In few books like this one it is so well described that fear is an uncontrollable feeling, capable of sneaking in through any crack and taking over our thoughts. It is enough for a person to be absent longer than necessary or not respond to a call for anguish to take over us. In this graphic novel, North American Jordan Crane transforms an everyday situation into a perfect gateway to the most absorbing psychological drama.
Don’t go (La Cúpula, with translation by Rubén Lardín) vibrantly evokes the fear of losing the person you love forever. A sensation that in these pages is born from small details that individually are not important but together, and added to all kinds of hypotheses that go through the protagonist’s head, they cause that feeling of anxiety that the author knows how to convey perfectly. A drama where everything happens in the head. An intimate and universal drama. A psychological thriller that avoids thriller conventions.
To achieve this effect, the book mixes different stories that all contribute to causing this concern. The story begins when the two protagonists, Will and Connie, arrive home after having argued in the car during the trip. Along with this main story, Crane introduces other stories whose function is to provoke a change in the reader’s perception of these events. On the one hand, the memories of that argument and the couple’s past are mixed, but the story of the novel that Connie is reading also sneaks in and serves as an amplifier of what the couple is experiencing.
Crane, who became known with the emotional Last Saturday of Solitude, skillfully combines this variety of stories – he leaves the vignettes drawn with a black frame for the main story – and from this multiplicity is born a story more powerful than each of its parts. individual. Crane’s success is to break the linearity of the main story with other stories, some real, others imaginary and many others that are mere hypotheses, to convey the protagonist’s anguish. To get the reader into Will’s head worried that he doesn’t know where Connie is.
The book conveys well that mental process that goes from doubt to fear and from fear to anguish. The anguish of losing a loved one. Because Don’t Go is also a powerful and original love story. A process unleashed little by little but that ends up being like a whirlwind that engulfs everything. The reader is also trapped in this spiral because reading this comic book is not one that can be put down easily.
This graphic novel has a relatively small, very manageable format, as if we were flipping through a notebook in whose pages someone has written this story. Perhaps the author thus seeks to emphasize the intimate and personal tone of the story. Throughout almost 300 pages drawn in rigorous fluorescent green – there is only a spot of another color, red, to show the couple hugging on the cover – Crane introduces us to a story in which the possible acquires a painful entity. real. Where the “what if…” is distressing because it is tremendously real.
To highlight the intelligent use that Crane makes of the plastic and expressive possibilities of comics to capture the anxiety and fear of losing the loved one. Because after the psychological thriller, what emerges after reading Don’t Go is a great love story. A poetic story that portrays the fear of loss. A book that invites us to enjoy the moment. Carpe Diem.
