Nocturnos by Laura Pérez

I like to read comics - or graphic works, however you label them - that work largely visually, that imply more than they say, that aren't looking to tell a single, straightforward genre story. Those kinds of books are rich and fascinating when done well, and I find them more impressive than any hugger-mugger plot.

Laura Pérez is a Spanish creator - most famous on my side of the Atlantic for creating the title sequence for the TV show Only Murders in the Building - whose comics are very much in that vein: moody, thoughtful, allusive, full of fleeting moments and emotional states among characters that we don't get to know very well at all. Because how well do we know anyone? (Even ourselves?)

Two of her books were previously published in English translation for the US market - Totem and Ocultos. This past fall, her 2019 book Nocturnos was also published in English, translated by award-winning translator Andrea Rosenberg.

Pérez's books are difficult to write about, difficult to classify. They're meditations or explorations more than storytelling exercises, books that wander through a visual space and a set of ideas rather than laying out a linear story for the reader to follow. Nocturnos is a book about night - mostly about dreams, but also all of the other things that go on under the cloak of darkness, creatures and feelings and connections.

Pérez works here largely with emotional states, with feelings - her night is not a place of danger, specifically, though she does start with showing a prehistoric woman (or a modern woman acting like one) and references to fears of what might be in the dark. Nocturnos follows a sequence of people - I think we see some of the same people repeatedly, at different ages in their lives, but we also see a lot of people, once or twice in passing, as the night rumbles on past them - and shows us their dreams, as well as what they see and what they do in the depths of the night.

It's mostly quiet; it's mostly low-key. These are realistic dreams - the kind where you just know things, and you can't describe exactly what happened or what it meant, but know it meant something important. There's a fine sequence a little more than halfway through where one character describes a dream in those terms, over Pérez's evocative art, and we don't really understand what he means, as the man he talks to also doesn't understand. And the things Pérez's characters get up to during this night - because I think this book is meant to depict a night, a particular time in a particular place - are mostly everyday as well. They read, they look out windows, they ride public transit, they sit in bars talking to the bartender, they drive trucks, they arrive at a vacation cabin. They live their lives, quiet moments in their lives, as the night envelops them.

Pérez's art here has a surprising brightness for a book about night; she has an almost glowing blue-green sky, flecked with stars, visible a lot of the time, and her people have faces that almost look illuminated. Black does envelop her pages much of the time, though, as if the night is surrounding each of these moments, making each of them distinct and separate, like beads on a string.

I can't tell you what Nocturnos means; it doesn't "mean" one thing. It's a sequence of ideas and thoughts about what night is, what night means, what goes on in our brains when the world gets dark and quiet and still. I found it fascinating and deep; I hope you will do the same.