In this graphic novel, title heroine Penelope is working as a surgeon in Aleppo. My final example is Penelope, by Judith Vanistendael (2019).
This focus on the humblest part of Petar's appearance eliminates the need for a verbal explanation: we get it. In fifteen close-ups Sekulic-Struja presents us these shoes, and sometimes the socks as well. As Petar strolls through the drab streets of a poor, Eastern European city, trying to make ends meet, those laces get untied again and again, sending an uncomfortable message to the reader: that life has no easy solutions. Better said, a pair of ragged shoes with loose laces. In his masterpiece Petar & Liza (2022) the Croatian artist Miroslav Sekulic-Struja repeatedly uses an effective emblem to evoke the loneliness (and sloppiness) of his anti-hero Petar: his shoes. The ability to speak figuratively is one of the strongpoints of the graphic novelist, who has the freedom to invent his or her own rhetorical tricks and develop a new visual language with its own codes and meanings. For me the essential difference between the two lies in the use of metaphors. In 2004 I published a booklet about the graphic novel in which I - in alphabetical order - investigated "the unexplored territory between the literal and figurative".* Words and pictures unite to tell stories about all things under the sun, but in a classic comic (say, Hal Foster's Prince Valiant) this happens more straightforwardly and literally than in a drawn novel (for example Jacques Tardi's It Was the War of the Trenches). There is no rock-hard boundary between the two, at most a sliding scale running from generic and genre-specific to authentic and author-specific. Looking back over the past thirty years, if I had to say what has been the dominant factor in it for me, it would be: the comic book or, more precise, the graphic novel. Indeed: who decides what the basic necessities of life are? I have friends who would wither away like neglected houseplants without a regular dose of soccer. A roof and a stove in winter, sunblockers and cocktails in summertime. Nobody, I guess, not like we need water and bread, love and safety.
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