My Life To Live
Duna Haller
Recap
A comic book about the transformative experiences one can have when engaging with art, as told from the perspective of a criminal trying to change her nefarious ways, that you can read here.
Review
“My Life To Live” is an ode to everyone who has a trauma that chases them, like a hard breakup from a toxic relationship, running away from abuse or breaking a cycle of addiction. It’s a sweet story about setting your own boundaries, recovery and the part that art plays in it. It’s also a reflection of movies and learning to love and explain ourselves through them.
The visual narrative carries and literally mutates with the story, including a beautiful mirror-reflection-transformation scene that calls to gendering the things we see and seeing ourselves in them in one of the most tender ways (“I see myself in women surviving those things in the scene” really shines there for me as a trans woman reading another trans woman creator), and that really elevates the care-filled, punk-ish but suggestive, precious art. The structure of the comic itself is that of a movie, contains a movie inside and references numerous directors’ work like Wong Kar-Wai or Jacques Rivette, and the artsy but at the same time rough, life-narrated life-related art-style and design really fits that structure.
There’s a bunch of commentary of art and the part it plays in our lives in this little gift of a comic, but one compelling point is that it shows a healthy relationship between two girls, in which the main character surviving abuse supports herself in her girlfriend, and that’s a picturing of LGBT+ relationships we rarely see in comics, which personally represents me to a deep level. So, just, thank you.
Final Thoughts
A minicomic that tenderly supports itself in cinema to remind the reader how powerful is finding yourself through art and narrating your story and being your own voice when surviving difficult situations. Just beautiful.
Comic Watch Pride: My Life To Live: The Things That Heal Us
- Writing - 9/109/10
- Storyline - 9.5/109.5/10
- Art - 9/109/10
- Color - 7.5/107.5/10
- Cover Art - 9/109/10
8.8/10
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