He doesn’t like to draw a line around his panels, which (mostly) stay separate from one another through negative space. He combines smudgy pencils with beautiful, dark ink that stands out sharply by contrast, casting shadows and directing eyes to his singular flow. The Interview is all black and white and gray in comparison to Fior’s previous bright colors that evoked so much emotion. It makes sense: his protagonist, Raniero, is middle-aged, whereas the actors in the earlier work started young and spiky.

Sometimes this method is a bit frustrating.įior’s illustrations are soft and rounded in this book, more muted than in 5,000 km Per Second. We’re thrown in and left to figure out what the heck is going on. Neither offers much in the way of exposition.

Both works also fall on the dreamy side, the Stanley Kubrick school of sci-fi rather than the hard-edged Ridley Scott approach-more concerned with the way human relationships are affected by interstellar contact than with the nuts and bolts of new technology. Both The Interview and Denis Villeneuve’s intellectual sci-fi film focus on contact with extraterrestrials, whose ships appear mysteriously and whose methods of communication differ considerably from those of humanity.

Manuele Fior’s second book in as many years from publisher Fantagraphics provokes interesting comparisons, not only to previous graphic novel, 5,000 km Per Second, but also with last year’s arty sci-fi film Arrival.

The interview by manuele fior