To The Last Page

Judith Vanistendael's The Two Lives of Penelope is ambitious in how it attempts to tackle serious issues not just through the medium of a comic, but in the simple relating of someone going about their everyday domestic business. This is a work where the unspoken - the things indeed that can't be spoken - is allowed to seep into everything else, where even the idea of keeping them separate is simply impossible. The two separate lives that Penelope leads are however dramatically contrasted in the opening pages of the graphic novel. Penelope is a surgeon who works tours of duty helping the war wounded in Syria. In the upper panels of each page we see the simultaneous daily activities of her husband and daughter at home in Belgium and in the lower panels, Penelope graphically struggling with the dead and wounded in Aleppo. Her husband is a poet wrapped in his own thoughts and words, her daughter 13 years old experiencing her first period while Penelope is dealing with a different ...