What I've Read: Park Bench by Christopher Chabouté

Christopher Chabouté's Park Bench is a quiet, meditative graphic novel centered around - you guessed it- a park bench.

A unique approach to graphic narrative, the story at the center of Park Bench is told entirely without written dialogue. Instead, the reader bears witness to the peculiar rhythms of life for a rotating cast of characters: the marginalized, the retired, the reckless, the quiet, all interacting in the liminal spaces of both the comic panel and the park depicted therein.

The lack of dialogue gives a definitively cinematic and voyeuristic sensibility to the story - the reader feels at once immersed in its world, and distinctly outside of it, unable to be fully absorbed. The effect is also one in which the reader is writing the story themselves, being guided by the images on the page, all culminating in a satisfying - but not entirely dramatic - conclusion.

Park Bench is a graphic exploration of the concept of sonder - "the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own". It's a fun, heartfelt, and quietly moving journey into the concepts of space and stranger - and how we understand them as part of ourselves.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for review.

What I've Read: Bread and Butter #1 by Liz Mayorga

I guess I'm still on my comic book streak! Here's the thing: I'm just starting to get acclimated to NetGalley, and did not realize that I only had until the Archive date to read a book that was approved for me. When I saw that Bread and Butter #1 was archiving soon, I jumped on it!

So, yes: thank you to NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book was ostensibly the first issue of Bread and Butter, a comic series about a young Latina woman named Liana Caudillo living in San Francisco. Anyone who works in the creative industry while also juggling another job knows something about her struggle: finding time to balance the demands of your work while maintaining your true passion and side hustle (hello, me).

This comic is a great entry into these ideas, and displays the central tension in places like San Francisco well. In just 24 pages, Bread and Butter asks how a city maintains it soul with progress and the ills of gentrification. It also asks how we balance our passion with the demands of the day, and how we fall in love with the place we call home while maintaining a complicated relationship to how it operates, its injustices, and all its beauty.

It's also a perfect example of how these dynamics play out within the service industry: the employee doing their best to perform their job well under the constrictions of low pay and high expectations, as well as the challenge of serving people who often exist in a higher socioeconomic strata than your own. Asking these questions under this lens is brilliant; an honest look at the working class and serving class is a good way to get a grounded sense of how the interplay of class and labour operates in a real way (and these viewpoints are generally under-represented in pop culture).

Bread and Butter feels confessional, and, as such, it's a beautifully insightful slice-of-life comic. The artwork is great, and I'm interested to see where the story goes from here. I did regret that it was only the first issue, because it felt like something that would be wonderful to devour in one sitting. I can't wait to see what comes next for Liana Caudillo and the Bread and Butter series.

What I've Read: Equinoxes by Cyril Pedrosa

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have a confession to make: I got burned out on comics a few years ago.

I know. Weird, inconvenient timing: it happened even before every second movie in the theatres was a superhero adaptation. Somewhere around 2011, I went from voraciously devouring everything from Clowes to capes to feeling far too oversaturated with superhero and comic culture. This may have had something to do with the emergence of geek culture as a pervasive cultural force. Being the malcontent I sometimes am, I just had to stop before I soured on it forever.

I've been slowly bringing myself back into the rhythm of reading comics and graphic novels, and the rewards, so far, have been many. I got caught up on Rat Queens earlier in the year, have Saga up on the docket, and have just finished the remarkable Equinoxes by Cyril Pedrosa.

Equinoxes follows the intertwining lives of a group of strangers living in France, and all of the muddled beauty that exists in their associated milieu. The artwork is at once unique, familiar and aesthetically intriguing. The plot, narrative and illustrations are all crafted with meticulous attention that flows perfectly from page to page, giving each vignette a dreamy, cinematic quality. The characters are skillfully drawn into life, with their brief interludes leaving a sizable emotional impression as they each explore existential truths, the depth beneath the banal, and the fleeting beauty of each moment. At once raw, cynical, wry, and sentimental, Equinoxes is a graphic novel that demands you pay attention, for the lives depicted in its pages are both familiar and revealing.