Heavenly Days

A person, alone in their home, applies their makeup, examining the effect of their mascara and blush in the bathroom mirror. They hold a picture of themself, younger, smiling, a face dotted with unconcerned stubble. Slumped down on the edge of their bedroom mattress, they begin to cry but stifle their tears and hide away the old photo in a discreet dresser drawer. Eagle-eyed readers will have determined by now that this person is transfeminine, and this moment of dysphoria could almost be a joke about how cisgender audiences imagine trans people to experience their traumatic socialization. Something about this moment is different. Notice how they smile in the mirror, seeing their face compared to the old stubble. Transition carries a little joy, a little anxiety, and it is also mundane. It’s something else about that photo, the past it represents, the person they were in its moment, that forces out their sobbing. Someone lives in that image, or perhaps outside its frame someone else can be felt. What inner life dwells here?

 

Heavenly Days is a sparsely illustrated work. Em Frank pairs their blunt and childlike line down to bare gestural essentials, sticking to a largely rigid structure of gridded layouts, dialogue lettered in a serifless computer font without so much as a word balloon to tie itself down. The aesthetics recall the studious dull of Nick Drnaso’s graphic novels or the standoffishness of Olivier Schrauwen’s wordier narratives, but without the convenient appeal of color or the play of apparent formal complexity to entice the eye - not at first, anyway. It is a comic book largely bereft of serotonin that seems resistant to being read. And yet the reader is drawn in, by a chance encounter.

Our sad heroine, Elise, meets the woman at a cafe. The two are both regulars – or rather, they were, a different cafe used to be at the location, Magnolias, but now it’s a chain. The woman, Annie, approaches Elise with memories of Magnolias and thoughts on cake, angels and UFOs. Elise opens up to this cheerful and impulsive eccentric with her own private obsessions, SF novels and Fado music (“There’s no happy endings in the songs, it’s all just wailing…”). The two meet the next day, and Elise asks Annie out. Annie offers a condition – they can date for a week, but at the end of that week she will be going to Vietnam and they will never see each other again. The comic’s titular heavenly days are the week that follows, a week of dates, walking, talking, museums and art galleries, visits to homes and anticipation. These days are dotted with moments alone, slumped on the couch smartphone raised up for video calls. “But it’s not boring with her,” Elise insists to a friend who calls their plan for the week rough. “Then if she’s leaving, it has to be tragic,” their friend asserts.

Elise and Annie’s conversations are what ultimately draw the reader in. It is rare for a comic to be so totally carried by dialogue alone, but these conversations are sumptuously enigmatic, compelling and normal. In Annie’s car, Elise rests on her shoulder while the two imagine the lives of passersby. At the beach, Elise infodumps about Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 while Annie ponders the moon and snowflakes. “You know, sometimes our conversations are so beautiful they depress me,” Elise purrs to Annie, gazing up at her eyes. The reader understands. As these conversations unfold, the stiff, dry, line of Em Frank’s cartooning comes alive. One begins to notice the versatility, the vivacity of their mark-making, the observation and warmth brought to every gesture, color emerges at last, albeit only one, a deep and unassuming blue gone as soon as it emerges. Anne and Elise’s conversations are as interesting for what goes unsaid as for the emotions carried in them. The two are reaching for whimsy, struggling together not to say something of life outside of the gentle pleasure they are sharing for a moment. That unspoken missing piece is eventually revealed in a moment that changes the entire meaning of the story, gives every pause, every comment and gesture a full and different context, one whose emotional truth will strike the compassionate reader a while before it is stated outright.

 

Heavenly Days is a rare and somber work of queer romance comics, setting aside the conventional dramas of youth and coming out for the difficulties of a life that follows trauma and acceptance. How does it feel to yearn for joys and connections lost from a time before self-acceptance? What does it mean to love again after learning not to? What does it mean to keep loving someone? Why do we want to keep the past alive when the past hurt unbearably and change made us better? Why do the ways we protect ourselves, protect each other, always seem to hurt? Do we ever get to go back? These questions are painfully familiar to queer and trans people who got to live past the hard stuff and grow up as themselves for long enough to realize that the uncertainty, the change, the difficult intimacy never really ends, is always in a state of being and becoming. Heavenly Days lingers on these questions, seated on the patio of a cafe that used to be a different cafe, then changed.

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