I read Farel Dalrymple’s “It Will All Hurt” this past week and it had quite an impact on me. My comics reading this first half of 2021 has been mostly illustrated in that hyper-polished Marvel and DC “house style”—with crispy ink lines, mathematically-perfect vector lettering and the shiny “cut-and-gradient” Marte Gracia-style coloring. Which is beautiful, mind you, but when most of your reading is dominated by an overall look, reading something like Dalrymple’s graphic novel is quite a lovely shock to the brain.
The experience is actually quite hard to capture in words. The plot revolves around a motley crew of interesting characters (a robot, a shrinking girl, a talking cat, a squirrel animorph, etcetera) on a quest to defeat an evil Red Wizard. They trek across a surreal wasteland and come into various encounters along the way, from abandoned science fiction bases to disguised tentacular horrors and sword-wielding rats. The plot doesn’t seem all that important. It’s just a broad canvas to hang the rest of the Dalrymple pictographic experience on.
And what an experience it is! This is probably the only comic I’ve read (outside of maybe Lynda Barry’s work) that captures the feel of leafing through a gifted artist’s sketchbook. The book has page after page of art that is aggressively lo-fi. Ink lines bleed and pencil marks stray and liberal watercolor washes over you. Backgrounds drop in and out as needed. Most of the book seems to hang on a 6-panel grid structure, but even this often becomes malleable to accommodate whatever feeling the moment requires.
Consequently, while there’s a lot of artistic prowess on display here, it never feels like it’s showing off. Instead, the book reads like an honest obsession put to the page, with a gently-moving story that stops for odd narrative asides, scribbled notes and beautiful visual chapter breaks. Despite being quite surreal, “It Will All Hurt” feels grounded and personal in its execution, and that lends the book all of its charm.
I find this so inspiring, and it’s now sitting on my desk as a kind of totem to remind me of some comics-making virtues I often ignore. In my quest to make “professional” art I can often leech out the energy of the quick sketch, polishing away the wild heart of imaginative drawing. It’s a bad habit that’s rooted in insecurity, and I need to change that. I’d love to just relax into drawing, trusting that the reader will join me for the ride despite not being whatever preconceived idea I have of what’s “acceptable.” I’ll keep trying.