Joy Rip

Girl with Camera: a Ghost Story Joy Rip

Publisher Marketing: "GIRL WITH CAMERA: A Ghost Story" is the new graphic novel by author and artist Joy Rip. It is the haunting, disturbing story about the last one hundred pictures found on the camera of a missing girl - a girl with great ambitions of becoming a world recognized photographer and photojournalist. "Girl With Camera" is an experimental ghost story. This ghost story creates a more lasting haunting experience for the reader by using the graphic novel to examine the ghostly fragmentary nature of all stories, all storytelling, and the ends to which we will go with our minds to create a sense of purpose, a sense of destiny and well-being, in a hostile, lonely, violent universe. In this graphic novel, the structure and genesis of storytelling is broken down into fragmentary words and pictures in order to examine how our thirst for meaning, for stability, cohesion, consistency and continuity in our lives creates a logic of its very own - a logic supplied by both reader and author - that brings (imaginary or real) order to chaos and gives a sense of permanence to our existence where none may in fact exist. Danny Heitman in his article "Great Books About the Beach" in The Wall Street Journal writes "The Best beach books are what all good writing should be -- a call to attention; a sense of mystery; a raised alertness to what is permanent...and what is transitory." Don't let the thickness of this book fool you. Joy Rip's 300-page graphic novel "GIRL WITH CAMERA: A Ghost Story" is a breezy read. But it is a haunting read. And it does it with paintings and words that set a host of ghostly anonymous figures against vast skies and spaces evoking simultaneous impressions of expansive desert flats and infinite seaside seascapes conceived as sun drenched wastelands and wondrous beauty.