Graphic Novel

The unnamed, eleven-year-old narrator protagonist of The Cartographer has an epileptic fit after witnessing a horrific rape-murder. The year is 1959. His father has just left the family days after his identical twin brother was killed by faulty playground equipment. The child’s closest friend is his wheeler-dealer grandfather, but it is in his own head that he thrives. To act out his grief he inhabits a series of superheroes, chief among them the Cartographer, creator of an intricate, pictorial, ever-growing map of Richmond and Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, above and below ground. Cartography (he learns the word from an old army manual) is his way of avoiding trouble. Unfortunately, trouble follows him wherever he goes.

It’s a simple proposition: short graphic stories about city life, and one narrator – Mandy Ord – drawn with a single bulging eye. But the slice-of-life stories in Sensitive Creatures are rarely straightforward. Sweeping and brittle, kinetic and lush, this is a consistently surprising volume, at once an autobiography, a collection of vignettes, and a comprehensive catalogue of an artist’s career.

Habibi, Craig Thompson’s new graphic novel, is an epic six years in the making. Set in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, spanning ancient and modern epochs, Habibi tells the story of Dodola and Zam, child slaves who fall in love and dwell on a boat moored in a desert, before being dragged violently into lives of suffering and misery. It is a melodramatic tale full of humour, conflict, and heartbreak. It reminded me of Osamu Tezuka’s histories and of Will Eisner’s gritty, realistic fables.

Painter Dmitri Pangalidis stares out over the baking Sydney rooftops as he waits for his partner, Choosy McBride, to come home from the gallery where she works as a curator. The city is besieged by heat and Pangalidis spends his day lounging on the couch, trying to motivate himself. The first five pages of The Silence contain no dialogue, with Pangalidis wasting yet another day at home, frustrated and filled with doubt about his art. These scenes are interspersed with those of McBride’s arduous return to the apartment across the city. Once the characters do speak, Bruce Mutard’s stark, contemplative meditation on art and beauty sets an unsettling tone that is maintained throughout.