Bye Bye Birdie

Shirley Hughes has certainly earned the right to take time out from her normal line of work to indulge herself with what the publishers describe as her ‘first graphic book for adults’. One cannot but admire the author’s tireless pursuit of new graphic directions after more than half a century of creativity. This nightmarish wordless sequence will not naturally translate into a verbal description. Suffice to say that the book explores a male-female dynamic employing the motifs of a somewhat terrifying man-eating bird and a dapper, boater-doffing little man. It is open to a range of interpretations but the theatrical visual narrative is a compelling, alarming read. Hughes draws upon her knowledge of the comic genre to create clever changes of rhythm and pace. Her passions for the music hall and silent cinema of the 1920s are other key influences at work here. One feels reluctant to find fault with any attempt to convince adults of the joys of learning to read pictures, but from a purely graphic perspective I would like to have seen more texture and contrast within the black and white frames on the page.