Totem by Laura Pérez

Some graphic novels make connections mostly in words, while others traffic primarily in images.

Totem is a book of images; it has several narrative strands, only about half of which have words at all. So I suspect I'll here somewhat echo the book's descriptive copy, mentioning different strands of images, and maybe find ways to tie them together. But there's no clear story that can be told in words here: this is a book of mood and juxtaposition. It's a book of questions, not answers: it doesn't intend to answer anything.

The clearest thread follows two women, probably a couple. They're traveling across Arizona, on a vacation or a quest - traveling, seeing things, looking for something vague or unspecified. But we begin with one of them, the redhead, some time later, after the dark-haired woman is gone - we initially don't know why or how.

We suspect it's not good, since the redhead is reminded of the brunette by hearing a news report of a dead woman: an architect, Yukio Kitaro - one of the few names in the book - who we later see in another, wordless thread, brooding by a window and staring out into what we assume is wilderness.

Another thread of the story follows the redhead's grandmother Carmen, long ago, when as a girl she went with her own father to see a local oracle, to hear omens from the spirits of the dead.

Yet another wordless thread has a group of girls - one may be the brunette as a child, or Carmen, or maybe neither of them - witnessing a strange group of lights in the sky, after which one of them also communes with the dead.

This is not the kind of book where threads come together. They sit separately, commenting on each other or providing different perspectives on similar things. What are those things? Creator Laura Pérez isn't reductive; Totem is not a book with A Message. It's about communion with spirits, of the dead or otherwise, I suppose, about the ways one can be connected with other people and with "the world," in a deep central sense. There's no specific tradition to that spirituality I can discern, no dogma that would explain it.

This is a world strange and overwhelming and mysterious, where strange things happen for unexplained reasons, and the voices of the dead can sometimes guide us through. Pérez draws that world, in soft blacks for the threads set in the past and quiet, mostly subdued desert colors for the modern day. I found her eyes particularly compelling: dark inky orbs starting out at the reader or diverting to the side, full of mystery and unknowable, just like real people.

This is a book to think about, a book to feel, a book to stare at the pictures and think. It will not tell you what to think: if you're looking for that you'll need to go somewhere else.