Remember, we were all young once.
Comics do teenage well, don’t they? Maybe it’s because it’s the age when life is at its most cartoony. Hormones pumping, jarring mood swings, dressing up, playing out, crying in your bedroom. Living in a constant state of over-reaction.
The best comics I’ve read of late have tapped into that, comics revved up by youthful energy and doomy ennui. John Allison’s ongoing Giant Days series (Boom Box), in which three girls discover themselves at university is mostly the former, a lovely sitcomish thrill, powered by Lissa Treiman’s slick, engaging artwork.
Liz Suburbia’s Sacred Heart could be its dark-times-darker doppelganger. Young women (and men) finding themselves in a world they don’t understand. Drink and drugs and sex and, oh yes, missing parents and the odd murder.
Yes, you can see all its influences writ large – Jamie Hernandez’s punk girls, Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar strips, big-screen coming-of-age dramas like Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and River’s Edge. But they’re only a starting point. Cartoonist Liz Suburbia has made her own world here – in black and white – and it sings and snarls in turn.
It starts with a series of full page and half page panels anchoring us in place. The gas cooler. The park. The video store. Graffiti. Abandoned supermarket trolleys. Junk and brokedown cars. Electric lights buzzing. Welcome to Alexandria. Then we meet Ben, a girl, and her friend Otto, a boy. They are at the heart of the story. Around them circles satellites like Em, Ben’s sister, and Kim, Otto’s ex, and a whole host of characters who careen through the pages. There are parties. There is music. There are fights.
And in the background there’s the drip, drip, drip of information and innuendo. What has happened here? The big picture is obscured. We can just see what is right in front of us. The hitch-ups, the unrequited passions, the questions about sexuality. And behind it all there is fear and grief and we’re not sure why but something is going on.
If anything, the final page reveal – while totally believable – slightly closes things down. An explanation of sorts when, really, it’s the mystery we love. Still, there’s a lovely sense of delicious care in the way Suburbia drip-feeds the reader information. This story has been thought through.
That aside, the pleasure is in all the usual stuff. Young hearts running free. The joy of sex. The fear of self. This is teenage wildlife, told with light and life and a drawn line that is all rubbery bounce and pared down style. It also has some of the best music sequences in a comic I’ve seen for ages. The savage pleasure of live music rendered in line and ink.
Your ears will be ringing when you put Sacred Heart down. Quite possibly your heart too.
Sacred Heart, by Liz Suburbia, is published by Fantagraphics, priced £17.99.
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