Review time! with ‘I Am Their Silence’

“Feelings are intense; words are trivial”

Jordi Lafebre’s first solo comic, Always Never, was a charming twist on a traditional love story, and now he’s back with a charming twist on a traditional murder mystery, I Am Their Silence. This is translated by Montana Kane, published by Dark Horse, costs $24.99, and is 111 pages long. It’s originally from 2023, but we’re just getting it now here in ‘Murica!

Like his first comic, Lafebre has fun with the structure of the book, so he can tell the story in an unusual way, which adds some interesting drama to it all. We begin with Eva, who’s standing on a ledge on top of a building in Barcelona. A man on the roof is panicking, believing she’s about to jump, but it’s quickly clear that Eva is just the kind of person who would climb up on a ledge for fun and has no intention of jumping. The man, Dr. Llull, is a psychiatrist, as is Eva, but her license has been revoked and Llull is trying to determine whether it should be reinstated. We learn very early on that Eva has some problems, including the fact that she communicates with some of her dead ancestors. Whether they’re actually there or not is left to our judgment, but Eva has some other behavioral problems that get her into trouble. What’s especially fascinating about them is that they’re not really bad problems, just things that a society — particularly a society dominated by men — might have issues with. Lafebre does a very good job at simply hinting at this without stating it outright, but it’s still there. Subtlety — who knew it could be effective?

Dr. Llull asks Eva to tell him about her week, and that leads into the main plot. Most of the story is told in flashback, as she explains that a patient of hers asked her to come to the reading of the will of her grandmother, who is, to be clear, still alive. The woman, Penelope, is the scion of a very rich winemaking family, and nobody in the family trusts anyone else, so she would feel better with Eva there. Eva heads off to the estate, gets involved in some drama, and discovers a dead body late on her first night there. Oh dear. I really don’t want to give away even who the dead body is, because it’s always interesting, in my experience, to try to figure out who’s going to get killed even before you get to figuring out who the killer is. So someone is dead. Eva is a person of interest, not only because she found the body, but because she communicated with the victim shortly before their death, and the police aren’t completely convinced she didn’t have something to do with it. She sticks around to see if Penelope needs her help, but she also can’t stop sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong, of course. Which makes the police more suspicious of her and alienates Penelope a bit, as no one wants the family’s secrets uncovered. She, of course, decides she needs to solve the case so she can prove her innocence. Isn’t that just always the way?

What makes this a good comic is that it’s not just a murder mystery. The mystery is fine, and Lafebre does a good job with it, but it’s not the entire point of the book. Eva is, technically, in therapy, and her issues are what drive the book. The mystery becomes linked to that, sure, but Lafebre is more interested in her, and he makes her a compelling character. She speaks to (and is spoken to by) ghosts, or at least visions of her ancestors, including her grandmother, who’s the only one we see alive in the book (in a flashback, but still). It’s probably not coincidental that the three women could be taken for the maiden, mother, and crone trope, or the three Fates, and they offer Eva advice and act as a bit of a Greek chorus, but they also highlight her neuroses, so Lafebre can do a lot with them in a small amount of space. She is, after all, not in therapy to discuss the murder, but because her patients have complained about her, so when Penelope turns against her, we can see some of the damage she might do to patients, even though she’s trying to help. Eva has family issues herself, and we learn a little bit about that, but Lafebre wisely leaves some of that to our imagination. Penelope, obviously, has family issues, as well, of a different sort, but there are nice parallels there that Lafebre explores a bit. Eva is a bit of a wild child, so her bonding with the police detective in charge of the case (one-sided, it seems, as Eva thinks she’s great, but the detective is constantly suspecting Eva) is very fun, as Eva latches onto her as a mother figure. As we find out as we go, the doctor examining Eva is no fool, either, which adds another layer of intrigue to the plot. The murder is interesting, but there’s a lot more going on the book, as well.

Lafebre’s art is, as I’ve noted before, what I think of as “European” — a nice, thin line, slightly cartoonish characters, and a very nice attention to detail. He does a marvelous job placing Eva in Barcelona and then on the country estate, filling in the background wonderfully so that she feels fully part of her surroundings. He takes the time to shade certain scenes marvelously, as they occur in places under trees or near sun-dappled leaves, so of course there would be shadows on faces and bodies, and it adds to the verisimilitude of the setting. His characters are interesting and distinct, and they move well through the plot and react nicely to the emotional trauma the plot throws at them. Lafebre does a wonderful job with facial expressions, as everyone is hiding something but they can’t always control what their faces say, so we get a nice dichotomy between their words and their thoughts. It’s beautifully colored, too, full of rich blues and bright yellows (Lafebre knows his color wheel!) that we always associate with Spain, or at least Mediterranean, vibes, and thanks to this, the book has a casual, easy-going attitude that often belies the serious themes within the story, which is kind of neat. Lafebre is a good artist, so I’m not surprised this book looks good, but it’s also nice to see how much attention he actually pays to the artwork.

Lafebre is now 2-for-2 in his solo comics, so I’m looking forward to what he does next. Feel free to jump on board the bandwagon!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆