Artist
Yeong-shin Ma, 636 pgs, Drawn & Quarterly, drawnandquarterly.com, $44.95
It’s difficult to exactly say what Artist is going to be about just by looking at its cover. Dancing middle-aged men? Technicolour joy? A guy with a frontal lobe so developed it would make Megamind jealous? “Yes to all three” was my response as I picked up this translation published by Drawn & Quarterly.
What drives this graphic novel is the characters: three friends representing the three main branches of art. You have the painter, who is so debauched, corrupt and pathetic that you can hardly look at him without the bile threatening to explosively exit your esophagus. Then there’s the womanizing musician whose early success gets to his head. Finally, you have the idealistic writer who’s forced to compromise at every turn. Amusing as it is honest, Artist achieves what few can in creating a cultural product about artists that doesn’t fall prey to the temptation to navel gaze or air sour grapes. Instead, Ma makes the choice to be descriptive and self-deprecating, resulting in an insightful work that is easy to interpolate with.
Something should also be said about the quality of this translation. The graphic novel goes to great lengths to explain aspects of the Korean literary establishment that may not be immediately apparent to foreigners, and the additional foot-notes go a long way in filling the remaining gaps. In this way, very little appears to be lost in translation.