Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Where the Body Was is many things: a graphic novel, a mystery, a portrait of a neighborhood. Set somewhere in California during the summer of 1984, it unfolds in a suburb that has seen better days. That’s the point, however, or one of them—to highlight both the aspiration and the desperation of this place as we pass through a series of narratives that weave in and out of one another in an elaborate yet understated braid.
Brubaker and Phillips understand what they’re doing; together, they collaborated on Batman: Gotham Noir and other monthly comics before beginning to create long-form graphic works. What marks their partnership, Brubaker as the writer and Phillips as the artist‚ is a kind of shared knowingness—not noir, exactly, although that’s part of it, but more a troubled empathy. This allows them to portray their characters, no matter how difficult, through a deeply human lens.
In Where the Body Was, such a sensibility emerges by way of a kaleidoscoping narrative; whatever else it is, the book is an ensemble piece. Beginning with an annotated map of a cul-de-sac called Pelican Road, the book relies on several overlapping protagonists, each of whom fills in his or her own piece of the puzzle, as it were. There are Tommy and Karina, troubled teens enmeshed in drugs and low-level break-ins. There is Lila, an 11-year-old who thinks she is a superhero and patrols the neighborhood in mask and cape. There is Toni, the unhappy wife of an unscrupulous psychiatrist. And there is Palmer, maybe a cop or maybe not a cop (he has a badge), with whom Toni fatefully takes up.
If this seems like a recipe for melodrama, it is—and delightfully so. Yet the idea is not so much to follow convention as to complicate it. That emerges in the way time, or chronology, is managed; Where the Body Was may take place in 1984, but it also involves a contemporary aspect, with characters looking back from the (semi-)present to add their thoughts. This can’t help but add dimension, as when Lila’s adult self emerges and we get a glimpse of who she has become.
Shopping in a convenience store, she addresses us directly about Tommy, on whom she used to have a crush:
“It was totally innocent but I remember I got butterflies in my stomach whenever I talked to him. He just treated me like a person, you know? That means a lot.”
Such a move is important for two reasons: first, because it puts the summer into perspective, and second, because it lets us know how the characters ended up. It underplays the urgency, in other words, which sounds counterintuitive but becomes one of the most vivid and surprising aspects of Where the Body Was.
Comics and crime fiction, after all, are both driven by necessity. We read to learn what happened, to resolve a situation or a case. Something similar is at work here, yes; there is the corpse of the title, which lands in the neighborhood about halfway through the book. And yet, resolution is slippery in this universe. The discovery of the body is less denouement than device. It opens up a host of questions, some of which, including how it got there, remain unanswered until an epilogue.
Normally, I’d be wary of this sort of exposition. Although I love a narrative that ends in the middle, it can also feel like a gimmick or a cheat. In Where the Body Was, however, the effect is just the opposite because it speaks to an essential randomness. The book unfolds in a universe, like this one, where things happen for no reason and all our attempts to explain them are little more than shots in the dark.
I don’t want to give very much away, for one of the great pleasures of Where the Body Was is seeing it unveil. We begin with the delinquents, Tommy and Karina, who have a fight with a roommate that Palmer unexpectedly, and brutally, resolves. The scene is witnessed by Toni, who becomes (shall we say) intrigued. Her intrigue leads to an affair that seems to drive the action, although like so much else here, it is also a sleight of hand.
In that sense, Where the Body Was is a book made of MacGuffins. It is built almost entirely of loose ends.
The paradox, of course, is that this is what makes the book so thrilling, that we are in a terrain we recognize but has also been reset. As we move from narrator to narrator, we begin to put the pieces together, even as the pullouts to the present remind us that the most intense experiences fade or gather dust and distance, and what feels hopeless in the moment (Tommy and Karina’s drug use, for example) may blur into memory.
Where the Body Was makes that explicit late in the book in a deeply moving moment, as Tommy, now 56, comforts his wife, who is dying.
“It’s so cold,” she says to him, unable to switch on the electric blanket.
“I know,” he answers, and cradles her in bed.
The sequence is inked in shadow, black and purple. “Tommy thought he knew a lot,” we read, “about life and love, the world and what it does to us.… Somehow he never really knew anything until that night.”
And there you have it, the crux of Where the Body Was. I admire its narrative innovation. I admire the lapidary way it builds. Most of all, I admire its heart and (yes) its vision. This is a book about time and tide and history, about who its characters were and who they have become. Not everybody makes it, but how could it be otherwise?
It reminds us that, in the end, the past is just a story if it is anything at all.•
