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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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This book attempts to be a casual and fun little story
that also, if we are to believe to the back cover,
takes “a hilarious swipe at the hype-driven world of
high fashion.” This would all be good if any of its
swipes actually had some teeth to them. Instead we get
a dull tale of an inexperienced photographer who
becomes a hit precisely because of his amateurishness,
in what is meant to be a “The Emperor Has No Versace
Clothes” tale. There is no doubt that the fashion
industry is a pretty vapid place but since this comic
itself is so lifeless its hard to see why the creators
behind it feel they have any case against such an
industry.
The first major problem is the artwork of Loux. If
there are any plans to subvert the glamour of the
fashion industry an artist should be able to capture
it first. Loux is unable to do this, or at least not
for most of the book. The characters are all outlined
with a very thick line, are meant to portray emotion
with beady little eyes and have these tall, lanky
bodies. This would be perfect for skewering the models
that walk down the runway but Loux never strikes a
feel of exaggeration for story’s sake with these
character designs. Almost every character is drawn
this way, from the ones we are meant to sympathize
with to the ones we are meant to “boo” at, as if the
look is to be inviting somehow. It all ends up
looking so bland, especially combined with the story,
as if you had claymation characters like Gumby and
Prickle act out the screenplay to “How to Lose a Guy
in 10 Days.” There are some parts that show Loux’s
promise. The few scenes where main character Nick
Stoppard is doing a shoot get much more stylized, with
models posing with very slanted bodies across
double-page spreads. These scenes do look cool with
Loux’s style, it’s just unfortunate that he cannot
create the same excitement in the panel-to-panel
action.
The unimpressive nature of the book is very much due
to Johnston’s script. There are many romantic comedies
in the theaters that seem like sitcom ideas stretched
out for an hour and a half. This is sort of excepted
because you can imagine how a budding television
writer can do a few changes to his or her idea and
sell it to Paramount. What we have here is a much more
curious creature. This is a book that has a
television-sized story that is meant to hold the
reader’s attention in the form of a 167-page graphic
novel. A reader is going to try and immerse him or
herself into the world between the pages here. It’s a
task only made harder when we have such scenes as the
second-in-command chewing out the plucky hero, only to
have the boss come in (which we are meant to expect
will make our man’s situation even worse), see the
photos and declare (to the surprise off all the people
in the story, if not all the people reading the story)
“these are WONDERFUL!” After the simultaneous, deadpan
“what?” of both the second-in-command and the
sympathetic regular guy I was ready for a commercial
break.
The characters have as much depth to them as the hot
young people trying to sell us beer and jeans in those
commercial breaks. If this was a better story I would
perhaps wonder why Stoppard has a bunch of friends
that act like an ad executive’s idea of go-getting
young people. After reading this book it makes perfect
sense to me, he’s just as shallow a character as the
rest of them. He spends most of his time reacting to
being in over his head, in increasingly more and more
grating ways, except when the story depends on him to
act on his now oversized ego. Since the book doesn’t
much work as a comedy there isn’t much of a surprise
that it doesn’t much work as a romance either. The
model Chantel and Stoppard fall in love for no other
reason than they hang around on a fashion set a lot
and of course the only conflict is that Stoppard’s ego
drives her away. I can assure whoever is reading this
review that you have a seen at least ten other stories
very much like the one contained between the covers of
this book.
F-Stop doesn’t much work as a satire; it’s far
too interested in being a nice little story about a
guy making his way as photographer. The problem is
that the book falls short of even being able to do
that by being horrifically typical. If Johnston and
Loux wanted to achieve their goal they should have
been a lot more ruthless in both their shots at the
fashion industry and their quest in coming up with an
original love story.
-- Ian Brill
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F-Stop