10 YEARS OF THE BF SIX TO WATCH! Four years ago as part of the online Small Press Day events on social media and in lieu of in-person events we offered a day of Broken Frontier “one-tweet” reviews for emerging creators on Twitter. It was an incredibly popular initiative, equal parts fun interaction with the wider comics community and opportunity for discovery. And discover new talent we did. Particularly in the case of one Mollie Ray, who offered up four pages of her graphic novel work-in-progress Giant for the most concise of critical evaluation.
It’s fascinating three years later to look back on what I said about that small extract of Giant on Twitter: “Telling a story without words and obvious exposition is the purest comics craft. There’s an almost lyrical quality to the sense of movement, perspective and passage of time across panels here. I want to see far more of Giant!” Ray would go on to become one of our Broken Frontier ‘Six Small Press Creators to Watch’ in 2021. And, of course, as events have proven we were entirely right in that declaration. We invariably are.
Giant is an intensely personal and affecting book, inspired by Ray’s younger brother’s story. Told entirely without words it follows the journey of a teenage boy after he wakes up one morning to find he has grown to the size of a giant. It’s an uncomplicated but eloquent visual metaphor, of course, for life-threatening illness, and the book follows both the boy and his family through these difficult months.
Ray’s distinctive art (all created in biro) draws us into the family’s story by representing them as blob-like humanoids, ironically ensuring our empathy with them all the more for their stripped back step away from recognisable human form. We follow the family throughout their young member’s treatment, from diagnosis to hospital visits to the impact on those around him. As time moves on his physicality becomes more pronounced and his appearance becomes more pallid as his illness progresses.
What’s remarkable here is how Ray so dexterously uses changes in perspective and vantage points to evoke intense emotional responses in her readership. Indeed such is the powerful purity of her sequential art that words would only be an encumbrance in communicating the story; a distraction from the super-charged reactions to the page that we experience from the visuals alone. Ray is adept at playing with comics’ relationship with the passage of time too – multi-panelled pages focussing on slight variations on the same shot of medical paraphernalia, for example, giving a sense of the tedium of treatment – while the worsening state of our young protagonist becomes ever more apparent as his enlarged form spills off the boundaries of the page.
At its heart, though, Giant is a book about the bonds of family and there are scenes here that, while devastating in their implication, are nonetheless beautiful in their portrayal of love, hope and the ties that bind. Recurring motifs involving playing cards and fish add to the book’s unspoken thematic complexities while Ray’s intuitive understanding of how to manipulate page structures to convey mood, poignancy and character interaction is quite simply outstanding in its application. Giant far surpasses the immense potential I saw in it from those few brief pages back in 2020. This often overwhelming, ever tender, and undeniably inspiring graphic novel is a stunning tale of healing and love that marks the arrival of a major new talent on the wider comics scene. No doubt one of 2024’s finest books to date and an astonishingly confident debut offering.
Mollie Ray (W/A) • Faber, £18.99
Review by Andy Oliver
2024 marks the tenth year of Broken Frontier’s ‘Six to Watch‘ initiative. Look for articles throughout the year celebrating the work of those artists who have been a part of the programme.
