A Three-Headed Monster in an Alchemical Flask, Representing the Composition of the Alchemical Philosopher’s Stone: Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury, c. 1909 by Edith A. Ibbs (1863–1937).
Category: Art
Briana Loewinsohn’s graphic novel Raised by Ghosts turns absence into haunting art
A decade ago I finally tossed out most of the contents of an old shoebox crammed with high-school nostalgia. Notes from ex-girlfriends, summer postcards, flyers from local shows, a handful of choice mixtapes. Some Polaroids. Our stupid band’s stupid lyrics, which we usually forgot or simply abandoned live. There was even a pair of fat shoelaces. The pain of return always hits me hard at such times, and I got dizzy. That box was crammed the scraps of an older life.
The preceding paragraph is an unfair opening to a review of Briana Loewinsohn’s excellent graphic memoir Raised by Ghosts. Reading Raised by Ghosts felt like opening that old shoebox: painful, dizzying, beautiful. Loewinsohn is one of us, one of us to borrow a chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks. “Sometimes I feel like I am an alien at this school…But there are other aliens here,” protagonist Briana writes in her diary.
Raised by Ghosts covers Briana’s seven rough years through middle and high school. These are the gay nineties. The narrator, like Loewinsohn herself, is about my age, which makes reading Raised by Ghosts an eerie act of self-recognition. It’s not a conventional memoir—it doesn’t hold your hand or deliver a clean, linear narrative. Instead, it moves like memory does: in flashes, in vignettes, in small sensory moments that coalesce into something greater than the sum of their parts. Everything here feels true. We have here the relics of a teenage moondream, those little ghosts of the past that flicker through memory like frayed photos freed from the rubberbanded bundle in an old Converse box. Briana’s adolescence unfurls as an ebb and flow of loneliness and acceptance among fellow weirdos. She finds her people, but never quite makes the scene; she dances at the live show but finds as much fun in playing cards in the back.
Loewinsohn’s art conveys Raised by Ghosts’ emotional weight. Soft, muted tones in drab olive and rust hues fill square panels that often resemble fading Polaroids. Candids and close-ups capture the messiness of high school. Briana is a sympathetic and endearing character, her sensitivity registering in ways she cannot understand herself, as when she skips out on a living-room VHS double feature. Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers would be way too much after the tragedy of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Loewinsohn includes full handwritten pages to accompany the traditional comic strips in Raised by Ghosts. These handwritten pages serve as a kind of diary, but often take on subtle visual changes that suggest other media. Often, the handwritten pages mimic the form of the long notes bored Briana composes in class to pass to friends. A passage composed on graph paper praises the note-writing skills of a particular friend; the technique suggests this friend prefers squares to lines. A passage on a brown paper lunch bag reflects on how Briana’s father always takes the time to write her name in detailed, expressive lettering. The variations of handwritten pages enrich the narrative and subtly inform us of Briana’s artistic development.
My favorite of the handwritten passages though is simply a list of bands scrawled on lined paper. When I got to that page, about a third of the way into Raised by Ghosts, I was already persuaded by the book–but the page of band names seemed so utterly true, so beautiful and banal. We used to do that, I thought, and: Why did we used to do that? knowing the answer has no good intellectual answer.
But let’s get to the ghosts. Loewinsohn never “shows” us Briana’s parents, yet the picture we get of them is hardly incomplete: a distant, detached mother and a father in arrested development. “I would say I was raised in an AA meeting,” Briana remarks of her mother, noting that it’s often hard for single mothers to find childcare. Of her father’s abode: “My pop’s house is a combination of Indiana Jones’ office, Pee Wee’s playhouse, and an opium den. I am kinda like a roommate here.”
Briana’s parents exist in Raised by Ghosts the way memories of the absent often do—fragmented, elusive, more felt than seen. Loewinsohn never lets them fully materialize, yet their presence, or lack thereof, shapes Briana’s interactions with her world. Neither parent offers Briana guidance. She’s a latchkey kid left to cobble her own sense of belonging among friends, music, and the small rituals of adolescence. In the absence of stability, she builds meaning from mixtapes, handwritten notes, and fleeting moments of connection.
And art. The memoir climaxes in a moment of transformation—an act of self-possession and, ultimately, self-creation. Throughout Raised by Ghosts, Briana moves through a world shaped by absence, by the ghosts of parents who are physically present but emotionally distant. Yet, in the book’s remarkable penultimate sequence, she steps beyond that absence, beyond memory’s hazy grip, into a space that is entirely her own. The panels swirl into a dreamscape of shifting lines—formless and chaotic at first—until Briana gathers them together, lassoing meaning from the void. It is a moment of artistic alchemy, where creation becomes a form of agency, a way to shape her own narrative rather than just mimic one. When she carries those lines from dream to waking life, the transition is profound: she is no longer just a kid collecting relics of meaning from the world around her—she is an artist, making meaning herself.
Publisher Fantagraphics labels Raised by Ghosts as a “young adult graphic novel,” and teenagers will likely identify with Briana’s story—the loneliness, the search for belonging, the quiet acts of self-definition. They may also feel a strange twinge of envy for a world that no longer exists. Being a latchkey kid could be lonely, but it was not without its freedoms. Those of us who were teenage weirdos in the nineties will see in Loewinsohn’s memoir not a young adult novel, but rather a reflective elegy composed by a mature artist in control of her talent. Raised by Ghosts lingers like the echo of an old song in your dim memory — you know the one, right? It’s a memoir about growing up in the margins, about finding meaning in scraps and silence, about turning absence into something tangible. It haunts, in the very best way.
April Fool! (Peanuts)
The Fool — Leonora Carrington
The Fool, 1955 by Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011)
The Wait (Detail) — María Teresa Morán
The Wait (Detail) 1980 by María Teresa Morán (1939-2017)
Propaganda III — Chen Ching-Yuan
Propaganda III, 2022 by Chen Ching-Yuan (b. 1984)
Fleeing Man — Leon Golub
Fleeing Man, 1965 by Leon Golub (1922-2004)
Abduction of Helen (Detail) — Liberale da Verona
Abduction of Helen (detail), c. 1470 by Liberale da Verona (1445–1527)
To Study the Numbers — Leonora Carrington
To Study the Numbers, 1941 by Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011)
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Detail) — Pieter Breughel the Younger
Detail from The Temptation of Saint Anthony, с. 1625 by Pieter Breughel the Younger (1564- 1637/1638)
Maggie Umber’s Chrysanthemum Under the Waves blends horror, surrealism, and poetic fragmentation into a haunting vision of the uncanny
Maggie Umber calls the nine pieces collected in Chrysanthemum Under the Waves “comics,” so I will call them comics too. The term “comics” has long encompassed a wide range of visual storytelling techniques, resisting attempts to confine it to rigid structures, and Chrysanthemum Under the Waves shows the form’s expansive potential, blending horror, surrealism, and poetic fragmentation to tap into the alienation, paranoia, and repression that lurks under the surface of everyday life.
The stories here resist conventional narrative logic, which will likely confound any reader expecting something traditional. Umber eschews the common building blocks of the medium: there are no speech bubbles, no thought balloons, no panels stacking up into a coherent sequence. In fact, the few pages that use multiple panels feel like an anomaly. Most of the work in Chrysanthemum is confined to single, expansive images. Yet, these full-page spreads do not recall the bombastic splash pages of Jack Kirby or other Golden Age comics. Instead, they underscore the inherent incompleteness of storytelling. No artwork, no story, can ever present a full picture of reality—there are always gaps, always gutters. And in these gaps, dread and unease fester.
Umber’s comics aren’t so much about exploring the fragmentation of storytelling; rather, they showcase it as an aesthetic choice. It’s a choice that generates a palpable tension, a constant refusal to return to any resolution. There is no resolving tonic chord here. The uncanny permeates these pages—not in the sense of something foreign intruding upon the familiar, but as if the familiar itself has been subtly warped. Maybe this horror is “real,” maybe it’s not—but what is certain is its presence. The world Umber paints is one of perpetual strangeness, captured in black-and-white, shaded with grays. Pen and ink, printmaking, and watercolor all blur together in a form that makes us feel the unease before we can even articulate it.
And while Umber’s work is refreshing in its uniqueness, it is by no means sui generis, but rather part of a clear tradition. As Umber notes in her introduction, Chrysanthemum started as a one-off “adaptation” of Shirley Jackson’s 1949 story “The Tooth.” If you have read “The Tooth” (and if you haven’t, do yourself a favor and resolve that problem) — if you have read “The Tooth,” you will likely recognize the uncanny unease that permeates Chrysanthemum. In her intro, Umber identifies James Harris as the agent of this unease: “James Harris snuck up on me when I was distracted by other things.” James Harris is a strange character who wanders in and out of not only “The Tooth,” but several of the other stories in Jackson’s The Lottery. Indeed, the original subtitle of The Lottery was not and Other Stories, but rather The Adventures of James Harris. This is the James Harris of the 17th century ballad “The Daemon Lover”; he is also the oblique star of Chrysanthemum Under the Waves. Look and you will find him in each of Umber’s tales, sliding like a shadow in and out of panels and gaps.
You will find so much more there as well–there are direct allusions to Goya’s Caprichos and Black Paintings, as well as nods to Toulouse-Lautrec and Sylvia Plath. There’s also a strong echo of Jackson’s American Gothic precursors and successors: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, David Lynch, Kathy Acker — and, far less famously, Jason Schwartz. Chrysanthemum Under the Waves most reminded me of Schwartz’s prose-poem John the Posthumous, so much so that I read it again to confirm my notion.
I’ve failed to remark so far on the apparent plots of the tales here. I found myself arrested by the ominous vibes in my first readings, and I still could not pin down a summary. At the same time, I feel that Umber clearly knows “what’s happening” in her stories, even if she keeps that information in the gaps and margins, out of the panel, but still, maybe, hidden in the pictures. The lead story, “Those Fucking Eyes,” is a collision of horror and beauty, twisting the artist’s gaze into something self-possessed and austere. “Rine” plays with fragmentation and distortion while evoking a ghostly presence. We get a gentleman caller, a broken bridge, a bouquet of flowers that flickers between reality and illusion. “Intoxicated” takes on a Gothic Toulouse-Lautrec aesthetic, unraveling into surreal rage and rejection. “The Devil Is a Hell of a Dancer” retells the “James Harris” ballad; it’s the first time written language infiltrates one of the stories.
The title track, “Chrysanthemum” is a surreal noir fantasia punctured by a cup of coffee, with daemon lover James Harris hovering menacingly in the background. It seems to reinterpret Shirley Jackson as does the aforementioned “The Tooth” — itself a revision of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s suffocating 1892 classic, “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” The shortest comic, “There Is Water” unfolds like a koan, enigmatic and meditative. Standout “The Witch” returns to Goya but also channels the American Gothic vein. The piece might be a nightmare one of Hawthorne’s characters endures. There are clouds, castles, dreams, doors, flickering horror. Is that a witch burning? And do the flames morph into a glimpse of Goya’s Saturn, only to resolve into the shadowed face of a woman? Shadows and erasures pulse through the imagery. It is both the strongest and longest piece in the collection. The book ends with “The Rock,” another riff on the the ballad “James Harris.” It’s a fitting end, conclusive but elusive. What remains rattles: unsettled, open, and always strange.
Chrysanthemum Under the Waves is a haunting, layered work that defies easy categorization. Umber’s pieces blend literary, artistic, and Gothic influences into a unique vision that expands the possibilities her chosen medium’s conventions. With its distinctive style and careful attention to space and detail, Chrysanthemum Under the Waves is a compelling read. Highly recommended.
Megalomaniacs — Bridget Tichenor
Megalomaniacs, 1967 by Bridget Tichenor (1917-1990)
Watch William Friedkin’s first film, the 1962 documentary The People vs. Paul Crump
I’ve been listening to William Friedkin read his 2013 memoir The Friedkin Connection on my daily commute and loving it so far. The first chapter, “Chicago,” details the making of his first film, a 1962 documentary called The People vs. Paul Crump. A chance meeting with a death row priest at a cocktail party leads Friedkin to make his documentary, despite having no real knowledge of how to make a film at all. (He even claims to have never have seen a documentary film at that point in his life.) From his memoir:
[Cinematographer Wilmer] Butler and I were editing the film each night as we got the dailies from the lab. Most of the time we worked at my apartment. My mother would make us lunch and dinner, and we’d work on weekends twelve or fifteen hours a day, with an old pair of rewinds and a 16 mm. viewer and splicer we had “liberated” from the WGN-TV newsroom. Splicing was done with glue, not clear cellophane tape, which came in several years later.
One evening, Ernie Lucas, a veteran TV director, happened to pass by on his way to pick up copy for the ten o’clock news. He was surprised to see us in a film editing bay in the newsroom, since we were involved exclusively with “live” telecasts. He expressed shock that we were editing our negative, and that we were not handling it carefully with white cotton gloves. “What are you guys doing?” he asked. We told him we were working on a short film for our own amusement. “But you’re cutting the negative; you’re not supposed to even touch it.”
“Why not?” We were confused.
Ernie was patient.
“Don’t you know that camera negative is never touched until you have a final edited work print?” he asked.
“What’s a work print?”
Ernie explained that a work print was made immediately after the negative was developed, and that it was this work print that you cut and recut, and only when you were finished was the negative conformed to the work print version. Neither did we know that the work print, negative, and 16 mm. sound track had to be edge-numbered simultaneously, so that picture and sound could be synchronized. Consecutive serial numbers were printed on the edges of these elements at intervals of a foot. Since we didn’t realize this, parts of our negative were scratched and torn, spliced and respliced, until we could belatedly apply edge-numbering. We had to “match” our synch-sound interviews by lip-reading, which took weeks, and we had no idea how to achieve a final print.
The Burial of the Sardine — Francisco Goya
The Burial of the Sardine, c. 1812–19 by Francisco Goya (1746-1828)
Mardi Gras — André Derain
Mardi Gras, 1943 by André Derain (1880 – 1954).
Small Portrait — Kay Sage
Small Portrait, 1950 by Kay Sage (1898-1963)
The Mysterious Garden — Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh
The Mysterious Garden, 1911 by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864–1933)
Biblioklept 