GRAPHIC NOVEL TACKLES GRIEF, LOSS AND NEW LOVE
Forward Lisa Maas | Arsenal Pulp Press $21.95, 198 pages
The graphic novel is a proven vehicle for tackling tough topics. In Forward, Victoria author and cartoonist Lisa Maas crafts a powerful look at grief, heartbreak and, as the title suggests, “moving forward.”
Following two forty-something lesbians on a road to discovery, Maas crafts a three-part story not afraid to tackle the insecurities and opposing passions that make up an intimate relationship. Part 1 introduces the two main characters, Part 2 brings their lives together, Part 3 offers future potentialities.
Rayanne is a high-powered professional profoundly affected by a bad relationship who is doing everything she can to avoid becoming emotionally entangled with anyone again other than her cat. Ali (based loosely upon the author) is a widower who suddenly lost her wife, Liv, to untreatable cancer. Both of them are going through life with a protective shell around them that is complicated and corrosive at the same time. As Maas notes in an interview, she saw a lot of examples of this in her community, which inspired the book as a healing process for her and — hopefully — all those who read it.
Through a series of coincidences, the two meet and both feel out of their comfort zones when an obvious attraction occurs.
How they conquer their fears — or don’t — plays out over the pages in a narrative that is most assuredly not some sort of self-help lecture turned into digestible comics. Were not Maas such an honest storyteller with clear connection to both characters, Forward could fall prey to that. Instead it bristles with textual honesty and often highly charged, lovely artwork.
A shout-out to having dual skills is in order here as it’s a select club of graphic-novel creators who do both story and pictures.
Forward’s protagonists are really mired down in their situations. And they spend a lot of time discussing feelings and fears. But that is what people do and the author isn’t going to lie about it. She never adopts the preachy, “just-do-this-andall-will-be-well” tone of far too much of the relationship literature coming from so-called experts.
The play-by-play of Rayanne and Ali’s experiences are believable and downright unbearable at times. It’s hard not to want to yell at the secondary characters all around them urging action. We all know how unsolicited matchmakers cause fires of an entirely different sort when their efforts go awry.
Maas has been drawing since she was a teen. Her dedication to the craft came early, such as rendering an illustrated adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth for a Grade 11 English assignment. Forward is her first published graphic novel and the author/illustrator admits that the artwork shifts over the course of the story as she became more skilled with rendering her characters.
Conveniently, this honing in on the art coinciding with the two characters’ emotions becoming more clearly defined actually contributes to the book.