My Skeleton Week

By Keren Katz

Appeared in Future Shock Zero, published by Retrofit Comics, 2015.

My Skeleton Week is a comic that reflects on themes of communication, memory, youth, and trauma as viewed through the lens of the body’s ability to contain and transmit these myriad ideas. Keren Katz depicts all this with an animated illustrative style that employs textured colours, geometric shapes, vacant page-space, and line trajectory to encourage a reading that is rife with expressive movement.

There are no panel borders in this comic, linework being reserved instead for the depiction of geometric forms in unconstrained, white page-spaces. While each page of this comic devotes itself to a single image, or a handful of images separated by whitespace, there is still a sense of sequence in these pages, albeit one that affords the reader a degree of control. Katz refrains from using conventional methods of illustrated perspective so that the distances between objects and figures become compressed, entangling them in a planar image. The tableaus that Katz constructs thus offer the reader’s eye a degree of freedom to move about their contents, tracking along the sharp lines of forms, moving towards areas of colour or textural intensities, or reading the spare words that give each image it’s context amongst a broader narrative.

There is a definite narrative structure to the comic but it avoids the prescriptiveness of linear plotting, instead opting to employ a dream-like logic that connects ideas and images together with a looseness that gives them room to breathe. The comic begins with an image of a disfigured car and a caption describing it as the body of an anatomy teacher. Such similarities between inanimate objects and physical bodies are a consistent theme throughout the comic - we later see a cello (or double-bass) depicted with arms and legs and a table tennis table with a shrouded figure laying on top of it, only their limbs left visible so that we’re unsure of where the person ends and the table begins. Katz’s style of figuration depicts bodies as lithe geometric constructs with angular features that merge the organic with the man-made. Despite this blurring of the line between organic and inanimate, Katz’s figures retain their vitality through a sense of physical animation that persists even within an isolated image. Katz draws limbs that stretch to unreasonable lengths, narrowing as they do so, encouraging the eye to trace their kinks and turns as it chases them to their conclusion, creating an impression of motion in the static image.

It’s through the movement and structuring of their bodies that Katz’s characters achieve their greatest measure of lyrical expressiveness, a fact which ties into another theme of the comic, the notion that bodies and objects store and convey meaning. This is first referenced early in the comic when the idea of physical trauma, in the form of broken bones, is voiced as a means of bodily memory. Ironically, it is the literal car crash of an anatomy teacher that students come to in order to learn about how bones break, the teacher of trauma’s impact being a victim himself. Katz depicts all of this with a sense of whimsy, showing strangers turned completely upside down, oriented ludicrously as the associated caption remarks on the frequency with which people break their collarbones as they board a bus.

The idea of the body’s capacity for a memory of breaks, ruptures, and impacts is developed most fully during a flashback, midway through the comic, where the narrator recounts the events of the titular “Skeleton Week”, a period where her and her cousin locked themselves in a room during a family gathering, building a fort from found objects and promising each other that they would grow up to be the same person and break the same bones in the process. Of course, there is a youthful folly in this attitude - how can one possibly expect to orchestrate the same experiences as another human being? - and so the pair are shown to grow, attempting to climb the same set of imaginary stairs in order to end up on the same floor but inevitably finding their paths diverted from a common endpoint by the defining currents of their respective experiences.

What Katz is able to achieve with her drawing style is a uniquely physical language of bodies, objects, and spaces that coheres in a dance-like performance of communication. Characters show signs of mutual connection through mirrored postures; objects wrap about figures and echo their form, while figures also take on the form of objects, each remarking on the nature of the other; mottled scaly-blue and red patterns are used to draw the eye’s focus and act as a recurring visual motif throughout the comic; youthfulness is depicted by diminutive bodies, dwarfed by their adult counterparts and yet to achieve the elongated grace of the adult figure; spatial separation is used to imply a communicative distance as the two cousins who promise to become the same person lock themselves in a room away from their family; characters are repeated in a single image, engaged in a progression of poses that immediately suggest the expression of feeling through movement and dance - these are all components of Katz’s illustration that feed into what amounts to an elegant and idiosyncratic performance of what reads like a personal story set in a reality heightened by a whimsical regard. The brief fragments of text that accompany the comic’s images provide a loose narrative logic but they refrain from being overly descriptive, particularly of mood or emotion, leaving this work up to the vibrant visuals to conduct.

My Skeleton Week is a comic that encourages the mind to return to the physical world. It revels in the stories contained in bodies and objects, showing how these are tied to aspects of memory and identity. It’s a comic that reads like dance, its images vibrating with motion even when what’s depicted is ostensibly static.