Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #199 by Drew Barth

Two Perspectives Here Before You

If there’s a medium that can use its visuals to their fullest extent when representing characters, it’s comics. There are only so many ways for film to show a person—but the face doesn’t change much without hours in the makeup chair. Comics, though, revel in that difference. Artists have their styles and techniques that make them immediately recognizable and, when we see those faces they’ve constructed for a story, we feel that immediate familiarity with their work. And a comic like Two Graves by Genevive Valentine, Ming Doyle, Annie Wu, Lee Loughridge, and Aditva Bidikar takes that idea of differing art to its fullest extent.

Two Graves is a comic about death. Mostly. Emilia and a man that could be Death are traveling, but we’re not quite sure where or why. All we know is that they’re moving as they can’t stay in one place for too long. By the end of the first issue, they already have two bodies to their one: one that had been waiting for Death, and another that hadn’t been expecting their night to end so abruptly. Emilia and Death work together, but we’re being kept in the dark, much like they are about one another.

What helps in this division between the two characters, though, is how each character is represented on the page. When we’re looking from Emilia’s perspective, we look through the lens of Annie Wu’s art. For the person who may be Death, Ming Doyle takes over. Because of this, we have a harder split between what we can and can’t see. Both Emilia and Death are being followed in a close first person perspective and, as a result, we only get a portion of each character’s thoughts and feelings as the story progresses. As readers, we know there’s portions of the story locked behind each character’s perspective, but this format allows for something more interesting in how the story is told. We would typically follow a single character or a larger cast with a roving third person narrator that may or may not know all in a typical series. But with this split between the two, we’re more privy to each of their thoughts and secrets—we simultaneously know more and less than each character as a result. We have to participate in the story in a more active way to get the entire picture.

As a first issue, Two Graves does what I love to see—strong characterization, established tone, worldbuilding—but with that added layer of Wu and Doyle tag-teaming on the art to create something more that I haven’t seen in a comic in a long time. It’s a mystery series that doesn’t show any hand too much or too often. We’re guessing intentions just as much as Emilia and Death are to one another. We can’t quite settle into the story as we know we’re missing something else. But that something else is what draws us into the story further and further. 

Get excited. Get going ahead now.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #198 by Drew Barth

Cat Time

How much time do we actually have? We sleep, roughly, eight hours and work for an additional nine. But then we have overtime and all the preparations for getting to work and the chores we need to deal with to keep our homes livable and, at the end of that, do we even have time left? As much as we want, we can’t fit everything into our days—at least not as much as we would like. But Genie Liang’s A Cat’s Day seems to have found the answer to where we can make up all of that lost time. Or, rather, it starts out that way.

Samo has been working away from her grandmother’s house and her brother for a while now. She wants to visit them more often, but the train from the city is a long trip and she just doesn’t have the time anymore. Work is work. She’s started a new job sorting people’s hard drives and doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be able to stay. Sure, the pay’s decent enough, but everyone else there does their work so quickly. How can anyone have the time to work and do everything else they need? This is where Samo meets a cat, a day planner, and a stamp. She still has the same amount of time in a day, but she can move those times around to where she needs them most. All those hard drives at work can be done over the weekend and then brought back in time to present as if she had done them over a couple hours.

What sells this sense of time travel and the lack of time we have with that is how Liang panels her work. From the precise grids of the day planner to the dynamics of the time travel itself once Samo starts to lose control of their time again, everything points toward the idea of trying to work within time’s contraints. These more manic pages give us a sense of the work and the panic that comes with trying to fit as much as possible into a finite amount of time. But as Samo progresses in the story, we see this eventual breaking of the panels entirely and a shift to floating in space while time and life disappear around her. It’s the breaking of this cycle of time and the freedom for prioritizing personal time over working overtime again and again.

A Cat’s Day is one of those graphic novels that gives you a certain amount of pause. You read it, you enjoy it, you slip it onto your shelf as a good book. But it’s the kind of book that lingers—you begin to think of your own time and how much you spread it around. Your calendar looks more full than it did before, those overtime hours seem like they’re taking up more time than the did before. And you find yourself clearing that calendar out for your own cat’s day. 

Get excited. Get a break.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #192 by Drew Barth

Undisputed Classics

Comics as a medium is old. The stories we tell about those older comics could likely fill up more pages than exist in comics. And even more pages could be filled by the comics that never existed but were talked about by masters of the medium in their idle chats with friends and publishers. But the world doesn’t revolve around comics, only the money they make for the people who barely touch them.

Diving into that aspect of comics is the classic graphic novel by Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville.

Hicksville feels like a high-water mark not only due to its usage of the medium, but also how Horrocks weaves a story. Starting with Leonard Batts attempting, and getting lost in route, to reach the titular Hicksville—the hometown of Dick Burger, the most famous comic creator living. But Hicksville isn’t apt to open itself up to Batts and his questions about Burger’s origins. What we do get is hints from friends, like fellow cartoonist Sam Zabel or former partner Grace Pekapeka, about something Durger had done in the past that has caused the town to shun his name. And in a town obsessed with comics, his crime was particularly heinous.

But the thing that makes Hicksville stand out is how it uses comics to tell its story. First serialized in Horrocks’ Pickle (made even more meta by Sam Zabel telling his portion of the story in his own issues of Pickle throughout), the story blends aspects of comics history with the fictional world Horrocks creates. There’s an odd sense of unreality as Hicksville the town feels like the kind of place that could exist—a small, closely-knit town off the coast of New Zealand—but is just unreal enough to fit in a comic world. From the difficulty of Leonard Batts attempting to find the town in the first place, it almost feels like it doesn’t exist at all. And yet, through the pages, issues of Pickle, and the integration of the story of The Captain, Hōne Heke, and Alfred at the most meta-narrative moments, and we have a world unfolding before us that tells a history of the comics world that could have existed.

More than anything, Hicksville is an examination of what could have existed. From the success of Dick Burger to the Hicksville lighthouse housing hundreds of volumes of comics that were only dreamed about by their original creators, it’s about this power of potential that comics hold. Even as the land is ever shifting and changing, the potential for something more still exists regardless of who happens to be holding the most power. Comic creators want to create, even if they’re stuck in the moral rut that can come with comics. And yet we keep wanting to make something with this medium that will resonate throughout history. 

Get excited. Get more. 

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #190 by Drew Barth

Thank You for Being Afraid

Battle Royals have been the preeminent form of entertainment for the past few years. Due to its dominance in the video game market, Fortnite’s battle royal style of game play is one of the biggest things in the world. But while this genre isn’t new, especially if we look at the film Battle Royale from 2000, its recent saturation has led to a large variety of experiments within the genre that push away from the simpler winner-take-all attitude of the game and focus in more on those unwittingly caught in the mass violence brought to them. This is where Golden Rage by Chrissy Williams, Lauren Knight, Sofie Dodgson, Shayne Hannah Cui, and Becca Carey brings in their island of grandmothers who are looking to murder one another. 

Although we don’t know why the murder is occurring just yet, The Island is still resplendent with violence. From the first splash page we’re presented with grandmas wholesale murdering one another for unknown reasons. But then that’s where we meet Jay and Rosie. Jay is very much not a grandmother and Rosie is larger than a sedan and swinging an ax at anyone that gets close enough. But Rosie grabs Jay and takes her back to a lighthouse hideout with Lottie and Caroline—a pair that have been on the island for an unknown amount of time, but are still somehow making a small living among the violence. All of this violence, however, still catches up to them. 

Golden Rage, though, is the kind of comic that keeps its hand close. It wants you to work for the information on the page. No one is yelling about what is happening in the panel or spelling every aspect of the story out—it trusts you to figure it out as you go along. It doesn’t feel like a revolutionary thing in comic storytelling, there’s dozens of mystery stories coming out that want you to find those clues, but for a more action-oriented series that presents itself as “Battle Royale meets The Golden Girls” it’s honestly refreshing to see it go in this more subtle route. And with this first issue, we’re getting that piecemeal approach: small bits of dialog, a splash page with minor hints here and there, a map of the island at the end. All of these elements build toward uncovering what this series is really trying to accomplish.

As far as first issues go, Golden Rage is a pile of secrets already. We’re given precious little, but then we’re looking through the eyes of Jay and her limited knowledge of The Island. But then that works out incredibly well. This is Jay observing the story of Rosie, Lottie, and Caroline as the newcomer and creators like Williams, Knight, Dodgson, Cui, and Carey know how to convey that newness in a first issue. It’s that newness that also immediately hooks you for the next as the cliffhanger on the final page just makes me want the second issue all the more. 

Get excited. Get golden.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.