When I’m Old and Other Stories (Alternative Comics) is a collection of very accomplished mini-comics by Gabrielle Bell. Bell has tremendous versatility as a storyteller, using a wide variety of tones, insightfully creating a wide range of characters, and modulating her distinct visual style to suit very different scenarios.
“When I’m Old” is a marvelous look at the odd glamour of dissipation. Bell gazes into the future and finds her cartoonist stand-in living on the street, hawking home-made drugs and scratchy portraits of naïve passers-by, and badgering strangers about art even as she delivers grotesquely blunt come-ons. It’s a bitterly funny and concise character study, and Bell overlays it with a cheerful narration that’s a perfect contrast to what’s happening in the panels.
Bell shows a different kind of comic flair in the creepy and very funny “Just One Reason.” It follows protagonist Kate through a bout of existential despair and a series of failed suicide attempts and ends with a grimly satisfying reversal. Bell’s visuals for the story have a sweet fairy-tale feel to them, and her script walks just the right line between lighthearted and horrifying.
In “Just One Reason Part II,” Bell picks up Kate’s story again, and she’s living with the fallout of events in the first chapter. Kate’s become something of a magnet for life’s frustrations and oddities. The despair goes from abstract to very concrete, and Bell builds the tension in Kate’s life very effectively. Kate’s world becomes a very menacing place, both because of her deteriorating mental state and because of actual, everyday threats.
Bell offers two very different adaptations in the collection. She takes a playful approach to her telling of Herman Hesse’s “The Fairy-Tale about the Wicker Chair.” Her light touch and inventive visuals beautifully support Hesse’s work while putting Bell’s own stamp onto the portrait of an artist as a young narcissist.
She takes a more direct approach to her adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Virgin and the Gipsy,” and it’s very effective. Many of the most striking moments in Bell’s work take place in a character’s head or on their faces, so it’s nice to see her demonstrate her skill at turning a straightforward sequence of events into moving illustrations.
I’m always a little reluctant to review auto-biographical work, because it seems strange to tell a creator that they didn’t tell their own story very well. That isn’t a worry with Bell, at least in the samples on display here. In these pieces, she tends to put herself at a disadvantage, whether she’s knocked back one too many or is lost in the unsettling, vaguely paranoid fog of jet let. My favorite is probably “Gabriella Picker-Packer in the Garden,” where she chats up a stranger about the therapeutic value of hypnosis. It’s a wonderfully illustrative bit of conversation.
This collection is packed with such a range of material. There are pointedly funny one-page pieces, longer-form urban fairy tales, dreams, and playful, detailed extrapolations on simple ideas. The unifying element is that Bell’s facility with language is every bit as strong as her visuals. As with all of my favorite cartoonists, Bell’s words and pictures work beautifully in concert.
The cumulative effect of When I’m Old and Other Stories is incredibly impressive, showing an ambitious, evolving cartoonist exploring the range of her abilities and the possibilities of her chosen medium.