In comics in particular, I think there can be an intriguing difference between the way a creator works alone and how they work with others - particularly interesting for those who both write and draw, and even more so for the ones who mix their work up depending on who they're collaboratorating with.
Jordi Lafebre has made at least two big solo graphic novels - there's two that have been published strongly in English, where I could see them, at least. He's also worked drawing other writers' stories, most commonly with Zidrou, I think. (With translations, there's a lot of "I think" and "here's what has made it to my side of the ocean" - it's a big world, and how someone looks at home is not always the same as how he dresses up to go visiting.)
Always Never was a sunny almost-love-story, told in reverse, starting with its sixty-something protagonists finally having time for each other and then immediately winding the clock backward, step by step, to show how they got there. From that book, I might have hypothesized that Lafebre liked complicated structures, hidden connections, and ambiguously happy endings - and that he would tend to tell those stories in sunny colors, with animation-inspired character designs with expressive faces, usually in well-framed panels at a middle distance, arranged into fairly straightforward gridded pages.
I Am Their Silence was Lafebre's next major solo book after Always Never, and it does have those elements, in a somewhat different mixture.
Eva Rojas is a noted psychiatrist in Barcelona, in her early thirties. As is the cliché in stories about psychiatrists, she's both not entirely mentally well herself - she's subject to strong bipolar episodes, and sees visions of dead women from her family during those times - and is in this story herself under the care of a psychiatrist. Well, not exactly "care," I suppose - she's being interviewed by a colleague, Dr. Lull, as part of an evaluation process after temporarily losing her license.
Lafebre frames the story with that session between Eva and Lull - we start there, we drop back to that room repeatedly, the story is narrated by their conversation, and the story ends in that room. In the middle, though, he flashes back and forth as Eva describes the events of the past week - a very eventful, busy, surprising week, as might be expected from a woman experiencing a manic episode.
Eva went with one of her clients, Penelope Monturose, to a family gathering in the middle of that week - Penelope's grandmother, the matriarch, was going to read her will, and the whole family was going to gather. Eva was to be there as support for Penelope, but...Eva, at least in her manic phase, seems to have trouble letting anyone else be the center of attention or to have the last word. (Which strikes me as not-ideal personality traits for a psychiatrist, but the narrative declares her to be brilliant, so perhaps her manic episodes are usually less common and/or less severe?)
Anyway, she meets her client's complicated family, makes a big impression, and is there when one of the three brother-heirs (children of that matriarch, all in late middle age) is shockingly murdered. Worse, she's so nosy and manic that she becomes the primary suspect in that murder, which means she just has to investigate it herself to clear her name. (Well, to be fairer, it's more that she's still manic and so overwhelmingly nosy that she can't help herself but to investigate - I get the sense that Eva can no more stop poking her nose where it doesn't belong during a manic episode than she could flap her arms and fly away.)
Eva narrates the increasingly dramatic events of the week, as she gets more and more enmeshed in Monturose family schemes and is repeatedly warned away from the case by the serious police detective who looks a lot like Angela Merkel - and so is called "Merkel" consistently, since Eva is narrating the story.
To that point: I don't think Lafebre is trying to make Eva an essentially unreliable narrator - that's more difficult to do in comics, where the reader assumes what he sees in a panel is real, and not just what the narrator is describing - but it does shade a bit in that direction. We are meant to realize that Eva carries everyone, not least herself, along on the wave of her manic episodes and part of that mania is the urge to explain and categorize and nail down every last detail.
In the end, the reader already knows Eva wasn't the murderer. She might be manic, she might be often-inappropriate, we might have doubts at how successful a psychiatrist she actually is - she does not cover herself in glory with the one patient we see her interacting with in this book - but she definitely did not kill anyone. And, eventually, that's clear to the important people in the book as well, and Eva's investigation, such as it is, wraps up successfully.
I've focused on the main plot, but - as you might guess - there's also more details about Eva here; she didn't randomly become bipolar, but was driven into it by early trauma. That intertwines with the main story throughout - often in ways we readers see but Eva does not explain to Lull, so as not to look even "crazier" to him (although she is, to be clinical about it, severely impacted in her daily life by bipolar episodes, so it is a major problem for her) - and reaches its own climax in a way that Eva takes to be triumphant but seems to me to break several laws and irrevocably screw up the evidence in this case.
But then I think I found Eva less charming and more of a frightening loose cannon in this book than Lafebre intended. As Lafebre presents her, Eva is only just barely able to life an independent life, and is teetering very unsteadily on the verge of a complete breakdown - on top of the "repeatedly interfering in a major police investigation" stuff, of course. I don't know the Spanish standard of care, but my guess is that Lull really should call for her to be confined under observation for at least the duration of a full bipolar cycle, to get a better handle on how Eva is actually living her life.
I doubt that will happen - Eva solved the crime and it is funny! - but Eva is still very much not well at the end of this book, even if she is slightly closer to well (maybe) than she was at the beginning. I also still have serious doubts that anyone with her massive failures in tact, decision-making, and information-handling can be any good at all as a psychiatrist, but I suppose that is a premise, and I try not to argue with premises.
Still, this is a smart, engaging, fast-moving story with a fascinatingly complex main character - full of flaws, as I keep saying, and doubly fascinating because of them - told brightly and compellingly by a great maker of comics. Just don't assume that Eva is right because she's the protagonist, and you'll have a magnificent ride.
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