Shutterbug Follies
"Shutterbug Follies" is a graphic novel created by Jason Little that follows the story of Bee, a quirky young woman who works as a photo processor in Lower Manhattan. After graduating high school, Bee becomes intrigued by the various photographs she develops, some revealing dark and mysterious narratives. Her curiosity leads her into a web of crime involving Oleg Khatchatourian, a Russian photographer with a hidden life, and the murder of his wife, Daisy Papavasilou. The story unfolds through a series of cliff-hangers, capturing the reader's attention with its blend of dark humor and suspense.
The graphic novel is noted for its unique artistic style that mimics the aesthetic of photo albums, employing various photographic formats within its panels. Themes of voyeurism, art, and feminist heroism are prevalent throughout Bee's journey, as she navigates danger, morality, and the complexities of urban life. "Shutterbug Follies" is described as "bubblegum noir," juxtaposing a fun, colorful presentation with adult themes and gritty storytelling. Its narrative structure and visual storytelling have garnered attention, though it has also faced criticism and censorship in some regions due to its content. As a fresh take on the detective genre, the book offers a compelling exploration of a young woman’s bravery and the blurred lines between right and wrong.
Shutterbug Follies
AUTHOR: Little, Jason
ARTIST: Jason Little (illustrator)
PUBLISHER: Doubleday Graphic Novels
FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2000-2001
FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2002
Publication History
In 2000, on the heels of his award-winning Jack’s Luck Runs Out (1998), Jason Little introduced readers to Bee, a quirky young woman working as a photo processor. Shutterbug Follies began as a free serialized Web comic that ran in weekly episodes on Little’s Web site, beecomix.com. It was also inked in a number of layouts and color formats for weekly newspapers. Little ended each Bee Web comic page (12-14 panels) with a cliff-hanger, enticing readers with “continued next week” and putting up a new episode on Sunday mornings. When collected into Shutterbug Follies, the installments tell a darkly funny and mysterious story.
In 2002, the strips were gathered into a hardcover Doubleday Graphic Novel (a defunct imprint of Random House that only published two other graphic novels). Little moved to Dark Horse Comics for his next installment of Bee’s adventures. He features Bee in Motel Art Improvement Service (2010), presenting readers with another mystery, this time with a more mature heroine.
Plot
Bee has just graduated high school and is working as a photo processor in a Lower Manhattan one-hour photo shop. She is an aspiring photographer and gets a voyeuristic slice of life every time she develops a roll of film. She begins keeping copies of the more titillating and strange photos: breasts at bachelor parties, puking frat boys, and before-and-after photos taken by a local mortician. The mortician’s handiwork is followed by even more corpses, this time crime-scene photos taken by a Russian newspaper cameraman. There is something not quite right about these latter photos, which sets Bee on the trail of Oleg Khatchatourian.
After trailing Khatchatourian to his apartment, Bee sets up surveillance across the street and snaps her own photos when the Russian cameraman receives a visit from a redheaded woman and a wheelchair-bound boy. As Bee spies through her viewfinder, a pill-wielding Khatchatourian confronts the woman.
Bee’s tedium resumes at the photo shop until she eventually develops another set of the undertaker’s before-and-after photos. This time, the corpse is the redheaded woman. With the help of Rodney, a taxi driver, Bee follows Khatchatourian to his photo exhibit entitled “Recent Atrocities,” a show consisting entirely of ostensible crime-scene photos.
Bee does some investigating and discovers the dead redheaded woman was Daisy Papavasilou, Khatchatourian’s wife, a famous artist, and mother of their ailing son. When the Russian shows up with another roll of film starring his dead wife, Bee is back on the case and tails Khatchatourian to Brighton Beach, where he becomes involved in an apparent kidnapping. Bee listens in as one of the men is murdered.
The next day, Khatchatourian shows up with another roll of film, and, after developing the film, Bee comes across a photo of the bullet-ridden corpse of one of the men from the previous night.
Out of the blue, Khatchatourian calls and offers Bee a night job babysitting his sick son, Yuri. Once Khatchatourian leaves, Bee’s curiosity gets the better of her, and she snoops around until she discovers a stash of pills. They are diuretics. It seems Papavasilou had been switching them for the boy’s anticonvulsive medication, thereby causing her son’s illness. Bee also finds the negatives that prove Khatchatourian murdered his wife.
Khatchatourian is not going to let Bee stand in the way of his “art,” and he tries to murder her. She gets away using a homemade WD-40 “torch” and locks herself inside a file cabinet, temporarily escaping Khatchatourian and his Russian mob buddies. She pages Rodney, and he calls 911. However, the Russian discovers and overpowers Bee, bringing a heroin-filled syringe closer to her, until Yuri appears in the doorway and distracts Khatchatourian, allowing Bee to escape. The apartment door is forced open and cops pour in. Bee is saved, the bad guys are taken to jail, and the last panel of Shutterbug Follies shows Bee in Rodney’s cab, looking back as Yuri is taken away by social services.
Characters
•Bee, the heroine, is a normally proportioned young woman, with a preference for striped T-shirts and jeans. Wide-rimmed green glasses complement her short-cropped red hair. She works at a photo-processing lab and is nosy to the point of voyeurism, making copies for her own collection of the more titillating photographs she processes. Her curiosity lands her in the middle of a murder mystery.
•Oleg Khatchatourian, the antagonist, is a bearded Russian who speaks in heavily accented English. He is an artist and assassin who operates under the occupational ruse of a newspaper cameraman, setting up his victims in poses fit for his exhibit “Recent Atrocities.” He is the father of Yuri and the husband and murderer of Daisy Papavasilou.
•TheMortician is a horse-toothed, white-haired, dapper old man. He takes before-and-after pictures of his “latest preparations,” some of which Bee saves to share with her best friend. He is Daisy Papavasilou’s undertaker.
•Daisy Papavasilou, the redheaded wife of Khatchatourian and mother of Yuri, is also an artist. She is mentally ill, having Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and substitutes her son’s anticonvulsive medication for diuretic pills that keep him wheelchair bound. Daisy is trampled to death by a horse, but it may have been murder.
•Lyla is Bee’s dark-haired best friend. She is sexually precocious and sports tattoos and urban chic outfits. She looks forward to the day that Bee saves up enough money to become her roommate. Bee seeks advice on several topics from her.
•Rodney Plaster, is a scruffy, cigarette-smoking cab driver that Bee enlists to track down Khatchatourian. He is a member of the music group the Polymers. He often gives Bee cautionary advice and ultimately saves her life by calling the cops when she is trapped in Khatchatourian’s apartment.
•Huey, Bee’s love interest, is a brown-haired young man who changes his looks to match his current situation. He fancies himself a photographer but seems to be nothing more than a Peeping Tom. He is Khatchatourian’s assistant and tells Bee that there is nothing fake about Khatchatourian’s bloody photographs.
Artistic Style
Shutterbug Follies’s full-color, horizontal hardcover format is reminiscent of a photo album, such as those found on the shelves of the fictional “Mulberry Photo” where Bee works. The front cover’s depiction of a filmstrip, with its negative images of atrocities, highlights Bee’s penchant for snooping, but when the film wraps around to the back cover, readers recognize the main characters.
Between the covers, a substantial rounded black line surrounds the narrative panels. Bee’s photo-inspired panels are less encumbered, using only a thin outline. Thirty-five millimeter film and photographs are just a few of the photo formats in Shutterbug; some panels are Polaroids, and others are black-and-white Brownie Hawkeye stills. The only deviation from the square, left-to-right, top-to-bottom photo-album style occurs in nightmare and action scenes, when Rodney has to “follow that car,” when Bee is risking her neck to get to the bottom of kidnapping and murder, or when she is being menaced by Khatchatourian.
The book also contains panels of red negatives with sprocket holes, emphasizing the photographic nature of Bee’s work and her voyeuristic tendencies. Many panels are seen through a camera’s viewfinder, as Bee utilizes her telephoto lens to spy on the bad guys. There are even panels that resemble television screens as Khatchatourian watches Bee on closed-circuit surveillance cameras.
The straight-on perspective rarely deviates and pulls the reader into the pictures, while many panels tell the story without words. Speech bubbles add to, instead of repeat, the story. Text boxes communicate the passage of time (“eighteen minutes later”) and space (“fifteen blocks later”). Shouting is rendered in bold text, sound effects are colored, and sweat (or stress) beads fly throughout. The photographic panel style is essential to the narrative of Bee.
Themes
Little calls Shutterbug Follies “bubblegum noir,” a Nancy-Drew-meets-Sam-Spade kind of story. Even though Bee may rival Miss Marple in sleuthing ability, this is no cozy mystery; her guts and spunk are reminiscent of a Raymond Chandler character as, for example, she wields a phone to knock her attacker senseless. Her cartoonlike visual identity may remind some readers of Velma Dinkley, but her exploits take her beyond Scooby Doo since characters from R-rated movies, not Saturday-morning cartoons, populate her world. Bee is an amateur detective who uses reasoning and logic like any good investigator.
Shutterbug Follies is a story in which good triumphs over evil, but that does not mean it qualifies for the Comics Code seal of approval. Like any first-rate noir detective, Bee has a secure sense of right and wrong when battling criminals in the gritty world of the city. She is ambivalent about morality, and even though she may be a “good girl,” it is not by choice.
Photography is both a narrative and stylistic theme in Shutterbug Follies. Developing film is the perfect career for the voyeuristic Bee, and Little exploits photography and film in the book’s layout and narrative. On a larger scale, Little seems to be asking, “What constitutes art?”
Bee is a feminist hero. She is the guts and brains behind a loose band of compatriots. The taxi-driving Rodney not only vomits at the sight of blood but also never wants to get involved in hunting down the criminals. He waits in the car while Bee risks her neck to see what the Russian mob is up to. Huey, Bee’s love interest, wilts at the slightest provocation, including criticism of his “art.” Lyla is always cautioning Bee against taking chances, unless they are sexual in nature. In the end, it is Bee who infiltrates the lair of the assassin and brawls her way to his ultimate capture.
Impact
Little appreciates The Adventures of Tintin (1929-1976), and it shows. His characters and settings have the saturated hues and clear line that made Hergé famous, with lots of full-bodied oranges, reds, purples, and greens. There is no cross-hatching, skies are blue, sidewalks are gray, and shadows are dark tones on top of the original color. Little’s art may fool some readers (those who expect Tintin-esque story lines), but ShutterbugFollies is an adult-rated adventure taking place on the streets of New York. Shutterbug Follies earned the dubious honor of being banned in Texas schools for profanity, inappropriate language, and sexual content, as well as in Arizona for material that Little supposes is “prurient in nature [because] all the panels with violence and blood have been left in.”
When Shutterbug Follies first appeared on the Web as a serial comic it featured a vertical layout and always ended with a cliff-hanger. These once-a-week comics, delivered each Sunday, kept readers coming back for more and, with few exceptions, constitute the hardcover edition of Shutterbug Follies.
Bee is a new kind of hero, a woman with a normal shape who wears flat shoes. Little’s phrase “bubblegum noir” is spot-on, with Bee in noir trouble, but shown in bubblegum colors and art reminiscent of the Sunday newspaper comics. Little’s narratives are best when they are shown, not told, allowing the reader to sit next to Bee as she rides on the subway and look over her shoulder as she peruses her catalog of the grotesque.
Further Reading
Bendis, Michael Brian. Alias (2001-2004).
Little, Jason. Motel Art Improvement Service (2010).
Mills, Christopher. Femme Noir: The Dark City Diaries (2009).
Bibliography
“Book Review: Shutterbug Follies.” Review of Shutterbug Follies, by Jason Little. Librarianaut, March 24, 2009. http://librarianaut.com/2009/03/24/book-review-shutterbug-follies.
Little, Jason. “An Interview with Jason Little.” Interview by Mark Bryant. Popimage, Fall, 1999. http://www.beecomix.com/comics/infoframes.htm.
Seven, John. “Motel Art Improvement Service Goes from Web to Print.” Publisher’s Weekly,December 14, 2010. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/comics/article/45504-motel-art-improvement-service-goes-from-web-to-print.html.