THE HARD TOMORROW
Eleanor Davis
Drawn & Quarterly $24.95
ReviewED by Rebecca Fish Ewan
We live in this moment. We breathe in and out all day long. We sleep. We dream. Each day has this rhythm. This rock of movement and flow. We live like water. Like ink on the page.
What I love about graphic storytelling is how closely it can mirror life as it happens. With such economy of words. Of lines. Pages become today. How it feels to be alive.
To read Eleanor Davis’s new graphic novel The Hard Tomorrow (Drawn and Quarterly, 2019), I sense this cartoon magic. I sit outside in the shade of a warming October sky, surrounded by ordinary sounds of dogs panting, going for a swim, people playing in the park beyond my back wall.
There is a kind of resonance to the drawings in The Hard Tomorrow, something I feel every time I see work by Eleanor Davis. The lines have a fluidity to them that animates the images. The drawings in this book move on the page. The story itself is in constant motion—acts of protest, lovemaking, driving across town, feeding kittens, all of it flows with loose ink lines, black and white balancing one another beautifully.
The Hard Tomorrow jumps ahead into the near future, extrapolating from the joys and terrors of being alive today in an increasingly fascist political climate, under the gloom of rising global temperatures, extinction rates and human violence.
And yet the protagonist, Hannah, wants to have a baby.
I remember that urge to procreate and the conflict it stirred up. Me wondering how I could bring life into a world already overpopulated and overheated. When my babies were born, Al Gore’s slideshow on climate change was starting to gain an audience. I remember all his charts and tables predicting dire conditions. Polar bears still had a chance back then.
Fast-forward to 2022. Polar bears are extinct, Marc Zuckerberg is president, and the first amendment “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” (U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, 1789) is all but dead.
And yet, Hannah wants to have a baby.
The book carries the reader through the day-to-day tension of what it means to be a person with a womb, to be a human who feels the natural desire to care for others, to be an active participant in making the world a better place yet making decisions that could compromise this betterment. Feeling the struggle that is life between the bookends of birth and death.
Hannah cares for an elderly woman, Phyllis, who reminds me of how I might seem to younger people, to the people who will inherit the mess of my generation and those of my parents and my parent’s parents and on down to the birth of capitalism and mechanization. It can feel like young people have no faith that the generations before them can do anything right. Maybe it’s a quirk in my brain, but I kind of love this feeling. I revel in the stories of younger people and seeing their perspective of those born before them. I don’t feel rendered useless by the efforts of younger people. I feel hope. Maybe this is why my favorite page is when Phyllis shares her old-school procreation wisdom with Hannah, whispering “make your husband stop wearing tight underpants.”
The Hard Tomorrow is a compelling story told with great skill. I started following Eleanor Davis’s work when she was tweeting her daily drawings as she bicycled across the United States (later published as You & a Bike & a Road, Koyama Press, 2017). Davis speaks through ink with such immediacy, intimacy and liveliness. I loved reading The Hard Tomorrow and look forward to the next book from this talented cartoonist.
Rebecca Fish Ewan is a poet/cartoonist/founder of Plankton Press. Her work appears in After the Art, Brevity, Crab Fat, Hip Mama, Mutha, Not Very Quiet, TNB, Punctuate, and Under the Gum Tree. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University, where she teaches landscape design with a focus on urban walking, landscape history and place-based hybrid storytelling. She is the Books with Pictures columnist for DIY MFA and the author of A Land Between, By the Forces of Gravity, and Water Marks.