Book review|The sandstorms of the 1930s in the United States have fascinated Eeva Meltio for years, which can be seen in the completed period picture.
Comics
Eeva Meltio: Sand. Kraft Ink. 224 pp.
in the 1930s sandstorms dried up the prairies of the American Midwest so that the area began to be called the dust bowl. 40 million hectares of fields were destroyed. The damage also extended to Canada.
Over the course of a decade, 3.5 million people moved from the area. About 200,000 from Oklahoma alone left for California in search of jobs, which were scarce during the Great Depression. There, many lived in tent villages like in refugee camps.
The most famous classics about the migration wave are by John Steinbeck novel The fruits of anger (1939) and John Ford’s the film he directed about it the very next year.
At the same time and the landscape takes place Eva Meltion decent comic book Sand.
The Dust Bowl fascinated Meltio already at least six years ago, when he made an eight-page comic on the subject Sandwhich is like a grain at the core of this pearl.
Protagonist Olive is a tomboyish girl who is interested in technology. He helps his father fix the water pump. Father has been running a water station for 20 years, but he doesn’t want water to come up from the soil anymore.
A rainmaker arrives in Tienoo, who fascinates young Olive to no end. He can’t bear to stay away from conjuring rain, which leads to fatal consequences.
As an adult, Olive can be found in the oil fields. He works with the pumps again as a helper. But making it rain and refreshing the home region still burn in the mind.
Olive meets the old rainmaker again. Together they embark on a final battle against sand and weather like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza against windmills.
For years was in the making Sand is Meltion’s (b. 1977) second comic work. First-born Beasts was published in 2015. Meltio has designed the layout of his book himself. In its hard fabric cover, it is also handsome as an object.
The sand the painterly images Meltio has sketched with a pencil and drawn cleanly digitally. The original mark is somewhat reminiscent of pastel chalk or wood colors.
In the extremely reduced color palette, the soft shades of green and blue barely stand out from the brown and gray landscape. The dry color scheme emphasizes the atmosphere effectively.
Meltio is well acquainted with the period and the subject. Clothes, buildings, cars, machines, houses and landscapes look believable and immerse you in the picture of the time. In the open landscapes, the narrative seems cinematic.
In the extremely reduced color palette, the soft shades of green and blue barely stand out from the brown and gray landscape.
The weather you still don’t know how to manage, and in the 1930s, making it rain was the job of scammers. In the sand both Olive and the Rainmaker believe in their cause. That and Olive’s interest in technology represent the machine romanticism and belief in technology of the time.
However, the core subject of Melti is different. Although Sand is a realistic picture of the times from about 90 years ago, it can be read as a metaphor for today.
The Midwest Dust Bowl was once talked about mainly as a weather phenomenon. Now that would be called an environmental disaster. It was a kind of local climate change.
Like the current global climate change, the Dust Bowl was also human-caused, at least in part.
The sand went with the storms because the land had been plowed for the fields. The prairie grass that bound the topsoil was gone. At the same time, the sown seeds and people’s livelihood went.
Today, based on computer models, it is estimated that the phenomenon was also caused by a reversal of the jet stream carrying rain from the Atlantic.
I feel it againthat to combat climate change we are waiting for a solution from technology rather than from the pop art of a rainmaker, instead of addressing the causes of the problem.
Drought caused by climate change is already one of the reasons behind migration flows. In Europe, we are now struggling with immigrants, just as in the past in California.
Meltio doesn’t underline the message of today, but it can From the sand read, if you dare draw comparisons and conclusions.
One essential difference between the Dust Bowl and current climate change is, of course. There is no California on the planet where you can move to slum when the disaster has reached its full extent.
The Helsinki comics festival will take place at Kaapelitehta on August 31–September 1, 2024.
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