The Great Beyond

Manel Naher–the Manel Naher we get to know, anyway–isn’t interested in fame. She haunts bookstores in the huge, noisy metropolis in which she lives, hangs out with a handful of like-minded people, and resolutely avoids the constant scramble for fame that powers the engine of her world. She’s a familiar, recognizable, even identifiable character; she only wants to be left alone, but she’s surrounded by an environment where if your name isn’t on the tip of everyone’s tongue, you might as well not even exist. The story that drives young French cartoonist Léa Murawiec’s terrific debut graphic novel is how literal that statement truly is.

There is, we quickly learn, another Manel Naher: a starry-eyed pop singer splattered all over the covers of glossy magazines and newspapers. She shares nothing with ‘our’ Manel except a name, but in their world, your name is everything. Billboards, marquees and buildings are festooned with advertisements - not for corporations or products, but for people, although it’s often hard to tell the difference. Those without the juice to have their names enshrined in neon for the world to see are reduced to dangling out of their apartment windows with cardboard signs announcing their identities. Even the homeless camp out on sidewalks with sandwich boards bearing their names instead of panhandling cups, hoisting placards that read “PRESENCE PLEASE.”

None of this concerns Manel, who just wants to read her books, hang out with her handful of friends, and stay out of the constant babble of everyone around her grinding to maintain as high a social profile as possible. She shares her odd little finds–a machete, a spyglass–with her friend Ali and dreams about escaping to the Great Beyond, a distant and perhaps mythical land beyond the seemingly infinite stretches of the city, where people live in harmony with nature and outside the iron grip of social climbing. But all that changes when the other Manel scores a massive hit (with a song called “My Name is on Everyone’s Lips,” one of the book’s most on-the-nose gags), sapping what remains of her public profile and sending her into cardiac arrest.

In The Great Beyond, name recognition and social status, “presence,” is actually a matter of life and death. Manel’s doctors and family urge her to follow a plan of “treatment,” involving all manner of humiliating plays for attention, lest her presence fall so low that she literally drops dead from the lack of it. Diffident at first, she’s gripped with terror when her symptoms recur, and she starts pursuing a program of self-promotion, starting with hanging out at a disco and ending with a shocking act of violence that leads her to eclipse the fame of her pop star double, propelling her on a new path in life that introduces unexpected problems that make mere lack of name recognition look like nothing. Soon enough, she’s the Manel Naher that everyone knows; but is eclipsing her namesake worth the cost of keeping the engine running?

This is the plot of The Great Beyond, and it works as far as it goes; it’s funny and clever, with some daring conceits and cute in-jokes (one of the names that shows up on an urban marquee is that of Nicolas Sarkozy), and as a satire of the internet age, it’s powerfully effective. Everyone who has ever used social media will recognize the emotional beats that Manel Naher goes through: the disdain for the whole game followed by the immediate and addictive boost that comes from a post going viral or being name-checked by someone famous, and then the addictive clout-chasing that is the cost of maintaining those followers and likes and comments. It’s abstracted enough that the mechanics remain vague while still being instantly recognizable to those of us who have experienced the dopamine boost of being flooded with push alerts.

But what really makes the book special is Murawiec’s excellent visual sensibilities. Much of The Great Beyond is in black & white, but its urban landscapes–dense, suffocating, grandiose and artificial–are rendered in blues and reds that give it a three-dimensional pop, seeming to lift these scenes right off the page. The movements of people are broad, stretched-out and kinetic, with stabs of jarring action that nicely contrast the artist's simple, cartoonish facial expressions and occasionally break out into aggressive slashes that seem to come right at the reader. The multiple pages of towering buildings dotted with stylized names would seem like padding in the hands of someone less gifted, but Murawiec’s design skills and sharp, loose angles make them a joy every time they appear.

The Great Beyond’s emotional arcs are broad and just as assaultive as the city skyline, but they are effective in ways that aren’t easy to predict. A revelation late in the story about what Manel’s constant press for self-promotion has cost her comes as a shock to both the character and the reader, and it gives the book a dramatic weight that you can’t really see coming in its early stages, where it reads like a much broader satire. By the time it reaches its ambiguous, uncanny and somewhat eerie conclusion, it’s earned a respect that a simple satire of parasocial relationships and online clout-chasing couldn’t have done on its own.

It's a book that arrives at exactly the right moment, with social media titans altering the way we understand the world, and people in every corner of that world sacrificing themselves and what they do in favor of a reified version of themselves propelled by nothing more material than name recognition. There is an obvious irony in The Great Beyond being the book that propels Léa Murawiec to greater fame as a cartoonist to watch. But given how dynamic and compelling this book turns out to be, it seems like a forgivable one.

The post The Great Beyond appeared first on The Comics Journal.