REVIEW: Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg
By Kirin Xin — Obsession. Sensibility. Politics. Romance. Longing. Betrayal.
Glass Town was released on March 3, 2020.
If you asked any diehard comics fan to pick a title sporting all of these things, they likely wouldn’t first point to a work by 1800’s English poet and novelist Charlotte Brontë. And for understandable reasons.
Comics and classic literature — while both equally worthwhile forms of written entertainment — don’t always mix well. Flowery language that makes a novel immersive and delicious to the mind and ear can be cloistering and congestive when adapted into spoken panels. Or alternately, it is completely watered down and made lackluster alongside imaginative graphics competing for the reader’s attention. Neither is very palatable. However, this isn’t the case in the graphic novel version of Charlotte Brontë’s Glass Town, reimagined by Isabel Greenberg. Instead, the new book from Abrams ComicArts takes elements from both the inspired original concept and comic rework and combines them perfectly into a refreshing literary rosé.
Glass Town wasn’t originally a classic work in the way the famous Wuthering Heights by Charlotte’s sister Emily or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by sister Anne was. Glass Town was a collective, a place, a world fully realized in the minds of the Brontë children. Recorded as first surfacing in 1827, it served as a gathering ground for their original characters and stories, thought to be a starting point for several themes realized in their later works.
In Isabel Greenberg’s original graphic novel reimagination, the creation of this wondrous fictional world is narrated by eldest sister Charlotte Brontë. She tells the tale in a meandering way to, of all people, one of her own characters. Her narration is posthumous of Glass Town and looks back through the years of its rise and subsequent fall. It reads almost like a biography, only written by a complete stranger over one hundred years after Brontë’s death. Though imaginative, it never feels disjointed, managing to combine fact with explorative fiction seamlessly.
In the same way, Glass Town also perfectly blends its classic origins with its new comic format. Since the story itself reigns from speculative bits and scraps rather than one big canonical collection, the writing is largely imagined by Greenberg, who puts words into the narrator’s mouth with grace that even Charlotte herself would likely approve of. The resulting tone lends itself to the handwritten script the book sports, (which doesn’t always work but looks fitting in this case,) and pieces out something uniquely dry, engaging, and historical. (Think akin to the Hark! A Vagrant comics by Kate Beaton.)
As Charlotte’s tale winds on, the story not only explores the historical implications of what we know about Glass Town, but also speaks through Greenberg’s lens to wider truths. As she takes the reader down the rabbit hole of her and her siblings’ creation, Charlotte touches on experiences known to anyone with a breath of artistic aspirations. Creativity, burnout, inspiration, guilt, it all comes to play within the walls of Glass Town, resulting in a manic and obsessive tale with Victorian sensibilities.
With little effort, Glass Town manages to create a sense of familiarity and accessibility between the reader and the Brontë siblings that is much needed in regard to famous authors. Refreshingly, it paints historical fiction in an abstractly entertaining way with respect for its poetic origins. At once delightful and consuming, it is a must read for anyone with a passion for both comics and classic literature, an interest in the minds of great authors, or a little too much of an obsession with their own ocs.
Glass Town Graphic Novel Review
Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës
Writer/Artist: Isabel Greenberg
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Price: $24.99
Glass Town is an original graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg that encompasses the eccentric childhoods of the four Brontë children—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne. The story begins in 1825, with the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, the eldest siblings. It is in response to this loss that the four remaining Brontë children set pen to paper and created the fictional world that became known as Glass Town. This world and its cast of characters would come to be the Brontës’ escape from the realities of their lives. Within Glass Town the siblings experienced love, friendship, war, triumph, and heartbreak. Through a combination of quotes from the stories originally penned by the Brontës, biographical information about them, and Greenberg's vivid comic book illustrations, readers will find themselves enraptured by this fascinating imaginary world.
Release Date: March 3, 2020
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Kirin Xin is a graphic designer, band freak, and comics writer and illustrator working out of the Midwest. They could have been prom king but devoted their life to making comic books. They can be found at kirixin.com or on social media @kirixin