Next Saturday, October 29, we’ll be hosting our second live book club meeting. This time, we’ll be discussing Ice Haven, by Daniel Clowes. The Central Library (as well as other branches of the Brooklyn Public Library) have copies of the book in stock or you can buy a copy on line or at your trusty local independent book or comics retailer
As we did last time, we’re planning to start by showing some slides to introduce a topic of cartooning that is related to Clowes’ book. In the case of Fun Home, we talked a bit about the use of text in comics and how it interacts with images. Ice Haven is striking for its use of a variety of drawing and storytelling styles associated with different genres and formats: kids comics, detective stories, “alternative” comics, and more. We’ll show some examples of the kinds of comics Clowes is referring to and talk about the way style and layout can be used as storytelling tools.
We’d like to remind you that we are posting this here for the use of anyone who wants to host a book club about Ice Haven. In fact, we already have someone looking into setting up a comics book club in Philadelphia—we’ll report back here if we get any news.
One way to approach talking about this book in a group or class setting is to assign or have participants choose a particular section of the book and describe it on its own terms and in relation to the overall narrative.
Here are a few general questions/topics that will likely come up in next weekend’s conversation:
And here are references to a few specific sequences and panels that struck us for one reason or another:
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