Becoming Horses

by Disa Wallander

Overview

Sometimes I dream about myself and in my dream I'm someone else
But also, I am me becoming the horse that I want to be.

Was it always like this? What if your self portrait was a collection of weird shapes? Have you ever felt like an abstract painting? Do you ever simultaneously wish and worry that the boundaries of your body will melt away and you'll become a magnificent horse? Becoming Horses is a book about squinting hard and looking from the right angle to find that everything around you sparkles—just a little—and the shapes of things are not firm but fuzzy. The You you know may shift and take form as a beautiful horse, a sunset, or something so special, so huge that you could never describe it.

Disa Wallander’s Becoming Horses is a mix of delicate cartooning and brash collage—watercolor and photography. Her colorful flowing drawings and watercolors are experimental yet accessible, as her characters mull big questions about life and art, philosophizing in a thoroughly modern voice. Bright dialogue and pleading silences create a beautiful journey that is, in fact, “the destination.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770463479
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	02/25/2020
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	689,860
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Disa Wallander is a Swedish cartoonist living and working in Stockholm. She loves to make zines and experiment with bringing collage and 3D materials into her comics. In her early twenties she read some philosophy books that suggested that nothing was real and ever since then she has made comics with the compulsion to affirm the existence of the world inside her head.

Her sporadic comic strip "Slowly dying" features an array of nameless characters that also appear in the long-form books The Nature of Nature and Becoming Horses. Her work has been featured in various anthologies such as NOW, kuš!, Drunken Boat, and Nobrow Magazine.

Editorial Reviews

12/09/2019

Swedish artist Wallander plays with the comics medium in this wry meditation on art and self-expression. Three little girls drawn in loose, squiggly lines wander a shifting landscape populated by eccentric artists working in unlikely mediums. One woman lives in a house-sized replica of her womb; another is an island and swallows visitors for inspiration; others try to transform into horses or gather for a group-cry. The jittery linework suggests Jules Feiffer, with similar accuracy at capturing human gestures in a doodle. So does the self-analytical dialogue, peppered with pithy observations such as “I haven’t made a single thing since I got here, but the suffering has been splendid” and “I’ve preserved my childlike sense of wonder. I’ve preserved it very hard.” The spindly characters move through colorful background collages of smudgy paint, photography, patterns, textures, and even sculpture, making this exploration of the artistic urge appropriately varied to look at. Wallander’s gently philosophical ramble is likely to appeal to creative types who periodically get stuck on the question of what creativity is for. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"A fantastic exploration of movement and form. Evokes equal parts Jules Feiffer and Tove Jansson."—Michael DeForge, author of Leaving Richard’s Valley.

"I wish Disa Wallander’s images could be eaten or stolen or inhabited. Because I find them so beautiful it hurts to have to settle with just looking at them. But the greatest thing about her book is that it talks about exactly that—the fact that we humans would sometimes like to inhabit works of art or become horses, and that these desires are as comforting as they are painful."—Julie Delporte, author of This Woman’s Work

"Wallander’s work in Becoming Horses strikes a lot of notes that modern cartooning seems to have eschewed... A style of cartooning that embraces the unknown and is comfortable with ambiguity. There’s a simplicity of line that is juxtaposed with emotional complexity. It’s a cartooning style that lets readers fall into themselves. It’s a style that makes Becoming Horses both familiar and powerful."—Solrad

"Wallander’s ideas about art are provocative, and her illustrations are incredibly striking in this memorable debut."—Thomas Batten, Library Journal

"This wry meditation on art and self-expression... and gently philosophical ramble is likely to appeal to creative types who periodically get stuck on the question of what creativity is for."—Publishers Weekly

"[T]he mixed media adventure that this book provides is a very serious and lively demonstration of play."
—The Quietus

From the Publisher

02/01/2020

DEBUT A group of girls searching for a herd of horses encounter a series of strange artists while wandering a shifting landscape in Swedish cartoonist Wallander's wonderfully experimental first full-length comic. Wallander examines the urge for self-expression and artistic process with a mix of surrealism, philosophical musing, and satire. The girls meet one woman who lives inside a replica of her own womb, another who brags about the intensity with which she's preserved her childlike sense of wonder, and later a group of artists who have formed a collective in order literally to cry a river in which they plan to drown. At one point, the girls are swallowed by a giant; inside her, an interior decorator instructs them how to pose their bodies. When they finally find the horses, some of them are tiny, others are abstract blobs of color. Central characters are mostly depicted in sketchy lines, while the world around them is composed of colorful collages that combine intricate patterns, various textures, different painting techniques, and photography. VERDICT Wallander's ideas about art are provocative, and her illustrations are incredibly striking in this memorable debut.

Library Journal