FANTAGRAPHICS AT 50! There’s something about Katriona Chapman’s The Pass that reminds the reader of the structure of a stage play. It’s a nuanced character study to start with. But it’s also a graphic novel where every scene serves a distinct purpose in furthering the story, and one with a thematic core that slowly builds in intensity right up to its quietly intense denouement. Chapman has a proven record in slice-of-life storytelling, of course, in books like Follow Me In and Breakwater (both from Avery Hill Publishing) but with The Pass she juggles a truly expansive cast of characters.
Principal among these is Claudia Grace, a rising star in the restaurant world whose own establishment, Alley, is home to a small, almost found family of characters. While Claudia is trying to realise her own life goals of success in the culinary world – both through recognition for her business and the more ostentatious lure of a major competition for chefs – her friends and colleagues are going through their own challenges.
Partner, sous chef and friend from student days Lisa has found herself pushed back into an administrative role at Alley while she struggles with her husband’s illness and problems with her children. Barman Ben has his own challenges getting his parents to understand his life choices. And all the while Claudia is dealing with controlling parents whose behaviour towards her can be cold and indifferent.
The Pass is a very human story but underplayed in a way that ensures its depth is all the more profound for its understatement. Chapman interweaves the lives of the cast with a deft narrative hand, ensuring our investment in them in a low burn manner that pays off when, at key moments of plot development, we realise just how invested in their lives we have become. There are questions of identity here; of why we pursue the ambitions we do and whether we do so for the best reasons. There are also recurring motifs surrounding the idea of living in the shadow of others and the different ways that can affect our actions. And then there’s the constant juxtaposition of the reflective (in the characters’ emotional journeys) and the chaotic (in the fast-paced reality of kitchen life).
Chapman’s visuals are their usual rich blend of shading and expressiveness with visual characterisation carrying as much in terms of conveying each player’s state of mind as dialogue and interplay does. Keen observers of the language of comics will no doubt be impressed by how dexterously Chapmen manipulates busy page structures to play with the passage of time or, conversely, can draw back at more contemplative scenes and ask to linger more fully on a single powerful image that gives us thematic pause for thought.
Books like The Pass can only succeed if we can see something of ourselves in the characters and there’s an evocative and poignant familiarity in the struggles of those herein that ensures we do just that.
Katriona Chapman (W/A) • Fantagraphics Books, $24.99
Buy online from Gosh! Comics here
Review by Andy Oliver
Fantagraphics at 50 Month runs through August at Broken Frontier. You can see articles as they’re published in one tagged list here.
