Writer / Penciller / Colour Artist / Letterer: Joe Kessler / New York Review Of Books / SC
Review by Paul Dunne
6th December 2023 (Released 2nd May 2023)
The Pitch: The life of an orphaned boy is shaped by the devotion of a fantastical Gull in this lovingly rendered, entirely wordless graphic novel by a contemporary comics innovator. Joe Kessler is at the forefront of European comics. Co-founder and art director of UK's Breakdown Press, and winner of the Angoulême International Comics Festival's Fauve Révélation for his breakthrough comic book Windowpane, Kessler rejuvenates the form once again with his vivid and moving The Gull Yettin. Told in striking colors and loose but confident lines, The Gull Yettin's story begins when a young boy awakens late one night to find his home on fire. The boy is saved by a lanky, shapeshifting Gull (who may or may not be real). Orphaned by the fire, and now adrift in a boat piloted by the Gull, the boy faces an uncertain future, one that will be both helped and hindered by his new attendant. Without a word, Kessler builds a strange but recognizable world, using it to explore all the forms that grief, jealousy, longing, and love can take in our lives, and the compassion and cruelty that can dwell in a single heart. Filled with all the warmth and poignancy of a great folktale, The Gull Yettin proves that Kessler is pushing comics to new heights.
Like Liam Cobb's What Awaits Them (which I reviewed a few weeks back), Joe Kessler's The Gull Yettin is a tough one to review... A dialogue-free, mixed-media art comic from a challenging creator. At first, the book seems one of simple pleasures, as kids play football in urban spaces. Look close though, because those kids are caged in and that seems to be what Kessler what's you focused on. How those spaces are ostensibly there to encourage exercise, teamwork, sportsmanship, freedom... Can actually be cages. We move on to a strange creature watching a young boy head home with his mother. Later, their house burns in the night, and the boy survives the fire and is then 'rescued' by the creature. Carried over the sea in a boat. Kessler offers up haunting images, making you wonder if it's a rescue at all. The sea the child and creature travel over resembles an ocean of lava, and the skies appear to be at an eternal sunset, both of which recall the fire that put the poor kid here in the first place. Moving us from the disturbing to the possibly nauseating is the Gull Creature baby-birding food into the boy’s mouth.
Spaces can be cages.
But other things happen, challenging that early disquiet. The Gull takes the boy to a house, leaving him in the care of a woman, whilst he watches - and sometimes unwelcomingly intervenes in the boy's progress. It's that progress that becomes the crux of the book, and perhaps an answer to the mystery of 'what's it all about?'. The boy is placed within differing, formalised structures that we've all experienced: Home, parental supervision, school... And perhaps finds little comfort in any of them. As the Gull tries different forms, eventually cocooning itself to become a man, so the boy must adapt to the places he finds himself. Perhaps another way to read the book is a warning against over-parenting your child or equally a warning against being too harsh with them. Kessler creates colour-coded environments and shifts between them quickly but not always cleanly. Things bleed here. People are punished. There is an anger in this work.
Burning skies.
Kessler's art is fascinating. Its obfuscating style wants you to look at it, really look at it, and gain answers. It gives them, but only if you're patient enough. Needless to say, this makes it a nightmare for reviewers and is partly the reason I've held off digging in and writing about it for so long. Kessler also provokes a reaction with his colours, too, clashing Red and Green making the eyes wince. This is not an insult, just in case that crossed your mind. Kessler wants to provoke a strong reaction. What he's made here is a work that comments on nature versus nurture, the encroachment of urban planning on natural space, and a book that speaks to loneliness and loss.
