Robert Coover’s Noir is a graphic novel.
Robert Coover’s Noir is a graphic novel. Not literally, in the contemporary sense in which the phrase is used to designate a highfalutin words-plus-pictures album; but figuratively, in that its language cannot help but be converted, in the reader’s inner eye, into a series of monochromatic images, images suggestive less of a film than of, precisely, the layout of some neo-noir comic-strip. Frank Miller’s Sin City, for instance.
Like Miller, Coover pulverises the film noir aesthetic to a hallucinatory essence. In a conceit subsequent pasticheurs will find it hard to improve on, he actually has the nerve to name his private eye Philip M. Noir (‘M’ presumably standing for ‘Marlowe’). Noir’s unruffled, seen-it-all secretary (horn-rimmed spectacles, natch, but surprisingly sheer and sexy gams whenever she’s prepared to expose them) is called Blanche, which means that, as a team, Noir et Blanche, they themselves personify the quintessential colour scheme of the genre’s nocturnal atmospherics, not so much neo-realist as neon-realist.
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