The Pass
Cartoonist: Katriona Chapman
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Publication Date: January 2025
One thing that’s been cooking in the kitchen lately is good stories. Groan if you will at the way I wrote that (you have every right), but it’s true. The groundwork for this explosion of chef stories was perhaps laid by the mega popularity of reality cooking shows like Top Chef throughout the 00s, before being rocketed into the stratosphere more recently by the Emmy-winning TV show, The Bear (at least the first two seasons, anyway).
Now, chef-based stories have started to spread out into more nuanced areas, from horror movies — The Menu — to character-driven relationship study graphic novels, like cartoonist Katriona Chapman’s latest, The Pass, which is out this month via Fantagraphics.
The Pass bears many of the familiar and comforting hallmarks of the thriving chef genre. The central restaurant in this book is fighting for financial viability while the folks working there have little to no work life balance. Meanwhile, the talented chef struggles to realize her true artistic potential for reasons that don’t have to do with the skill of her cooking. These are all great elements to have in the book, to shape our understanding and start as a point of familiarity for entering this world, and they’re all done very well.
Where The Pass separates itself from the rest of the genre, however, is with its pacing and tone. This is perhaps most evident in the artwork, especially the coloring. There is a soft hue to the colors in this comic that really create a nice buffer between the reader and the chaos of the kitchen. It’s especially evident when the characters step out into the streets of London or visit their families, taking quiet moments to watch a bird fly above, which is an interesting metaphor that plays into the main character’s journey, or discussing the nature of business with abrasive but well-meaning parents, whose central concern is that their child be financially secure. I think many of us in the arts can appreciate that, but I digress.
Back to my point: the mix of colors–as well as London as our setting–are such a stark contrast from our aggressive American chef stories, set in places like New York and Chicago, where the city is loud and the chefs louder, and the colors (or, more often, lighting) all amp the mood up to the extreme. Chapman’s character work also has a softness to it, a quality that makes even the characters who wrong the others feel relatable, or at least sympathetic.
What also made The Pass interesting to me was the way it was more a story of relationships than it was one of perseverance and achievement, or perfection, which are the central themes within the vast majority of fiction about chefs. There’s a point where a character decides to do something that runs counter to this that I liked very much. And striving is still in this book — as is the nature of collaboration that appears in most other chef stories — but The Pass feels like a character-driven tale of how people can work together over long stretches of time, rather than a story of the personal toll one must pay to chase a passion. In this book, the characters have great familiarity with each other and long histories. They are a coherent and supportive bunch (largely), rather than a band of mismatched hot heads who fight first and then ultimately learn to pull together.
There’s also just some nice use of the comics medium in here to accentuate feelings at key moments. One in particular stood out to me. After the restaurant receives a glowing review, our lead character steps outside and we get a full page splash of two parrots overhead. It struck me as the perfect way to convey the ineffable satisfaction of someone else in the world truly understanding your art and and saying I see you, even when there’s no money or formal achievement attached. The bird metaphor also anchors the end of our story in a way that I found as satisfying as I did smart, a way to parse the purposeful ambiguity of The Pass’ final pages.
The flipside of the story’s subtly may be that it feels a bit too understated for readers who come in expecting an angry kitchen like The Bear, or another gritty and troubled Anthony Bourdain take on cooking. That’s not really this book. There’s some intense discussions around the nature of weaving business into your art, but they’re all grounded, held over cups of coffee in quite family rooms rather than back behind some dumpster after the service storm.
I found that alternate tone refreshing, one of many contributors to the quiet charm and beauty of this wonderful graphic novel.
The Pass is out this month from Fantagraphics
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