Comics have a love/hate relationship with words. Ask any golden age fan and they’ll be endlessly effusive about the density of information the greats could pack into a page. Ask a non-fan and they’ll put the book down halfway through page one, bored by the extraneous, purple prose, the duplication of action and description, and frustrated at the lack of trust in the artists. Bring up Alan Moore to a group of readers and a cacophony of conflicted opinions will pour out.

Critics often praise sparse, naturalist dialog, the restrained writer, the wordless issue. True comics success – the strawman I’m constructing – comes when the words serve their purpose but do not overshadow the visuals. Comics are not simply “illustrated novels.” They’re not “picture books,” we say, flexing against the ancient stigma. They’re comics. They’re graphic novels. They’re “legitimate art.”

What do we make, then, of Aminder Dhaliwal’s A Witch’s Guide to Burning?

Crack open page one and it’s clear that something is very different about this comic. For starters, rare is a page that has a panel, the assumed building block of the comic. Even books like Pretty Deadly and the works of J.H. Williams III that eschew artificial lines contain such boundaries. Instead, in Dhaliwal’s book, all things happen in a void, against spare backgrounds, while text dances across the page, prose meandering its way between spot illustrations. Sometimes we’ll get treated to a landscape, other times a full-page spread of a location. Most of the time we are tight on the characters or objects, be it close-up on their faces or far enough away to see them all.

Still, Dhaliwal’s illustrations are active participants in the narrative rather than passive decorations. They interject, interrupt, overrule the prose. They layer meaning onto dialog through their facial expressions or provide that extra push to the emotions of the moment. Comedy is enhanced, such as when Bufo, the witch who became a frog in this book, is hopping around the page eating flies, one of which is attached and integrated into the word “flies,” and so is the drama, like early on when our main character, Singe, still in her early stages of recovery, cycles through eight related-yet-different emotions concerning the village that burnt her, denial at its unjustness primarily.

In doing so, Dhaliwal creates the experience of simultaneously watching the events and listening to a storyteller, slipping between the modes seamlessly and frequently. This approach also makes the story feel older, more timeless, as befits the semi-fairytale-esque construction of the narrative.

I should note here that A Witch’s Guide to Burning was originally serialized on Instagram, and the transition from screen to page was not a smooth one. Dhaliwal’s illustrations aren’t black linework on a white page but, instead, colored with a grey-wash. It’s a nice look that adds a hint of depth to the art without adding the extra work of coloring, and it allows for a wonderful color sequence to shine about midway through.

However, because so many of the page backgrounds are black, the grey-washed illustrations sink into the paper, making them muddy and hard to parse, as if they were painted color illustrations scanned into grayscale, which is often a terrible fate that befalls many a manga chapter here in the US.  Perhaps this was an issue with the original as well, though I expect it looks far sharper on a screen. Dhaliwal’s excellent cartooning deserves better.

The same is true for the darker text. While some of it is meant to be semi-to-totally illegible, the rest is not and this hinders the reading experience. Speaking of the text, it, too, is different. Not its content, which is full of the same biting satire and thoughtful consideration of themes and characters Dhaliwal brought to “Cyclopedia Exotica,” but the actual lettering. Words burn. They fl^oat. They d

r

o

p. They sn ap. They move ^up and _down and left and right across the page. “Eyes” have eyes and tails loop around, dragging us from one paragraph to the next. Disorienting at times, they are as dynamic and alive as the information they contain and the illustrations convey.

I’m brought to mind the work of Elisabetta Dami, whom American audiences may know by her pen name for the titular Italian children’s book series, Geronimo Stilton. These books are full of text that breathes, text that lives, and illustrations that accompany and enhance but are not necessarily a part of said text. That is to say, not enough to fulfill the sequential in sequential art. This style of lettering is not uncommon in the picture book space, though it is far less common in chapter books. It is there to serve an educational purpose – teaching kids to associate more abstract words with their meanings through visuals – as well as keeping the text lively.

This begs the question I’ve danced around for the first half of this review: can we consider A Witch’s Guide to Burning comics? Should we? It shares more DNA with a long-running children’s book series than comics after all. In fact, when they made graphic novels featuring Geronimo, they featured all the hallmarks of a comic: panel borders, balloons, illustrations that act rather than portray, and text that is functional over whimsical. 

And yet, Dhaliwal is channeling the originator of the modern graphic novel far more than any of her contemporaries. Flip through Will Eisner’s A Contract with God Trilogy and you’ll see what I mean. Panels are de-emphasized. Dialog and narration intermingle. Text looms, it fades, it frames more than it emanates. It is inarguably comics, yet it acts more like prose.

A Witch’s Guide to Burning would argue, rightly so, that what I’m doing is reductive and these delineations harmful rather than productive. Words matter, yes. Names matter, certainly. The crux of the first half of the series, after all, is about remembering one’s name, for that is an important facet of a witch’s power. Without it, once it is burnt away with the rest of their memories, the magic goes away, or at the very least is suppressed. What we are called, what we call ourselves, defines us. Literally.

However. 

When we let those definitions, those expectations behind the words, become immutable and rigid, we are all worse off. They become the chains that keep us trapped rather than the expressions that set us free. Singe’s journey throughout A Witch’s Guide to Burning concerns itself with the coercive and caustic power of these rigid expectations. It is not the only thematic concern, nor is it necessarily the most pressing, but it is there all the same.

It is there for Yew-Veda, hemmed in by the expectations she gave herself when she was first burned and the ones she sets for Singe as she heals. It is there for Bufo, stuck on this one path as he pursues the potion that will turn him back. It is there for Singe, trapped by her village and her world’s view of what a “good witch” is and her own idea of what healing must look like.

And it’s there for us, the reader, in every word placed on the page, every split split, every eye drawn into eyes. Every fire burning on top of burn.