I find comics hard to review. I know they can have depth and I know they can be meaningful, but so many of them I read and can only think of them as slight. So, does Rendez-vous in Phoenix have a bit more heft than others? I suppose I could be convinced, but if I need to be convinced of the merit, doesn’t that say something as well?
I think my problem is two-fold:
- I either get distracted by the pictures or I ignore them entirely, missing out on that entire aspect of the medium; and
- to get any internal character depth, it ends up like voice over and pretty much the only thing I remember from Adaptation is voice over = lazy. And really, I like character depth more than anything else in fiction.
Everyone has a right to tell their story, ergo Sandoval has every right to write about his attempts to cross the Mexican-American border illegally in the nineties. Everyone has a right to use whatever medium they want to tell their stories, ergo, again, Sandoval can choose comics. But comics as a medium to tell deep stories — I know Maus managed it somehow; but whatever Maus had, that unknowingable, intangible whatever isn’t there in Rendez-vous in Phoenix.
It’s not bad, Rendez-vous in Phoenix. I feel super dismissive saying it’s just a comic when I don’t want that to be dismissive at all. But it is just what it is. And that’s fine, but it’s hardly transcendent.
Rendez-vous in Phoenix by Tony Sandoval went on sale November 8, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.