Moody, surreal, and fairly plotless, Zuo Ma is a respected member of the Chinese indie comics scene, and I can appreciate the drive of that movement to reject the commercialism which continues to produce pulp-minded tropes and plots.  More, I can appreciate, too, that there is a value in autobiography, in personal reverie, in confessionalism that is offered through a graphic novel medium. After all, why can't one simply offer detailed and personalized pen and ink art which honors key memories of their lives and why can't we slow to appreciate them? 

All this is very very personal, of course, and it clashes absolutely with the moment we produce a massive compendium as we have here, offered to the larger publishing world for its paying consumption. Other reviews make this clear: too personal, the art quality is not strong enough, a lack of storytelling, too many disconnected stream-of-consciousness dream sequences, etc.

Those reviewers are not wrong. If you want Night Bus to match what graphic novels have come to represent, it will absolutely fail. And for Zuo Ma, who offers his own doubts about the value of his work throughout, recognizing that a lone artist writing into the hungry spaces of capital is a grisly task requiring some negotiation and compromise.

Still, while I fall largely with the harsher critics of this work, I have no need to pile on here.  Night Bus has some beautiful moments of simpler times, of nostalgia and childish dreams, of a refusal to surrender to those hungry modern machines, and though I personally found too little pleasure in the ambling length of this work, I can't help but wonder at its value and necessity, of a single boy, dreaming and drawing.