hook
cartoonist: Emma Rios
Publisher: Image comics
Publication date: November 19, 2024
We like to live with purpose, feeling like we have a purpose and have something to contribute to the world. But not everyone has the same skills, or even the same ambitions and dreams. What it means to be helpful, to live a life of purpose, to shift and change as our needs and the needs of our community change. If we allow ourselves to be indecisive in these moments, we can easily be swept away by the ever-changing waters. How do we effectively find ourselves in community while maintaining the independence of our identities? What does it mean to have purpose without being reduced to your function? How do we navigate these waters with others who feel the same way?
Cartoonist Emma Rios returns with a new original graphic novel, hookIt tells the story of three children who find themselves alone after a tsunami destroys civilization as they know it. In the first few pages, Rios describes the challenges faced by the three men to find dry land, build a fire, and forage for food, before transforming into an existential horror story about our relationship with community and how it reflects on our sense of self. . Along the way, as the community grew, we found ourselves grappling with these questions of purpose, community, and identity as we became accustomed to this strange new world. Who are we in a world so alien to us? What can we do for others without losing ourselves?
hook part hemingway old man and sea and Lovecraftian horror. This book is driven by the spirit of humane individualism in trying to survive and maintain hope in an unfamiliar world. Our characters are energized by their desire to live peacefully in an ever-changing environment. When the kids first find shelter, there’s no denial or science fiction speculation. No one can reject the reality before them. Instead, they all turned inward and tried to articulate to the best of their ability what they needed to do to survive. But at what point does a lack of questioning become a form of denial? Facing the unimaginable, hope slowly dying? As the story progresses, there are lingering precipices of death and starvation, as well as a sense of isolation as the world around you changes in the blink of an eye. No matter how well a child or their eventual community does a good job working together, the specter of personal responsibility will creep in, sowing seeds of doubt.
hook First and foremost, focus on the emotion and create the feeling of a world that is completely alien to us. Rios’ art here is done with watercolors, and some digital enhancement A neater presentation of panel gutters. The effect is an interesting combination of impressionistic art and an almost uncanny neatness. The panels are perfectly boxed in, with clear lines and gutters, and they become our life raft as we look inside each panel, seeing swirling lines and blending into the surroundings. graphics. The question for the reader, therefore, is whether the order imposed on the world we see is artificial. As our characters struggle with their growing community, and their need to be a functional, purposeful and useful part of it, the paneling and art invite us to ask whether the system is unnatural, whether order is simply a form of violence against nature , we could otherwise get lost in it.
Rios also chose to use mostly warm colors, reds and yellows, rather than the predominantly cool blues you’d expect in a story about the ocean. This again reinforces the core idea of community in the book. We may feel alone, speak as if we are alone, and act as individuals, but the warmth of others is always present and can overwhelm our doubts about our abilities because they deny the premise that we are always only our own abilities, rather than our own abilities.
hook It functions best as a meditative text about defamiliarization and finding oneself within this experience. But the book loses itself at times, addressing these characters’ problems and growth in a way that doesn’t always follow structurally. The biggest problem is the time jumps, which often occur where I can’t quite tell where we are without a few pages of context clues in the dialogue. I have a hard time understanding the reasoning behind this choice, mostly because the art style didn’t evolve in time to reflect these changes. From beginning to end, the book feels like it has consistent questions and a consistent tone, and doesn’t seem to need the jumps in time, or at least benefit from the artistic development of those jumps.
There’s no denying that Emma Rios has produced one of the best-looking comics of the year, a visual feast like no other. Her style here captures a full range of warmth, melancholy and loneliness, and even if the script doesn’t always match it, it works at a high level.
I think the reason this mood and style resonates so deeply is because the book’s reasoning closely reflects concerns about climate change and the uneven impacts of rising sea levels around the world. The tragedy of global warming is that most of us reading this won’t experience a significant change. But what about our children? What about the world we leave behind? As we follow these characters in the aftermath of the events that devastated the previous generation, as they work to reshape their communities in ways that are radically different from the world we know, a fear permeates what we do with the world How and why. Ideas brought to the forefront.
hook It’s an excellent comic, full of philosophical reflections, and it left me thinking for days after reading it. Emma Rios’ art alone is worth the price of admission, and while the script doesn’t always succeed, the atmosphere and tone more than make up for it.
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