It's Lonely At The Centre Of The Earth
Zoe Thorogood, writer & illustrator
Image Comics, 2022
British cartoonist Zoe Thorogood subtitled this memoir of six months of her life "An auto-bio-graphic-novel." Despite the success of her graphic novel The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott, she was feeling depressed and suicidal ("I've been considering stabbing myself in the neck with a sharp knife"). Suicidal thoughts are nothing new for her, but she is completely filled with self-loathing, and can't avoid feeling that her professional calling almost requires her to be pathologically self-absorbed.
But in a month, she will be sent to the United States for her first comic convention as an invited guest. Surely that will make her happy, if she can just make it until then. As the days count down, she remembers things like her childhood interest in art and the London comic convention where she first made professional connections (colored by insecurity and self-doubt, as always). This description makes the story sound unbelievably dark and depressing, but even the darkest thoughts are offset by visual treats like cartoon representations of her as a child, her depression (a towering black figure with a blank cartoon face), and interpolations of the series Rain which she was illustrating at the time (at one point she reacts to imagined criticism from the main character by threatening to draw her cross-eyed in the next panel).
The time she spends with the American comics creator she met online is a whirlwind of mismatched feelings, a drug trip, meeting his children, and miraculously failing to contract an STD from him (a win!). She returns home feeling like she still doesn't understand what her life is about. But she has a pile of comic pages–this book–so that's something. In typical fashion she promises a great breakthrough understanding to close the narrative, which (Spoiler Alert) doesn't actually happen.
Replies