Beverly

"You can’t know how dark this book is until you start reading it. I met Drnaso in Chicago. He was a student of my friend Ivan Brunetti, who’s a fabulous cartoonist, and does a lot of really amazing New Yorker covers, and a friend of my friend Chris Ware, who’s also a famous cartoonist. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . One of the things that he captures so incredibly in this book is that it’s not just a ‘slice of life’ look at suburbia. There are a lot of comics like that, capturing the texture of everyday life. Chris Ware is the master of that form. This book is about really dark things, from the very first, fascinating and incredible story about race to the story that feels really relevant right now, about a teenage girl who fakes an abduction and says that she’s been abducted by an Arab man. The community starts producing this anti-Arab sentiment. There’s the story about a child named Tyler, who has a form of OCD. He has these unwanted thoughts so that everywhere he looks, he sees people being killed and dismembered. I actually found that hard to look at. Deeply disturbing. And that tension—between the surface of a page, what it looks like, what certain colours make the reader feel—and the content is something that comics excels at. This book, Beverly, really excels at it. Part of what is so interesting is its style and the bleak pastel colours. Nick Drnaso worked very hard to create this style. There was an interesting interview with him in the Comics Journal when this book came out. He said that he wanted to tear things down to their essence in the way he draws people and places, which I think he is very good at. The faces of his characters are very simple. They have these weird, blocky, abstractly husky, Midwestern bodies. He also talked about wanting to make the work very still, very bleak and frozen. Part of the effect of that for readers is that we do the animation ourselves. We’re filling in a lot of information when we’re reading. Then, in a story, like the one with the child who keeps seeing bodies around him, we don’t know if this is something he is revelling in and takes pleasure from, or if this is something that he experiences as very horrible. That is part of the tension created by the story. In comics, you can present a character’s interior psychic landscape. That’s an incredible narrative thing to be able to do — and to toggle back and forth between the third person narration and the first person visualisation. … or storylines or universes. Very unsettling. It’s a devastating book. I actually find this book really hard to read. The characters walk on and walk off. Then we find information about them parcelled out, across the entire narrative, in really powerful ways."