Everything We Miss
Reviewed by Andrew Moreton 14-Sep-11
Breaking up is never easy y’know and Luke Pearson’s extremely gloomy meditation on a relationship on the rocks doesn’t go too easy on the reader either.
Breaking up is never easy y’know, and Luke Pearson’s extremely gloomy meditation on a relationship on the rocks doesn’t go too easy on the reader either.
It’s a beguiling little package to be sure, a nice A5 hardback, about 20 interior pages, a two-colour, black and orange print job and hand rendered titles in skinny sans serifs that discreetely assert the impeccable polish that Nobrow have bought to their line. But, boy, is the story a downer.
An unnamed schmuck has, through, neglect and some misfortune, driven an unbridgeable rift between himself and his lover. He’s also driven to the edge of a lake, where, morose like a Smiths song, he contemplates the breakup and, maybe, suicide.
So, while our man is missing his ex, the narrative POV sweeps up and away from our heartbroken hero, and alights, for mostly single panel vignettes, into the secret lives and thoughts of citizens, aliens and ghosts, intermittently returning to the key events of the relationship’s decline.
It’s all very non-linear and fractured. Extra-terrestrials hurl asteroids at the earth, people contemplate their past, drink lonely drinks in bars, split into sixteen pieces and reassemble, contemplate death, all unseen, all Things We Miss.
Luke Pearson tries to thematically tie these short tableaus to the book’s title, but Things We Miss (things we remember fondly) and Things We Miss (things we fail to see) don’t fit together too well in this instance.
The stop-start of the constant change of perspective creates a dissonance within the strip that’s ultimately unsatisfactory and that, married with some clunky dialogue, detracts from what’s a good-looking publication.
Pearson’s art though is really quite nice – there’s some echos of David B and Kevin Huizenga about it, but overall it’s his own style that comes through, a cartoony simple line with exaggerated and expressive figures acting against simple yet evocative backgrounds. His colouring is excellent – the limited palate of tints of orange and the care he’s taken in overall page design make up for the some of the defects in his storytelling.