The Hard Tomorrow

Continuing with the theme of disaster grappling, The Hard Tomorrow, a new graphic novel from Eleanor Davis, who also wrote the terrific middlegrade graphic novel The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook. I always hoped there'd be more Secret Science Alliance but this (decidedly adult) book is exactly the kind of thing I wish more people were writing these days so I can't exactly blame Davis for agreeing. Hard Tomorrow is about the question of how to live in this era, and what it could be like as things get worse both politically and ecologically, and also a lot of other things - different kinds of relationships, and the ways they break down, or unexpectedly don't. Davis's art is really powerful, sometimes really spare, sometimes detailed in unexpected and expressive ways. That's two "unexpecteds" in a row but there's a lot going on here. I really appreciate Davis for wrestling with the specific topic of what it means to choose to have children knowing how bad things are and how they're just getting worse. I'm not quite in that boat myself... I remember being pregnant with Junie and crying listening to Obama's acceptance speech, you know the one about the 100-year-old voter and what she'd seen in her lifetime. The world seemed so hopeful then and gosh we turned out to be so wrong about that, but it was a comforting feeling at the time and quite different than how I think it must feel to be making that choice now. I mean, I certainly don't blame people for still wanting children - I don't regret mine, even dreading what their adult lives might be like - but it *is* a hard tomorrow.