Anzuelo
Cartoonist: Emma Ríos
Publisher: Image Comics
Publication Date: November 19, 2024
We like to live our lives with purpose, with the sense that we have a goal and can contribute to the world. But not everyone has the same skills, or even the same aspirations and dreams. What it means to be helpful, to live a life of purpose, shifts and changes as our needs and the needs of our community change. And it’s all too easy to be washed away in the ever changing waters if we let ourselves drown in our indecisiveness during these moments. How do we effectively find ourselves in a community while also maintaining an independence of our identity? What does it mean to have purpose without being reduced to your function? And how do we navigate these waters with others who feel the same push and pull?
Cartoonist Emma Ríos returns with a brand new original graphic novel, Anzuelo, which follows three kids who find themselves alone after a tsunami washes away civilization as they knew it. In the early pages, Ríos depicts the challenges these three face to find dry land, start fires, and find food, before transitioning into an existential horror story about our relationship to community and how it mirrors our sense of self. Along the way, as the community grows and as we become accustomed to this strange, new world, we find ourselves wrestling with these questions of purpose, community and identity. Who are we in a world so unfamiliar to us? What can we do for others without losing ourselves in them?
Anzuelo is one-part Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and one-part Lovecraftian horror. A human, individualist spirit drives this book, one that tries to survive and maintain hope in an unfamiliar world. Our characters are animated by the hope that they can live in peace with ever changing circumstances. When the children first find shelter, there’s a lack of denialism or sci-fi speculation. No one ever rejects the reality in front of them. Instead, they all turn inward trying to articulate to the best of their ability what needs to be done to survive. But at what point does the lack of questioning become its own form of denial? A slow death of hope in the face of the unimaginable? As the story progresses, the precipice of death and starvation lingers, as well as the isolation that stems from the world changing around you in the blink of an eye. No matter how well the children or their eventual community do in terms of working together, the specter of individual responsibility seeps in to sow doubt.
Anzuelo is concerned, first and foremost, with mood and creating the feel of a world that’s completely unfamiliar to us. Ríos’ art here is done with watercolors, along with some digital enhancements to more neatly present the panel gutters. The effect is an interesting mix of impressionistic art with almost uncanny neatness to it. The panels are all so perfectly boxed in, the lines and gutters are clear and they become our life raft as we look inside each panel to see swirling lines and figures that are at one with their surroundings. Thus, the question for the reader becomes whether the order imposed on the world we see is artificial. As our characters wrestle with their growing community, and their need to be functional parts of it with purpose and usefulness, the paneling and art invites us to ask if that system is unnatural, if order is simply a form of violence on nature that we can otherwise lose ourselves in.
Ríos also chooses to use primarily warm colors, reds and yellows, rather than what you might expect in a story about the sea with dominant, cool blues. This again serves to enhance that core idea of community within the book. We may feel alone, speak as if we’re alone, act as individuals, but the warmth of others is always there and it can overpower these doubts in our own abilities precisely because they deny the premise that we are ever just our own abilities rather than the strength of solidarity with others.
Anzuelo functions best as a meditative text on defamiliarization and the search for ourselves within that experience. But the book can at times become lost in itself, moving through questions and growth of these characters in a way that doesn’t always structurally follow. The biggest problem being the time jumps, often happening in ways where I couldn’t entirely tell where we were without several pages of context clues in the dialogue. I struggled to see the reason behind this choice, primarily because the art style does not grow to reflect these shifts in time. From beginning to end the book feels like it has consistent questions and a consistent tone, one that didn’t seem to need jumps in time, or at least would have benefited from evolving artistically with those jumps.
Emma Ríos though has undeniably made one of the best looking comics of the year, a visual feast that draws you in unlike anything else. Her style here captures a full range of warmth, melancholy and isolation that works on a high level even if the script doesn’t always rise to match it.
The reason that mood and style resonates so deeply, I think, is because of how closely the book’s extrapolations mirror concerns around climate change and the uneven impact of rising sea levels around the world. The tragedy of global warming is that most of us reading this will not feel a significant change. But what about our children? What about the world we leave behind? As we follow these characters after events that have washed away the previous generation, and as they strive to remake community on terms so different from the world we know ourselves, a dread seeps in about the how’s and why’s of what we’ve done to the world and what unfamiliar territory others will find themselves in. The questions here of community, order, individualism and nature all run parallel to the vices of a world that could not strike that balance when it needed to, and thus birthed a new age that had no other choice but bring those ideas to the forefront.
Anzuelo is a stellar comic, rich in philosophical musings that kept me thinking for days after reading it. Emma Ríos’ art is alone worth the price of admission, and while the script doesn’t always land, the mood and tone more than make up for it.
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