Season, review: images of a summer love story
Season, review
Another night of illusions, when the summer is now gone, years and years ago they sang one of the most loved Italian groups by teenagers of the time, the Finleys, and this verse seems to be decidedly appropriate to the story we are going to know in this new graphic novel. Guido Brualdi is the author of Season, a comic whose main theme is a summer love affair between the protagonist, who is named after the author, Guido, and a waitress, Luciana, met by chance in a place frequented with friends. But how long can it last? The time of a shock or something more? Let's find out together in our review of this story, published by Edizioni BD, as part of the BD Next series, an editorial project by Edizioni BD dedicated to young Italian beginners and very soon available in bookstores, comics and online stores from last June 3rd.Season, story of a fleeting love
We follow, in almost two hundred pages that are really smooth and not at all heavy to leaf through one after the other, the daily events of Guido, a boy with different paranoia, from hair loss to annoyance with noise, passing from a passion for running that allows him to put aside the saddest thoughts and helps him to let off steam. We know him in that magical period of his life called adolescence, when the protagonist, during a summer evening spent in a club with his friends, meets Luciana, a mysterious girl with long hair whose eyes he doesn't even see at first, and who works there as a waitress.After a few clumsy attempts, Guido decides to throw his heart over the obstacle and ask her to go out together after work, and so it is. A first exit, then another and another. The two are together, an overwhelming and passionate love that immediately risks burning the entire fuse. Or will she somehow manage to preserve herself over time? Whatever the resolution of the story, it is always the lesson that is drawn from every experience like this that counts and makes the difference, and it is once again a popular saying: "the heart is not commanded".
Guido proves, as anticipated, a bit paranoid, clumsy, clingy, and this certainly does not help, not even trying to dedicate a song to Luciana, he who plays the guitar, loves music and is also a singer-songwriter . Precisely the presence of musical pieces, Italian and foreign, punctuates the narration here and there at a constant pace, characterized by a remarkable freshness of language and some hint of Bolognese dialect, the territory where the story takes place, which makes the whole story.
The characters we meet in this story represent the people closest to the protagonist: Guido's family and friends, who, however, surround the events narrated. Their role, especially that of the parents, is not too relevant in the progress of the love story of the two young people, thus remaining in the background and interpreting, above all on a narrative level, almost a pause from the main plot, a short interval that it dampens, but only for a few squares, the tension that is created between the two lovers and that accompanies us until the end.
Feelings in music and drawings
Season is the first comic book by the Pesaro-based singer and songwriter Guido Brualdi. This double occupation, and passion, can only interfere in the drafting of this story, where it is no coincidence that music represents one of the main themes of the story between Guido and Luciana, becoming an expression of the protagonist's feelings, both for the songs and for himself. sings and writes, both for the citations of titles.Not only music within the story, but also available for readers: the author in fact, in the volume itself, made available two songs, conceived as a sort of soundtrack of the comic itself, and can be downloaded , or simply listen on the site, using the appropriate QR code. The song titles are Sassi e Maree and Season, both written and recorded by Brualdi and mastered by Luca Vagnini at Avangarage recording studio in Pesaro.
Guido Brualdi is not the only author to convey in images the most intimate expressions of everyday life: if we are talking about love, adolescent, fleeting, passionate, recently also new faces of the Italian scene such as Carlotta Scalabrini, that we interviewed to learn more about his experience, he speaks instead in The magic circle of fear, anxiety and all its manifestations, even in the youngest.
- So you play?
- Ah ... II, well yes ... W-that is ... for now it's just a hobby, but here ... One day I'd like to go around ... Playing in front of people ...
The means offered by the graphic novel thus becomes a tool to sincerely express the nuances of life, and not only for fantasy worlds, thanks also to the features of a particular style of drawing, decidedly fresh, imprecise and sometimes sketchy just like certain phases and situations of human experience.
