Eartha by Cathy Malkasian

Cathy Malkasian's 2017 graphic novel Eartha is a metaphor for social media. It's more than that, too, but that's the log-line: it is centrally an argument against fake "connectivity" and the addiction to bad news.

(Whether the problem it metaphorizes is even our current problem in 2024 I'll leave as an argument the reader can have; I'm a bit dubious myself.)

Our main character is a very large woman - twice as tall as everyone around her, and notably more solidly built as well - among the gnomish happy rustics of the sleepy town of Echo Fjord. She's the usual soft-hearted giant: we first see her saving people from a flood of water caused by her own mother's flightiness. Most of the folks of Echo Fjord either grow crops or help to corral and progress the dreams of the faraway City Across the Sea, but Eartha has what seems to be a unique role: she's so much taller and stronger that she's the one to carry all the heavy things, and we keep seeing her pick up and carry the older people, as if they are babies and she is the adult.

The dreams of the city people is an important, complicated system - evocative without being quite as directly metaphorical as the didactic social media metaphor (which I'll get to in a moment). The people of the City Across the Sea have busy, complicated lives, so their dreams separate from them quickly. Those dreams manifest in Echo Fjord, generally popping out of the soil as purple-hued people - who look mostly like their dreamers - focused on a monomania and with a brilliant beacon of light shining straight up from the top of their heads. The Echo Fjordians attach "shadows" to the dreams to keep them from flying away, and watch them as they act out their psychodramas - usually a few times - before they inevitably go through the Dream Departures area and dissipate while crossing a broad, sunny field.

The Echo Fjordians have been guiding these dreams for a thousand years - before that, they were major trading partners with the City, but they broke off contact because it was unseemly to profit from knowing their trading partners' innermost secrets. So this is a major activity of these people, but it's not an industry: it's amusing and entertaining and central to their lives in the way that a church or tradition could be, but it doesn't bring them money or anything positive other than psychologically.

And the dreams are waning. It's been a week since there were any, and then we see a bare few of them.

Eartha, of course, is more worried than most people about the change, and goes around talking to various Echo Fjordians to figure out what to do. The aged keeper of the Archives, Old Lloyd, tricks her into taking a journey to the City to find out what happened - Eartha is uniquely right for this job, not just for the physical reasons we can see, but due to other things Old Lloyd knows that become clear later.

So she takes a small rowboat, and sets off. Somehow - this is a fable, basically, so a lot of things are "somehow" - she arrives at the City, to find it in turmoil. The average people of the city are selling everything they own, bit by bit, to a group of men in plaid jackets called the Bouncers, in return for biscuits with four-word "news" reports printed on them. The biscuit messages are all negative - HYSTERICAL JACKASS STABS RECLUSE; that kind of thing - and the point of the exercise is to be connected to the truth of the world, which is negative, and to gain that knowledge by giving up material things.

Of course, it's all a scam, but it takes a long time for the naïve, confused Eartha to realize that. The bouncers are led by a man named Primus, a nasty twisted authoritarian obsessed with women's breasts. Eartha runs into him, wanders through the city, is led by a talking cat who knows more than it's willing to tell Eartha, and eventually learns the truth.

The biscuit business started out normally, but it picked up steam when they started printing messages on the biscuits. The messages are not actually true - they're just generated randomly - but they seem true because they're negative, and that led to the feedback loop that ended with the Bouncers controlling the whole city and close to owning everything.

There is a resistance movement - which sends rubbings of gravestone life-summaries down gutter downspouts, and is more effective in breaking the hold of the biscuits on metropolitans' minds than you would expect - and Eartha joins it, in her confused, easily-led way. It turns out that many of the major characters - mostly ones I haven't mentioned - are related to each other, and we learn their stories.

Eartha is a didactic story with a message to deliver, so of course it has to end well, to bring Eartha back home and underline its message. (Rural is better than urban, lives are each unique and special, murderous authoritarians should be stopped - that kind of thing.) Old Lloyd shows up again, to deliver large pieces of that message.

Eartha looks lovely - its people are quirky and odd-looking, with lived-in faces, so maybe "lovely" isn't quite the right word - and it's full of ideas, impressively constructed and intensely imagined. I had a vague sense that it was a long argument against something that has already shifted substantially since the book was published, but that's not the book's fault.