Tsunami

Tsunami by Ned Wenlock (2023 Earths End Publishing paperback 275pp)

 

Even though this is his first full-length graphic novel, Ned Wenlock is no newcomer to the artistic scene. Starting out as a graphic designer, he’s been drawing comics and creating animations for several decades now. He recently found acclaim as the producer of short films and music videos.

Tsunami tells the tale of Peter, a young man aged around twelve or thirteen living in what looks like a semi-rural New Zealand town. It is six weeks until the end of the school year and the change to becoming a high school student looms out there beyond the summer break.

With the background of his parents arguing and growing apart, Peter’s sense of fair play and always doing the right thing leads him into a turmoil of extreme anxiety and danger. The local bully Gus seems to be after him and a new girl from the UK called Charlie seems to want to be his friend, but can she be trusted?

The story takes several unexpected and sometimes brutal turns – just when you think this is going to be another whimsical coming-of-age tale, Wenlock will throw in a twist or three. Clues abound about Peter’s true state of mind. Set to draw a picture in class he produces an image of a lamb surrounded by menacing wolves. His teacher catches him staring longingly at something in a shop window – is it the fishing rod like he claims or the hunting knives?

The black and white art is both simplistic and stylised. People are all a peculiar rounded shape like cross between balloon animals and jellybeans. Apart from their hairstyles and relative sizes there’s very little to differentiate them. On a few occasions this led me to being confused about who was talking or who we were following. The artwork, for the main part, is arranged in a traditional 12-panel grid on each page and Wenlock packs a lot of story into them. It reads well and I managed to finish the whole thing in around an hour. Even after all the twists I was still expecting a conventional happy ending for poor beleaguered Peter or maybe I was hoping for one for his sake. Wenlock has other ideas and maybe don’t read this one as a bedtime story.

The author accurately captures all the feelings and pressures of a certain age without turning it into a message-heavy episode of The Simpsons or South Park. Not for little kids or adults looking for something to ban.