I don’t respond to cold calls much and I’m trying to get out of the book-review racket, but when Maggie Umber wrote me about her nearly wordless book Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, something told me to answer.
The jumping-off point was a piece Umber made for an anthology of graphic work inspired by the writing of Shirley Jackson. Her story, “The Tooth” features a malevolent stranger named James Harris. Soon Umber was seeing Harris not only in Jackson’s stories but also in her own life.
A failing marriage, stressful work situation, and health problems contributed to a drastic transformation in Umber’s life. She pours all the struggle and pain into this collection of mostly nonverbal but definitely not silent stories. Using a series of techniques and styles that reference Old Hollywood cinema, the etchings of Francisco Goya, the art of Edvard Munch, Casper David Friedrich, and countless others, Umber dramatizes the death of a love, barely needing a word.
I think about the wordless novels of Franz Masereel and Lynn Ward. Of William Gropper’s Alay-Oop. These are not the typical references that come up when I look at a comic book. That’s the world Umber has been aligned with much of her career, but this thing she’s made has no thought balloons, super-heroes, or fantasy wish fulfillment. There are panels and a sequential structure of sorts, though.
In an interview I recorded with the artist, she worries how her community will respond to the book. She moved from Minneapolis to Chicago years ago to be part of the vibrant cartoonist scene, but everybody knows everybody here and people talk. I think Umber shouldn’t worry. For one thing, she doesn’t name any names. Unless you count James Harris, and he’s a mythological demon, so, not likely to complain. This is not a roman a clef and Umber’s not trying to settle scores. She’s simply using art to tell the same story we’ve been telling since the very beginning. It’s got hope, madness, betrayal, loss, and all the rest. These are themes that will never not be relevant.
By changing up her style in each story, Umber avoids any chance for the work to become monotonous. Many of her techniques come from printmaking, which she majored in in college. There are monoprints, etchings, mezzotints, and woodblocks referenced in these pages. My favorite might be “The Witch”. It is the longest but also possibly the most atmospheric and oblique chapter in the book. Inky, bottomless darkness pervades this narrative of a couple in a bleak landscape. There’s a castle in the distance, packs of dogs, and a haunted stagecoach. A lot of Nosferatu DNA throughout.
Somehow Umber manages to make the heaviness of the subject-matter bearable, even beautiful. I don’t know whether there’s really light at the end of this tunnel but she provides just enough illumination to see us through.
By letting her images speak, she’s able to say what she wants more eloquently than many books I’ve read.
Umber is publishing this book herself so it’s best to get a copy from her directly. Order early and often.
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Chrysanthemum Under the Waves
by Maggie Umber
self-published; 284 p.
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