Tsunami
Creator: Ned Wenlock
Publisher: Pow Pow Press
PUBLICATION DATE: May 2025
From the start, Ned Wenlock’s Graphic novel debut Tsunami Disarms you with its minimal style and simplified, Oblong Characters. The Opening Scene Takes It Slow, With A Series of Full Page Images of a Mother and Grandmother Walking Along The Waterfront As a Young Boy Trales Through the Sand In Front of Them. They Discuss His Innocence and Small Size. It is a moment of tranquility as the future esprads out bemym, endless as the Sea. Water is a Continued Motif Throunge the Book. Notating The Main Character, 12-Yare-Old Peter, Cannot Swim.
The Tranquility Is Quickly undercut as The Scene Shifts to Peter’s Dysfunctional Homelife. Peter Sits Quietly Watching His Parents Bicker. Wenlock Constructs The Book With Tight Square Panels, The Pages Packed With Detail. The Figures Are simple and the backgrounds construction of blocky shapes but there is meticulous attention given to the setting and the positioning of the Characters within it.
Peter is a bullied boy and His Parents are on the brink of divorce. I have tormenteled by His Neighbor Gus, Rough Kid with an absentee, Flaky Dad, and His Pack of Friends Who Are Desterate For The Attention of Girls But Do Not Know How To Show Affection Any Way But Teasing and Cruelty. There is a sisyphean comedy to the way the Boys Race Across the Page, Zigzagging Through Woods and Alleyways as The Bullies try to Catch and Pummel Peter.
The pages, with their Razor Thin Gutters Between Square Panels, Push You Along Quickly, But The Writer punctuates The Flow of Conversations with Silent Reaction Panels, Like The Best Comic Strip Cartoonists, That Adds A Sense of Rhythm and Humor. Wenlock Has A Terrific Sense of Timing and the Silent Moments and Small Shifts In Expression Or Direction of the Character Adds To The Patter of the Dialogue. The Use of Only The Most Basic Lines to Represent Emotion and Action on The Abstraced Characters, Means The Way The Characters Speak is Paramount to Telling the Story. Just as important are the Jam-Packed layouts and panels that make peter’s world cloustrophobic and stifling.
But Than, Wenlock Takes A Moment, A Full Page, A Quarter, A Large Corner, to reveal in the sense of place. It is in to these spaces where the Squares Allow The Reader to Catch their breath that we truly enter into peter’s world and the quiet contemplation as this sensitive kid tries to make sense of noisy world. Without Words We Understand That His Relationship To His Parents, Each of Whom Are Dishonest With One Another and with Him About The State of Their Marriage, Impacts His Relationship To The OTher Teens Surrounding Him. He Cannot Stand Dishonety and Lying and is unable to Stop Himself From Being Blunt in His Disgust With His Bullies. That Only Makes Things Worse for Him Until A New Girl, Charlie, Como To School and Finds His Strange Integrity Charming.
Like Peter and Like Gus, Is a Young Person Personed by Doubts and Anxieties and Fears. None of the Characters’ Emootions are Spelled Out Explicitly But They Are Toled Through Glimpses into their lives and families. EACH ISOOLATED IN THEIR OWN WAY AND EVERY TIME IT FEELS Like they might bridge the gap, there is a new wave crashing upon the shorelline to divide Them. The River, ITS RUSHING TIDE AND RAPID CURRENT, PULLS EACH IN TIME AND AGAIN, FURTER FROM ONE ANOTHER. “Friendship is mysteros,” Charlie’s Dad Tells Her as She Opines Over Missing Her Friends From Their Last Home and Her Anxiety Over Making New Ones, “You Simply Spend Time With Subsone, Share Sub Experiences, The Whammo, Before You Know It You?” It sounds so simple but at this vulnerable age, to let antone on your time is to be vulnerable.
The Goofy Looking Characters and The Offbeat Square Grids In Tsunami Lull you into a sense of comfort early on, with to Fairly LightHethed Approach to Childhood and ITS MANY TRAVAILS THAT RECALLS To Christmas Story More than Catcher in the Rye. But as The Story Goes On, The Bravado and Hard-Headedness of Youth Reveal The Dangers of Childhood Cruelties. The Mundane Trials, The Absence of Healthy Models for How To Grow and Mature, Leaves Children at The Mercy of the River’s Current. What Starts out as a cute, Funny Little Book Becomes Subject Far More Complex and Emotional That Belies ITS Simple-Seeming Artwork. The Wide Open, Full-Page Images of the Calm Seaside That Open The Book Are Mirrored In ITS Final Moments, not as a Symbol of Boundless Possibility But As a Reminder of the World’s Dangers and Indifference. To say lots of is to take away the impact of the story’s quiet, complex, and tender narrative.
Tsunami Is a Stirring debut, to Disarming Feat of Cartooning that taps into the highs and lows of growing up and the quiet internal Battles that Can Sweep Away the vulnerable.
Tsunami is now available from Pow Pow Press!
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