And I nearly did cry when reading Bob Byrne's latest comic book: Mister Amperduke.
I had just been to the wonderful 2D Comic Festival in Derry, Northern Ireland, and was travelling on a Bus from Derry to Belfast to catch my plane home and decided to ignore most of the beautiful Irish country side in favour of a front row seat into the imagination of cartoonist Bob Byrne.
Bob kindly gave me a copy of Mister Amperduke at the festival, and I was very intrigued to see that the whole 160 page graphic novel was - in fact - a story told in sequential picture only, without the use of dialogue, captions or any other written word storytelling devices.
On reading I must declare that Mr Byrne is a f*%king genius!! The talented bastard managed to completly engross me in his magical world of miniature people and killer insects within just a few wordless pages.
In just two panels he achieves more character building than two bloody seasons of the latest US Tv drama.
Unbelievably, none of the characters in this book are human and a good proportion of the story revolves around some little miniature people in a tiny town built by what can only be described as a Dog Man.
However, the book somehow manges to say an incredible amount about what it means to be human, and made me care more for a set of characters than I have done for a very long time. It also makes one think about themselves and how we treat those around us (well if -like me- you are inclined to think about such things at any rate).
The story features prejudice, courage, hate, love, self sacrifice, and death, not to mention impeccable pacing, solid cartooning, wickedly dark humour, and heart stopping action scenes.
My hat is well and truly off to Bob Byrne for creating this singular and original piece of work, and I urge anyone who loves comics and reading this to visit http://www.clamnuts.com/ and order your copy right now.
Over and out.
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