I Am Their Silence

Eva is a psychiatrist with bipolar disorder who’s currently being evaluated by another shrink before her license can be reinstated.  So it probably doesn’t help her case when she lets him know that she was around when a murder took place at her friend Penelope Montruous’ estate.  The Montruoses are a dynasty of wine producers and this could potentially see it come to an end.  So Eva decides to look into it for the sake of her friend, for her own curiosity, and very much against the will of the police assigned to investigate it.  This just means that she’s going to need more than her own formidable smarts to crack this case – she’ll need the voices of the dead women in her family as well.

A few years back, creator Jordi Lafebre gave us “Almost Never.”  It was a delightful romance story told in reverse with art that beautifully conveyed all the emotions of the story on the page.  “I Am Their Silence” is Lafebre’s follow-up and it shows that he’s going to be someone worth following from here.  While the mystery itself isn’t all that complex, it’s still engaging and Eva is a captivating lead to take us through it.  Lafebre’s art also impresses throughout, delivering some of the most emotive characters I’ve seen in recent memory all with a subtle exaggeration to them that gives them a cartoonish vibrancy while still feeling like they belong in this grounded setting.

If there’s anything dragging this story down, it’d be Eva’s status as someone who suffers from bipolar disorder.  Lafebre notes in his introduction that he did work with mental health professionals to get its portrayal right, but it doesn’t feel like he did.  While the story doesn’t actually say her illness is the source of her incredible deductive abilities, we never get a sense that she experiences any adversity as a result of it – or how she’s able to work as a psychiatrist with this diagnosis.  The feeling is that she was only noted to have it because Lafebre wanted to have her ancestors be a factor in the story in a way that at least made a little sense.  That doesn’t quite work, but it didn’t stop me from enjoying “I Am Their Silence” or from looking forward to whatever genre its creator decides to tackle next.