Two things stayed with me after reading In My Darkest Hour: how the images were constantly distorted, like a television set not adjusted to the right aspect ration, and the walls of text, ranging from Courier New typeface to spiral-arranged handlettered chaos, covering or forming the backgrounds to entire pages and sequences. Both of these unsettled (and truthfully, annoyed) me – and I think that is the desired effect. In his interview, Santiago notes that Omar is drinking in every panel – a state of mind often conveyed through visual distortion of images in film. The sharp use of digital tools to mimic other filmic techniques (such as the blurry/sharp focus pull effect when Omar and Lucinda face each other on the stairs) makes me think that Santiago probably drew his figures relatively “normally” proportioned, and then used the tools in whatever software he created the book in to distort them as he saw fit. However, none of the images necessarily required this two-step process (at least, from my perspective). The difference in creation process leads to the question of why would one choose to draw then manipulate over simply drawing already distorted. The former, as I noted, mimics the process of film, while the latter roots itself firmly in the world of draftsmanship. While not an unequivocal answer, I read Omar’s photographic habits and the splicing/collage use of actual photos as an indication that Santiago is deliberately copying techniques of film – probably, as John notes, as a reflection and commentary on our own viewing of the world through television and film (and to a somewhat lesser extent pictures in other media).
In contrast to the clear development of filmic techniques to both add visual sophistication to the work and assist in audience participation in Omar’s state of mind, the prominent positioning of text militates against the kind of smooth, quick reading I genearally associate with both filmic grammar and sequential art narratives. The constant jerk from combining small text balloons/captions to trying to take in what amounts to a complete page of prose, often in obscuring fonts/lettering and shaped/angled/spiralled out of comprehensibility frustrated me as a reader, and led me to posit two conclusions about Santiago’s goal in this technique. The first is that most readers wouldn’t scan the text pages, instead catching key words, the emotional state of the writer (from the font/lettering style), and the place the words have in the point of view of Omar. The second would be that Santiago actually does expect readers to scan instead of skim, rapidly changing pace in their information/page intake, perhaps contributing to the identification of Omar’s disjointed, constantly changing perspective and feelings about the world around him. For me, the former is an interesting and somewhat effective experiment, while the latter seems far to self-involved and arrogant. Though my own perspective on this is clearly based on my own reading habits, I would argue that knowing how to successfully navigate physical reading pacing shifts is an admirable skill, while deliberately piling up text like bricks in front of a train indicates a mentality I find difficult to admire or sympathize with.
I suppose I ought to have been as forthright as Lindsey and mentioned that both the style and character of In My Darkest Hour deeply irritate me, not necessarily because Omar is a misogynist (though I believe he is), but because Omar teaches me nothing about what it is like to feel worthless (a trait I believe he shares with the similarly apathetic, abused, and deeply misogynistic Jimmy Corrigan – and possibly several of Alan Moore’s Watchmen). Though there is a modicum of happiness/hope at the end of the story, Omar’s journey seems to be cyclical rather than teleological, merely revolving around his naval instead of walking towards a better life.