Optometry

by Xiang Yata, James McNulty (Editor), Jerrod Schwarz (Editor)

In Optometry, a girl goes to an optical shop for a pair of glasses. As the eye doctor calibrates the optometry machine to investigate the faults and fractures in her eyes, she is transported to a new world, a place full of overlapping images, dots, curves, houses, and light reflections. The girl must navigate through the various unique planes within optometry world, confronting endless labyrinths, exploding worlds, and multiple versions of herself to find her way back to reality before she becomes lost forever in a daze. Artist Xiang Yata takes you on a journey showing how our thought patterns branch out through multiple art forms, including sketching, photography, and graphic design to investigate the myriad ways we perceive ourselves.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels

260 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2023

About the author

Xiang Yata is a Chinese illustrator, cartoonist and animator.
She attended the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts for high school and then the Beijing Film Academy for animation and film. While working as a professional animator, Yata has published a number of experimental works within the alternative comics scene in the US. Her longest and most famous book to date is Optometry (2023).

Reviews

[Rick Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Xiang Yata's Optometry opens with a girl getting an eye examination in order to purchase her first pair of glasses. What begins as a simple examination soon leads into an explosion of scenes to challenge the reader's sense of depth, perception and imagination. Filled with mixed media styles, Xiang Yata's artwork is evolving throughout the duration of Optometry and in turn creating a morphing narrative that relies heavily on visual storytelling alone. The dialogue only really exists in the beginning and the in the end, so much of Optometry relies on the reader utilizing their own interpretation of the ever-changing scenery and spectacle.

The varying art styles also leans heavily on the use of symmetry and patterns to cultivate visual trickery and optical illusions, but all towards the sense of taking the protagonist and reader on a journey of sorts. An interview with Yata at the back of the book indicates that she's worked on Optometry over the span of a decade and that is abundantly clear by just how different the art gets from page to page. In that alone, I found this to be an intriguing demonstration of an artist's growth. The subtextual narrative found within the artwork and art style is significantly more interesting than the actual laid out narrative, but that's likely by design. It is the main narrative that I did find fairly lacking, particularly in the ending where Yata does engage in some excess exposition to explain the journey the young girl goes on. It's fairly unnecessary and overindulgent, but a small sin for a fairly ambitious project like this one.

Optometry is pure visual storytelling and one of those books a reader can pick up and flip to any page to find something engrossing. The simple premise makes the narrative a little lacking and thus one could just argue this is more of an artbook than actual graphic novel, but I'd challenge that argument by saying there is definitely a spiritual journey spanning the pages of this book.

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

J’adore the multiplicity, possibility, and transformation in Optometry.

Details galore. Finding new paths and visions each time. Wondrous.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cool and trippy!

[Lake Scherr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Needing a quick read, I decided to pick this book up. And I was kind of disappointed. The artwork and concept is beautiful, but the book itself is far too abstract for my liking. I wouldn’t even consider it a graphic novel. More like a book with art. The lack of words made most of it up to interpretation but also hard to follow.

I love how the different mediums were included here, however. And I believe that may have been the cause with the higher price. However, I think the book is just not for me. I’lol probably give this book away to someone who likes art.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Experimenting with form can go so wrong. That's not what happens here.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very relatable, this always happens to me.