By Zack Quaintance — Chartwell Manor is a recent graphic memoir from veteran alternative cartoonist Glenn Head. While inherently disturbing — the book details a boarding school whose headmaster was guilty of the sexual and emotional abuse of children, Head himself being a victim — it is also a masterpiece, a staggering and honest work in which a massive talent processes his most difficult memories to find searing poignancy and raise powerful questions. Chartwell Manor spans most of Head’s life, using a bifurcated structure in which the first half focuses on childhood trauma while the second details the aftermath, not just for Head but for others victimized at the school, too. It’s very good. There is a quality to this book that sort of tapers the severity of the events with how well the story is told. Essentially, the narrative is so clear and well-done, that readers can’t help but sense Head has come to terms with all we see happening on the pages; that he our main character is, in a sense, okay.

As a result, Chartwell Manor is as compulsively readable as it is difficult to process, a credit to the storytelling decisions. The trauma detailed in the first half involves the two years Head spent as a boy at Chartwell Manor, a now-defunct boarding school in New Jersey, frequented by the progeny of East Coast wealth. As promotional material for the book notes, this is trauma that took Head nearly 50 years to process, and as such, the way the events are depicted is with the context of looking back through a long adult life. The abuse happened in the ‘70s, it was exposed, and the victimizer was sentenced for his crimes in court. The cartoonist knows all this, he knows how he felt as it all happened, and he knows how it all reverberated.

That said, the sexual and emotional abuse suffered by Head and others is tough to read here, as it should be. It’s delivered in a clear and almost detached way. As Head notes in the book’s intro, “My aim in drawing this book was to be as uncompromisingly truthful as possible. There is no attempt to make any of the characters, myself especially, sympathetic. Correspondingly, there was no attempt to make anyone look bad. Simply to depict my life as it happened, and, more importantly, how it felt.” The book certainly accomplishes that.

Throughout Chartwell Manor, the honesty in which Head depicts himself and what he experienced makes it easy to keep going, to understand Head both as he was then and as he has come to recall these events now. The terrible things that happened to Head are tapered with his own wit and sincerity, as well as with his skill as a cartoonist.

There is some truly impressive artwork in this book, from the grounded depiction of what occurred to segments in which Head is abusing substances to some really intricate two-page spreads, one of which shows head immersed in sex addition in New York City, another that shows the explosion of his abilities as an alternative cartoonist. It’s a great looking book throughout. There are standout detail touches throughout, from posters on the wall to looks on the characters’ faces. It’s all great. One last visual choice I’ll note as particularly effective was the way Head disembodies the face of his accuser, having it float through his recollections, not looking traditionally monstrous yet being all the more haunting for its sleazy predatory air of normalcy, it’s evil looking all the more bloated and mundane. It’s really brilliant visual storytelling, comics at their finest.

So while Head is not trying to paint himself as sympathetic, it is nigh-impossible to not want badly for the young boy in this book to be protected and okay, for the adult cartoonist to have found peace in his life. We see Head meet plenty of former classmates from his days at Chartwell, all of whom feel much worse off than he is, albeit in different ways that make any act of comparison difficult. The entire second half of the book is an equally as honest look at the threads of resultant trauma, how they have shaded the rest of Head’s life, and how he has (with various levels of success) fought to overcome them.

Chartwell Manor is, simply put, a magnum opus, among the best graphic memoirs of all time, and one of the best comics of the year.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Chartwell Manor by Glenn Head

Chartwell Manor by Glenn Head
Writer/Artist: Glenn Head
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
No one asks for the childhood they get, and no child ever deserved to go to Chartwell Manor. For Glenn Head, his two years spent at the now-defunct Mendham, NJ, boarding school ― run by a serial sexual and emotional abuser of young boys in the early 1970s ― left emotional scars in ways that he continues to process. This graphic memoir ― a book almost 50 years in the making ― tells the story of that experience, and then delves with even greater detail into the reverberations of that experience in adulthood, including addiction and other self-destructive behavior. Head tells his story with unsparing honesty, depicting himself as a deeply flawed human struggling to make sense of the childhood he was given.
Price: $29.99
Release Date: May 26, 2021
Buy It Here: Chartwell Manor via Amazon
Read It Digitally: Chartwell Manor via comiXology

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.