A man struggles to deal with his teenage son’s violent outbursts. Two elderly neighbors engage in a heated back and forth. A woman, stuck on the floor due to chronic back pain, is forced to rely on her hated, violent ex to take care of their young children.
The world of New Zealand cartoonist Ross Murray’s Bedford Street is one of a turbulent suburban everywhere, filled with the tiny social dramas which make up every life, here portrayed as the very fabric of life itself. These are the disturbances that fill our days, and these are the stories playing out in every neighborhood; specifically, these are the dramas of Bedford Street.
Murray captures these dramas, big and small, with an eye for the genuine: they aren’t all played for laughs, or even played for maximum tragedy. These are even-keeled stories, as natural and as benign as real life, and that makes them somehow more human, more earnestly touching. Any reader could slip into these lives and find themselves at home; torn, emotionally frayed, but at home nonetheless.
Murray’s art does a lot of work in sustaining that everyday drama: detailed but stylized, his lines are like simplified photographs, real life boiled down to its accurate outlines but bled of its subtleties. Every character is immediately identifiable – not simply in their roles in the book, but as the types of people they must be: a chatty, bubbly and ultimately troubleless young white woman; a once-tough young man now gone to the softness of care-giving. You can read their vague, social archetypes in their shapes, written into the linelessness of their faces.
Just as interesting is Murray’s use of color, turned down from vibrant hues to a dull suburban palette. Some stories utilize a full range, while others live in a sort of monochrome hue, decided on by the whim and vibe of the independent stories. A girl loses her dog in blues, a man cheats on his wife in yellows, but because we’ve seen the full color worlds of other characters we’re somehow led to invest these single-color stories in emotional colors of our own.
Bedford Street is a new masterpiece of short, dramatic comics fiction; it can proudly go on the shelf next to books like Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying, which is a very high mark of excellence. It’s a book to sink into and let roll over you; all human drama is our human drama, and Ross Murray has made that apparent.
‘Bedford Street’ is pitch-perfect, brilliantly mundane human drama
Bedford Street
Filled with earnest heart and genuine, small-scale dramas, Bedford Street is a literary, pitch-perfect collection of short comics.
Reader Rating1 Vote
8.9
Emotionally genuine and lacking sensationalism or schmaltziness
Beautifully illustrated.
Succinct, powerfully literate sense of storytelling.
10
Fantastic
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