Checked Out by Katie Fricas (Drawn & Quarterly) is a love letter to books and bookishness, wrapped in a memoir of part-time work, queer love and the suffocating perils of writer’s block. Louise is an army brat who’s moved to New York to spread her wings, and finds herself working in the city’s oldest private library, where she stacks shelves, plans dates and attempts to surreptitiously research a long-gestating graphic novel project about the heroism of pigeons in the first World War.
Fricas’s art is frenetic, matching the scuzzy, chaotic contours of early adulthood, and the bursting enthusiasm of those drawn to big-city life. Her text, too, is scratchy and blunt, as if drawn at speed, so as to better capture the natural speech of everyone around her. This is dialogue with the ring of truth, filled with nuggets of casual wit, keenly observed character moments and a pitch-perfect sense for dry non-sequiturs.
Checked Out has too many laugh-out-loud moments to count. Arriving for a date, Louise is aghast to find her partner for the evening is wearing a floppy, oversized homburg on her head. “I think it was my dad who told me,” she tells us, deadpan, “it’s hard to get close to people in big hats.” In a book entirely stuffed with them, these are truly words to live by.
Raised by Ghosts by Briana Loewinsohn (Fantagraphics) is a sweetly melancholy coming-of-age memoir, of a slightly more subdued hue, telling the story of Loewinsohn’s early 1990s teenage angst. Formed from exquisitely crafted vignettes from her life as a latchkey kid – TV dinners, empty house, shifting friend groups, absent parents – it’s complemented with teenage diary entries and transcriptions of the actual notes passed between Loewinsohn and her classmates in high school, largely kids falling between the cracks of adults who barely notice them. They agonise over mixtapes and fret over the spurned feelings and fallings-out that populate any ascent toward teenagerdom.
We are, in a sense, passengers in the drift of Briana’s hormonal fog, but there is much sweetness to be found. The absence of her parents from the text is literal, both in the sense that Briana goes through much of her life without seeing them, and that we as the reader are never shown their faces when they do occasionally appear.
These parental shortcomings are, however, small enough matters, and Loewinsohn’s genius is for depicting quotidian dramas that never quite rise to the point of crises. This is not a plot-heavy book, nor one that comes off as cloyingly sombre or self-pitying. It’s a marvel of tiny observations, of the diffidence and dislocation of youth, and the life-giving power of art and friendship.
I came to No Time Like The Present by Paul Rainey (Drawn & Quarterly) as a devotee. Rainey’s previous book, Why Don’t You Love Me?, was my pick of the year for 2023 and, as any one of the dozens of people to whom I raved about it will attest, left a mark on me for some time afterward. His follow-up, then, had a lot to live up to, and with a respect for your time that its author would likely approve of, I’m happy to say: it has done.
[ From the archive: Adventures in parenting, sun-worshipping and strange giftsOpens in new window ]
No Time Like The Present begins in a near-future Milton Keynes, albeit in a universe where a great shift has taken place. Though the exact mechanics are not laboriously described, people of this present have been granted access to the future, via a series of “junctions” through which time travellers from the future have recently begun to pass.
For almost all ordinary people, actually traversing these junctions is prohibitively expensive, but those with a little know-how can access a future-enabled web portal called the “Ultranet”. Through this, they can gain details of events yet to come or, in the case of our nerdy protagonists Cliff and Barry, settle for access to as-yet-unreleased Star Wars and Doctor Who properties.
Saying much more about what follows would undermine the premise but, as with Why Don’t You Love Me?, the genius of No Time Like The Present lies in its construction. A time-travel epic that barely leaves the bedsits, comic shops and community centres of Milton Keynes for its first 200 pages, and centres its drama entirely on the heartbreaking, heart-warming interpersonal relationships of people watching their lives slip away in entirely grounded, entirely familiar, ways.
This is mind-bending sci-fi married to the tiny mundanities of modern life. Smart, funny, sad and sharp as a tack. Rainey had a seriously hard act to follow before he wrote this book. I’m delighted to say he now has two.
Muybridge by Guy Delisle (Drawn & Quarterly) is a biography of rambling British inventor and entrepreneur, Eadweard Muybridge, from his start as a failed bookseller in 1850s New York to travels in the wild west, and his eventual place at the head of European art and science some decades later; a rise centred on the quest that would define his life’s work: to prove, once and for all, whether all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground mid-gallop.
Delisle gets us to that point by charting, with his trademark lightness of touch, the course of one irascible man’s eventful life, at a time when photography, the telegram and electricity were still brand new, and film, recorded audio and, indeed, the American west, were still being born.
The many nesting connections between Muybridge’s work and all these other developments are wonderfully explored, and there is scarcely a page without a scintillating factoid. In one throwaway panel, Delisle mentions that photography predates the invention of paint tubes by several decades, forcing us to reckon with the fact that Muybridge, with his bulky, expensive and temperamental equipment, was capturing his subjects with greater freedom than painters of the time.
Along the way, there’s also deceit, death and murder, and we discover our cantankerous protagonist’s work hold the seeds of everything from modern photography and film to animation techniques still used to this day. But Muybridge is, at its heart, a rip-roaring study of obsession, a triumph of biography set amid one of the most fascinating eras of scientific and artistic history.
Few reads this year have given me more contemplative satisfaction than The Compleat Angler, adapted by Gareth Brookes (Self-Made Hero), a beautifully toothsome rendering of Izaak Walton’s seminal book on fishing, first published in 1653. Of course, The Compleat Angler is no more solely about fishing than Jaws is solely about a shark.
In an age when the call to reject our busy, materialistic world is so common as to be a cliche, it may sound trite to call a 17th-century fishing manual timely. But we are given no other option when we encounter these themes so explicitly in its first few pages, which see Walton railing against “money-getting-men, men that spend all their time, first in getting, and next in anxious care to keep it: men that are condemned to be rich and then always busy or discontented: for these poor-rich-men, we anglers pity them perfectly”.
Much of the book’s text is filled with that same wry, rambunctious energy, providing meditative paeans to the slow joys of quiet dedication, interspersed with zen-like koans about life and its many mysteries. And, yes, the rest is instructions on how to catch, and prepare, various fish.
Brookes’ exquisite rendering of the text, including hundreds of illustrations combining linocut printmaking and ink on bamboo paper, comprise some of the most deeply pleasing imagery you’ll find in any graphic novel this year. The fish putt in and out of their four panel borders, while ink blotches mimic raindrops and air bubbles and slowly radiating ripples on glassy river streams.
The Compleat Angler is, truly, a gorgeous object. It’s no exaggeration to say that, barring the publisher’s details on its dust jacket, every single page of this book would sit handsomely on a gallery wall. But it’s also a seductive treatise on reflection – a call, one might say, to inaction, from a slower, more contented past. It’s one that may not have ever existed, of course, but we could do worse than reach for it regardless.
Misery of Love by Yvan Alagbé, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York Review of Books) is, occasionally, a tough read. This is true in several senses. The first being that most of the book is formed of disconnected memories playing out of order in the mind of Claire, a young woman attending her grandfather’s funeral in Paris. The narrative is, thus, fragmentary.
Through it several patterns emerge: ruminations on death and religion; a strained, abusive relationship with her father; and, perhaps most prominently, a passionate affair with an African man, who her family rejects on grounds of his race.
Parcelled out in this way, many of this book’s mysteries are not initially apparent from the bricolage of experiences, snippets of conversations, flickers of sexual encounters and replayings of personal trauma we receive. All of which swirl from page to page, greatly enhanced by Alagbé’s charcoal watercolours, which give every brushstroke a spectral, haunted quality.
As Misery Of Love progresses, we gain greater context for the meanings of these images, and it becomes increasingly clear that the only way, perhaps, to deliver their whole without overwhelming the reader, is to ration such memories to us piecemeal. Moreover, there is a sense that this devastating carousel of fleeting glimpses mirrors Claire’s own hesitance, or refusal, to address the events, and pain, they hint toward.
Eventually, Misery of Love unfurls into a story about French colonialism, doomed romance and the long-lasting impacts of familial abuse, one so adroitly conveyed that its many interconnected climaxes converge to create one of the most affecting reading experiences I’ve had for many years.
