“Swallow Me Whole”, by Nate Powell

Posted on 28. Feb, 2010 by madspihl in Reviews

Swallow Me Whole
Hardcover [and such a pretty one, too!]
216 pages
Published by: Top Shelf Productions
ISBN: 9781603090339

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I try to imagine what Swallow Me Whole would be like had it been a novel and not a graphic novel. The graphic novel medium simply seems tailored to Nate Powell’s haunting story of two teenagers and their crossing back and forth over the line between growing up and going crazy.

Actually, come to think of it, only Hunter S. Thomson and Mark Haddon have only ever written stories of madness that really convinced me, Haddon especially, and his voice is the one I think of when I try to form words that tell the story of Ruth and Perry, the main characters of Swallow Me Whole. But even Haddon’s style would not be enough to describe what Powell has achieved in a story which is holding back on words and is all about the artwork.

The drawings often swirl, zoom out, and pan around in fast motions while everyday life rolls over the pages. Or we stay in the same angle of the shot frame after frame while an existential nightmare slowly unravels.

The artwork itself, all black and white, seems to be a running commentary on or direct representation of the emotions of the people in the book. As if their thoughts, emotions and mental challenges played a part in drawing the lines that form the artwork.

And there are plenty of mental challenges to go around. Both Ruth and Perry struggle with their own editions of The Teenage Demons. They float in and out of possible personalities, possible worlds, and possible friends.

They alternately suppress and give complete right of way to buzzing insects, talking mini-wizards, compulsive organizing, internal voices, and a plethora of other phenomena, and the way these kids are easily bruised by the world is often painful to watch and sometimes incredibly funny in a tragicomic way.

A fine example is a scene where Perry is trying hard to have a conversation with his wizard without making it audible to others. A fairly common social norm dictates that we do not question or verbally address certain borderline actions made by others, and the always strict observation of this norm by Perry’s step mum makes it absolutely bizarre to watch her watch him having a conversation with an invisible pen-sized Wizard. Especially since Perry himself is well aware that the wizard is a weird presence, like here:

Or here:

It is never revealed how much their classmates at the Wormwood High School [gotta love that name] suffer the same kind of sometimes debilitating mental disturbances as Ruth and Perry do, but the step-siblings sure take their part of the flak.

The questions I keep asking are: How much is growing up? Being a teenager? Coping with simply just being? The questions are (luckily) never answered, but they are there on every page, and Powell does a really fine job exploring their social ramifications.

Swallow Me Whole superbly probes into family life with teenagers. The parents never have a moment to digest the challenges faced and caused by one kid before the other turns up hurt, harassed, questioned by school police, etc. Which is not so unlike family life with younger kids.

But once you combine bouts of madness with the teenage syndrome of thinking and experiencing yourself so different from everyone else that you become lonely on the inside, the parental part turns out to be a monumental challenge.

A great feature in Swallow Me Whole which I have not seen used so well elsewhere are the many muted, half heard conversations that trail off or fade in whenever a social situation brings more than two people into the frame.

Powell uses this technique to create centers of attention both visually and audibly, and he often makes many voices speak literally on top of each other, while at other times the speech bubbles merely contain doodle like text which hints at possible conversations. Much like in real life, where not everything that happens around us is immediately available to us, but always remains open to interpretation as it forms a part of the social settings we act in.

Swallow Me Whole eventually takes its share of sinister turns in its imaging of schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder, but the plot is too easy to give away by retelling parts of the narrative, and I just want to give Nate Powell’s story my warmest recommendations. Somewhere, way back when, they must have thought of this book when they decided that the world needed graphic novels to turn up in the future.

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