Review: _It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth_

[jducoeur]

So, there's this genre of comics that I traditionally call "whiny autobiography". It's an author dissecting their own recent life in detail, not just "warts and all", but obsessively focusing on those warts. I tend to think of it having seriously kicked into gear somewhere around the late 80s or early 90s, with a bunch of B&W author/artists doing it, especially the trio of Canadian bros: Chester Brown, (to a lesser degree) Seth, and the self-indulgent master of the form, Joe Matt.

Frankly, while it was interesting for a bit, it got annoying before terribly long. There's a lot of parading around going, "Look how awful I am!", with little sense that the author has learned anything, and precious little artistry.

This buildup is intentional contrast. Having just finished It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth: An auto-bio-graphical novel by Zoe Thorogood, it technically falls into this category. It's limited-timespan B&W author-artist autobiography, with the author very much self-absorbed by her depression. (CW for suicidal ideation)

But it also makes its forebears look even weaker by comparison, because this is a bloody damned work of art.

tl;dr -- buy it.

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Without getting too deeply into the story, Thorogood is a young comics creator, who broke at least someone big a couple of years ago with the graphic novel The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott. Then COVID hit, leaving her somewhat isolated (like so many of us), which did nothing for her depressive tendencies. So in order to do something, in the middle of 2021 she decided to spend the next six months just rendering her life in comics. (I gather this was done somewhat as it was happening, but clearly not day-by-day -- there are some very clear chapters here.)

What could be downright turgid in lesser hands winds up absolutely fascinating. As she goes through major ups and downs (including no small amount of self-sabotage), she takes the opportunities to wander off into digressions about her life and upbringing. The result is that the story is never slow, even when the days are passing with no real events aside from some page-by-page toe-tapping as she waits for upcoming planned events and excursions.

And the thing is, it is a story. Frankly, I can't even figure out how closely to realtime she was drawing this, because it ebbs and flows very much like a good novel, foreshadowing and all.

And the art is just glorious. She wanders freely between styles ranging from basically stick figures to near-realism, page-to-page (and sometimes within a single panel) for expressive effect: she has many different ways in which she renders herself, each with different emotional connotations. (Indeed, she has several different versions of herself, each drawn differently, occasionally arguing.)

Lurking behind it all is the personification of her depression, sometimes just along for the ride, sometimes looming so large it consumes the page. This is a very internal story, but she uses the graphic form brilliantly to render all of that emotion to the page.

Most often it's done semi-realistic (several characters are consistently drawn semi-anthropomorphically), in more or less standard panels, but occasionally you turn the page and boom -- there's a full or double-page spread that just punches you in the face. I would say the page turns here are more effective than anything else I've seen short of The Sculptor (Scott McCloud's masterpiece).

Perhaps most astonishingly, after all that -- the self-imposed timeline, the emotional roller coaster -- against all odds, the story actually manages to end with an epiphany that is beautiful, appropriate, and if not exactly sunny, at least hopeful.

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Put it all together, and I'm just floored. She's young -- still in her mid-20s -- and this is a graphic novel that I would stack with the masterworks of many of the greats.

Indeed, I am going to stack it with them: this is going on The Shelf -- the three-foot span at the top of my graphic novel bookcase, reserved for the absolute creme de la creme of the medium. It says a lot that, toward the end, I was doling the book out a few pages at a time, because I didn't want to get to the end.

So like I said -- this is one worth seeking out, unreservedly recommended.

(And as for myself, I finally tracked down The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott, which I had missed the first time around, and will be reading that next.)

Comments

[andrewducker]

Thank you for the review, I'll add that to my list!