Title: Oracles
Creator(s): Olivia Sullivan
Publisher: Avery Hill Publishing
ISBN: 978-1917355261
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Grief is, I think, becoming one of the defining characteristics of life in my generation. There are the personal, “small,” griefs that come with a human life well-lived – the loss of a parent, a pet, a child, or even a beloved hobby or job. But then there are the existential griefs, the “large” things that cannot be escaped – rising fascism, renewed bigotry, late-stage capitalism, and, of course, the inescapable reality of living in a time of a collapsing climate.

If grief is a defining aspect of life for us, then the question becomes how to live with this emotion that can, if left to its own devices, consume us and limit our capacity to find joy or even stability. This is the question Olivia Sullivan meditates on in her new comic, Oracles out this April from Avery Hill Publishing.

In Oracles, we follow a grief-stricken daughter on what can only be described as a trippy, meditative journey across time, space, and emotion. Across landscapes both barren and teaming with life and memories of things now lost, she seeks understanding but seldom finds it. She seeks safety and home, finding that neither are quite as simply having them or not. She stumbles, fumbles, recovers, lingers, and seeks – only to repeat the process again in a new environment over and over again. These environments are populated with a surprisingly calming mixture of realistic, almost naturalistic, landscape and animal drawings up against surrealist, new-age, experience I associate with a spiritually guided Trip. The sepia toned coloring is inviting and adds a timeless quality to the story.

Having had a difficult past few years, living with losses both expected and not, I found myself relating a lot to this journey. In particular, in the excerpted image above, hit a little too close to home. Wandering around my city, taking long walks for no reason other than to be doing something, anything is my preferred form of physical comfort. What happens when even that is interrupted by inward reflection that brings only more confusion? I have no answer to that and, by my reading, neither Oracles, at least not in an actionable sense. Rather, true to meditation as a practice, one might say the takeaway is best distilled in one line near the conclusion: “I have to take myself with me wherever I go.”

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Librarians: Oracles will fit in well in your graphic medicine collection should you have one, or an adult comics collection should you not. Consider pairing it with One Year Wiser by Mike Medaglia.