“The Hard Tomorrow”

If paying attention to the world’s catastrophes makes you question bringing children into it, Eleanor Davis offers a response as lush and wild and yet as elegantly simple as her stunning art in “The Hard Tomorrow.”

Written and Illustrated by Eleanor Davis

Hannah is a thirty-something wife, home-health worker, and antiwar activist. Her husband, Johnny, is a stay-at-home pothead working―or “working”―on building them a house before the winter chill sets in. They’re currently living and screwing in the back of a truck, hoping for a pregnancy, which seems like it will never come. Legs in the air, for a better chance at conception, Hannah scans fertility Reddits while Johnny dreams about propagating plants―kale, tomatoes―to ensure they have sufficient sustenance should the end times come, which, given their fragile democracy strained under the weight of a carceral state and the risk of horrible war, doesn’t seem so far off. Helping Hannah in her fight for the future is her best friend Gabby, a queer naturalist she idolizes and who adores her. Helping Johnny build the house is Tyler, an off-the-grid conspiracy theorist driven sick by his own cloudy notions of reality.

Here are five steps to bringing a child into this world in these apocalyptic times.

(Yes, this IS a review of “The Hard Tomorrow.” Out now from Drawn and Quarterly. I’ll try not to spoil anything while still talking about why this book seems to me one of the year’s best and most important comics.)

Step One for Baby-making in Dark Times: Find love fertile enough to grow life into.

At the center of “The Hard Tomorrow” is Hannah, hoping to get pregnant. Hannah is a hero who neither needs to fill up the room or the page with the noise of her own personality, nor dissolves into the flame of whichever charismatic character she’s with. You’d think such full fledged mutuality in comics characters should be common, but don’t overlook how finely balanced Eleanor Davis manages to keep every key character dynamic in this book, from how they trade banter and barbs to occupying space on the page. Hannah is central but every other character with whom she shares a scene becomes a genuine sharing, a robust intertwining of two or more distinct souls.

That’s the case from the book’s opening scene with Johnny, Hannah’s partner in a trailer-and-station-wagon life in the woods, where Johnny promises to construct their house, and they wake to limbs entangled and morning flirtation in their makeshift bed on the back of that station wagon. The first we see them, lovemaking amid their quilts and hairy bodies and the dog sleeping between them and the birds chirping outside, we understand the two anchor truths holding “The Hard Tomorrow” together: their love is real and they want a baby.

Step Two: Be awake to a world desperately in need of different living.

Davis is brilliantly efficient at bringing Hannah’s community to life in quick but lively strokes. Hannah’s paid job is as caregiver for Miss Phyllis, aging, sweetly concerned for Hannah, anxious in her dementia-tinged worry of a moving world. Caregiving, like parenthood, is a paradox of dashing madly to be on time for the life-and-death importance of your presence, only to sit for hours waiting for those moments of the simplest but most intimate and important things you do for another human being. Wash. Sing to sleep. Watch in love.

Off hours, Hannah and her friends are activists and organizers in a future (but not far-off) America where the President Mark Zuckerberg administration suppresses political action against its chemical warfare regime, among other atrocities. But to show us this world, Davis forgoes the newsreel-footage (or even the social media scroll) rendition of these social near-realities, instead presenting it all to us through the talk and texts of Hannah and her friends, frontlines planning and rallying in the streets. They are organizers in the HAAV (Humans Against All Violence), mothers who bring their children on marches and meetings, crafting anti-Sarin gas signs and megaphone statements of protest, phoning in solidarity from their friends at Food Not Bombs or the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Deep, deep at the heart of this book is Hannah’s optimism in the face of tragedies seismically huge or humanly small. Protesting fascistic state violence, she chants, “the People! United! Will never be defeated!” with tears welling up in her eyes in righteous indignation. As she bathes Miss Phyllis, she is tenderly attentive. And she lovingly wraps her arms, full of belief and holding loosely to grievances, around her partner Johnny, even as he drags his feet on their dreams, more preoccupied bartering weed than building their future house. Hannah is that person who, never bowling anyone over, somehow stays conscious of the world’s pain without being defeated by it.

Step Three: Dance, whenever you can, to the music.

A reviewer’s aside: approaching forty is a great time to consume culture because your age peers (and those of your slightly older and younger siblings) have risen the ranks and are now producing their best art. So it is that every song lyric that blasts from Hannah’s radio was immediately recognizable to me, flooding my memory with a danceable tune that immediately sent me back to 90’s Billboard charts. Mariah Carey, sung with abandon, eyes closed while bopping at the steering wheel.

“The Hard Tomorrow” isn’t light pop fluff, as the touches of Cinéma vérité and the incredibly artful chiaroscuro dramatic climaxes (no spoilers!) prove. But the effervescence of that pop music is a key to the simple fortitude that makes Hannah astounding and makes “The Hard Tomorrow” powerful.

It’s a vibe of vitality also pulsing from the book’s cover, which speaks volumes about its contents. Hannah reaches up to a fruit tree above her, under her own vine and fig tree, alluding to an edenic future of satisfying enjoyment and rest. The tree and its fruit are the deep reds and purples of sensuous blood-and-chlorophyll sunset. Hannah is resolutely slightly off-center but fills the cover space languidly, haircurls free and rich with the bangs chopped short in a rebel style that’s also a relationship marker (as we read in the book). The Mona Lisa satisfaction as she tastes the fruit, the tattooed arm free under a tank shirt brandishing unashamed underarm hair and sun-bronzed arm flesh that makes space for an embrace of the whole world. All before a background of baby blue that is just the shade between real skies and ones dreamt of. Hannah is eating fruit, but she could very well be grooving to music.

It’s a joy echoed early in the book, when she’s driving (and singing along to the Spice Girls, naturally). She catches a glimpse of a family of passersby, a mother lifting up a baby. Davis pulls us in to a closeup that’s so transfixing that we too have forgotten about the fact that she’s driving. The closeup is a baby’s smile and the mother’s face taking it in from inches away, and it’s the most crushingly beautiful thing that exists.

And then, of course, Hannah is immediately pulled over by a cop for running a stop sign.

Step Four: Coexist… and prepare for the cost of that coexistence.

I haven’t yet mentioned two characters key to “The Hard Tomorrow” and its wise take on the prospects of making children in these times. Without spoiling too much, but with a knowing nod to those who’ve read the book, they are Hannah’s friend Gabby (radical mentor and mushroom enthusiast) and Johnny’s friend Tyler (Reddit reactionary who names his cats after Game of Thrones houses). They remind those of us who would presume to hope for children that there may be skeptical better angels (or devils, depending on your perspective) worth listening to, parts of ourselves that live a mode of life that cannot even imagine our own calm survival, let alone bearing brood into this hellscape of a society.

As much as Hannah and Johnny are winsomely earnest, they’re also as hapless as any of us. And from opposite ends of various extremes, Gabby and Tyler reminds us of that haplessness, of our profound vulnerability that makes us question whether we can and should be responsible for new little humans. The two character foils manifest as parts of our protagonists that are also very real concerns for many of us. In one pivotal early scene, Gabby is outright flummoxed: “Why would anyone want to have a kid right now?” Gabby and Hannah’s argument crackles with sincerity, with sincere fear and sincere hope.

Yet nonetheless, their friendship is intact. “The Hard Tomorrow” does poignantly suggest we have to make hard choices about the voices we let into our lives. Every new parent knows the costs to relationships and friendships of suddenly closing ranks, of ending your social lives at 7pm and drawing the lines of quality hang time at what’s tolerable or acceptable for a 3 year old. On the other hand, Gabby and Tyler remain integral to the story because in some senses, they are inseparable from what Hannah and Johnny must live with if they are to become parents with eyes wide open.

Step Five: Live Your Tomorrows Today.

Again, I won’t give away whether Hannah and Johnny succeed in getting pregnant. Whether they do or they don’t, the questions still hang with the same dread and wonder. Do we dare to hope? Is life too painful? Is our world too wrecked?

I will say, as someone who was once unsure whether we could have kids, and unsure whether we should have more: When you can look in your child’s trusting eyes and count the years— around thirty or so— until they are your age, then the climate-uninhabitable, disastrously polarized world we are making for ourselves becomes tangibly a desperately unacceptable eventuality.

In other words, to me, the most beautiful thing about “The Hard Tomorrow” is that Eleanor Davis, who dedicates the book to their at-the-time-unborn child, seems to insist that we should enter the future neither with ignorance nor with despair. Don’t toss off the frightening realities. But also, don’t quit striving to change them and replace them with life-sustaining possibility. Keep hope, and keep your skin in the game.

Eleanor Davis was already a beloved treasure to comics after such delightful works like “How to be Happy” and last year’s sharp “Why Art?” I’m certain “The Hard Tomorrow” cements her place as one of comics’ most important voices.

At the very least, it gave one parent the sustenance of hope to continue onward.