Lion Forge adds another wonderful entry to its Magnetic Collection line by republishing Un Océan d’amour, originally released in France in 2014. Since the story is presented wordlessly over its 224 pages, the folks at Lion Forge didn’t have to do much (or any) translating for English-speaking readers, but this is not just an anecdotal aside. It speaks to the universal themes that “A Sea of Love” grapples with in its profound and profoundly absurdist tale of true love, and Wilfrid Lupano and Gregory Panaccione have created a something truly lovable in these pages.
Written by Wilfrid LupanoCover by Gregory Panaccione
Illustrated by Gregory PanaccioneWhen an old fisherman fails to return after a storm, his doting wife goes on an adventure across the ocean to find him.
The extraordinary thing about “A Sea of Love” is the way it captures the essence of ordinary people cast into extraordinary circumstances. From the mundanity of a shared breakfast to the desperation of life and death events, “A Sea of Love” is not charting new territory in graphic storytelling by letting the pictures tell the story. As a young comics reader, I remember the first time I saw a similar sequential storytelling method in practice in a comic book. It was in “G.I. Joe” #21, a “silent” issue where Snake Eyes must rescue Scarlett from Cobra headquarters. Somehow the lack of narration and dialogue allowed for a more organic and more heightened form of drama, creating an issue that many readers of my generation remember better than any other story in that series to this day.
Over thirty years later, “A Sea of Love”‘s creators have infused their silent and memorable story of a fisherman separated from his wife with a surprising amount of drama, pathos, and humor. The story excels in forcing readers to focus on the little details of both characters’ journeys to be reunited. The story structure itself is almost rudimentary by design, but that allows the artwork to shine, and shine it does. Melding classical cartooning with watercolors and pen and ink techniques, Panaccione’s pantomime is like a fine art version of Sergio Aragonés, but instead of relying on gags, each page is a facet in a large jewel of a slice of life story, revealing the beauty and simplicity of true devotion while managing to tell two quest stories in parallel. It’s a feat that Panaccione makes look easy, and the ways Lupano chooses to impart necessary information are as clever and clear as anything you’ll read in comics this year.
In addition to the wordlessness, Lupano’s simple but far-flung story also allows a larger canvas for the embellishments in the fisherman and the wife’s journeys. On the surface, the fisherman has the worse end of things as he battles to stay alive on the high seas with only a cross-eyed and scraggly seagull straight from Disney central casting to accompany him. In a series of unfortunate events, the fisherman leaps from the frying pan into the fire over and over again, creating a tragicomic arc that is the most absurd of the two stories, and that’s saying something when the wife’s story culminates in a dance party with a former Latin American dictator. What the wife’s story lacks in the fisherman’s drive to survive it gains in a homespun self determinism. The wife, initially portrayed as the patient women who dutifully stands by the shore awaiting her husband’s return, is full of constant surprises. As she begins her own sea journey, her story yields unexpected plot twists that are a result of her own no-nonsense outlook on life. It turns out the the world needs more salt of the earth people who are loaded to the brim with common sense and homemaking skills. Her eventual celebrity status is as far-fetched as it is inevitable.
The conclusion to “A Sea of Love” does not come as a surprise. There is no dark twist lurking in the book’s final pages. It’s heartfelt and satisfying at the same time as being maddeningly conventional. While it’s a story beautifully told it may leave readers with the sense that they’ve seen these ideas presented before. The equation of marriage and devotion to quiet and comfortable is not revelatory. As the story ends, readers get the sense that these two have just experienced the great adventure of their respective lives, and it seems a shame that they didn’t get to share it with one another. There is a level of contentment and resignation that serves as the coda for stories like these, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just commonplace. On the other hand, the notion that people never really lose their individual agency even after years of marriage is a nice one. Perhaps there are more adventures in this couple’s future—just less dangerous ones. I’d like to think that.
