Graphic Novels – reviews of some recent releases

The mother in Becky Barnicoat’s best-selling graphic novel is delirious and dishevelled and probably expressing nothing that mums don’t already know. But it is a hilariously honest and incredibly tender portrait of early motherhood (I have that on good authority from new mothers themselves). We are told “this is definitely not a parenting manual, but it might be the only book about parenting you’ll ever need” and in its graphic, visceral depiction of the exhaustion, the anxiety, the identity shifts and the overwhelming love that underpins it all, this might be true. Whether you’re a new parent, supporting someone who is, or simply interested in an honest memoir, Cry When the Baby Cries is a moving and beautifully crafted read.

There are many ways to learn about a place. There is non-fiction to tell of the important developments in history and to explain why a place is the way it is. There is fiction, to tell the stories that bring colour and breathe life into a place. And then there are graphic novels, perhaps combining the two? In Palestine, first published in the early 1990s, Sacco documents his time in the West Bank and Gaza where he interviewed Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The result is vital reportage and deeply human stories that you can, quite literally, watch unfold. Palestine remains a seminal text in graphic nonfiction and adds yet more texture to our understanding of Palestinian history.

As an enormous fan of Olga Tokarczuk, I was so excited when this arrived in the shop last year. And I was delighted to find it every bit as unsettling as her fiction. The story is about a man, our hero ‘mr distinctive’, who possesses a face that no one can forget. He travels the world and still finds his face to be the most important thing to be seen and so he takes picture after picture in front of forests, beaches, and other wonderous landmarks, documenting the world but more specifically his own place (or face) in it. With each click, his face begins to lose focus. His chin and lips are the first to blur, but eventually he finds himself in need of a whole new face. Olga’s text is sparse, but the illustrations deliver a creepy, cautionary tale and make it all the more impactful.

Bechdel’s Fun Home was probably my first foray into the world of graphic novels. Fun Home is about Alison Bechdel’s childhood, her complicated relationship with her father, and her acute desire to understand why she is the way she is. It’s brilliant. Spent, her latest graphic novel memoir is no less brilliant.

In Spent, Bechdel turns her highly self aware voice to the subject of money- how we earn it, spend it (or justify spending it), and the frustrating way it seems to taint life. As she strains to make enough money to feel financially secure, she laments living in a world of such inequality that her own security feels somehow wrong and morally dubious. She finds herself wondering “precisely when had her moral erosion begun?”.

What I think makes Bechdel’s memoirs/ social commentaries/ philosophical enquiries so well suited to the graphic novel form is that you can quite literally see the contradiction on the page. Contradictions both obvious and subtle are nestled into the pictures accompanying the text making it so much more rewarding of a read.

Wake is about the history of women led revolts during the slave trade. It is also about the process of uncovering that shadowy history. We follow Rebecca Hall in this visual version of her PHD as she parses through ‘the erased, the unspoken, the blank spaces in the documents’ to give voice to the women who revolted against their captors. It feels a little cheeky to use a pull quote to tell you about this book… but it’s Angela Carter so I think it’s probably fine: ‘Not only a riveting tale of Black women’s leadership of slave revolts but an equally dramatic story of the engaged scholarship that enabled its discovery’. The details in the illustrations are painful, and powerful and tell a multi-layered story– expertly contrasting Hall’s present struggle with archival bureaucracy that leaves her feeling burnt out, with the ancestral voices and figures of the past buoying her onwards. Hall tells an important history and also gives physical form to those who have been reduced to objects.