Mr. Lightbulb /

Award-winning animator Wawszczyk's graphic debut, which won the Polish Comics Association's 2019 Best Graphic Novel award, is available now for English-language readers thanks to this translation by the lauded Lloyd-Jones. A decade-plus in the making, this epic bildungsroman superbly imbues the surreal with quotidian resonance. "That shining dot is me," the protagonist introduces himself amid an overwhelming black background. In the next couple of pages, the audience's point of view approaches the brightening, expanding glow: "For several years I've been working as a streetlamp. The people below are watching me trying to beat the darkness." That escape from darkness defines an unlikely artist's life journey as his "happy family" childhood home transforms into a stifling personal prison. While he's still a boy, his parents are literally broken at work: his father is flattened by an oversized iron, his mother split in half at the steelworks. And yet they live. Meanwhile, the boy swallows a molten glob that gives him the power to glow, a talent he'll need to learn to nurture and control. Leaving behind his struggling parents affords him some semblance of freedom--college, work, falling in love--but the guilt never lifts. In Wawszczyk's black-and-white, paneled, and full-page artwork, phenomenally dynamic pages turn swiftly, revealing an Everyperson's struggle to live life fully despite persistent obstacles and setbacks. Narratively and artistically, Wawszczyk shines.

Wawszczyk's marvelous debut takes a decidedly unusual approach to the familiar story of a mopey young artist struggling to escape his family and find his way in a baffling and often cruel world. Set in a generically bleak Eastern European landscape of monolithic apartment towers, grinding poverty, and cruelty born of impoverishment, a fabulist origin story sets the stage for how the Polish artists's hero became a human light bulb. Starting in the infancy of "Bulb boy," Wawszczyk refracts the stark realities of his protagonist's parents' lives into absurdist fantasy, with workplace accidents turning his father into a flattened "pancake" and nearly splitting his mother apart, so that she walks bent over, parallel to the ground. Bulb boy's accident (swallowing molten steel) burns out his inside, leaving nothing but wires, which he discovers allows him to project light and heat. Rendered in over-the-top fashion by Wawszczyk's heavy, thick-lined exaggerated cartooning, the story builds steam through anxiety dreams about cloying parents and surrealist allegory about society's insistence on people carrying on no matter their damage. As Bulb boy uses his luminary power to create art and help others, the narrative morphs into a Giving Tree--esque fable about sacrifice. This masterful and darkly comic epic finds the all-too-human reality in its fantastical inventions. (Apr.)