This summer brings a spate of well-timed comics about loneliness, not all of which address the fallout of Covid-19. They are, however, all redolent with the sense of disconnection the last year and a half has brought on. Kristen Radtke, the cartoonist and art director of The Believer magazine, where she publishes cutting-edge comics, has a follow-up to “Imagine Wanting Only This,” her melancholy 2017 debut memoir, which chronicled her pervasive sense of loneliness throughout her 20s. SEEK YOU: A JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN LONELINESS (Pantheon, $30) amplifies her previous effort (it’s longer by 75 pages), expanding the topic through extensive research interwoven with stories from her own life. Part literature review, part essay, part autobiographical meditation, “Seek You” exemplifies the capaciousness of nonfiction comics today. In the realm of fiction, the English cartoonist Lizzy Stewart’s mournful, lovely IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD BE (Fantagraphics, $24.99), nine interlinked vignettes about girls and young women, often embodies what Radtke makes explicit in her documentary form.
“Seek You” sat in a stack of books on my staircase for a while before its beautifully designed cover — a dark green apartment building with windows framing single figures, bedecked with a striking rooftop sign in peach and green bearing the large bold letters of the title — called out to me, along with its indubitably important subject. Even before the onslaught of Covid, as Radtke details, the “loneliness epidemic” was sizable, particularly among older Americans. As she points out, loneliness affects all populations, poses acute health risks and is not synonymous with being alone. The book’s title, a nod to the amateur radio operator “CQ call,” is evidence of Radtke’s significant command of interesting facts, which range over five sections dedicated to various senses (plus “Click,” about life online, now its own special category of being in the world).
“Touch” is perhaps the hardest to read. Proceeding through “Seek You” I often had to gather myself up, in dread, to encounter the full, horrifying details of scientific studies that I had previously known about only as passing reference points. “Touch” is largely a deep dive into the personal life and academic work of Harry Harlow, the psychologist most famous for his controversial “wire mother” and “cloth mother” studies, in which infant monkeys were separated from their mothers at birth and subjected to cruel experiments to gauge their emotional and social development. Radtke’s take on the man himself, as well as his results, epitomizes this book’s reach; she calls his acts “monstrous” even as she tries to understand him and his own desire to figure out attachment. But the book’s showcasing of deliberately isolated animals and their suffering can feel unbearable.
The London-based Stewart opens “It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be” with a pitch-perfect story that is also about the vulnerability of animals. On a hot summer night, the narrator and her little brother bond with other children from their large English housing complex when they discover a sick, unmoving fox before a rainstorm. Dubious they can save him, they build him a shelter anyway, and decide to give him the dignity of making it beautiful, with flowers and “Coke cans with dandelions stuffed inside and lollipop wrappers tied like flags.”
Stewart captures the magic of trying to push back on isolation. She combines pen and ink with watercolor; when the downpour finally comes — the story is called “Heavy Air” — the sky is a swirl of dense graphite scribbles. In “Dog Walk,” we meet a pair of adolescents whose profound friendship deteriorates as they age; the story appears as three interludes scattered across the volume. It’s like “Ghost World,” without the sardonic edge. Stewart gives each installment a distinct look, with its own color scheme, drawing implement and weight of line.
Stewart’s dynamic, warm, flowing art invites the reader in, whereas “Seek You” ultimately feels chilly even as it ponders connection. Radtke’s aesthetic is impressive, with clean, crisp black lines, swaths of white shadow and stylized, muted blocks of color. She has a designer’s eye for arresting graphics. But her images have a static quality; both gorgeous and frozen, they result in a book that, however pretty, looks alienated, perhaps too perfectly in sync with its subject.
In THE TROJAN WOMEN (New Directions, $19.95), the poet and classicist Anne Carson and the painter Rosanna Bruno step up the febrility seen in Stewart’s fluid marks: Bruno’s shaggy black-and-white drawings evoke palimpsests, often with visible pencil marks underneath. Her scribbles radiate urgency. Unlike in Radtke and Stewart, this book features hand-lettering, large and loose across the page, commanding our eye. (The Believer once printed a Carson quote — “I Do Not Throw Out Anything Handwritten” — on a postcard.) This collaborative, experimental adaptation of Euripides’ antiwar tragedy is the first graphic work from the venerable New Directions, which has long published the celebrated, idiosyncratic Carson (including her 2010 visual book, “Nox”).
The Greeks have sacked Troy and killed all of its men. Here we move from the structural and social loneliness charted above to bottomed-out grief: The women at the center of this shattering play-turned-graphic novel lose husbands, sons, brothers and grandsons among them, brutally. Carson and Bruno eschew realism for the imaginative world-building and flexible visual articulation of comics: Hekabe, the queen of Troy, is an “old sled dog”; the Chorus comprises cows and dogs; and Athene is a pair of overalls. The experimental figuration is especially moving in the most devastating part of the book: Andromache, wife of the slain warrior Hektor (who is also one of Hekabe’s sons), is a tree who cradles a little branch — their toddler, Astyanax, who is himself taken from her to be murdered as the tree spins inconsolably, “a blizzard of broken branches, twigs and leaves.”
How to portray this boundless anguish? “Oh let me lie,” Hekabe beseeches the Chorus, in one of Carson’s typically engaging formulations. “Good posture’s kind of a right-wing concept. I’m past it. God! Now why did I say that? God’s never helped me.” Her weary, resigned face, and the horizontal flattening of her body on the ground, pack a wallop — as does the posture of the shrunken, eviscerated tree when her son is taken from her. Carson and Bruno are keenly attentive to the shape-shifting of the bereft.
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Graphic Novelists Who Show Us What Loneliness Means - The New York Times
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