By Zack Quaintance — The Rough Pearl is a new graphic novel from cartoonist Kevin Mutch, who roughly a decade ago won the prestigious Xeric Award for his first book, Fantastic Life. That earlier work was set in Winnipeg, Canada, where Mutch himself is from. It took place in the early 1980s, and it involved punk rock, quantum mechanics, and a protagonist who begins to question his own sanity.

Those who read Fantastic Life are sure to find thematic continuity in The Rough Pearl. This newer work is set in New York City in the mid-1990s (where Mutch’s bio indicates he also spent time), and it’s sort of split between two worlds — fine arts and academia. Neither of these worlds are depicted glamorously. In fact, The Rough Pearl almost feels like a deconstruction of both. Or at least, it might have a few years ago, before the conversation around academia — specifically working as adjunct faculty — pivoted toward more realistic depiction in the media, showing adjuncting for what it is: an exploitative and low-paying figurative lottery ticket for tenure track. 

Anyway, whereas Fantastic Life read like an exploration of the listlessness Mutch presumably felt in his 20s, this new book reads as an exploration of the listlessness its creator went on to presumably feel in his 30s. There’s so much relatable material within that. Mutch’s character is at several crossroads, with a failing marriage, a fading belief in his creative talent, burgeoning concerns about physical health as middle age approaches, and the list goes on. It’s all unfurled in The Rough Pearl, which intertwines these very real concerns with two effective storytelling devices. 

The protagonist in this story has begun to suffer a series of black outs. At the same time, he’s seeing a bug-eyed and bald-headed man (or men?) in his life regularly, on the bus, in his office, behind a bar in a random strip club. The two might also be related. Oh, and eventually they start to predict the hero’s imminent death and appear as a cluster of disembodied eyes (which is super gross and excellently memorable, by the way). This might seem like a set of disparate elements, but it all coheres nigh-perfectly. Indeed, every choice Mutch makes in The Rough Pearl feels organic, and they all serve the story well, be it by heightening the atmosphere of professional/personal frustration, emphasizing how difficult art and academia can be, or just depicting the ambiguous anxiety that sets in when one transitions from figuring out what they want to do with their life to not knowing the right way to do it.

On a more technical narrative level, The Rough Pearl is wonderfully told. It uses a close third-person perspective with its protagonist Adam that really puts the reader in his frame of mind. If Adam is blacking out, the reader is being sent to a hazy sequence of unreality. If Adam is fantasizing about a woman, the reader is taken right to the nature of that fantasy with him. If Adam is struggling to find the right thing to say, the reader is given a thought balloon that nails his process of grasping for a thought.

Finally, I want to be careful about spoiling anything in this story, but I quite enjoyed the ending as well. It’s ambiguous, but given how close the perspective kept to Adam, that’s the right choice, too. Adam’s central problem is that he finds himself at pivotal points for his marriage, artistic aspirations, and academic source of income. He doesn’t know how any of it will play out. None of it is stable, and trying to guess is what consumes most of his time and energy. It only makes sense that the book ends at a place that raises more questions than it does answers.

The Rough Pearl
Writer/Artist: Kevin Mutch
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Thirty-something Adam Kline is an aspiring artist with bleak prospects, stuck in a thankless adjunct teaching gig and married to an ambitious woman tired of supporting his starry-eyed pipe dreams. Just as things seem to be looking up for hapless Adam, he begins to black out at random and awaken in a pitch-dark void surrounded by billions of probing eyes. When these uncanny visions appear in his real life, he starts to worry that he’s losing his mind…In The Rough Pearl, Xeric Award-winning cartoonist Kevin Mutch skewers the pretentious world of academia and the soul-crushing New York art scene — and enlivens this wry, slice of life (and death) tale with a touch of the surreal.
Available Now: Via Fantagraphics website!
Online: Coming April 22!
Release Date: April 8, 2020

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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.