#CBR11 Review #01: FLEM by R Rosen

This is a difficult one, because there is clearly a lot of emotion and depth to what the author is trying to do here, but the problem is that it just didn’t quite come through for me. Her illustrations and artwork are beautiful (that cover alone and the vibrant colours in it are stunning!), and it takes a lot of time and work to create both story and art for graphic novels, but this one here needed a lot more in order for it to work: leaving too much to be read between the lines leaves big gaping holes that are difficult to connect to, or to really follow the story as a cohesive unit.

FLEM is about a young woman named Julia, who is struggling through art school, running out of inheritance money, and always coming back to thoughts about her mother and the mental illness she had which seems to have seeped into every aspect of Julia’s life; however, when Julia meets a radical feminist art group, she feels she may have finally found a place for herself in the world, though the draw of drugs and alcohol may be ruining these new relationships. Julia’s strained connection to her mother and questions about her own mental health at this point in her life are the tie that threads the whole story together, and comes through movingly in the lino-cut art pieces we are shown being made by Julia.

This is definitely a story about someone struggling in almost every aspect of her life, and it is difficult to see something like that play out, but can also have a lot of power and layers to it. The problem with FLEM, however, is that everything is so disjointed. didn’t understand if some pieces were future or flashback, or what really was going on: it would be in one place one minute and another in the next, and while each piece clearly affected the other, it was hard to tell at times what the flow of the story was really supposed to be. Like I said, graphic novels often take a lot of time given all the art involved (and the art here is gritty and real and emotive, while also being intruding in it’s unusual use of vibrant but monochromatic colour schemes), but there needed to be more meat here for me to really like it. There also seemed like there were pieces and topics only touched on that looked like they would become bigger pieces and subjects in the story, only to float by in but a brief moment.

So overall, I think FLEM comes across as the start of something good, that would do well with more fleshing-out. It is indeed a very short graphic novel, and who am I to know what an author’s intentions were, because perhaps having more content would make it too-explanatory beyond the emotional pull: that heart-stirring certainly is there at times, but just couldn’t grab me from page to page due to the disconnected a brief nature of it all.

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