Likewise, her narrative voice in this section describes her thoughts of suicide as “ a performance for no audience” from which she could choose to walk away. The possibility that she might kill herself is, from a certain perspective, simply a story Zoe (who is a character in a comic book) tells herself - not a reality. This icon - Zoe with her face covered by a narrative about self-harm - recurs often in the book’s first section, and it is an elegant way of visualizing the complexity of her depression. The narrative text box that explains her suicidal ideation is obscuring it, as if Zoe’s dark thoughts are physically blotting out a vital part of herself. But is this Zoe? Almost certainly, and yet we can’t see her face. The accompanying full-page image is drawn from her perspective, picturing Zoe as she looks into a mirror and grips a knife. “ I’ve been considering stabbing myself in the neck with a sharp knife,” Zoe tells us.
In the opening pages, we are confronted with a blunt and excruciating picture of her mental illness at work. Thorogood is not shy about her priorities. But the comic is primarily about Thorogood’s own experience with suicidal depression. The book - nominally structured around six months of Thorogood’s life in 2021 - is about many things: It depicts an overwhelming and whimsical trip to a comics convention, documents a doomed international romance, and tells the broader story of her development as an artist. Zoe Thorogood is one such cartoonist, and her new graphic memoir, It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (Image, 2022), is a dizzying pyrotechnic cocktail of self-expression that will shred your expectations of what an autobiographical comic “should” look like and then cut your heart out of your chest with a pen. Just try to build a tidy little theory and watch as some talented cartoonist comes along and blows your bullshit straight to hell.
Autobio comics are way too weird for that to be true. And the complex interplay between visual and verbal helps reveal the elusive nature of the cartoonist’s “true” self.
On another level, you have verbal representation as expressed through narrative text boxes. On one level, you have the visual representation of the artist via their cartoon avatar. It is relatively simple to schematize the presentation of the self in autobiographical comics. Content Warning: This review includes a discussion of suicide and self-harm.
0 kommentar(er)
