Old Man Winter | Review Page 2
See page 1 of this review of Old Man Winter here.Guilt-Trip and "Roadtrip"
Except for "Logging Sanjay," animals figure in some important way in every other story collected into "Old Man Winter."
With 'Roadtrip,' though, Yost goes further with his animal casting and presents a dual-story of the destination for a cow that will be slaughtered for the benefit of providing meat for hamburgers at McDonalds, versus the happy experience of a young girl who gets to visit an amusement park and ends up at a McDonalds to have a meal. The mode is a kind of ersatz social-realist documentary.
A flaw is that the tale isn't completely straight-forward, and though we're following the trip of both the girl and the cow by train, Yost interposes other figures and images to the tale. A superfluous panel of a family eating Kentucky Fried Chicken appears, though no chickens are actually shown in the story. Likewise in the same position on another page there is catsup being squirted into a plastic tub. Is this to say something about the plight of tomatoes? Of course not, but the visual language Yost is using gets confused when he moves away from the cow/child duality. The brutality of the life of the cow that will become food is combined with the smiles and fun of the human female, and that message is clearly stated. The cow is anthropomorphic in it's emotions, and this also adds to the tragedy at hand, but it also undermines the documentary approach of the story. Can a cow be a martyr?
There is a single page watercolor image of the young girl offering a hamburger to a cow in a livestock train car with a slightly-obscured McDonald's sign behind her. It is a slightly humorous gag cartoon, but it also highlights a message of "you don't know what is in that hamburger, do you?"
It is an earnest thirteen pages, and continues Yost's theme of blind savagery existing in the middle of commonplace human existence.
A page from "Roadtrip" by J. T. Yost. Click to enlarge.
Circus Act
The final two page story is another duality tale, in which a boy flees a cruel home life to live with a circus, and in an irony comes face to face with a certain animal that hardly had any desire to be under the big top, too.
It is the simplest of these stories in both writing and artwork, there are no shades in the observation of events, it is just cruelty and stupidity propelling human and animal events. But it does end with a reference to animal poo, which is also where "All is Forgiven" ended.
"Circus" two-page story by Yost. Click to Enlarge.
The development in artistry between the clichés in "Circus' versus the presence of the ambiguities in "Old Man Winter" story are large. Though the themes Yost is interested in exploring seem to be firmly set in a certain direction in all of these stories, his ability to make a tale with some complexity of human experience and emotion is greatly expanded in the most recent tale ("Old Man Winter"), versus the older stories which stamp out their pain without much subtlety.
Stories of petty human cruelty can be coldly told, like with Guy de Maupassant; or they can be provided as a hook to lay upon some moral or political message. Yost isn't within those parameters at all, because he delivers his tales with a minimum of anger and with a sadness that seems to absorb everything else.
Nicely printed with square-bound binding, J. T. Yost's Old Man Winter and Other Sordid Tales is a collection that showcase an emotional and thoughtful response to a vision of the world as a circus of unintended cruelties.
Published by Birdcage Bottom Books 2009
See page 1 of this review of Old Man Winter here.
- Twitter feed unable to load
