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A Graphic Love Story
"Nufonia Must Fall" by ECW Press, March 2003

By Tommy Tung

Sure, Romeo and Juliet have their problems, but nothing like the star-crossed office girl and out-of-work robot in "Nufonia Must Fall." The robot resolves to write her a love song--the only problem being that he's tone-deaf. To seal his fate as fortune's fool, the office girl also invents a new robot model, rendering the robot as useful as a Beta VCR. "Nufonia" comes packaged as a comic book with a CD soundtrack, indeed a new medium born of graphic art and silent cinema.

This kid was born to play with needles. Courtesy of Canadacouncil.ca

"Nufonia" elegizes the doomed romance without gushy words, instead discovering the endearment of heartfelt action. What are called "private moments" in performance art compose most of "Nufonia" with the office girl pining in her cubicle or the robot atrophying in his one-bedroom squalor. Slapping on thought balloons would smother the quiet power of solitary yearning. Prudently, Kid Koala treats dialogue scenes with silent film techniques of body language and written signs. The connotation simply succeeds when a customer points to the deli menu and the robot makes a sandwich for him.

As much as this graphic novel innovates comic books, the "Nufonia" experience does so with its sound design, a familiar territory for renowned turntablist Kid Koala. Chinese-Canadian Eric San donned his DJ alter ego when he began scratching experimental beats for the Ninja Tune label in 1997. Six years later, Koala's cocktail of piano and turntable magic governs the "Nufonia" soundtrack-a playful collage of phonics, emotively innocent and tragically threnodic. The soundtrack owes much to the silent film tradition of pensive piano strokes, but also to the daring genius of Koala who mixes in hiccupping accordions, warbling violins, grasshoppers, hysterical organs, and buzzing electronic signals. These lurking background elements spin a whimsical yet cohesive quilt for the glockenspiel-like piano to tiptoe upon.

Complimentary to the postmodern score, the otherworldly dystopia of "Nufonia" plays the ultimate antagonist for the lonely hearts. The city of technological efficiency costs the individual a price of emotional warmth woefully strewn in artist Louisa Schabas' charcoal renderings. The duo-tone drabness of "Nufonia" not only invokes black and white silent cinema, but it envisions a frightening premonition of futuristic malaise.

If the majority of directing a film is in the casting, then Koala does well in his sympathetic design of these characters, two-dimensional bodies with three-dimensional souls inside them. The overweight and maladroit robot elicits Chaplin-like pity while the dainty full-lipped love interest solves the algebra of his misery. The robot clearly drives the narrative vehicle with a larger-than-life heart and consequential suffering. Five o'clock shadows, anxious perspiration, and frequent gasping detail the affliction of being a hopeless romantic.

Camera-wise, "Nufonia" displays an unquestionable prowess of cinematic direction. The motivated angles, the depth of field, and the sequence of panels construct storyboards for an enthralling animated film. Also commanding is the size of panels to emphasize crucial moments. Being one step short of a film, "Nufonia" offers the reader more time to linger on certain panels. However, such liberties of reading duration don't necessarily function well with the brevity of the soundtrack, which has a running time of 16 minutes and 24 seconds-too quick for a 342-page adventure. Each CD track intends to accompany each chapter, too, but the music often ends before the reader finishes the section. But perhaps these technical shortcomings of the soundtrack derive from my prolonged fascination with the artwork rather than an oversight by the creator. As the first silent film on paperback, "Nufonia Must Fall" pioneers into a brave new world of evolving entertainment media, which sometimes loses its way capitalizing, instead of captivating as this stunning debut evinces.

October 24, 2003