Margot Ferrick’s Star of Swan leans heavily into that unlikely truth in visual storytelling that anthropomorphised characters allow us important insights into the human condition by, ironically, the stripping of their physical human qualities. This sense of the strangely relatable in these pages is bolstered by a story that also taps into the intensity of our experiences over the last few years post-2020; that period where online parasocial connections became for many a most vital link to the outside world, and where what once may have been considered artificial and detached morphed, by necessity, into a substitute for intimacy.
“Most people laugh right in your face when they discover you’re an adult drawer.” Star of Swan follows one lonely swan. Leona, as she makes a journey across the country to meet up with a group of fellow swans with a shared interest that she has only met online. When we are first introduced to her she is anxiously anticipating this first meet-up as she embarks on a journey of fraught expectation and reflection. Ferrick’s employment of point-of-view perspective accentuates both Leona’s solitude and nervousness in these early sequences, ensuring that the eventual in-person interactions with her online friends feel all the more overwhelming when they do come.
Readers can draw their own inferences or parallels on what this fan-enthused world of “adult drawers” represents to them. But as Leona comes face to face with fellow forum members Myungy, Sam and company the questions that form are as much about the facades of online connections, the conflicting relationship between our perceptions of these friendships and their realities, and the potential contrast between expectations and longings. Social interactions that by their very nature we interpret without ever being able to truly measure.
Visually Star of Swan is brooding, haunting, occasionally oppressive, and rich in its application of light and shade. Ferrick manages to imbue the story’s protagonist with the visual tells of everything from apprehension to despondency despite her cygnine physical attributes, while her lettering choices are highly effective in capturing characters’ emotional states. Exactly the kind of practice that Breakdown Press has been so adept at finding a home for in recent years.
Margot Ferrick (W/A) • Breakdown Press, £14.99
Review by Andy Oliver
