“Sunburn”

We all want to take a vacation, and going to Greece seems like a perfect choice. We all want to fall in love and have a summer fling, and here in “Sunburn,” we get to see the adventure of an English teenager living that dream.

Cover by Simon Gane

Story by Andi Watson
Art by Simon Gane

Rachel is a teenager who lives a gray suburban life in gray suburban England. It’s a world of brown sauce, warm beer, and scrambled eggs every Tuesday. With her summer already mapped out for her—a job working at the butcher and a caravan holiday in Clacton—it seems like this year will only bring more of the same. So when family friends invite her to spend the summer with them in Greece, she jumps at the chance to escape her life and finally be treated like an adult.

The Warners are everything her parents are not—glamorous, sophisticated, and carefree—and when Rachel meets Benjamin, a handsome young friend of the Warners, her summer seems to be taking a turn for the better. But there’s no escaping the pains of growing up, and she’ll soon learn that life on a small island where everyone knows each other’s business may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

There’s something magical in going to your local comic shop searching for nothing in particular. That’s how I found out about “Sunburn,” this original graphic novel from Image Comics. I saw its cover and I vaguely remembered that I had seen some images on Twitter (although I was wrong, it was another comic, but that’s the magic of finding something new.) I thought that this would be a good read and I got it, without knowing anything.

Back home, I investigated about the book, and I found out that writer Andy Watson is somewhat a veteran, having written mostly graphic novels, but he has some books by the mainstream publishers, like Dark Horse’s 1998 “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” comic, and the “Namor” series from Tsunami, Marvel’s manga-inspired short-lived imprint.

Artist Simon Gane has experience too, he worked on Vertigo’s “Underground” and in “They’re Not Like Us” from Image. But it turns out that I had already read something from him, he’s also the artist on the excellent (but relatively unknown) “Ghost Tree”, from IDW. Together, Gane and Watson had previously worked in Paris, a limited series.

Unlike usual Image comics, “Sunburn” is a slice-of-life story, the book follows Rachel, an English teenager tired of the monotony of her town, and bored of her potential vacations: working on a butchery, suddenly she gets the opportunity to have a vacation in Greece, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be problems there.

This is a deep story, it begins with Rachel’s mother telling the family that their daughter was invited to Greece, there, she is received by a couple of friends of his parents, Peter and Diane Warner, I immediately felt some red flags, why would she travel alone to vacation with a pair of practically strangers? Do they have some intentions with her?

Rachel quickly establishes a routine, she goes to the beach, and, at night, they go to parties together. Diane acts with Rachel in a maternalistic way, as they begin to develop a somewhat close relationship. Given that the Warners did not have children, we can notice their interest in protecting their guest, almost like a “what if” from another life. She meets Benjamin, who seems to be the only other teenager on the island, and they begin to develop a classic summer love.

Art by Simon Gane

The dialogues between Rachel and the other characters touch on topics such as enjoying life, and the relationship between luck and destiny; there is a background of loneliness, in which they all, Peter, Diane and Benjamin, seem to be each trapped in their own world, even though they share the Greek island.

It is heavily implied that Rachel is in there for a reason, an open secret between the islanders. After reading this book, I can’t quite fully understand what the reason is. I don’t know for certain if there is an erotic justification or if she’s invited there simply to fill the void of loneliness that the characters have. What we do know is that, for Rachel this is a journey that makes her mature and understand, in a certain way, that the Moirai – the Greek Mythology’s personifications of destiny – are always present.

This is also a story about longing, Benjamin longs for “the” chance to be someone in life, with a great job; Diane longs for her husband to “enjoy life” while struggling with her own enjoyment of it, and the townsfolk seem to long for something to happen between the two teenagers, maybe hoping to live a good life by-proxy.

The art in the book is nothing short of spectacular. Simon Gane uses mostly blues, contrasting them with shades of yellow and brown, one might say, shades of sunburn. This is a relatively silent comic, where the beautiful, pages-long, panoramic drawings of the landscapes of the Greek island shine; there are also crow shots where sometimes we might mix-up Diane and Rachel, although this is not a mistake. I think that it’s a deliberate act to contrast between the life of the young teenager and perhaps a possible destiny, a Rachel of the future.

Facial expressions also deserve special attention, because they reveal a lot about what the characters are thinking and feeling at that moment Gane is a master in this ability and his faces are full of emotions.

This is a peaceful book. There’s not much conflict, at least not in the way we are used to (I mean violence.) In “Sunburn” you can lose yourself for hours appreciating the beauty of the drawings that, in turn, reflect the beauty of Greece, and here you can have a little “summer adventure” along with the main character. As expected, it is a beautiful experience, even with the bittersweetness of heartbreak or coming back home.