Star of Swan

Star of Swan is a comic that loves drawing. It's other things as well—a journey on the cusp of adulthood, a time-fuck, a picture of isolation—but for me, this is a story about drawing.

All of us draw as children but some people leave it behind. Drawing is a way of looking at the world. It is a manner of thinking. Star of Swan exemplifies this not just through beautiful drawings but a story about drawing as a forbidden form of adult understanding and ideation.

Each page is full of sensual, atmospheric, extreme-value drawings that demand a slower and closer look. One glance does not always illuminate what's happening. If you spend time with the pages, bold ink shapes and odd perspectives reveal themselves—the taught paper about to be ripped from the dispenser, water streaming from a faucet, a reflection in a black airplane-seat TV. The drawings focus on small details of the environment and have disorienting perspectives. It's both dissociative and attentive.

I think some people will read Star of Swan and be puzzled. If looking for visual information that's easy to digest, you will bounce right off the page. Still, this comic is inviting. With its long, semi-opaque opening sequence—18 pages until we see a character's face— it guides us into a mode of reading where we have to look closely and wonder. We see from Leona’s perspective, or just to the side of it, with her hands and feet on the edge of panels as she navigates a near-empty airport. She is on her way to meet a group of online friends who are so excited to see her. She’s also an anthropomorphic, wingless swan, as are all people in this world.

We learn that Leona's friends are members of a forum for adult drawers. They are rejected by society for drawing, but found each other online where they share clandestine images of their own creation.

“Most people who find our drawing forum are enraged by what they see: Disgusting! Nauseating! Adults… drawing! Drawing!! Looks like mommy never cleaned out the drawing bin… probably abused every day, haha…” — Mungy

Leona has a special connection with Mungy, who made a drawing closely resembling a good dream she had in a sea of nightmares. As she describes it, “I was an airplane, huge and weightless, my insides had been purged and cleaned, all the nightmares washed away… I flew all on my own!” His drawing was a revelation to her, and a means of escaping her tormented mind, and she and the other adult drawers have come together to make the drawing a reality.

Star of Swan has an excruciating tension between adulthood and childhood. There is an ambiguity to Leona’s past that allows us to read in the worst that we can imagine. Hiding in a closet surrounded by debris. Hungry adults crowding around a nest of eggs. The trauma is incomprehensible or forgotten, but drawing is a way of understanding what happened, as seen in the opening illustration and the closing page.

“A group of people I’ve never seen before, surrounding me—They do many things but they never kill me, they try to make our time together last as long as possible…” —Leona

Leona has recently become an adult, or is child-like; she is drawn to the children’s toy store in the airport and has her “first adult clock” hanging on the wall of her home. Her innocence makes her entrance to the gathering ominous as everyone surrounds her and bombards her with affection.

She participates eagerly in a horrific transformation of her own body, and we’re left to wonder about malice, violation, and abandonment.

When I was a teenager, I used to try and memorize all the details on an airplane. The pattern of the carpet, the shape of the plastic mold that held the TV screen, the seam of the seat. I would try and see things for how they really looked, not what I knew them to be. I think Leona is doing the same—looking at the world as shapes, light, and shadow, and wondering what her place in it is.

If there's one thing that Star of Swan left me wanting, it was a little more time with Leona’s transformation and disabling aftermath. The first leg of the story is so slow and long and then it all crunches together at the end. This is purposeful. The clocks in this world show that time is experienced slower and faster depending on the time of day, reflected in the comic’s pacing. Even the panels, which at times are ambiguously defined, echo lines from the clock. It’s an interesting experience, I’m just not sure what to make of it yet.

The last panel was so puzzling to me that I had to reread the page three times and then go hunting through the book for clues. Perhaps another beat with the ending would be less disorienting, but I think this book is aiming and succeeding in disorienting the reader just enough, so I can’t complain. It made me think about it for days afterwards.

Some stories are not meant to be clearly understood. Of these, not all are meant to be puzzled through like Inception's spinning top (it definitely does not fall, by the way). But that's the fun. You have to chew on it, think it over, really look at what it's doing and decide on your own interpretation. You can find new perspectives when you return to it. Movies, books, comics, and art like that aren't pretentious— they trust the audience to be smart and engaged.

Star of Swan is a true experience to read, and deserves to be read slowly. It’s the kind of book I would recommend to someone without telling them anything about it, and then bug them about what they got out of it. I’m sure I’ll be looking at it again and again.