The Globe and Mail
For anyone still in doubt, Tillie Walden’s Charity & Sylvia (Drawn & Quarterly Publications) makes a persuasive case for the greatness of the graphic novel form. Cinematic and immersive, it relates the true story of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a same-sex couple who ran a popular tailoring practice out of their shared log-cabin home in early 19th-century Vermont.
Theirs is, rather unexpectedly, less a story of persecution than of gradual acceptance. Though some community members politely turned a blind eye, or less politely chastised them, both women’s families and their community came to tolerate, even embrace, their unconventional life together.
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Walden has drawn on an unusually rich archive – hundreds of pages of the women’s candid journals, letters and poetry. But as compelling as her story is, the star here is the book’s sepia-toned illustrations, as copious as they are sublime. Thousands of small, delicate frames, each worthy of a protracted linger, offer a portal into Charity and Sylvia’s world. We follow them along unforgiving rutted roads through the endless measuring and cutting of fabric, enduring winters, making meals, and other quiet rituals of daily life. Both women were the eighth child in their families, and both endured multiple sibling deaths. Walden carries them into old age with an intimacy that choked me up more than once.
Charity is the more forceful of the pair: She knows, from the beginning, that marriage isn’t for her. She has multiple relationships with women before meeting Sylvia, who, despite her devotion to Charity, struggles to reconcile their life together with her Christianity. While much of the book is presented as a straight chronological narrative, Walden doesn’t hesitate to turn to abstraction when the material warrants it.
Walden herself is something of a phenom. Just 30, she has produced 14 graphic works in a decade – including graphic adaptations of Tegan and Sara’s memoirs – an almost unfathomable output in a medium defined by its long labours. This, her first graphic novel per se, is a triumph.
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Hamilton’s Joe Ollmann belongs to a subset of graphic novelists – Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine and Seth among them – whose specialty is an artisanal, often male-centred quiet despair. The Woodchipper (Drawn & Quarterly Publications), a follow-up to Fictional Father (the first graphic novel nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award), is a series of graphic short stories. (In the book’s intro, Ollmann tells us the hottest trend on BookTok right now must surely be “graphic shorties” – a line made funnier by its obvious wrongness.)
Ollmann drops his varied cast of characters, many of whom are struggling to navigate the gig economy, into highly specific situations that quickly spiral out of control, often triggering a crisis of conscience. A middle-aged city worker who once sneered at therapy is left unable to work after nearly feeding an obnoxious co-worker – napping unseen – into a woodchipper. A bookstore clerk is trapped in a basement washroom over the Christmas holidays when a toppled tower of books blocks the steel door. Elsewhere, a man watches his short-term rental bookings dry up after a suicide in one of the units, online commenters branding the property a “murder house.”
In the book’s longest story, a newly promoted security guard at a controversial laboratory is drawn into the orbit of animal-rights protesters who suspect something insidious is happening inside (they’re right). Throughout, Ollmann keeps us rooting for his hapless underdogs as they endure their finely calibrated predicaments.
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Jon Claytor’s absurdist coming-of-age story, Nowhere (Goose Lane Editions), opens with young Joel and his family – a unit that includes his mother, stepfather, dog, cat and two turtles – rolling, quite literally, into the town of Beauséjour, their car being on its last legs. They’ve come to start over, something that has become a regular habit. Joel despises his stepfather, Jake, a drinker and emotional bully. Molly, his mother, is the one who holds the burden of keeping the family together, thanks to a waitressing job she picks up at a local diner.
It quickly becomes clear that nothing about Beauséjour is quite right. On the town’s edge sits a giant white cube whose existence goes unquestioned by residents. The town is meant to be small, yet the Victorian-looking school Joel attends is improbably vast. There’s also a movie theatre, arcade, and even a newspaper whose latest headlines have been dwelling on the unexplained disappearance of residents – a fate that will soon extend to Joel’s parents.
By night, the streets fill with a smorgasbord of pop-cultural menace: zombies, clowns, wolves, giant rats, black cats, ghosts and vampires. Other recent arrivals include a gaggle of aliens with a penchant for TV, there to test human fear responses.
Claytor, who paints and writes out of Sackville, N.B., (this is his graphic novel debut), draws in a loose, baggy style well suited to the chaos of his material. Beneath all the humour lies a portrait of adolescence as a time of drift and dislocation sharpened by the disarray of Joel’s family life.
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is the inventor – and prime practitioner – of Haida Manga which, as its name suggests, blends West Coast Haida artistic practice with Japanese manga. He was born in 1954, at a time when the Haida culture – after enduring nearly a century of decimation as a result of smallpox, colonialism and forced assimilation – seemed on its knees. As Wade Davis notes in his foreword, however, Yahgulanaas came of age in the late 1960s and ’70s – a time of cultural rebirth for the Haida. (He is of mixed Scottish-Haida ancestry; on his maternal side he descends from a long line of Haida artists.)
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What makes Yahgulanaas’s work, The Lost Haida Manga (Douglas And McIntyre) – which is often funny and playful – more than a clever hybrid is how naturally he brings together the two traditions. Both favour bold lines, flattened space and stylized expression over realism, and both tell stories by guiding the eye across the page in a visual, almost musical rhythm.
In Haida art, that rhythm is driven by the black formline. Working largely in black and white, Yahgulanaas lays that structure bare. His images often read in reverse: The same outlines that contain his figures generate other, unexpected forms.
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This striking collection samples his comics from the late 1980s to the present. The early work is more overtly political, taking on the poisoning of Haida waters with mercury and the depredations of multinational logging companies. Much of the book is devoted to Yahgulanaas’s Rocking Raven series of comics, centred on a trickster figure drawn from traditional Haida narratives.
The book is lavishly, almost extravagantly, inked – black lines pooling and swelling across the page as if ink itself were, unlike the water and forests whose sullying he decries, a limitless resource. It’s a collection for readers – but also for viewers willing to read.