Maharajah

Finally finished reading Joann Sfar's huge sketchbook diary thing, Maharajah. It's rather amazing to think he wrote and drew these 402 pages in just six months. Actually it's crazy! The book starts on December 3rd 2006 and ends on May 6th 2007 so it's also very current, fresh stuff. But the price of that fast pace seems to have been paid in the lettering, which is probably the worst hand lettering I've ever struggled through in a professionally published book. I mean, at times it's essentially unreadable. The pleasures to be found in the book would have been greatly enhanced if the actual reading of the text hadn't been such a frustrating struggle. I really don't understand why Sfar didn't revisit these pages and clean up his lettering for publication.

Anyhow, I still find Sfar's loose artwork to be quite a treat - especially the way he uses watercolor to enhance his usually pretty minimal line work. It works really well in making everyday stuff interesting to look at, but works a little less well when trying to show the atypical - where his minimal style sometimes doesn't include enough information to make looking at a sketch of something unusual (say the Taj Mahal) much different than looking at the wall of an ordinary Paris apartment. And since probably half the book covers a train trip Sfar and his wife took across India, unfortunately that half of the book is probably less interesting to look at than it should be (though there are plenty of interesting drawings in there too - particularly the musician related stuff).

Maharajah is actually at its best when dealing with the mundane. I really enjoyed all the bits in the book about his children. The love really shines through there, and while some might find it too cloying or cutesy, I found these sections extremely charming. There's a naturalness, a comfortableness in Sfar's so called everyday stuff that's quite special.

But again, the bulk of the book covers his trip across India, which should read more interestingly than it does. The problem is Sfar falls into the trap of spending too much of the text in these pages going over the same old stuff about the caste system and different religious sects, karma, etc... that most everybody has already read too much of in many other books about India. It's the didactic nature of these hard to read text blocks (telling instead of showing) that makes this section of the book such a slow grind. The personal anecdotes are where it's interesting, but those moments are few and far between in the Indian section of the book. Most unfortunate.

The text holds a very large role in these sketchbooks, but perhaps it's best to mostly ignore it and enjoy a little more this peek into all the different things Sfar chose to draw over the course of these six months.