You and a bicycle and a road
cartoonist: Eleanor Davis
Publisher: Fanta Figure
Publication date: July 2024
Consider this idea: a space, a building, an online interface, or basically anything you interact with forces you to perform certain behaviors as a requirement of using the space. You might think of this like a park bench with intermittent handrails to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. Or more subtly, in the age of social media, character limits force you to either simplify a complex piece of content or inorganically break it into multiple posts. Whether you are online or in real life, the design of your environment is not equal in any sense. Instead, everything is driven by access issues: Who can easily access something, and who can’t?
You and a bicycle and a road It tells the story of cartoonist Eleanor Davis who rides her bicycle from Tucson, Arizona to Athens, Georgia. As she travels from city to city, we meet a variety of interesting locals and the challenges they encounter not just geographically with cycling in general, but also with specific physical challenges when trying to travel in general. You and a bicycle and a road It’s essentially about these hostile design concepts that influence your behavior, juxtaposing the physical barriers to bike travel with the escalating challenges for people along the U.S.-Mexico border.
If there’s a central question in Davis’ comics, it’s “What are we fighting for?” Davis’s journey is self-arranged, she loves riding bikes, and she wants to take the opportunity to do so because she never knows When that might happen again in the future, riding a bike makes her feel alive. So it’s not just about being able to get from one state to another, it’s about committing to something tangible and not letting opportunities and lives disappear through indecision. However, along the way she noticed Border Patrol agents, police officers and people trying to cross the border. Her journey of deciding how to live is juxtaposed with others struggling simply to survive, for whom journey and destination are inseparable but intertwined as part of larger questions about survival.
So Davis walks the walk (or rather, rides the bike) well here, and instead of chalking up the struggles of others to her journey, she bears witness to it as life’s privileges are denied, turning And a down to earth look at the experience of living in America.
To help us understand these challenges, Davis employs two different perspectives on every page. First, there is a linear left-to-right movement from scene to scene, showing her progress in a way that simply and effortlessly moves from one page to another. The pages read quickly and give you a sense of the tedium of Davis’s journey. Forever moving forward becomes an illusion because progress never feels tangible, but the drive to keep going is always there.
The second type of layout is all about depth, where the objects or characters at the top of the page are always the farthest away, and as you move down the page, everything gets closer. When flat, linear pages are juxtaposed with pages of depth, the shift in our perspective mirrors Davis’s cycling challenge, as we become more accustomed to seeing things far away (and therefore exhausting) or nearby of things (hence a relief).
Every mountain Davis climbed, every rest stop she nursed on her sore knees, every moment of doubt along the way was accompanied by a sense of the inevitability of the journey. We are constantly moving towards something, but it always feels like there is still more to do. The momentum doesn’t let up, and in a way, it makes Davis feel like a passenger on her own journey, asking herself a question: What is she fighting for?
In the early pages of the book, Davis gives various reasons why she did this, and she has several moments of self-doubt along the way. This ambiguity always reminds us of what this choice meant to her. But the answers came not in long, external forms, but in the simple relationships and nuances of the people she met and urged her to follow.
The emotional core is the people she meets along the way: the nice old woman who lost her husband, the man trying to cross the border, the friendly cyclist and the doctor, who all cross paths with her and reflect her struggles in different ways . The weight of these interactions begins to build a tension in the story. We grow to empathize with everyone, but we also begin to question who can get on with life and who can’t. As Davis goes through her journey and finds support, she similarly sees others not having the same luxury.
This is where the comic starts to fall apart for me, with Davis trying to articulate the struggles inherent in her choice and experiencing America on two wheels, but inevitably gets stuck in what it’s like to tour, our Compassions become conflicting. As the journey gets more difficult and she learns about life’s small joys along the way, we begin to long for home again. The image of Davis finally seeing her husband’s face resonates deeply as we realize how difficult it was to get here.
But the world she leaves behind, the people and places and the problems she enters, are reduced to her own end, rather than grappling with the chaotic world she witnessed. This is a story that seeks a degree of ambiguity, denying catharsis and instead being punctuated by a clear endpoint. After all, as the old adage goes, it’s the journey and not the destination. But in the end, it became too much for the destination. In that sense, while the ending feels solid, it doesn’t feel satisfying, as if the book isn’t over yet but has simply run out of pages to continue reading.
However, based on our own advice, this journey You and a bicycle and a road It’s a pleasant thing. Davis’ use of perspective makes for engaging reading as we need to study the nuances and charm of each page. The townspeople, bikers, and others we met were an interesting window into the vast American South. It’s all so rich that you might consider biking the entire country yourself before the political realities of travel set in and give you pause.
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