The alopecia comic.
Bald. text by Tereza Cecechova, art by Stepanka Jisbova. Translated from Czech by Martha Kuhlman. University Park: Penn State Press, Graphic Mundi imprint, 2024, $19.95.
Guest review by Paul Buhle
The spread of published graphic novels across the planet is already outperforming the expectations of a couple of decades ago, not to mention the volume of non-printed materials on the web. This volume can only continue, and perhaps marks the presence of a particular bent of a generation armed with skills in software and in need of self-expression.
Generalizations risk anything from mild inaccuracy to total idiocy. But the work of young to early middle age people, 20s to 40s, very often reveals the search for personal meaning. The world is falling apart, the future looks pretty grim, but it is more than possible to evaluate and re-evaluate interchanges of relationships, especially friendship and love. To suggest that women artists have a special interest in these areas is not to draw any firm conclusions but to note how frequently these topics turn up in the lists of bigger comic publishers like Fantagraphics. Adventures, including fantastic adventures that somehow still involve relationships in crucial ways, only reinforce the suggestion.
And then, there’s the medical angle. Comics about youngish people facing all kinds of physical problems, living through extended treatments for cancers in particular, open up comic art to the most intense personal examinations. These days, the details have become available and susceptible to pretty clear explanations. Perhaps the moral here is that people can live through assorted woes, thanks to advanced medical practices. Or perhaps the intensity of environmental stresses, not to mention the sinking job market/living conditions of the young in particular, make the medical angle more intense. “Living With Disease” might just be one of the central experiences of our time.
Bald involves a young woman’s experience and pursuit of strategies. She goes on a camping trip to Iceland with an attentive boyfriend, almost an ideal miniature love saga with fantasies of a future wedding—a story a little too perfect—when she observes that her hair is falling out. Here the narrative takes shape.
Much of the GN takes place in her search to understand the problem and various, posslbe solutions. Nobody quite knows what causes alopecia, loss of hair in part or enitrely, in assorted areas of the body or the entire body. And no one, apparently, understands how it may be cured, although there are many treatments, opening a great opportunity to spend a lot of money and be bitterly disappointed.
That Bald was originally published in the Czech Republic, and that the artist and writer seem to have spent most of their lives in Central Europe, seems to make no difference: they could be anywhere in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa or in the Americas, without much altering the plot. That the experience of young women in many parts of the world is likely to similar tells us something about the issues of gender in today’s society. They are not being held in place anymore, and they are not overwhelmed by setbacks.
Thus our protagonist and her saga. Her boyfriend/lover is not always in the same geographical spot as her, but remains unformly supportive. He admits the situation will take some getting used to—and this is the closest he approaches anything like rejection. So she must solve the problems of workmates and social occasions.
Perhaps the worst is the casual but reasonable conclusion that a young person and especially a young woman without hair may be receiving chemotherapy for cancer. A certain telegenic, African American congresswoman of Massachusetts with the same ailment, Ayanna Pressley, may actually offer more accurate public perceptions for US audiences in particular. But the stereotype remains, and our heroine need to get past all this.
She is realistically, perceptively drawn trying all kinds of things but especially a variety of wigs, before realizing that the expense is ridiculous and she could use the money better. She finds her narrative at a storytelling conference, and perhaps the real idea is that we learn in groups, especially learn how to accept ourselves. And this does not apply only to personal life: one of the supportive women’s comic art groups, Laydees Do, offered her an opportunity to share experience after she attends the conference in Scotland where she gains some invaluable moral support. The artist herself has since helped organize such an artists’ group in Prague.
Bald is not an adventurous adventure. Or perhaps it is, or at least as adventurous as a princess in an ancient realm surrounded by dangers (and suitors), coming to realize herself, her destiny. Perhaps this is not even a young person’s story, as a balding critic writes.
