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Best graphic novels of 2023, so far: Adventures in parenting, sun-worshipping and strange gifts

A story of a feckless, lazy couple doing their best to raise their children, a reworked fairy tale set in a frozen forest and more

Why Don't You Love Me? by Paul B Rainey: funny, riveting and riven with true, dark bleaknesss

Séamas O’Reilly
Thu May 11 2023 - 04:41

I have a serious dilemma with Why Don’t You Love Me by Paul B Rainey (Drawn & Quarterly), which is irrefutably the best graphic novel I’ve read this year. Its opening stretches tell, ostensibly, the story of a feckless, lazy couple doing their best – and sometimes a good deal less than their best – to raise their children in contemporary Britain.

What emerges seems, at first, to be the sort of ironic, self-lacerating chronicle of modern parenting that’s been in vogue for a few years now, most especially on television comedies like Motherland, Breeders and Catastrophe. You know the type of thing; the frustrations and absurdities of two people having to look after a child when they’re not even sure how to look after themselves. As those things go, it’s an excellent example of the genre; funny, riveting and riven with an unsentimental streak of true, dark bleaknesss.

But then, something else happens. Something I can’t really set up or describe, and am wary of even addressing, beyond this short paragraph I’ve allowed myself for the task. It’s at this point you realise you’ve been the target of an ingenious act of literary distraction. One that gives a much deeper resonance and meaning to the excellent first act you’ve just read, and then coheres into a truly superlative middle and final act which folded me in two.

All of which leads to my dilemma: it is my sincere hope that the nebulous, detail-free gushing you’ve just read will induce you to buy this book, because if ever a book deserved as wide an audience as possible, it’s this one. But, once you’ve bought it, I will then need you to forget everything I’ve just said and enjoy the pleasure of reading it with no forewarning. If you can manage this then, trust me, you will thank me. Or at least, you would, if you could remember this conversation ever took place.

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Moving on, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Daughters of Snow and Cinders by Nuria Tamarit (Fantagraphics) was a reworked fairy tale, its title perhaps evoking doughty old folk standards, Snow White and Cinderella. But this rich and rugged portrait of survival in the 19th-century Quebecois territories has a flavour more gritty than Grimm. Telling the tale of two strong young women staking their claims in the New World gold rush, Daughters tracks their indefatigability in the face of cruel and lawless men, who tear through people and nature to enrich their petty selves.

Joana has fled war in her home country, and teams up with native woman Tala to fight off both evil hunter Matwei and the giant wolf pursuing him through the frozen forest. The anger of this latter beast, whether it be literal or symbolic, reflects perhaps the pain of the endless, ransacked wilderness that envelops and, later, entraps them.

Where fairy tale comparisons may be apt is in Tamarit’s exquisite, painterly style, which all but demands you pore over every page to savour every detail. This is a gorgeous book. Even while watching ugly men do ugly deeds, there is rarely a page here that is not a thing of true beauty.

In Cuckoo by Joe Sparrow (ShortBox) we meet two more strong female protagonists. The first of these, Dorothy, is minding her own business when a strange meteor crashes in her garden, and a flash of its geometric light imbues her with dormant, cosmic superpowers. Flash forward five years and these powers have begun to manifest, while she is a directionless young adult just about getting by in a small local college, and struggling to find her place in the world. It’s here that she meets Ellie, a similarly affected classmate with whom she learns to explore and explain the strange gifts they’ve somehow received.

The past decade or two has seen a glut of fables in which modern, relatable people attain superpowers and don’t know what to do with them - so many in fact that there have been at least a dozen based on teenagers in contemporary Britain alone. For this reason, the freshness and charm of Cuckoo’s execution is particularly notable. Its script sparkles with the inflections, humour and prevarications of real teen speech, and Sparrow’s extraordinary, manga-scented visuals lift the thinky, cosmic subject matter to mind-bending, eye-popping peaks. The choice to ground the story’s human drama in the subtleties of friendship, and family drama, render its headier elements not just explicable, but thrilling to read. All of which results in a climax that not only purports to solve the mysteries of the universe, but may well leave a lump in your throat while it does so.

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How does one describe the tone of Harvey Knight’s Odyssey by Nick Maandag (Drawn & Quarterly)? A Canadian cartoonist in the vein of Seth and Chester Brown, his work is predictably excellent when it comes to minute observations of the mundane world in which we all live. But then comes another major talent; his dream logic detours into realities so fantastical, it’s hard to believe they came from the same brain. If you conjure in your head that ineffable blend of social commentary and wild absurdity you find in the films of Charlie Kaufman or the comedy of Tim Robinson, you might land somewhere close to the mark. Comprised of three stories, Odyssey opens with The Plunge, a short tale set in the office cubicle where Nick, as himself, has begun bringing a French press to work for his coffee break each day. Somehow, despite the low stakes plot I’ve just described, it becomes both a thing of spontaneous fascination for all his colleagues, and a riotously funny riff on the searing boredom of office life.

The titular story in the book comes directly after and centres on a world where all sectors of society have become infiltrated by a sun-worshipping cult called the Solarians. Whether in the slow drip of their cult’s rules and regulations, or the absurd actions taken by adherents in its central plot, Harvey Knight’s Odyssey coalesces into one of the strangest, funniest books you will read this, or any, year.