Thursday, June 27, 2013

Review: Point Your Face at This

I picked up Point Your Face At This off the library shelf, flipped through it, had to rent it. My reasoning was simple: I was curious if a book consisting of 288 pages of crudely drawn pictures and no explanatory text could make for good reading. The answer I'm happy to report is a definite Yes.

On one hand the drawings are for the most part quite simplistic. But the visual storytelling is wonderfully clever. Sometimes I'd get the joke immediately, other times I might have to spend a moment or two with the page. There's only a couple of PG-13 (I don't think you could call them R-rated) related pages, the rest are pretty wholesome fun. Another impressive feat if you ask me.

When I finished the book I checked over at Amazon to see if could learn about the author. Turns out, I do know him. He's Demetri Martin and he did a number of appearances on the Daily Show. He's apparently a stand up comedian, which actually makes perfect sense. In many respects, the book is essentially a visual stand up routine. In stand up, the comic starts off on a seemingly random tangent and you wait to see what twist makes it funny. Same goes with the book. You open up a page, sort out what you're looking at, and frequently smile or laugh.

Of course, I'm biased. I have an affinity towards the clever, simple. A story in 140 characters, a web server in 10 lines of code and a wordwide communication protocol using two symbols are my idea of beauty. So a book filled with seemingly "simple" drawings? Heck Yeah!

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