This beautiful child defines the book by her absence from Tom and Leela’s life. Hart doesn’t hold anything back as he shares his grief with his audience as he’s showing these from her all-too-short life to introduce her to us. In many ways, Rosalie’s life feels like a dream in this book because her loss is staggeringly evident already only pages into the story. And with a quote from Werner Herzog buried on page 147 of a 263 book, Hart provides answers of why he’s doing this even as he himself is asking so many questions of why did this happen and how are they supposed to live life after this tragedy? The first few chapters of Rosalie Lightning were released as mini comics over the past few years, going back to 2012 (I wrote about it at Newsarama as one of the best comics of that year.) Hart’s cartooning is full of so much love and so much pain that you had to wonder why an artist would put himself the long process of creating a comic book about the death of a beloved child. The way that Hart includes that Herzog panel, without fanfare or much context, is such a strong indicator of why Hart continued to create this comic.
Instead of focusing on the meaning of the movie, Hart includes an almost inconsequential panel that’s a shot of the film’s director Werner Herzog saying, “If I end this now I would be a man without dreams.” The tragedy of Rosalie Lightning is that for the days and months following the death of their daughter, all Tom and Leela have are dreams of a daughter and they don’t want to let go of that dream. A bit over halfway through Rosalie Lightning, as Tom and Leela Hart attempt to find some solace in the world after the sudden death of their young daughter, the couple try to escape reality for a short time by watching Fitzcaraldo, a movie about a man’s obsession to carry a steamship over a mountain.
0 kommentar(er)
