(courtesy Walker Books)
If you think you have seen everything possible about the apocalypse, then Benji Lee and his wondrously imaginative and affectingly thoughtful graphic novel, Garbage Night: The Complete Edition is here to urge you to think again.
Set in a near-future Earth where humanity has just up and vanished without warning and with a totality so exhaustive that there’s literally no one left to survive whatever wiped us clean from the flow of history, Garbage Night centres on the animals left behind, all of whom react to the absence of people in wholly different and quite understandable ways.
The three main characters of Simon the dog, Cliff the raccoon (though a bunch of farm animals think he’s a cat for some reason and he doesn’t disabuse them of the notion) and Reynard the Reindeer spend their human-less days roaming through a comprehensively emptied neighbourhood which has no food left to be scavenged.
While the three close friends hold to the idea that the absence of people is just a temporary glitch in their hitherto cosy world of discard food grazing – at one point Cliff checks on a garbage bin in the hope it’s full of yummy scraps only to find it empty, promoting this exclamation of disbelief “It should’ve been garbage night!” – it becomes increasingly clear that the status quo they once enjoyed is no more.
Even so, they, and Simon most especially, hold fast to a dying optimistic hope that there might be people out there somewhere with overflowing garbage bins and so they set out, with the help of a irascible coyote named Barnaby to find a town where apparently people persist and the old foraging ways can be resumed.
Like all grand adventures in an apocalyptic wasteland, there’s no guarantee of success and they encounter more than their fair share of very nasty animals who don’t take kindly to others encroaching on their rapidly diminishing turf, but also some others who, like the three friends, can’t quite make the leap to a world where there are no humans EVER AGAIN.
Garbage Night then is really the story of how these animals transition to a brand new world where all the old certainties are well and truly gone – though again it takes them, and Simon most particularly, a while to fully embrace that truth – and they have to work out who they are and how they live their lives when food is no longer readily on tap and they have to fend for themselves as nature, rather distressingly, intended.
(courtesy Penguin Random House)
With artwork that creates a beautiful sense of time and place and which imbues each and every character with real, moving emotiveness, Garbage Night is a delightfully incisive look at how anyone copes when everything they know just vanishes.
It’s traumatic when the entirety of the grounding of your life just vanishes, and Garbage Night captures this quite perfectly with Simon, Cliff and Reynard and their new friends on the farm – who discover, quite amusingly but also powerfully, that they can go beyond the fences and NOTHING BAD WILL HAPPEN – grappling with what life looks like when readily available food, of the garbage and cultivated variety is no longer there for the ready taking.
There’s a real affecting, dare we say it, humanity to the way in which every animal in this story reacts to a wholly abnormal situation – it rapidly, of course, becomes very, very normal to the animals’ bewilderment, fear and then acceptance – and the journey Lee takes them on really drives home how terrifying this cataclysmically sudden change would be.
While the artwork is a journey to behold, and suggests landscape and place rather than rigorously and exhaustively defining it, what really makes this gem of a graphic novel such a pleasure to read is how it deals with big themes of change, identity and belonging.
You can help but be affected by the way in which the three main friends journey from the old to the new and while you may shake your head at the some of the decisions made, the consequences of which come alive with art that is boldly colourful and intimately dark depending om the situation, they mirror exactly what any of us would do when the world turns upside down.
Garbage Night is a nuanced, clever and emotionally thoughtful graphic novel that takes us down a well-worth path into the apocalypse, but which does so with a richly evocative sense of imagination, characters that mean something to us and a story which takes us on a journey from denial to acceptance with all the expected stops in-between and which asks us to consider how we would cope if the world ended and if we’d fruitlessly cling to the old days or strike out to see what this brave, new and yes, frankly terrifying world might have to offer.
(courtesy Penguin Random House)