Oh, I forgot there's a cartoon :) Yeah, Giffen invented that language too.
"You say you're purposefully starting with the writer's least legible work?"
Ha ha ah ha, oh dear, no. There's a lot of competiton for "Giffen's least legible work" and this doesn't even place.
I started here for two reasons. One is that I think the art is glorious. I love it.
The second is that I spent hours last night trying to shoehorn FYL into our posting format without writing a hundred pages of notes. It was nearly impossible and not much fun. So I decided to go back a bit and at least establish the visual language of the series. You cannot approach this series expecting to understand everything that's going on -- that's like starting a thousand-page book on page 400, except even more so.
My hopes were to lay a storytelling framework and a common ground for discussion. It's the only way we can even discuss FYL, because so much of the source text is out-of-print or so-silver-age-as-to-be-unreadable, and Giffen is easily the *least* decompressed storyteller in modern comics history.
I'm also way below the 1/3 page limit here, so if there are any stories people really love, they can still post those bits (I left out Gim and Yera completely, frex).