Carol Tyler, The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2025. 232pp, $39.95.
Review by Paul Buhle
The joys of childhood, according to folklore, scholarship and wide personal experience, lead to sadness in old age. How could it be otherwise in a secular age? Carol Tyler is an artist of sadness, artistically calculated remorse, and a distinct curiosity about the whole train of human experience too often neglected in comic arts (because they are supposed to “entertain”).
Her early, spectacular work encompassed her pressing her father about the grumpiness and evasion that she figured out, probably by her teenhood, to be undiagnosed PTSD. Dad was one of the hundreds of thousands, at a modest estimate, who did not, could not speak about his experiences in the Second World War. To acknowledge let alone describe them, even to the most intimate of family members, would be to show weakness of character, or perhaps they would bring to the surface things that could easily become unbearable. You’ll Never Know, a trilogy of these stories, won her a much-deserved fame. She has added to it in various ways: teacher, stand-up comic, and scholar.
To this saga, we cannot fail to add another. A second volume of Tyler’s “grief series” will relate her life to that of her late husband, Justin Green, who as much as reinvented a key trope of modern literature for comics, and not just Underground Comix of lore. His one-shot Binky Brown Meets the Virgin Mary delved his own earlier life, the confused kid who became obsessed with religious imagery as he tried to navigate his own OCD.
Green’s totemic achievement encouraged other artists, most famously Art Spiegelman, toward a similar path about self and family. Robert Crumb was already there, but only in metaphors of various kinds (a little later, an identified Troubled Crumb becomes a live character as well). These were the Walking Wounded of comic art, and their success emboldened thousands of others, including Alison Bechdel (with Fun Home) to take a similar path. When Underground Comix could be seen properly as having added something decisive to comic art, Justin Green stood high, even if he could not continue comics, finding his modest role in sign-painting.
A lot closer to home, Carol Tyler dealt with Justin and their daughter, Justin’s abandonment of both of them for another woman (he came back after a few months, guilt-ridden the rest of his life), as she followed Justin in seeking self-discovery in comic art. She had the skill and personal intensity to develop, especially in themes particular to women artists and other women.
The Ephemerata is fascinating for so many reasons. What her earlier trilogy seemed to feature, dense black and white drawing, is not so much in these pages. It would take a finer eye than mine to suggest just what she has done with sometimes thin drawings, near full pages of hard-written prose, carefully chosen shading and sometimes spare but seemingly accurate portrayals of herself and family, including Justin.
Let me stick to the story, the best that I can. For her, life’s dearest discoveries seem first of all to be in the garden. Never formally trained as a gardener, using whatever land happens to be available, she discovers her sometimes-fulfilled self but also Melancholy with a capital “M.” She eventually labels the branches of trees (p.18) with deaths of those she has known and loved, such as “Worn Out” or “Too Soon” or “One I had to Put Down” (her dog).
In a secular age, the older, religious-based consolations or rationalization of our Dear Dead have slipped away. No doubt, the collapse of American society, the glum prospects for global nature and so on, also pay their part. She does not seem to think that her remarkable work, bound to have lasting value, is any condolence, at least for herself. Ahead is Darkness, labelled “Griefville.” For pages and pages she wanders in what she imagines to be Victoria Park in London, with the statue of the queen on hand, dominating the landscape as well as the age.
She comes curiously to that forgotten headpiece, the Bonnett, typically used (I did not know this) by women treating the Civil War wounded and when aiding the victims of the Flu in the late 1910s. She imagines herself entering a bonnet large enough to shelter her, today the size of a Manhattan (or Tokyo) apartment. Is it perhaps a womb regained?
Never mind. As she leaves to further explore the landscape, we realize that she is reenacting Dante’s famous traversing of the Underworld. These are not damned for their sins, tormented by little devils, but the sufferers are also not to be consoled. By now, by p.63, we come to the main point of the book: the suffering of those who, so far, survive.
Tyler has an abundance of visual metaphors, invented expressions both verbal and visual, terrible moments (like “The Realm of Cessation,” reached at the point of death) and what, in her imagination, happens afterward.
I am going to come back, for a moment, to a 1950s, Middle American family discussion about Heaven. My father loved to sing in the choir, and my mother considered weekly church attendance to be mandatory. But they weren also modern Congregationalists, and she once quipped to me “You make your heaven or hell on earth.” Forget about the Afterlife: it was all about kind metaphors that the minister offered, and the sense of community.
Carol Tyler is there and not there. She boldly rips off her clothes (pp.89-90) to help her cancer-ridden sister in the shower. A couple pages later, she is a college art teacher, a little later she is maneuvering her OCD husband to help a little with household chores, or she is treating a mother getting worse, or she is remembering when a stray dog suddenly appeared and became a beloved pet.
A mean-spirited family member, or a hard-nosed psychologist, might say that artist Tyler lets herself in for abuse, faithfully helping a father who is losing it but evidently saving his strength to lash out at her. Then again, she really does help her failing mother, eventually taking mostly upon herself the task of scattering the ashes. She recalls her mother’s hard-wrought accomplishments, managing the family plumbing business while raising the kids, including an autistic daughter.
This is not an unusual story for middle Americans in the middle twentieth century, but she tells it with great sympathy and real insight. And tells it over again, from different angles,about different moments in her mother’s life and especially the final phase.
The final chapter is really about herself and husband Justin (their daughter, leaving a troubled family, is long gone). His OCD seems to get worse and is mixed with paranoid delusions—I can remember his writing to me about the “conspiracy” around the 9/11 bombings—and then she leaves Justin for the next book.
She is herself alone, with worsening Tinnitus (join the club!), difficulty in sleeping,rare moments of joy or pleasant self-discovery. Trees give her solace. Her friends, also provide joy. Or her sisters, while they are still around. The conclusion is no conclusion. She needs another volume of ruminations.
Like any other reviewer who is also an admirer, I am happy that Tyler finds consolation in her art. I’d like to say that this Ohio story is about Midwestern suffering, Protestant or Catholic, large city, small town or suburb. We repress so much, it is obviously in our nature to do so. We rarely grasp the politics and economics of our suffering as firmly rooted in class society and the particular deep illnesses in US society, rootless by nature and a lack of deep history. She has taken on, as an artist, a different set of particulars.
