Come Again

Come Again is an unusual graphic novel that takes the medium to new, interesting, meditative places. It’s a cerebral exploration of what it means to keep forbidden secrets and at what costs those secrets come. On the surface, the plot follows a somewhat non-linear tale of a man and a woman having an affair, meeting in an abandoned mine shaft they’ve converted into a secret meeting place. Beyond that, much of the story is hallucinatory, blurring the lines between what’s actually happening and what’s happening in the guilty consciousness of to woman, Haluska, more or less the story’s main character/narrator. Visually, Come Again takes full advantage of the ambiguity inherent to the graphic-novel form–the line between which are “real” and which are metaphorical images is uncertain, and, here, the author purposefully doesn’t intervene to tell the reader which is which. Instead, the reader has to decide how much of what we see is experiential, how much is representational and where, when, and if the difference matters. Because of this, the feeling of the story leaves a greater mark on the reader than its premise or events.

Come Again is an intriguing, confident, and adept exploration of human consciousness–guilty consciousness, particularly–that pushes the bounds and possibilities of the graphic-novel form in exciting ways. Recommended to fans of graphic novels as well as to those skeptical of the form’s literary merit and innovative potential.