Customer Reviews

Can of Worms

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This brief and elegant graphic novel is the first from comics author/artist Catherine Doherty, and it is a powerful example of the deftness with which comics can tell a story. The story, in this case, is quite simple: a young woman, Catherine Margaret Flaherty (a thinly disguised version of the author), searches for her birth mother. The genius of this graphic novel is that there is no dialogue per se; instead, the only text we read is through various court documents, the main character's search notes, and letters. The bulk of the story is told through deceptively simple pictures. To read this book too fast would be a mistake, for the reader would miss out on the rich, understated details that Doherty puts in her frames, and the clever way in which she contrasts the "cartoony" look of her main character (and her mother) with the "realistic" look of the other people around her. My one complaint about Doherty's book is that it is too short. One reason that the length is a problem is because the resolution comes a bit quickly. Another (more important) reason is because I want to see much more by this very talented comic book artist.

Catherine Margaret Flaherty (a thinly disguised version of the author) is adopted. But Catherine wants to know who her birth mother is and thus she begins her search through reels of microfilm and indexes at the library chasing clue after clue to find her. And then writing to contact her...and waiting on the response. This wordless story tells a tale of heartbreak and some joy.

The biggest problem that I have with this book is that in some places the illustrations don't carry the story well, which is a bad thing from a wordless graphic novel. For example, towards the end of the book where Catherine is sitting in a car in front of a house is she stalking her birth mother or looking at the house? What made the birth mother change her mind and then change her mind again? None of these events are clear and there's just a disconnect between what we're supposed to perceive versus what the illustrations really show. In some places towards the end of the book we can only really pick up the story by reading the letters that Catherine receives. I get what Doherty was trying to do with the story and why she wanted it to be wordless, but I just don't think this book has enough visual queues to set that up well. I will say that Catherine's illustrations remind me a lot of Josh Neufeld's work (A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge) and are captivating and worth looking at...she just needs to work on her visual story queues a bit more.

It's an interesting attempt at a wordless biography, but I don't think Doherty really succeeds in telling the story that she wants to. It would be interesting to see if the author creates