Comics seek to explore themes of mental health on a fairly regular basis, but I have never seen it done as viscerally or as devastatingly as in “Barking”. Lucy Sullivan has brought the spectre of depression to live by infecting every aspect of comics with its influence, from the art style to the layouts to even the fonts used in the comic. This twisting of the medium works in unison with main character Alix’s journey through both her own mind and a mental healthcare system that doesn’t help as much as it simply exists. “Barking” gives the reader to see what depression is like from the perspective of those who experience it, and it will likely affect all who read it.
Written and illustrated by Lucy SullivanCover by Lucy Sullivan
Barking font designed by Dan Berry“Barking” follows Alix Otto’s journey from the brink of suicide into the harrowing halls of a mental healthcare ward. Following the death of someone close to her, protagonist Alix falls into a well of grief that bottoms out with her atop a bridge contemplating suicide. As Alix receives treatment for her mental illness, she realizes that the care that those with mental illnesses receive can often be far from helpful. “Barking” explores mental health and the broken nature of the system that claims to care for it.
The visual style of “Barking” is haunting, and submerges the reader in Alix’s despair from the beginning. The stark black and white color scheme makes for striking visuals. While monochromatic color schemes are usually accompanied by crisp, clear lines, the art in “Barking” is chaotic and murky. Even the layouts are scattered and hastily rendered, leading to the reading order for certain pages to be unclear, with each different reading leading to slightly different feelings being evoked. All of these visual factors coalesce to give “Barking” a heightened air of disorder and helplessness which is at its peak when Alix’s depression is at its zenith.
The visual element that I found most unique was the lettering. The entirety of the comic uses highly stylized fonts, which either feel or are hand-lettered. For the majority of the comic, “Barking” uses a scratchy font that is akin to someone nervously penning their thoughts in their notepad. Sometimes words are scratched out, replaced with different words. When the events are particularly intense, the speech bubbles crowd each other, which gives the feeling of a mind failing to repress the assault of intrusive thoughts bombarding their consciousness. When Alix’s mind simply cannot handle what is happening, the text becomes illegible scrawl, little more than meaningless shapes trying in vain to describe what is going on within. In comics, where dialogue is regularly integral to story progression, emotions and events being beyond the use of the written word is a terrifying concept, and a powerful immersive device.
While the events of “Barking” may seem to be akin to the grandiose arcs of Big Two crossover events, that is merely a consequence of Sullivan’s evocative writing. What actually happens in “Barking” is a personal tale of how one person deals with grief and the consequences of the death of a loved one. In story terms, it is not an apocalyptic tale on a grand scale. However, Sullivan makes the reader keenly aware of how apocalyptic these events are for Alix. She is demonstrably destroyed by what has happened to her. She needs to regain control of her mind, or risk being torn apart by her own thoughts. By so expertly getting the reader to empathize with Alix, Sullivan ensures that they ends up caring far more about what happens to one woman in a broken system than the thousands of nameless souls that are saved when superheroes avert the latest doomsday.
Sullivan’s version of the mental healthcare system highlights primarily its indifference. The conditions when Alix is first given away to the system is largely similar to stereotypical dystopian mental asylums of old – staff that don’t care at all, patients with disorders of varying severity wandering largely uncared for beyond the medication that must be consumed, or else. A distinct touch is snippets of report paper that are used as captions occasionally, with the cold typeface of the form contrasted starkly with Alix’s descriptions of the abyss in which she finds herself.
Continued below
However, “Barking” also hints at the impact that one caring individual can have on the otherwise heartless machine. Alix meets a staff member who, while not warm, actually seems to care about her well-being and future, unlike the rest. This one character helps Alix find the strength within herself to begin to manage herself. This relationship appears to highlight the effect that outside encouragement can have on sufferers of depression. It is certainly not a universal panacea, but it can provide invaluable strength to those in need.
“Barking” is a singular vision aimed at making the nebulous concept of depression more tangible to the comic-reading audience. Its eye-grabbing art style and the technical representation of depression bring to life a personal tale that has remolded my own personal idea of depression more than any other comic. It is not easy reading. It is painful. It is bleak. But it is also important and masterful.
