Review: Fourteen Euros at Primark by Sarah Bowie
Sarah Bowie recently sent over a copy of her new comic Fourteen Euros at Primark , which debuted at ELCAF this year. This is the first work I’ve seen from Bowie, who is an illustrator, cartoonist, and cofounder of The Comics Lab in Dublin.
The storytelling of Fourteen Euros at Primark centers on the post-mortem of a cancelled engagement, with the action of the story being based around narration and retelling rather than traditional character interactions. The female narrator gives readers a window into specific moments of the relationship and her general feelings during the course of the eventual breakup. Fourteen Euros at Primark is reminiscent of memoir, but it’s hard to tell if Bowie is the main character. I’ve seen pseudo-memoir in literature, but if it exists in comics I haven’t read it yet (or perhaps I just read it?).
One of the most important narrative devices of the work is fundamental misunderstanding between the narrator and her fiancé. Fraught emotional moments where the narrator feels the relationship is at an end are the precise moments where her fiancé chooses to escalate the relationship. And those interactions in real life are overwhelming, but when the dust settles the background noise remains, the fear and uncertainty are still there. The disconnect is still there.
Bowie also gives readers a sense of the conflict between the narrator and the fiancé through group interactions with the fiancé’s friends. Men and women both interact in ways that make the narrator uncomfortable, emphasizing her interpersonal exclusion as a mirror of her emotional isolation. There are a lot of these, “What do you say to that?” kind of moments that echo frustrations and worries.
I really like the way the comic looks - the linework is all blue ink in a 2x3 or 3x3 grid. Bowie uses some of the formalistic choices of artists like Alyssa Berg, with images existing in multiple panels on the grid. This is a complement to Bowie’s keen sense of pace. The work is very distant and there’s a clear unease in the cadence of the telling, the stop and start of it; the repetition of images is a mechanism in the same vein, emphasizing that unease. There’s this smokiness to the art via smudges and thumbprints that make it seem clouded, like a remembering. Oftentimes the image associated with the text of the story is seemingly disparate, like images of cats in panels where the narrator recounts her mother’s initial reaction to meeting Niall, the narrator’s fiancé. The result of these stylistic and formal choices is clear - the narrator is creating distance between herself and the subject matter at hand.
That distance, and some stunning illustrative choices make Fourteen Euros at Primark a welcome introduction to Bowie’s work and a comic worth pursuing. Recommended.
Sarah Bowie’s tumblr is @lidlesscomics and other comics and illustration work can be found at www.lidlesscomics.com.