Frezno's Comics Challenge: June 2024 (Are You Listening?)

(TW: sexual assault)

For this entry of the Comics Challenge, which I welcome you back to once again, I want to start off with Sean's question to me regarding the book: What is your favorite memory of a car trip? Being honest, I don't know if I really have one, but that doesn't mean I can't answer the question in my own way. I don't recall the specifics of any one particular car trip, but I do remember the way that I feel upon encountering certain vistas. The endless wilderness of Central Newfoundland is well-worn ground for me, with its own landmarks and familiar spots that are as ingrained in my memory as a natural clock. I could talk about the odd feeling I get whenever I pass from Central into Eastern Newfoundland, a crossing of a spiritual border into a country not my own. I could speak of the mighty Burin Peninsula, craggy mosslands and massive seaside cliffs and the cozy comforts of my home away from home. Alongside all of that is a concept I dubbed the lonely highway, of driving late at night or early in the morning with nothing but the open road ahead and whatever music or podcast I've brought with me. Resonant music, interesting podcasts, voices from the machine which speak to me and only me thanks to the magic of my headphones. My constant companion on the rural highways of this half of my wind-swept frigid rock.

Tillie Walden's Are You Listening? is about such lonely highways, and so much more. The mysterious roads of rural Texas are thousands of miles away from rural Newfoundland, but in them I feel a certain kinship. They are painted with elegant colors, no strong color theory overwhelming the others. The opening purples and reds with our first protagonist Bea give way to pinks and greens for our second, Lou. From there the two drive on down the lonely highway, the colors giving way to starkly lit tunnels or the blinding white of sudden snowstorms. It is a medley of a palette, and there is a beauty to it. As a famous girl once said, however, it's beautiful and also sad. Bea and Lou are two deeply fucked up queer folks, for various reasons and traumas that we will get to in a moment. They have each other on this impromptu road trip, but at the same time there is a distance between them. That distance lessens as time goes on, bridged together by the cat they find, and the loneliness of the highways of their own internal landscape is bridged a little because of the connection they make together.

It's enough to get them to open up about their traumas. God knows that rural Texas must be one of the worst places on this planet to live in as a queer person. I can't imagine it, and the recoil at the thought of imagining it gives me immense amounts of empathy for not just these two but anyone stuck in that situation, or similar. Driving down the lonely highway is not just a trip, but a means of escape. Lou has lost her mother, and is struggling to get on without her. Bea is running away from home after sexual assault from her own cousin, confessed to Lou in a gut punch of a scene which uses nothing but the ripples of pool water and Bea's narration before ending with a stream of blood flooding the lower right of the page. As we learned in Unflattening, marrying art with words creates vivid expression unlike anything either could do alone, and it is in the absence of any art but ripples upon water fading into pink and then the red of blood which make the words hit all the harder. The art getting more and more scribbled and frantic with both its characters and word balloons sell the panic, the hurt, and the guilt over sharing one of the most traumatic and fucked-up things that can happen to another human. It is intense, it is raw, and it is real in its honesty.

In the end, though, there is hope and there is healing. The rural roads of Texas are a liminal thing, where anything can exist and you can go anywhere. This is why the nefarious Office Of Road Inquiry wants the cat these two find. To restrict that freedom, that expression, to enforce control and compliance and the norm. They are an evil thing that must be driven away from at top speed, to build your own bridge, to take back your own life and agency by any path necessary. There's a magic here with the lonely highway, a magic that both the cat and Bea can tap into. It is suggested that the magic is due to the way rural Texas is, but I don't entirely buy it. It's a special thing within one's self. Both Bea and Lou suffer a crash in the climax of the book as they're pursued by the Road Inquiry, both falling back into past traumas they have shared with the other. It's Bea who takes a bike and treks along the lonely highway to pull Lou back from the ego-death of anxiety and misery, and both find a sense of happiness and self along the road. The end even has Lou give Bea her car, a relic from her late mother. Several scenes are spent with Lou trying to teach Bea how to drive, and this gift is the ultimate expression of freedom and the power of the highway. Go anywhere, Bea. Be truly free. 

Where Bea goes from there is up to you. Does she take in the sights of Texas further? Go onward to parts unknown. Maybe, just maybe, she will drive far to the north and to a little island on the east coast.. Maybe she'll experience the gale force winds of Wreck House, or the great glory of the Exploits River. The majesty of the Dover Fault, the beauty of Terra Nova. The serene shores of Bonavista, the looming sea cliffs of Bay L'Argent. I have not been to all of these places, but maybe Bea has. Someone, somewhere, has. The point is that they were there, and for one brief moment they got away from whatever worries and anxieties troubled them in their lives and saw the natural beauty of things. The point is that they, for just a little bit, got away from it all.