Review: Becoming Horses by Disa Wallander
Details of the cover of ‘Becoming Horses’ by Disa Wallander.
‘Becoming Horses’ was not what I expected. Not in subject matter or illustrative style or even the artist herself.
Disa Wallander is a self-described cartoonist, illustrator and general creative dabbler who lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. While she has made numerous comics and zines before, ‘Becoming Horses’ is her debut graphic novel published through Drawn & Quarterly. It is not a story with a clear narrative thread, more a meandering survey of art, beauty, feeling and being alive.
Page from ‘Becoming Horses’ by Disa Wallander.
In interviews, Wallander has explained that her initial questions for the book around the nature of beauty, became sidetracked by other thoughts and ideas.
Her sidetracked mediation on art and it’s purpose echoes Eleanor Davis’s ‘Why art?’.
While Davis immersed herself in black and white to illustrate her response, Wallander collages drawings, photographs of various textures like stone and glitter, sculpture and painting.
The result is a language that can take a few pages to orient in. Her line drawing holds the book together, building on a cartooning tradition established by artists like Charles Shulz and Tove Jannson.
The charming main characters offer a reason to stay in Wallander’s pages as they walk happily into the unknown to answer questions about self and the reason to exist.
Page from ‘Becoming Horses’ by Disa Wallander.
Wallander clearly has fun playing with the interactions her characters find themselves in. She invites the reader into this thought exercise with humor and sometimes a quiet sadness.
In an interview with the LA Review of Book, here, Wallander describes the spontaneity she seeks in her work by not having a plan or working back over her first thoughts: she gives herself permission to figure out the answers on the page. In ‘Becoming Horses’ the answers are very rarely realized, but it’s a journey well worth joining her on if only to see a searching and playful comics dialect emerge.
- Emma at SAW