Graphic Novel Review: Sunday, by Olivier Schrauwen

reviewed by Luke C. Jackson

Olivier Schrauwen, Sunday. Fantagraphics, 2024. US $39.99. ISBN: 9781683969679. https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/sunday

Highly regarded Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen is known for producing both short- and long-form comics that combine moments of absurdity and surrealism with in-depth characterisation that often depict the inner lives of men living in isolation. He brings a new level of depth to this type of character study in Sunday, a 472-page graphic novel from Fantagraphics.

Sunday is regarded by many cultures as a day of rest, relaxation, and contemplation. In his eponymously-named graphic novel, Schrauwen depicts a fictionalised account of the life of his cousin, Thibault, a thoroughly ordinary man, on a largely uneventful Sunday. By offering a nearly minute-by-minute account of Thibault’s physical experiences and mental processes between 8:15am, when he awakens, and midnight, Schrauwen invites the reader to inhabit the world, and consciousness, of his protagonist. In this way, his approach is reminiscent of early Modernist novels, including Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses, both of which were set in a single location on a single day, and are particularly remarkable for their use of interiority, which creates a level of intimacy and identification with their lead characters. According to notes provided by Schrauwen in his introduction, he was attracted to the project because it would give him the opportunity to use the comics medium to create something ‘beautiful’ from what his cousin Thibault described as a ‘wasted day’. Such days are those filled with ‘procrastination, aimlessness and boredom, in which [Thibault] failed to do anything edifying’.

In trying to find a way to describe how Schrauwen achieves this feat, it might be most appropriate to look at music. Certainly, music features in the graphic novel explicitly. Thibault wakes up with the song ‘Sex Machine’ in his head, an ironic theme song to the first two hours of his day given what can only be described as his ambivalent relationship to actual sex with his girlfriend, Migali, a visual artist who is on her way home after weeks spent engaged in collaborative art in an unnamed African village. While she has been immersed in African culture in reality, the closest Thibault gets is playing West African music on his turntable while imagining the band surrounding him in his unremarkable apartment. Another live music performance is featured when Nora, a previous love interest of Thibault’s, and Thibault’s cousin Rik, are depicted attending a piano concert, while – much later – a parallel is drawn between a mole on Nora’s face and the symbol for a pause in musical annotation.

However, the graphic novel’s musical connection runs deeper than these explicit references to artists, bands, and musical notation. Like a conductor on a stage, Schrauwen has utilised words, images, and the spatial elements of the page control the reader’s perception and experience. Indeed, Schrauwen is ever-present within the text. In the introduction, he provides ‘reading instructions’, along with a self-portrait, and later appears as an illustrated version of himself, to offer a brief commentary on his cousin’s character. Schrauwen’s illustration style is equal parts impressionistic and realistic, like a rough and slightly naïve rotoscope. Spatially, while he has chosen to depict the world of the text largely from eye-level in a series of close-ups, mid-shots and wide shots of the type familiar to filmgoers, there are instances of more dynamic representation, as the camera floats above our protagonist and even tours the galaxy, the latter a product of Thibault’s fantastical imaginings.

Reinforcing the link between layout and Thibault’s subjective experience, when he smokes marijuana, the panels depicting the experiences of the secondary characters whose experience he is not privy to, become far less linear. Some panels snake around the page, while the frames of others melt and merge together. At the same time, the page numbers become unmoored from their usual place at the bottom of the page, rearranging themselves almost randomly before disappearing altogether. Thibault’s thoughts are similarly jumbled, with some of his words appearing enlarged, making them impossible to read, while others run in circles and even backwards. It is in these moments that Sunday’s most outstanding – and most musical – feature can be seen clearly. This is what Daniel Albright has referred to as Modernist music’s ‘testing of the limits of aesthetic construction’. 

In these ways, this graphic novel defies categorisation. It is a depiction of banality that is anything but banal, and an exploration of the life of an unremarkable man that is nevertheless remarkable. In this way, it’s a book about all of us … whether we’d like to admit it or not. Thibault (or perhaps it is Olivier Schrauwen, speaking through Thibault) says as much when he suggests, ‘I’m holding up a mirror … so you can recognize your flawed selves.’ Sunday shows how, when viewed from the right perspective, what might otherwise be dismissed as a ‘wasted day’ can have value and – yes – even beauty.

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 26:2.