the care package is back, rebranded as a weekly end-of-week present from myself to you. Each newsletter contains a short essay about something, or someone, that this week brought me joy. A few words to help you through the weekend. Please enjoy.
Tillie Walden is the flap of a butterfly’s wings. Beating gently at the top of a snowy mountain, generating just enough wind to send a handful of snowflakes tumbling downwards, collecting friends as it goes, becoming an avalanche you cannot escape from. Undeniable. Seismic. Gigantic. She’s also a 26-year-old graphic novelist.
The End of Summer, her first book, was published in 2015 when she was just nineteen. It was shortly followed by eleven more over the last six years- seven graphic novels, a picture book, a compilation and a sketchbook for good measure.
It’s interesting to see which themes and images she carries from book to book. Giant animals. Queer romance. Families both born and found. Connection. Young people with feelings so big they could swallow a planet.
Yet, her work differs greatly from book to book. The grand otherworldliness of The End of Summer becomes the grounded emotion of Spinning becomes the grimy tension of Clementine: Book One. And yet, no matter how much changes, how much stays the same, there is one thing that defines a Tillie Walden book.
Gentle intimacy.
It can be quiet. It can be tense. It can joyous. It can be horrifying. But whatever the book, that intimacy is there. Not just between the characters, but between book and the reader as well. Walden’s work invites you to engage generously with the material. To have a relationship with it as if it were a living, breathing person. Because Walden’s books feel alive. They ask you to trust that whatever lies ahead, the two of you will get through it together.
A lot of that can be ascribed to Walden’s style as an artist. Graphic storytelling is, after all, the realm of the artist. How they choose to frame each panel, how they draw each character, and all the little nuances in between. Reading her work you are struck immediately by the simple, sparse, character models. Some of these characters are little more than a few ruffled lines and a couple of dots to make a face. And then, she juxtaposes these characters against rich, lush backgrounds. Backgrounds that are filled with minute detail that breathes life into every panel, giving the world a robust three-dimensionality.
In I Love This Part, the romance of two teenagers is captured with surrealism. The girls are giants, lounging with abandon amongst the book’s vast cityscapes, meadows & mountains. They grow larger as their love blooms and shrink as the outside world forces them apart. The backgrounds are vast, and intricate and more importantly- reflect the infinity and claustrophobia of first love.
These inks are masterfully brought to life by Walden’s colouring. Walden is particular with her colour choices, each book only ever using a handful of shades. These colours are then massaged into her art with swaths of booming watercolour- or at least a digital approach that reflects it.
On A Sunbeam jumps between the past and present, following protagonist Mia at boarding school as a child and as space-travelling as an adult. The present is seeped in muted purples that give way to subtle maroon as Mia becomes more confident in herself. The past is coated in blues that are invaded by sharp oranges as the sanctuary of childhood is besieged by the adult world. The two palettes are eventually brought together in gorgeous phantasmagoria as Mia’s two worlds collide. Most striking is Walden’s use of yellow to emphasise strong moments of emotion, whether it be awe, grief or something between the two.
Spinning uses the same shade of yellow to do the same thing, albeit used much more sparingly amongst the core palette of deep blues, greys and whites. This makes the use of yellow even more striking. Spinning is an autobiography of Walden’s own childhood as a competitive figure skater. Her use of colour here makes the book feel like a collection of memories, with some events standing out like sore thumbs and others fading into the subconscious.
Another one of Walden’s many talents is the way she letters her books, with minimal sound effects and crude, hand-drawn word balloons. Combined with her dialogue, also written by hand, makes every character feel incredibly human. This humanity is extenuated by her fine attention to character detail. I said before that her characters are relatively simple, a choice by design. Because her characters are drawn so simply, the smallest, subtlest changes to expression or to stance, creates an enormous depth of personhood in every single one.
A look in The End of Summer can hint at a deep and intimate sibling bond. A hug in On a Sunbeam can speak volumes about a childhood love.
In the best of these examples is Walden’s greatest weapon. One that she uses to miraculous effect over and over again.
Silence.
Moments when all, or almost all, dialogue, captions, and sound effects are stripped away, and you are asked to simply sit in the moment. In a particular feeling, in a particular space, and soak it in. I Love This Part is built on these moments. The book is a playlist of intimacy, picking and choosing the quietest, most meaningful seconds that build a relationship. But it isn’t used more effectively as in Spinning, sometimes to brutal effect. The following moment in particular stands out.
A key theme in Walden’s work is the blossoming romance of young queer women. Girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen, typically still closeted, finding private comfort in each other in an increasingly isolating world. We learn in Spinning that Walden found this kind of young love for herself at the start of high school, a love that develops quietly over the course of the book. For Walden, it is one of the few bright spots in a rigorous existence dominated by the stress of competitive figure skating. Everywhere she goes she feels tiny, insignificant, small. This romance is the one thing that makes her feel strong.
And then, at the turn of a page…
These three pages command the gravity of a planet. A magnitude of space between Walden and her mother. Deep blocky colours dominate the background. A single spotlight shines through Walden directly onto her mother, like the world is beaming the truth through her, a truth that can never be put away again. Mother and daughter cannot look at each other. Walden’s mother looks at the wall, where the spotlight is most prominent, unable to look away. Walden looks at the source of the tension. A simple, almost comical drawing. It draws our attention too, enough to get its own close-up. We understand. This drawing has lit a fire of dread and fear that has absorbed all the oxygen in the room. You take a look at those images and it’s easy to assert that no one has taken a breath in some time. We don’t see Mother’s face. It will take another hundred or so pages for us to see that, and only after Walden has grown strong enough to confront her.
The heart-breaking, dismissive conversation between Walden and her mother comes afterwards. But Walden uses silence for these first three pages to illustrate the gravity of that moment. The horror of her worst fear realised. Presented so simply, so gently. The meaning is clear. We are in a black hole from which there is no escape.
The combination of all of these elements, her characters, her backgrounds, her colours, and her silence, come together to make engrossing, tragic and joyous books. Walden approaches storytelling with a gentle and delicate intimacy that makes her work utterly unique, each book with a sincere, watercolour heart at its core.
Tillie Walden is a modern master, whose command of the art form is both intoxicating and enviable. She elevates the medium by being a part of it and, with more ventures into the mainstream with Clementine: Book Two and Tegan & Sarah: Junior High Book One (both due in 2023), I trust she’ll continue to make great work for a long time.
The avalanche will continue to build speed and size. The butterfly will flutter away from this mountain, catch the wind and move to the next.
***
Here are a handful of things that I’ve really been liking lately! Click on each title for links directly to them!
Mister Organ dir. David Farrier
I think I preferred Farrier’s last film Tickled, but much like that film, this one starts silly and strange and gets depressing and dark over the course of 90 minutes. See this one in theatres! Support local cinema! It’s great and will make you feel all icky all over!Dead Man’s Bones by Dead Man’s Bones
Ryan Gosling got together with his mate Zach Shields (who would go on to write the next couple Godzilla movies, no big) and a children’s choir set up by Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and made a Halloween album in 2009. It’s extremely good.
Bodies, Bodies, Bodies dir. Halina Reijn
A really fun slasher whodunnit that just tears the shit out of entitled, rich gen z’s. It’s not getting a proper release in Aotearoa but if you’re in Auckland on the 25th, the Terror-Fi film festival is putting on a special one-off screening that will 500% be worth it. Get your tickets by linking on the title above!
(TW: Pete Davidson is in it)Chris & Eli’s Porn Revolution dir. Kate Prior
Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson’s docu-series on porn for The Spinoff! Insightful, cringeworthy and quite funny, they tackle the public perception and understanding of porn from all angles and it’s quite good! The cinematography is gorgeous considering the subject matter and it’s taught me all about JOHN, our very own 100% kiwi made gay prono. If that’s not NZ Cinema history I don’t know what is.
That’s us for this week. See you next time.
I hope you’re well.
-mattie bee