Ashes by Álvaro Ortiz

I really like how cartoonists are no longer tied down to linear time. In the bad old days, a comics story might have a flashback - one big one, with huge caption boxes and every other signpost the creators could think of - but that was about it; the audience was assumed to be too young and/or unsophisticated to handle complicated transitions.

But I've read a number of books recently that play much fancier tricks with narrative and order-of-events, and all of them have been perfectly clear. Onion Skin, for example. The Bend of Luck.

Ashes isn't even that complex, in this company. It starts out with the comics equivalent of a cold open, setting the scene, and then has something like a flashback prologue to explain who the characters are and how they got into this situation. (It even plays a small trick with the narrator's voice, which I won't spoil.) The main body of the story is told in chapters, one for each day of this road trip, and then there's a leap forward at the end, in the way of a post-credits sequence. It does all that effortlessly and cleanly, telling this story in a slightly non-linear way to hit the right moments in the right order, which is what storytelling is all about. Again, I love that comics can do that these days, that it's equal to the older, more established media in its flexibility and options.

Álvaro Ortiz - not the golfer, I'm pretty sure, in the same way I am not the Wikipedia-notable Andrew Wheeler (hack, spit) - is the creator of Ashes; it was published in English earlier this year (though, if I'm reading the copyright page, originally came out in 2012 in Spain) and seems to be his first book to be translated. (This one was translated by Eva Ibarzabal.) I think, from internal evidence, that Ortiz was an established cartoonist in shorter forms before that, and I'm hoping, from the fact that Ashes just got translated in 2023, that he's had a successful career since then, with more books waiting to come over to my shores.

Because Ortiz comes across as quite assured and mature here, both in his story structures, as I just said, and his dot-eye cartoony drawings, which give me a distant echo of Guy Delisle. This may have been his first book, but it wasn't his first rodeo, if you get me.

Anyway, Ashes is the story of the three people on the cover: Piter, Moho, and Polly, reading left to right. They were friends, some years ago, but drifted apart since then. They're all around thirty, hitting that "what the heck do I do with the rest of my life?" moment in their own ways.

There was a fourth friend: Héctor. The three of them are on this road trip because of Héctor.

It's a slight spoiler why, but it's revealed very early, is alluded to by the title, and is central to the book. Héctor is dead; they're following his last wishes, to take his ashes somewhere specific to be scattered. There are interstitial pages, throughout the book, about the history of cremation, in various times and nations - Ortiz says in his backmatter that they were adapted from Lazaro Vitro's A Brief History of Cremation.

It's a long trip, several days of driving to get from "the city" to a much more rural area - Ortiz doesn't use place-names to make it more general; I assume this is set in Spain but it doesn't need to be. It's anywhere with at least one big city and stretches of wilder terrain, rivers and islands and roads connecting them all.

And the interpersonal drama of the three of them meeting again, bouncing off each other again, after several years apart isn't our only plot thread. There's a thriller element - never overwhelming, generally semi-serious - following them as well, tied closely to details in the lives of these three people. Eventually, they get to their destination, and find what Héctor hoped they would find there.

It ends well. It began well and went along well, so I expected that, but it's always great when everything clicks. I found the ending appropriate but maybe slightly too nice: it's one of those "everything went better than expected" endings. I am old and cynical; I tend to think nothing is ever better than expected, unless you're expecting utter disaster. But it's earned, I suppose, and it ties together a lot of moments and ideas earlier in the book.

So I recommend Ashes: it looks great, it moves well, it's smart and full of quirky people and interesting cremation facts, and the story is told precisely in a slightly unusual way that completely works.