Comics / Spotlight

Keep An Eye on Jesse Lonergan

By Beth Davies-Stofka
June 13, 2010 - 20:23

Among the many young talents nurtured by NBM is Jesse Lonergan, a Boston-based auteur with a terrific blog.  Although he is still building towards full strength, Lonergan's potent display of raw talent and sheer productivity hints at an extremely promising future.  It will take time for his story-telling talent to develop the deep "literary" quality of his favorite writers (such as Wodehouse and Maugham), but he is well on his way.  Lonergan could one day be on our lips with Bechdel and Satrapi.

And NBM will be able to say fun things like, "We saw him first!" and "Told you so!" 

NBM published Lonergan's first novel, Flower and Fade, in 2007, and his second, Joe and Azat, in 2009.  These are short little books telling quirky little tales, perhaps of no great significance.  But they establish Lonergan's promise, and the leap in narrative and graphic skills from the first book to the second is our signal that something major could come from him, one day soon.

Flower and Fade chronicles the short-lived love affair between Kyle and Erika.  I think nearly everyone has had one like this.  You meet someone easy to know, and fall into an easy relationship, and somehow, you don't develop a stake in the relationship's success or failure.  Was it meant to be?  Can't say.  Does it make a difference in your life?  Not sure.  Would some part of you die along with it?  Really don't know.  You fade away in the ambivalence and uncertainty until there's not much relationship left.

There is some good character development here.  Lonergan focuses specifically on Kyle, and bravely allows the reader to see how Kyle's insecurities blind him.  Stuck in a job he doesn't like, neglecting his calling as a writer, "I need to write" struggles fiercely in Kyle's heart with "I have a job and I just signed a lease." 

One of Flower and Fade's most superb pages.

As a result, he reacts poorly when Erika starts to feel a need for something more.  Although she focuses on her own thoughts and needs, Erika nevertheless articulates Kyle's buried desires, and where she is pulled to explore the questions and possibilities that tug at her, Kyle fiercely works to keep those questions buried.

It's not the old "freedom vs. responsibility" debate that hamstrings Kyle.  It's something deeper – he's weirdly self-indulgent, and we're never sure why.  We don't know Kyle's game.  Lonergan doesn't tell us.  And that's the strength of the novel – Lonergan is comfortable with ambivalence.

Kyle and Erika meet.

Flower and Fade is a quiet and understated novel.  Kyle and Erika often communicate without saying anything.  They don't break up, they just go separate ways.  The relationship doesn't end, it just transforms.  She goes off to Europe, looking for God knows what, and he finally starts paying attention to his writing.  There's no resolution here, and that's okay.  Life is kind of like that.

Two years later, after a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkmenistan, Lonergan produced Joe and Azat, a remarkable little story about everyday life in a totalitarian country.  While the story concerns the friendship between the titular characters, its interest lies in the insight it provides into the daily challenges, and daily absurdities, of a long-isolated culture attempting to join the capitalist world system.  While the characters and their friendship are fictional, the cultural mayhem of contemporary Turkmenistan is real. 



In Joe and Azat, Lonergan uses the device of a friendship between an American and a Turkmen family to explore the limits that ancient tribal culture and totalitarian rule place on the hopes, dreams, and spirits of everyday people.  Joe seems to prefer his home country because things make sense to him here.  Azat, an energetic young entrepreneur who is wildly enthusiastic about the possibilities he perceives in American capitalism, dearly wants Joe to marry a local girl and stay in Turkmenistan forever.  When Azat's dreams are shattered, he adjusts.  Joe, on the other hand, is overjoyed to escape the frustrations and limits of a culture that mixes in the ancient and the modern in such contradictory ways.  Lucky Joe!

An overheated engine in Turkmenistan.

So far, Lonergan's stories don't deliver biting satire.  Nor do they work as moving explorations of the depth of human intimacy and our ways of sabotaging it.  But they present familiar types of stories – romance and fish-out-of-water – in surprisingly original ways.  Lonergan's art is bold, simple, and expressive.  In Flower and Fade, a great deal of the dialogue between Kyle and Erika occurs in panels without words, and a great deal of nuanced feeling passes between these two young lovers, even though their faces are drawn with so few lines.  And while Lonergan showed great originality in some of the page compositions in Flower and Fade, his orchestration of caption, panel, and story in Joe and Azat is really expert.

Turkmenistan is just a crazy place.

I'm very happy I own these books, because I do re-visit them on occasion.  I'm not sure why, except that I'm so attracted to Lonergan's faces, and to his brave approach to human emotion, that now and again I just like to see it all over again.  The stories never yield anything new, but I know that with this gifted young man, it's only a matter of time.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12