Welcome to the latest installment of my comics review column here at Skiffy & Fanty! Every month, I use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers.
This month, I’m going to explore one of this year’s Best Graphic Story Hugo nominees, a work (and a creator) that, to my embarrassment, I was previously unfamiliar with. What work might that be? The remarkable On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. Warning: this review contains spoilers!
I knew nothing else about On A Sunbeam, but after it landed a Hugo nomination, I knew I was going to need to read it. I figured I’d give it a shorter review as part of an overview of the nominees (like this one from last year). Roughly three minutes after picking up and beginning to read a copy at this year’s Toronto Comics Arts Festival, I knew that approach was not going to fly. This is an important work by a remarkable talent, and it merits more than a capsule review. It is deep and heartfelt, and it is a major work of science fiction that deserves every accolade that it’s received.
On the Sunbeam is set in the far future. Mia, at loose ends after graduating from one of the galaxy’s most exclusive private schools, is alone, adrift, and unsure of herself. She joins spaceship whose crew – firecracker Jules, steady leader Alma, gently stubborn pilot Char, and silent, brilliant Elli – travels among the abandoned corners of humanity’s worlds and colonies, painstakingly restoring old buildings. That story alternates and subtly interweaves with the story of Mia five years earlier. Younger, wilder, this Mia is brash and confident, but also frustrated and angry – very unlike her future self – until she meets quiet, reserved, mysterious new student Grace, and an awkward friendship grows and blooms into love. But then Grace’s past comes calling and pulls her away from school and from Mia. Mia never has a chance to say goodbye, never knows what might have been between them, until in her present, a restoration job goes wrong, leading to trouble for her crew – but also an opportunity, to learn about Grace, her family, her isolated planet, and maybe to see her again.
If this is a space opera, it’s a quiet one, reflective and sung in a minor key. There’s very little plot as such, and most of the future technology remains entirely unexplained. The starships all look like winged fish, except for the ones that look like private schools flying through space, and although Grace’s belief in magic is treated as a sign of her innocence and naivete, there’s an ironic note to the joke, because this future society might as well function on magic from the reader’s perspective.
And it’s beautiful.
Because this is a story about characters and relationships. The story of Mia and her relationship with Grace and, later, Mia and her relationships with the crew. But also the story of married couple Alma and Char’s relationship, of Alma’s fractious relationship with Jules, of the relationships that led to Elli leaving their home, joining the crew and choosing to live without speaking, and the stories of Mia’s growing relationships with all of them, and how those relationship help her to grow in turn. Those relationships and that growth take time. This is a slowly building graphic novel, and that slow build and thoughtful, careful pace – shot through with moments of sorrow, joy, melancholy, and laughter – is profound and moving. If On A Sunbeam – a YA science fiction graphic novel – is like anything in prose science fiction for the adult market, it’s like a Becky Chambers novel. Set against a vast, cosmic backdrop, but then closely focusing on a handful of people learning to understand one another, support one another, and live together. This comparison occurred to me even before I realized that Becky Chambers provided one of the blurbs for On A Sunbeam’s back cover. Clearly I’m not the only one who sees Walden and Chambers as flying on similar courses through the stars.
It’s also a wonderfully diverse story, featuring women of a tremendous range of ages, body types, appearances, personalities, and ethnicities. In a fascinating touch, all the characters are women and/or non-binary. There are no boys, no men. They’re entirely absent, not only from the cast, but also from the universe. Again, this goes unexplained, because it’s not the point. This is a story about women – younger and older – creating found families and making meaning in their lives in a vast, inhospitable, and often very lonely universe.
Additionally, the art is just purely gorgeous, and perfectly marries the narrative in tone; Walden knows when to let her gift for character and expression speak for itself and when to craft intricate pages with detailed backgrounds. There are clear manga and anime inflections, not so much as an obvious visual aesthetic and only a bit in character designs. The clearest influence is in the use of composition and transitions to depict emotion. Paralleling the unhurried narrative, this is a story that’s unafraid to hold its moments, to let feelings unfold and to let the reader feel their impact.
And there’s at least one splash page that Miyazaki would have been proud to draw.
The use of color is extraordinary; at first, I thought the story used limited colors in a fairly common way, delineating the scenes set in the past with sepia tones. But Walden’s true approach is much more skillful, subtle, and powerful. She employs a deliberately austere palette; much foreground and character art is in black and white, with backgrounds, settings, vital details and what I want to call “emotional emphasis” using a handful of complementary colors – contrasting blues and reds on one page, yellows and oranges in another scene, purples elsewhere.
It’s still comparatively early in Tillie Walden’s career, but she’s clearly a creator fully in control of her prodigious talents. On A Sunbeam is an outstanding contribution to both science fiction and graphic novels. It’s entirely worthy of its Best Graphic Story nomination. Seek it out, savor it, and join me in looking forward to what Walden does next.
On A Sunbeam
Writer and Artist — Tillie Walden
Cover Design – Tillie Walden and Andrew Arnold
Book Design – Andrew Arnold and Molly Johanson
On a Sunbeam is published by First Second. It is available where all good graphic novels are sold.
Disclosures and Acknowledgements:
I have no personal or professional relationship with the publisher or creator of this work. I purchased my own copy of the book for review.
I would like to acknowledge that Toronto, and the land it now occupies, where I live and work, has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. This land is the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory waswha the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. This territory is also covered by the Upper Canada Treaties. Today, the meeting place of Toronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. I am grateful to have the opportunity to live and work in the community of Toronto, on this territory.
