The Voyeurs

“The Voyeurs,” a series of memoir and semi-autobiographical comic stories by Gabrielle Bell spanning 2007-2010, may be my favorite collection of her work I have read so far. From her trips to France and Japan to her Brooklyn apartment to her encounters at Comic Con, Bell’s understated brand of melancholic, self-deprecating, and extremely humane humor is a masterful examination of the awkwardness of daily life and the human condition. Her art and writing is so adept at capturing expressions and feeling, and I especially love her use of slight magic realist elements (though this is a bit less prominent in “The Voyeurs.”) As a fellow introvert who simultaneously wants to meet people while staying in my apartment all weekend, I show more found much to ponder and to empathize with. I feel the title is very appropriate for semi-autobiographical memoir comics like Bell’s, as the readers get such an intimate, thoughtful look into the thought processes and life of another person, I find it very insightful. show less

I can't stand to be alone and I can't stand company.

I began reading Gabrielle Bell's online diary comic “Lucky” a few years ago, and had been meaning to seek out her books for some time. The other day while racing around the library tracking down all the books on my list, I saw this most recent graphic novel of hers out on display. I snatched it up immediately, thus vindicating my frustrating second trip in a row to the third floor. Although this does reprint some of the strips from the online comic, there is a wealth of additional material I hadn't read and it's nice to read it all packaged so nicely into one hardcover volume.

From the outsider's perspective, it would appear that Bell has a good life. She makes enough money to live show more off of her art (though clearly not as much as she'd like), which I'm pretty sure is the dream of most cartoonists, as I think it probably is of many writers, too. She lives in Brooklyn, where all kinds of cool stuff is constantly happening. And she has a circle of seemingly supportive friends. However, if we are to believe her autobiographical comics, Gabrielle Bell lives perpetually on the brink of an existential crisis. She constantly doubts her abilities and struggles with anxiety and depression. She is simultaneously drawn to and repelled by people (a problem that I can certainly sympathize with). This can make daily life difficult, and often makes one question one's ability to successfully navigate through life. She also likes to hide out in her apartment, becoming easily overstimulated on the city streets. When her friends try to console her, she is often inconsolable:

I don't want to go outside! Inside, outside, it's all the same, it's all ugly.

However, for someone who claims to hate moving around and prefers to stay in one place, Bell also seems to travel a lot. In this book, we see her on extended stays in both Japan and France. During the course of a long-distance relationship, she also ping-pongs back and forth between the East and West Coasts of the U.S. In fairness, during these trips she does frequently hide in her room and generally avoids sightseeing. Most of her travel also appears to revolve around promoting her comics, and probably seems unavoidable to her, given her complete dependence on her art for a livelihood.

In the pages of this book, there is always this constant push and pull between Bell's urges to get out in the world and her equally strong urge to retreat from it. She'll go out dancing one night but then spend weeks without leaving her apartment. As Aaron Cometbus declares in the introduction, Bell's true nature remains elusive and enigmatic, which is what keeps the reader reading, as we are always thinking that maybe in a few more pages we'll figure out her mystery. But such is not to be the case. Like all good writers of autobiography, Bell knows exactly how much to include in her pages and how much to leave out without completely giving herself away. She deftly plays on the sympathies of her readers without sounding whiny or too self-involved. There is a great art to this that so many writers fail to pull off. But with her it seems effortless.

There is not a lot of happiness or joy in this book. An undercurrent of sadness runs through it from start to finish. The epilogue is heartbreaking and when I finally closed the book I felt distraught. I was reminded once again of how people's lives often appear different from the outside, how all “success” in life is relative, and that we are all struggling in our own ways to come to terms with our own limitations. show less

I don't know, she seems like a fairly interesting person, but for me this is not too far off from someone making a comic of their mostly banal diary entries. Perhaps it's more meaningful to people hooked into the graphic novel genre. I'm a mere occasional tourist here and might not be the appropriate reader. I mean, I know who Michel Gondry is, he's an intriguing film director and seeing his name on the back cover just might have prompted me to read this book, but all the writers in the graphic novel world she interacts with here are strangers to me, limiting my interest, no doubt.

And while she gives the reader a good sense of her private, reclusive nature, she keeps other things to herself and out of the work. Not surprisingly the show more best part of the book for me is the early part when she is with Gondry, and then she breaks it off with him, but... why? She didn't feel like sharing, which on the one hand, okay, she's a private person, but on the other, this is a memoir kind of thing, so... well. show less

(from 2nd reading, 2020). I suspected I had read this before but wasn't sure. Gabrielle Bell is an observational and semi-autobiographical New Yorker comics writer. This collection has some amusing parts: her dissection of MySpace and early 2000s Internet and comics culture; her relationships with her ex-boyfriend Michel and her long-time friend Tony.

I read Bell's stories of anxiety at exactly the right time: when I was struggling with writing my thesis proposal. I felt much better and more capable of working afterwards.