Highbrow lowbrow art
Nufonia Must Fall is probably the world's first comic by someone with a cartoon-character side persona. In this case, that would be Montreal DJ Kid Koala, probably best known for being part of the animated pop super-group Gorillaz.
And what a project Koala has turned in: a graphic novel that is 300-plus pages, almost
entirely dialogue-free, and drawn in bleak charcoal hues. It's too bookish and highbrow
to be a mere comic book, yet also too slapstick-y and hastily drawn to feel completely
literary. In a world where Dave Sim and Alan Moore clearly try to bridge the gaps
between the planes between pop art and something much more rarified, Koala's graphic
novel seems to occupy a bizarre space in-between.
While Nufonia certainly isn't flawless for all its invention, the book is still
strangely compelling when thumbed through quickly. (The entire thing can be devoured
in no more than 15 minutes.)
Koala, whose real name is Eric San, has had a long-standing fascination with the
sequential arts long before he allowed himself to be rendered into a two-dimensional
member of Gorillaz, which also features Blur's Damon Albarn, hip-hop producer Dan the
Automator and Del the Funkee Homosapien, among others.
Koala's last solo disc, 2000's Carpal Tunnel Syndrome , even came with a small
bonus comic book far superior to the CD itself -- a sometimes hard to take, stream-of-
consciousness pastiche created from his sprawling, eclectic music collection.
Nufonia, however, is the exact inverse: the book is the main attraction here. At
the same time, the accompanying 16-minute CD of ambient incidental music isn't a mere
trinket. It's actually an improvement over Carpal . (More about that in a
moment.)
In Nufonia, we meet a headphones-wearing robot facing impending obsolesce at
his cafeteria job who, additionally, has trouble standing on its own two feet. So when it
falls for a cute office drone, a human electrical engineer, it really falls for her in the most
literal sense. However, she's charmingly won over by the nameless robot's clumsiness,
despite also harboring reservations about its imperfections. While the robot goes about
writing love songs for its newfound source of admiration, she goes about internally
picking daisies: Will she or won't she come to love the imperfect machine?
This has sort of topic has been tackled before elsewhere, but it's the medium that Koala
uses, and the way he uses it, to express his point that is simply novel. The book is
infectiously drawn in sketchy pencil lines and colored in murky black-and-white textures,
a style that has been favorably compared to the feel of an old silent movie by other
reviewers. You can sometimes see the sprocket holes, however. The world these
characters inhabit occasionally has trouble containing itself within its own borders, as
though Koala couldn't wait to let his thoughts and ideas pour out onto paper. The few
words that are sparingly peppered throughout Nufonia sometimes leak out of
their confined spaces.
This failure to stay within the lines appears to be an amateurish mistake at first glance,
but, on second observation, the book could very well be a treatise on the perils of
perfectionism. Koala has told interviewers that he felt an inordinate amount of pressure
delivering a debut record other people wanted to hear, so he made one for himself
instead. This, of course, turned out to be the dreary Carpal Tunnel Syndrome .
But where that record was needlessly self-indulgent, Nufonia effortlessly opens
into the realm of communal, shared experience. Koala has learned something over three
years, it seems: if you're going to create something, you'd better make it something that
resonates with someone else.
By stripping away names and dialogue, Koala gives his characters an every-person kind
of quality that transcends cultural or gender identity. While it is easy to slip into the poor
robot's shoes, just about everyone in Nufonia shares his problem: they wander
about, clumsily incomplete in their own ways, often paranoid that some impending sense
of failure might gum up the works. And when things do go wrong, they're all caddish
enough to take their frustration out on the next person down the food chain.
On a more microcosmic level, Nufonia sees Koala recovering from the sins of
Carpal without resorting to kicking anyone in the street. The book's incidental
CD is quiet and sullen, and successfully accentuates the somewhat downbeat yet
whimsical atmosphere of the book. The 10 'songs' here can probably even be described
as a much less-visceral distant cousin to Tom Waits's junkyard cabaret. Think Town
With No Cheer from Swordfishtrombones and you'd be along the right
track.
However, trying to actually enjoy the CD along with the book is something of an
unintentional challenge. Page numbers on the compact disc's outer label seem to indicate
that certain tracks are only meant to be played against key sections of Nufonia .
Due to some kind of publishing oversight, these numbers are rather puzzlingly only listed
on the CD's label itself, and the book offers no further instructions as to how you can
align the disc with the book.
Maybe this error is the whole point. Or perhaps that's reading too much into it.
Make no mistake, though, Nufonia Must Fall is as compulsively 'readable' as a
child's flipbook, where you absolutely must get to that very next page as quickly as
possible to not shatter any momentum. True, $25 might seem to be a
rather hefty price for such a simple pleasure. Yet, Koala has done something truly worthy
here: he has created an imperfectly perfect two-dimensional work of art. We can only
wonder what this cartoon kid might have up his sleeve next.
— 15 September 2003
