The Jellyfish
Creator: Boum
Translators: Robin Lang and Helge Dascher
Publisher: Pow Pow Press
The Jellyfish is a powerhouse of a story, a grounded graphic novel that starts small and subtly evolves a major challenge for its protagonist. The challenge is relate to their vision and sight, and this book uses its inherently visual medium to express the severity of that challenge, the way it grows and interferes and becomes a new status quo for the protagonist to deal with. This book could perhaps be called slice of life, although I feel like that term often trivilalizes a story’s stakes, and the stakes are very high here.
In brief, The Jellyfish is the story of Odette, who is in their early 20s and works at a bookstore, has a pet rabbit, and meets an intriguing new romantic prospect — but at the same time, there is a jellyfish floating inside their eye. The jellyfish starts as an annoyance, a little blotch that occasionally flits about the page as Odette and the rest of their narrative progress. But the jellyfish grows…and multiplies…and multiplies again, until it becomes a far more significant challenge for Odette, one that interferes with their life as well as the conveying of the action on the page.
It’s a brilliant concept for a graphic novel, really, making for interesting and immersive pages that really put you in the frame of mind of Odette, feeling their surprise and panic as the plight accelerates. The end result is a deeply empathetic comic that immerses a reader in a way I’ve not quite seen before within this medium.
So, a great deal of credit is owed to Boum, the Canadian cartoonist who wrote and illustrated the story (aided in translation here by Robin Lang and Helge Dascher). The art style is fantastic throughout, but it’s the way Boum conveys the changing severity of the jellyfish in the eye situation that makes this book stand out as one of the most striking reading experiences I’ve had all year.
And while Odette’s life is fairly different from my own — I’m an old who came of age in a different time, have never been to Canada, and have not ever had a jellyfish in my eye — it brought me back to a very similar time for me.
Right after college, I got my first job in McAllen, Texas, a city I’d never been to before. Within a few weeks, I awoke one morning and the white part of one of my eyes was bright red. I could not put in contacts, I could not focus my vision, and I could not look at bright lights without experiencing searing pain. This was serious, making everything harder and accentuating the chaos and struggle of my early 20s. An eye doctor was unsure what was causing it, and the confusion made it so much worse. I felt alone with my challenge…while adjusting to being alone in a brand new city, at an inherently chaotic age.
So that was my basis for relating deeply to the central conceit of The Jellyfish, but I imagine most readers will be reminded of times in their own lives they’ve been lonely and afraid and left to deal with a challenge that feels mysterious and highly-localized to them. I think it’s a major credit to The Jellyfish to tell such a fantastical and striking story, to do so in a visually innovative way, and to find such deep universality.
I give this book my highest recommendation.
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