that weird time that a random old man sat besides you on the bus and told you his entire life story before arriving to his destination.
While I related to a couple of the situations I found the comic book a bit lacking, both in terms of content and creativity. There's an infinity of experiences that could have been told so I guess it just would have been nice to see the author portray more experiences in general (as the book is very short. You can finish the read in 30 min probably) and also a bit more outside of the “romantic relationship” realm as I felt that was the one that got most of the spotlight. I especially enjoyed the family ones (relationships between parents and children) so it would have been nice to have more of those, but there was also a big missed oportunity to expand on the catalogue of individual experiences (like the stories on the bus/train, our relationship with pets, with our own sadness, with the little things that make us happy, the embarrasing and frustrating everyday moments, etc)
I also felt like the art was underwhelming:
- The colors are very flat and there's basically no shadows, it makes the drawings looks one dimentional, they don't pop out of the page.
- The art style and the color palette are also very safe. Everything is drawn with pretty much the same proportions as in real life, and colored in the same way, so the drawings could have been substituted by photos and it wouldn't have much of a difference.
- As there is no play with the color or the drawings itself it would have been nice to at least have variations in the formating, but every comic had the same 4-koma type of format that, while adecuate and even encouraged for social media (especifically Instagram) leaves a lot to desire in a comic book.
It's a nice enough side read for when you have a little time to kill and don't want to spend much mental energy trying to piece a plot or even to share on social media for it's relatable aspect, but there's not much besides that.
