Days of the Bagnold Summer

In Days of the Bagnold Summer, Sue and Daniel Bagnold , mother and son, 52 and 15, are unexpectedly spending the long summer weeks together and Joff Winterhart uses this to frame a six-week snapshot of a relationship between a single mother and her awkward teenage son.

Not much happens, action fans! Daniel and Sue are both emotionally reticent introverts and their interactions don’t run to much sound and fury. I’ve seen Days of the Bagnold Summer compared to work by Raymond Briggs, and, in the understatement, and the things left unsaid between the characters, Winterhart’s storytelling is reminiscent of the benign yet detached story telling that Briggs brings to his best pieces.

Briggs is also present somewhere in the artwork. The Bagnolds and their associates are small imperfect people, stooped by life and utterly unglamorous. They’re rendered (and it is only them, there are no backgrounds in this comic, just people and an occasional chair for them to sit on) in an ink and grey wash whose hesitant, slightly jittery line further exposes the characters’ fragile vulnerability.

It’s well-observed too; subtle resemblances between family members and shy glances of complicity and love are all beautifully observed, and there’s a grace about it that elevates some moments from the farcical to moving.

(There’s a sequence where metal-loving 15-year old Daniel Bagnold is trying out to be singer for a band. It becomes apparent that the other band members are much younger than him. A lot of cartoonists would have played Daniel as butt of this scene; however, Joff Winterhart makes the scene somehow very touching, this gawky teenager finding his place fronting a pre-pubescent grindcore band.)

Generally speaking the characterisation stands up very well. Daniel and his slightly hipper, more confident best friend Ky are really well-played, with fine acknowledgements to the subtleties of death metals and the peculiar and unoriginal ways that teenagers choose to define themselves. Winterhart is a less successful with Sue, whose consistent lack of a colour (she’s a librarian!) feels lazy and on the edges of cliche.

In execution, it’s a bit like Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek; each page contains a separately titled strip of six panels, each a plucked vignette from the longer narrative, which I think is intended to be read alone or as part of the greater story arc.

It’s a hard one to pull off though, making individual pages work on their own and be part of the greater whole, and it doesn’t quite come off here. Often the single strips wouldn’t make much sense if you read them alone. It seems a shame to have added the constraint of the single page strip format (there are moments where a scene could do with being longer than a page) without making sure the strips work independently.

Those last two criticisms aside though, Days of the Bagnold Summer is a very human, subtle debut from someone who should develop into an even stronger cartoonist in the future.