You Love to See It: Vision (Patreon)

Vision, horror cartoonist Julia Gfrörer’s third and latest graphic novel, is a once-in-a-decade piece of art, a pitch-black story of domestic suffocation set at the end of New York’s Gilded Age. Eleanor, a not-quite-widowed spinster whose fiance's death has left her socially and economically adrift, lives with her brother Robert and his sickly wife, Cora, for whom she serves as unwilling caretaker, in a house Gfrörer renders in her trademark intricately tapered style, thin lines and dense cross-hatching investing every outstretched hand with a kind of brutal fragility, every shadow with a thick, impenetrable emptiness, as though the forced intimacy which connect the book’s characters has pooled and congealed in the corners of the house’s rooms.

That intersection between force and intimacy occupies much of Vision, from Eleanor’s ocular surgery and subsequent recounting of the feeling of a man’s finger on the surface of her eye to Cora’s queasily infantile insistence that Eleanor administer her medicine by dropper into her open mouth, as though she were a baby bird. It contrasts uneasily with the barrier separating Eleanor from her supernatural lover, an entity which haunts a mirror on the mantel in her room. Their sexual relationship consists solely of their voices and her body. Her masturbation and exposure at his instruction are as much a source of tension as a relief. His gaze, intoxicating as it is, is all he has to give her, and in return he appears to expect complete devotion.

There are strong shades of Goethe’s Faust in Gfrörer’s book, trading as it does in poisonings, romance, and pacts made with otherworldly entities, but where in Faust the matricidal Gretchen is shown mercy and accepted into Heaven, no such divine condescension waits for Vision’s troubled characters. Eleanor’s agreement with her own ghostly intimate is frightening more for its conventional unspoken rules than for the presence of the ghost himself, and love provides no special redemption, nor even a way out of suffering. The comic’s final act, in which a spark of hope flickers to life just before Gfrörer snuffs the lights for good, is one of the most gutting in recent memory, a bleak homage to Alice in Wonderland in which the fall through the rabbit hole is terribly real, all wind and rushing darkness, but with nothing waiting below. 

You can buy Vision here.