Where do thoughts come from, and what even are they? These, and other questions, form the basis for What It Is by Lynda Barry (Drawn & Quarterly), a joyous meditation on creativity by one of the world’s premier cartoonists. Barry is an interdisciplinary artist, whose latter work has been preoccupied with the craft of art itself. In 2019′s scintillating Making Comics, she made the case for, well, making comics, and in What It Is she ventures even further into the terrain of ideas, images and even thoughts themselves.
If that sounds heady and self-absorbed, the result is anything but. Laid out on her signature lined paper, short, biographical cartoons are interspersed with provocative thesis statements on creativity. Each section is headed with different axiomatic questions, pondering things such as: What are images, and are they alive?; What is the past, and what is it made of?; What’s the difference between memory and imagination?
There’s barely a page without a picture to marvel at, a line of prose that doesn’t make you sit upright and read again. Throughout, we get glimpses of Barry’s own backstory, a childhood that sat “somewhere between happy and unhappy”, and her path to liberation through art. Crammed with thousands of drawings, paintings and pasted-in photo collage works, this is nothing less than a workbook for making and thinking, a long, moving and frequently hilarious examination of the best way to go about either enterprise. This is a book that brims with urgent, empathetic clarity.
In Palestine (2024 Edition) and War On Gaza by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics) we encounter clarity of a different sort. Written in April, when Biden was still the presumptive US presidential nominee, War On Gaza is a 34-page broadside from one of comics’ most acerbic voices, an unflinching and sardonic swipe at the horrors of Israeli strikes in Gaza and the complicity of the United States – and Biden specifically – in their execution. Told in the form of short, punchy cartoon essays, it is a bitter howl of disgust aimed at throttling the reader’s conscience into submission – a task at which it succeeds with grisly brio.
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As a companion piece to Sacco’s Palestine – first published in 1993, but reprinted this year with a new foreword from the author – the effect is deliberately, and necessarily, jarring. In Palestine, Sacco’s form is stringently documentarian, giving a thorough account of the hundreds of locals Sacco speaks to, as well as a deep sense of the author himself as an inserted protagonist; the clueless westerner who begins his trip brimming with presumptions about a conflict he doesn’t understand.
Over the course of the following chapters, he is relieved of his gormless hubris, gaining a deeper understanding of the existing conflict, and the decades of turmoil that have preceded it. (An equally excellent follow-up, Footnotes In Gaza, goes into further detail on massacres of Palestinians that took place in Rafah and Khan Younis in the 1950s).
It would probably have been impossible for Sacco to write War On Gaza in the boots-on-the-ground manner in which he wrote Palestine or Footnotes – at least 180 journalists have been killed there in the past 12 months. But, to those of us who first experienced those works 20 or 30 years ago, their effect is enhanced; suffused, throughout, with the depressing sense that their snapshots of life and death, of pain and struggle, have now been rendered obsolete by horrors even worse.
Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics) has an annoyingly simple premise: it purports to be an exacting, minute-by-minute record of a single wasted Sunday in the life of the author’s cousin, Thibault. We watch as our protagonist whiles away the hours, pondering what to eat, whether he should have a smoke, or a drink, or buy a pastry from his local Turkish shop, and frets constantly over unanswered messages from his girlfriend, Migali.
In actual fact, we experience it with him, for almost all of the book’s “text” is related through his internal thoughts and feelings, delivered in a stream of consciousness that will be uncannily familiar to anyone who’s faced down the burning tedium of a nothing-happening type of day.
We are not, however, constrained to the small world to which he restricts himself. While we never leave Thibault’s internal monologue, Schrauwen’s eye leads us off-frame and around the houses; to neighbours running errands, mice escaping local cats, Migali making her way back from a trip in Gambia, and his wayward cousin Rik attempting to plan a surprise gathering for Thibault’s imminent 36th birthday.
By itself, closely depicting an interior life is not new. Ulysses mined such deep-buried material more than a century ago – and did so with similarly unvarnished detours into paranoia, drunkenness and erotic thoughts – but Schrauwen’s gift for elevating the mundane spins gold from lead at every turn. This large book might prove daunting for some, but delivers dividends when digested in chunks – a tactic espoused by the author himself, who pops into frame to tell you to put the book down for a while and have a coffee.
Sunday is the something and nothing of life at its most everyday, raised to the point of literature by an artist at the peak of his powers.
Hot House by John Hankiewicz (Fieldmouse Press) is an entirely text-free experience that challenges the reader to discern meaning from domestic scenes, arranged in an uninterrupted series of four-panel grids. Two adults live in a house while rarely interacting with each other, spending their days instead indulging in mundane chores; folding laundry, sweeping floors. Repeated motifs – twigs, washing lines, a naked little boy – give proceedings a randomised flashcard quality as the exact nature of their relationship, and the reality we’re observing, come in and out of focus.
It’s hard, sometimes, to judge when text-free comics migrate from the inscrutable to the profound, but as with last year’s The Gull Yettin by Joe Kessler, Hot House manages this task without slipping into the trap of being too ponderous by half.
However cryptic, one feels its mysteries can be divined through careful reading, even if no two readers might come to the same conclusion.
Brotherhood, Part 1 by Seán Hogan takes us back to 1920, and a Tipperary town gripped by the violent conflict then spreading across Ireland. Teenage boy Macdara would rather be reading cowboy novels and playing with his dog, when his life intersects with the War of Independence in a manner more grisly than he could have desired. After accidentally killing a Black and Tan soldier with an all too well-placed rock, he finds himself needing to cover up his crime. So, together with his friends Colm, Seamus and Ciara, he forms the Brotherhood, a rag-tag crew of misfits that flatters itself as an elite paramilitary unit for their own self-defence.
Hogan’s script captures the central tension between these kids’ desire to do great deeds for Ireland and their ignorance of the terrifying realities of the adult world. Their speech is peppered with the sort of grandstanding derring-do beloved of Boy’s Own fiction and British war comics of the 20th century, albeit undergirded with their natural terror of all the actual violence, and actual death, encroaching all around them.
The beats of the story, from their troubled home lives to the dawning realisation that heroism is easier to read about than undertake in real life, recall other coming-of-age tales from War Of The Buttons to The Goonies. Hogan ably transposes that form to 1920s Ireland with a canny script and clean, black-and-white lines. The Brotherhood is a ripping yarn that has something dark bubbling from within its hidden centre. At its heart, it tells two stories, and tells them well; of children attempting to meet the challenges of adulthood; and of a country reckoning with the unfathomable horrors of war.
Rune: The Tale Of A Thousand Faces by Carlos Sánchez (Nobrow) is a sprightly, colourful fantasy aimed at younger readers, but with more than enough joys for all ages. Best friends Chiri and Dai are students at a Catholic school, constantly beset by bullies for their nerdy ways. We don’t get to spend too much time in that world, however, as most of the book’s events take place in Puddin’, a fantasyland to which they find themselves transported early on.
Puddin’ is a place of dark magic, beset by rumours of a returning nemesis known only as The Shadow King, a dark sorcerer with the ability to possess and control his subjects. So far, so rote – but what elevates Rune above many similarly tropey stories is Sánchez’s gorgeously toothsome art and character design, which populates every page with infinite tiny details and critters for the reader to pore over with rapt delight.
His art style has a distinctly animated quality, pitched somewhere between Adventure Time’s Gus Allen, and Over The Garden Wall’s Patrick McHale. The result is a series of static images that seethe with movement and life, scaffolded by storytelling that lets their strengths sing.
None more so than in the case of Chiri, whose mutism and hearing impairment mark her out as a target for bullies in the real world. In Puddin’, however, her sign language skills render her adept in the gestures necessary to perform spells – a choice that is as narratively ingenious as it is unshowily, but masterfully, empowering to deaf readers. It’s just one of many elements that makes Rune a real treasure.
At the very outset of The Last Queen by Jean-Marc Rochette (Self-Made Hero), our hero Édouard Roux is a boy living in the French Alps, the child of an unmarried woman designated a witch by local villagers. Édouard earns the latter’s approbation by reacting with horror to the killing of the region’s last living bear – the last queen of the novel’s title – a creature he loves and respects for its dignity and strength.
Soon, we cut to the older Édouard, now a disfigured veteran, who returns home as a gueule cassée (broken face) at the end of the first World War. When Jeanne Sauvage, a talented animal sculptor, makes him a new face, Édouard finds a new lease of life, and yearns to return them both to the unspoilt perfection of his alpine home and his connection to its natural wonders.
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Amid all this, there is barbed commentary on class, greed, art and war, and flashbacks that cover 100,000 years of local history. None of which describes the central draw of this magnificent book, which are its beautiful draughtsmanship, sublime pace and exquisite writing. Best known for authoring Snowpiercer, Rochette delivers here a more subdued and quiet narrative, and it is better for every measured word and silent page. Excellently translated by Edward Gauvin, this is a book of sweeping drama and penetrating insight. It is a deep and humane masterpiece and, like the bear of its title, it lives long in the mind after departure.
Séamas O’Reilly is features editor of the Fence Magazine
