No One Else

Starred review from September 6, 2021
In two-tone panels punctuated by spare dialogue and splashes of sunset orange, Johnson (Night Fisher) tells an achingly realistic story of a Hawaiian family reeling in grief. Charlene, a busy single mother and ER nurse, takes care of her elderly father, until his mortal fall down the stairs. After she tips into an obsessive depression (the tidy family home filling with bags of garbage and stacked up mail) and ignores her young son, Brandon, her freewheeling, globe-trotting musician brother Robbie intervenes. Between alerting relatives to his father’s death, trying to pick up groceries with Charlene’s overdrawn credit card, and smoking pot, Robbie tries to comfort Brandon. “Part of being a man is standing up to do the thing no one else wants to do,” he opines. Robbie eventually takes his own advice, but first he and Charlene have to push past their old familial roles as the responsible one and the runaway. Set in Maui, where burning sugar cane fields choke Brandon’s dreams, the graphic novella’s splintered world is populated with striking, evolving images that symbolize the characters’ changing emotional landscape: their dad’s old fishing boat, big-jawed agricultural equipment, the urn containing his ashes. A subplot about the missing family cat, Batman, provides the final note and a poetic reminder that neither family nor identity is fixed. Johnson’s careful style conveys big emotions and family dynamics in concise scenes. It’s a beautiful example of a short comic containing multitudes.

Starred review from June 1, 2021

Charlene is a single mother who's so busy caring for her young son Brandon and her father that she barely has time for anything else. When her father suddenly dies, she throws herself so wholeheartedly into preparing to apply to medical school that Brandon is basically left to care for himself. He becomes consumed with locating his missing cat, Batman, who he worries may have fled into a sugar cane field near their neighborhood on Maui. Meanwhile, Charlene's brother Robbie, a traveling musician who has returned home after falling out with his father years earlier, struggles to connect with his family and old friends. Robbie's easygoing demeanor is slowly revealed to be a mask for seething resentment, but as his sister's home falls into disarray and his nephew's obsession with Batman becomes increasingly troubling, he takes it upon himself to help his family process their grief and move on with their lives. VERDICT As he tracks a few days in the course of his characters' lives, Johnson (Night Fisher) avoids the easy cliches typically deployed in tales that depict the grieving process; he eschews even catharsis in favor of conveying raw emotion with brutal realism.

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