Adrift on a Painted Sea by Tim Bird

Comics memoirs, like so many publishing categories, get pushed to be bigger, to tell "the whole story," to make statements. But a life isn't a statement, most of the time: it's just a life.

There are comics-makers who push back against that, who focus on small moments to tell quieter stories. John Porcellino comes to mind first, but I'm always looking for more. I think I just found one.

Tim Bird's new book is Adrift on a Painted Sea, published last week by the small UK house Avery Hill Publishing. The cover is not by Tim Bird, though - his comics don't look like that thumbnail image. Adrift is largely the story of Tim's mother Sue, a prolific and lifelong painter of mostly landscapes, and Tim uses Sue's art throughout. You can see, right from the cover, how she was a very textured artist, which I love to see in oil paint - ridges and bumps and clumps, a real tooth to the canvas.

Sue Bird never sold a painting - that wasn't the point - but a painting of hers was included in a national student show when she was twelve, and she kept painting for the rest of her life.

There's a minor mystery about that painting, which Tim explicates in the first section of the book: family lore is that it was a still life that hung in Sue's parents' house for years, and is still in the family. But the exhibition catalog gives the title "View from a Classroom Window," and an old school friend of Sue's tells Tim that was the class assignment: they all looked out the window and painted what they saw. Whatever that painting was, no one is quite sure, fifty-plus years later. It may be in the masses of paintings Sue did and kept all her life, or it may have gone somewhere else. The big-publisher version of this book would be about that one painting shown in a Sheffield art gallery, the before and after of that art exhibition - how she came to do it, where it went afterward, with probably a triumphant moment when Tim finally finds it. 

But Tim doesn't know where that painting is, or even which one it is. He doesn't find out. That's not the story here - this isn't a "one physical thing gave me a closer connection to a family member" story. Tim was already close to Sue - he doesn't say so, but the cartoonist son of a talented amateur painter clearly had a strong connection.

This is a book about those connections, about remembering a parent who is now gone - and, inevitably, in its quiet way, about that loss. Tim Bird organizes Adrift around a broadcast of the BBC shipping news, with sections named things like "Backing Southwest Six" and "Good, Occasionally Poor." It's an allusive organizational scheme rather than a constricting one - for Americans in particular, it will be mostly random words, evocative in tone but obscure in meaning. It sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I didn't make the connection until Tim listens to that broadcast late in the book, and it clicked - for a lot of British readers, I expect it will click much more quickly.

Tim Bird draws his pages with crisp lines and writes them with straightforward, declarative words. He's not making it simple, but he does make it clear and precise. I could throw out some stereotypes about British reticence and avoiding obvious emotion, but that would be facile: this is inherently an emotional story, and Tim Bird chose to tell it. He's just not wallowing in the emotion: he's presenting it, as clearly as he can, in all of its complexity.

Adrift is the kind of book that gets called "a meditation" - that quietness, the way it moves around, section by section, telling stories of small moments throughout a life, focused simply on Sue's life and the painting she loved - and, allusively, the landscapes and places, especially the sea, that she preferred to paint. Tim Bird is not here to tell you how to feel; he's not even going to bluntly say how he feels. But he will show you moments from their lives, what an interesting specific person his mother was, and give you at least a small sense of the loss he felt. It is a lovely gem of a book.